Madness or Something Like It
As the narrative progresses, the narrator—Adam Jeffson—becomes a figure of increasing madness. Jeffson’s descent into not just madness, but a particularly “Biblical” sort of madness that may or may not at the same time be interpreted in the same way some might view the madness of those who claim to have spoken with God. This madness is vividly expressed through the imagery of the language which Jeffson turns to during those moments where lucidity may be seen as either operating at peak efficiency or on the verge of complete collapse:
"O wild Providence! Unfathomable madness of Heaven! that ever I should write what now I write! I will not write it....
The hissing of it! It is only a crazy dream! a tearing-out of the hair by the roots to scatter upon the raving storms of Saturn! My hand will not write it!"
Unreliability
The reliability of Jeffson as narrator is immediately called into the question by virtue of the frame story which explicates how his story came to be published; a tale involving a medium receiving his story from the future while in a trance in the past. Even disregarding that fact, the very opening lines finally attributed to Jeffson call his reliability into question:
“Well, the memory seems to be getting rather impaired now, rather weak.”
As his story progresses, this failure of memory and becomes a motif of dementia which serves to constantly undermine the reader’s ability to trust what he says. For instance, one of the single most important recollections from his past that Jeffson shares earlier in the text:
“Cambridge; and there it was that I came across a man, named Scotland, who had a rather odd view of the world… Quite well I remember Scotland now—the sweetest, gentle soul he was, with a passion for cats, and Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in stature, with a Roman nose, continually making the effort to keep his neck straight, and draw his paunch in.”
is visited once again later by which point his memory has devolved to this point:
“There was a man whom I met once in that dark backward and abysm of time, when I must have been very young—I fancy at some college or school in England, and his name now is far enough beyond scope of my memory, lost in the vast limbo of past things.”
Racism
Imagery allows for an undeniably strong case supporting the argument that “The Purple Cloud” envisions a future for mankind that is a paradise of racial purity. When Jeffson first meets the only other living survivor of the global human apocalypse, he describes her using terms almost guaranteed to fly right over the average reader’s head; contemporary readers being especially susceptible to this ignorance of underlying meaning:
“Her age appeared eighteen or twenty. I guessed that she was of Circassian blood, or, at least, origin. Her skin was whitey-brown, or old ivory-white.”
Nevertheless, the imagery here is reasonably indisputable. “Circasssian” is a direct historical reference to disproven scientific theories regarding racial superiority. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German scientist who became the first to apply the term “Caucasian” as a description of a “white race.” Circassian is a term applied to the Slavic people of the Northwest Caucausus; most specifically, the Circassian woman described as being the most beautiful on earth because the whiteness of their skin had not been genetically impurified by mixing with non-Caucasian races. Blumenbach went so far as to describe the Circassian as the true model of “God’s image” precisely because of unstained purity of their whiteness. This direct implication of a racially empowered idealism for the new Adam and Eve is supported throughout the text by more indirect imagery which situates the West as a thing of beauty and purity and while suggesting the East’s power to taint and contaminate must be battled against.
And just in case there should be some confusion, take note of what are nearly the final words of the novel:
“But this I understand: that it is the White who is Master here….I look for a race that shall resemble its Mother: nimble-witted, light-minded, pious—like her; all-human, ambidextrous, ambicephalous, two-eyed—like her”
Biblical Imagery
The novel is permeated with Biblical imagery. An evangelical minister shouting warnings of prophecy about launching an expedition to the North Pole suggests that the Arctic is not fit for human beings by comparing it to trying to reach for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam Jeffson’s name combines another reference to the Garden of Eden with a contraction form of the phrase “son of Jehovah.” Adam’s life is constructed as a very loosely based allegory of the sufferings of Job as the object of a battle between two powerful forces: The White and the Black. And, of course, when he finally finds a young woman who has also survived, she suggests he call her Eve after growing tired of being referred to by the name of his former murderous fiancée, Clodagh. (Eventually, he gives in once he impregnates her, the forces of White win out and he finally accepts his role as the Adamic founder of a purer race of humanity.)
