Imperial Middlebrow 9789004426566, 9789004426559

Citation preview

Imperial Middlebrow

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Literary Modernism Series Editor Gernot Wimmer (University of Vienna, Austria) Editorial Board William Egginton (Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, usa) Patrick Fortmann (University of Illinois, usa) Roland Innerhofer (University of Vienna, Austria) Cindy K. Renker (University of North Texas, usa) Simonetta Sanna (Università degli Studi di Sassari, Italy) Andrew J. Webber (Churchill College, University of Cambridge, UK)

volume 7

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/limo

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Imperial Middlebrow Edited by

Christoph Ehland Jana Gohrisch

leiden | boston

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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2405-9315 ISBN 978-90-04-42655-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42656-6 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Acknowledgements  VII List of Figures and Tables  VIII Notes on Contributors  IX Introduction: Cross-colonial Encounters and Expressions of Power in Middlebrow Literature and Culture, 1890–1940 and the Present  1 Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch A Girl’s Own Empire? Imperialism and the Girl’s Own Paper, 1880 to 1903  22 Jochen Petzold Picturing Africa: Illustration in the Allan Quatermain Adventure Fictions of H. Rider Haggard  44 Kate Holterhoff “Cramful of snakes and ghosts”: B.M. Croker’s Anglo-Indian Ghost Stories  72 Christoph Singer “An artificial little community which has climbed eight thousand feet out of the world to be cool”: Sara Jeanette Duncan, Simla, and Middlebrow Aesthetics  89 Samuel Caddick Imagining the British West Indies in Middlebrow Fiction  103 Jana Gohrisch “Intimacies of complicity and critique”: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Victoria Cross’s Imperial Fiction  124 Cornelia Wächter Cross-colonial Encounters and Cultural Contestation in Somerset Maugham’s “Rain”  140 Victoria Kuttainen

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Contents

Revising the Romance: Depictions of Biracial Women and Mixed Marriage in Anglo-Indian Popular Fiction  159 Melissa Edmundson “A small seasoning of curry-powder” in A.J. Cronin’s Hatter’s Castle  178 Robert Wirth Sidelining Racism and Discrimination – Recent British Black and Asian Fiction  206 Gesa Stedman Middlebrow 2.0: The Digital Affect and the New Nigerian Novel  218 Hannah Pardey Index  241

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Acknowledgements This volume has had a slightly longer than usual production period, as its initial idea goes back to a series of mini-conferences in London and a larger meeting in Reading in 2017. When the original co-editor Kate Macdonald departed in 2018, Jana Gohrisch stepped in. She did not only make it possible to continue the work but also added a new thematic and methodological focus that links historical middlebrow and contemporary postcolonial studies. We are both grateful to our support team: Masja Horn and Christa Stevens at Brill, who have provided us with guidance as professional and encouraging as ever; Yvonne Jende at the University of Paderborn played a substantial part as she oversaw the editing process, kept the project rolling and contributed in manifold ways to the success of it. Last but not least, we are immensely grateful to our contributors for their enthusiasm and patience. It has been a pleasure working with you. Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch

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Figures and Tables Figures 1 2 3 4 5

Illustration by Maurice Greiffenhagen for Allan’s Wife 45 Illustrations by Walter Paget, Russel Flint, A.C. Michael for King Solomon’s Mines 51 Illustration by Charles Kerr for Allan Quatermain 58 Illustration by Charles Kerr for Allan Quatermain 59 Illustration by Thure de Thulstrup for Maiwa’s Revenge 64

Tables 1 2 3

Analytical levels of the digital affect 229 Realizations of the EMOTION concept 233 Adjective collocations 235

