Ideas of Conquest

One of the ideas brought up in class was the one of new land representing a woman and one that people wanted to plunder and take advantage of. The conquistadors told narratives of their conquests as sexual exploits. Diaz discusses the difficulty of the hunt to conquer Mexico. “It won’t be an easy conquest.”

I see Cortes as a cocky man who asserts his power over others who are powerless. He is a bully who believes he is superior to the Aztecs because he has God on his side and thinks he is saving them from damnation. His thoughts about his superiority show when the natives gather to watch him and his men “No wonder, since they had never seen horses or men like us before.” (69) “Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me. “(Napoleon Bonaparte) I think that Cortes would agree with Bonaparte. He became power hungry and even burned down his ships so that no one would be able to retreat.


When discussing the idea of conquest and females, I was reminded of a TV show that I watch call How I Met Your Mother. One of the characters spends an enormous amount of time trying to get women to sleep with him. He even has a “playbook” in which he discusses all the different types of cons he has played on women to get them to sleep with him.






This greed and lust for conquest make me think of the Berlin Conference in 1844-1845. European countries scrambled to gather up as much African land as they could, to gain new resources as well as assert their power on the natives of the land. They believed they could convert them but more importantly knew they could exploit them and their resources. Even though the African countries got their independence eventually, their cultures are still marked from the effects of the Berlin Conference.




The Corquette:
In class, the example was made between Boyer and Sanford as England and America at the beginning of the American Revolution. I thought it was a very interesting way to think about it and it really helped me to understand the characters in a new way. Sanford (America) was seen as unpredictable, the “wild one” and one with passion. Boyer (England) was seen as a safe, stable and consistent choice. He was tame and somewhat boring choice.

Someone in class brought up the idea that Stanford uses guerilla warfare as tools of seduction. They likened him to Mel Gibson in the forest scene of the Patriot, when he was covertly killing the British. He has a kind of predatory aspect to his character. He spoke of Eliza saying “If I can’t have her, no one can.”

Questions:

Why do men always think of being violent as a form of power?
What does The Corquette teach us about relationships between men and women?
Why did Eliza see marriage as a loss of freedom?




Sources:
"Conference of Berlin." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. 3 Feb. 2011 .

Crowe, Sybil Eyre. The Berlin West African Conference, 1884-1885. London: Pub. by Longmans, Green and, 1942.

Förster, Stig, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Edward Robinson. Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: the Berlin Africa Conference 1884-1885 and the Onset of Partition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.