The Politics of the Animals in the Forest: Leonard Woolf's The Village in the Jungle

In the novel, Leonard Woolf draws heavily on his own experiences as a British civil servant living and working in a colony and explores a range of topics including such factors as the living conditions of the people in villages, the mingling of cultural traditions, and the overarching influence of the British commercial policies and judicial systems, but this analysis will focus primarily on the intricate connections Woolf depicts between and among the human and non-human animals in the setting of the everpresent, ever-encroaching forest. In her Introduction to the 2015 Journal of Commonwealth Literature issue devoted to the centenary of The Village in the Jungle, Elleke Boehmer reaffirms these insights, arguing that Woolf's novel "is probably one of the first in the English language to present the experience of colonization from the inside, and from below, that is, from the vantage point of its victims" (3), a work that "offers an unprecedented portrait, by a European, of the destructive impact of empire on a native community" (5). [...]while Woolf's perspective is shaped to a degree by his colonialist role, he also seems to be keenly observant of the specifics of daily life that he records from what seems to be a more neutral viewpoint. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the term referred to the concept of "Waste or uncultivated ground (= 'forest' in the original sense)" (n.1). [...]jungle" was used to describe "Land overgrown with underwood, long grass, or tangled vegetation; also, the luxuriant and often almost impenetrable growth of vegetation covering such a tract" (n.1a) or "a particular tract or piece of land so covered; esp. as the dwelling-place of wild beasts" (n. 1b).