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Notes on Contributors Samuel Caddick is in the final stages of his PhD at Liverpool John Moores University. His research focuses on the deployment of Colonial Space as a method of managing Colonial Anxieties in Women-Authored Works of Raj Fiction. Melissa Edmundson is Lecturer of English at Clemson University (South Carolina, USA) and specializes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British Women Writers, with interests in Women’s Ghost Stories, the Supernatural, and Anglo-Indian Popular Fiction. She is the editor of two critical editions, Alice Perrin’s East of Suez (1901), published by Victorian Secrets Press in 2011, and a Broadview Edition of Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste (1851) published in 2016. Edmundson is author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Wales Press, 2013) and Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her other work on British Women’s AngloIndian Fiction includes an article on mixed-race relationships in the novels of Alice Perrin for a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture focusing on Victorian India. Christoph Ehland is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn. His research focuses on Early Modern Literature and Culture, Romanticism, Middlebrow and Anglo-Indian Literature, Literary Culture and Spatial Practices as well as Mobility Studies. Jana Gohrisch is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at Leibniz University Hannover (Germany). She has published two monographs, one on Black British Literature (1994) and one on nineteenth-century British Emotion Cultures (2005). In addition to co-editing several volumes, including Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines (Brill, 2013), she has written on Black British, Caribbean and African Literatures, on various aspects and periods of British Literature, on Popular Culture and Cultural Exchange. Her current book project contributes to Transatlantic Victorian Studies and deals with Post-­Emancipation Constructions of Agency in texts about the British West Indies since the midnineteenth century.

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Notes On Contributors

Kate Holterhoff completed her PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA) in 2016; she is currently an Affiliated Researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Technical Editor at The Central Online Victorian Educator (COVE), a scholar-driven open-access platform that publishes peer-reviewed Victorian material. Her research areas include ­nineteenthand early-twentieth-century British Literature, Visual Culture, Digital Humanities, and the History of Science. She has published articles in Configurations, Digital Humanities Quarterly, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, The Journal of Victorian Culture, The Journal of the History of Biology, and Victorian Network. She directs and edits the digital archive VisualHaggard.org, a literary and art historical resource indexed, and peer reviewed by NINES, which contextualizes and improves access to the illustrations of Victorian novelist H. Rider Haggard. Victoria Kuttainen is an Associate Professor of English and Writing at James Cook University, Australia. Her research focuses on the convergence of Colonialism and Modernity, with a particular focus on the Literatures of Canada and Australia in this context. Her books include Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite (2010) and The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity (with Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly, 2018). She is also the convenor of a new international research group Planetary Material Modernisms. Hannah Pardey is a Research Assistant and doctoral candidate at the University of Hanover (Germany). She teaches British Literatures and Cultures from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century with a strong focus on Postcolonial Literatures in English and theories and methods of Literary Studies. Her master’s thesis “Historiographic Metafiction from the Nigerian Diaspora” has received the GAPS Graduate Award (complimentary prize) in 2016. Her dissertation project, “Postcolonial Middlebrow: The New Nigerian Novel,” concerns the conditions of production, distribution and reception of recent Nigerian Fictions. Jochen Petzold is Professor of British Studies at the University of Regensburg (Germany). He studied in Freiburg i.Br. (Germany) and Eugene, Oregon (USA). His PhD project  focussed on contemporary South African Literature, his second book (­Habilitation) examines speech situations in lyrical poetry. He was Marie Curie Fellow (ERC) at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the - 978-90-04-42656-6

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University of Edinburgh, examining the portrayal of natural science in Victorian juvenile magazines. His current research interests centre on Victorian Popular Culture, particularly Juvenile Literature. Christoph Singer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany. In 2012, he finished his dissertation on literary representations of shorelines as liminal spaces. In 2019, he completed a monograph on Post-(Modernist) Narratives of waiting. He also published anthologies on intersections of Middlebrow and Modernism, and the iconography of Dante & Milton. Gesa Stedman heads the Culture and Literature department at the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests include the Victorian Discourse on Emotions, Early-Modern Cultural Exchange, Gender History, and the contemporary literary field in the UK. She has just completed two interdisciplinary edited collections: Contested Britain. Brexit, Austerity and Agency, with Marius Guderjan and Hugh Mackay (Bristol University Press), and Imagined Economies – Real Fictions. New Perspectives on Economic Thinking in Great Britain, with Jessica Fischer (transcript). Cornelia Wächter is Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessorin) of British Cultural Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. She is the author of Place-ing the Prison Officer: The “Warder” in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination (2015) and co-editor of Middlebrow and Gender, 1890–1945 (2016) and Complicity and the Politics of Representation (2019). She is currently working on a book project on Complicity, Queer Theory and Queer Modernism, as well as co-editing a collection of essays on Heritage, Space and Well-Being. Robert Wirth is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies of the University of Paderborn, Germany. His primary research interests lie in the field of Scottish Literature, Politics and Culture – with a main focus on the utilisation of history and nostalgia in contemporary political campaigning. In addition to having published in journals including The Journal of Scottish Thought and Litteraria Pragensia, he is co-editor of Complicity and the Politics of Representation (Roman & Littlefield, 2019) and Timescapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral (Brill/Rodopi, 2019).

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Introduction: Cross-colonial Encounters and Expressions of Power in Middlebrow Literature and Culture, 1890–1940 and the Present Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch 1

Fictions of Empire

It is rather curious that references to Britain’s imperial past should play such an important role within the discussion of the United Kingdom’s future relationship with the European Union. In addition to the issues of sovereignty and immigration, of taking back control of borders, laws and money, it was the notion of a Britain reconnected with its Commonwealth allegiances that featured prominently within the Brexit debate and especially its aftermath. The vision of a “Global Britain” which was formulated by Theresa May and other conservatives in the wake of recalibrating Britain’s foreign policy after it decided to leave resonates with this objective. In a speech delivered at the first ever meeting of the Commonwealth trade ministers in 2017, Liam Fox proposed that “[t] his Commonwealth of Nations has the opportunity to lead the defence of free trade, working together to shape new policies and approaches, showing the world a route to prosperity” (Fox). The argument for reengaging with the former colonies, preferably with the so-called Anglosphere, may be driven by an ideology of free trade and the hope for profitable commercial relations, but it goes much deeper than mere blindfolded and self-serving economics. Already in 1975 when the first referendum on Britain’s still young membership in the eec was held, those who wanted to leave looked to the Commonwealth as an alternative to Europe. At the time, the campaign for leaving the eec coined the slogan “Out! and into the world.” Although its advocates, then and now, have stressed the economic and strategic utility of the Commonwealth organisation for a Britain that finds itself outside the frameworks of the EU, their notion of a “truly ‘Global Britain’” (ibid.) which is built on the country’s allegedly time-honoured connections has been received with much scrutiny and even ridicule as well as an air of suspicion. In the 1970s, the call for a “global” perspective rather than a European one echoed defiantly reactionary amidst the reality of a swiftly decolonising world. In the context of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, the latest update to this notion has been exposed not only by left-wing critics as an attempt to establish an “Empire 2.0” but also by (anonymous) Whitehall officials who had coined the very term in the first place (cf. Tharoor). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426566_002

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James Blitz refers to the paradox that lies at the bottom of this reflex to turn to the Commonwealth in this muddled political situation when he writes in the Financial Times: The Commonwealth has long been regarded as a somewhat peculiar institution, one whose precise function has never been entirely clear. But as Britain prepares to leave the EU, Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, is expressing a keen interest in the 52 nations that make up the former British empire. blitz, 7 March 2017

For one, the Commonwealth lacks a clearly defined political agenda. The Oxford Companion to British History calls it “an accidental by-product of history” and states that historians are undetermined whether to interpret it as a mere substitutional “husk” or as the “culmination of the empire” (ibid.). In this regard it is of little consequence whether the Commonwealth’s “informality” and “unofficial manifestations” (MacIntyre 700) represent its main political and economic assets, as W. David MacIntyre argues in The Oxford History of the British Empire, or whether the institution primarily poses the danger of “seducing Britain away from her continental neighbours” without offering anything tangible in return, as others have contended (Cannon 234). In the recourse to the Commonwealth and the “Anglobalisation” (cf. Kumar 9) there is more fiction and fantasy involved than seems healthy, especially in view of the fundamental shift that the exit from the European Union will mean for Britain after almost half a century of its membership in the organisation. Critics have identified this resort to old allegiances as “empire nostalgia.” For example, Tom Whyman complains in the New York Times that “Theresa May’s empire of the mind” consists of little more than “a few rose-tinted memories of the 1950s together with an understanding of imperial history derived largely from images on vintage biscuit tins” (Whyman). The rhetoric of Brexit has an identifiably nostalgic core that consists of a dream of a re-engagement with the nation’s imperial past through its Commonwealth connections. Philip Murphy, Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, even titled his circumspect analysis of the myths of the Commonwealth The Empire’s New Clothes (2018). He argues, In a sense, the Commonwealth provided reassuring mood music for a Leave campaign keen to demonstrate that Britain would not be isolated in the world. Yet the actual promises about what could be delivered through the organization were never well defined. There was much talk

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of ‘our friends’ in the Commonwealth, but when mention was made of specific ‘friends,’ they tended to be the old white dominions. Not content with the contemporary myth of the Commonwealth, the Brexit campaign was apparently seeking to revive an older mythology of white-British racial solidarity dating from the early decades of the twentieth century. murphy 198

Given the obvious inconsistencies in the plans put forward for the future of the country in this heated debate, not few have called these visions “delusional” (cf. Tharoor, Whyman, et al.). In the propagation of the Commonwealth alternative its supporters are oblivious to the fact “that Britain’s empire was a ­precursor to the forces of globalization and migration that the Brexiteers so ­profoundly resent” (Tharoor). The very appearance of the ghosts of Empire, right at the moment when Britain is struggling more desperately than ever to define its future role in the world, is indicative of the imperial disquiet that still exists in the country more than four decades after the majority of its colonies gained independence. In his popular account of the British Empire Jeremy Paxman attests the British a “collective amnesia” with regard to “what was done in their country’s name” during the time of Empire (Paxman 286). Instead, politicians encourage the country to ignore the critical insights offered by postcolonial studies in the universities. Where the insights of the academic postcolonial debate cautions one with regard to the promises of a reengagement with the international ties that were formed during the Empire period, the popular debate often falls painfully short of acknowledging these acumens. It has become somewhat of a defence mechanism within conservative circles to maintain that British history is beyond reproach, ergo that there is nothing fundamentally questionable about former imperial policies. In a tweet released on 4 March 2016 Liam Fox proclaimed that “[t]he United Kingdom, [sic] is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its 20th century [sic] history” (qtd. after Tharoor). Michael Gove’s spell as education secretary was overshadowed by debates over his redrafting of the school curricula which were, according to Gove, meant “to celebrate empire” (Milne). With regard to this it does not come as a surprise that the results of a survey undertaken by YouGov in 2014 shows that a majority of the British public entertains a rather positive image of Britain’s imperial past. The survey indicates that 59% of the British population thinks the British Empire “is something to be proud of.” More than a third of those questioned would even like Britain still to have an empire. Only 19% in this survey believed that Britain’s imperial past is something rather to be ashamed of (cf. Dahlgreen).

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Clearly, these results must be seen as ironic or at least disheartening when considering the achievements and insights produced by leading scholars of the colonial and postcolonial in British universities such as Catherine Hall, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy et al. But perhaps the persistence of an uncritical appreciation of the imperial past in the wider public reflects the ivory tower isolation of academic research that is frequently not taken up in the wider realm of popular public debates. Beyond these considerations, the figures raise questions about the facilitating factors that foster the perseverance of a nostalgic attachment to the fantasies of the British Empire in Britain. There is, moreover, perhaps a tendency in political analysis to overlook or marginalise the influence of cultural productions on a nation’s readiness to believe and do strange things. If the revisionist changes in the school curricula of recent years undoubtedly play their part in the dissemination of a particular image of the British past, then so do the manifold other cultural discourses that feed into the nation’s historical imagination. In his study of the First World War, The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson dedicates much space to the discussion of the cultural factors that contributed to a situation in which the nations of Europe almost inevitably were drawn towards this war. He pays particular attention to the stories that flooded the reading markets during the so-called “spy-craze” of the 1890s and explains that these were not merely wild figments of the literary imagination but contributed to the very climate that prepared the public of the key European powers for the hostilities to come (cf. Ferguson 1–15). Ferguson convincingly shows how the crucible of literature brought the sediments of politics, cultural change and societal unease into reaction with each other: “Those who attempted to visualize a future war generally had two motives: to sell copies of their books (or the newspapers which serialized them) to the reading public; and to advance a particular political view” (11). This interpretation is also corroborated by I.F. Clarke, who collected the shorter fictions and fantasies of the war-to-come in The Great War with Germany 1890–1914 (1997). Clarke emphasises the fact that the “dream warfare” which agitated public opinion was directly linked to the advent of “universal literacy, of the mass press, and of mass publishing” (Clarke 2). The example of the literary anticipation of “the-conflict-to-come” (1) may be an example too agitated and frantic to compare easily to the long-lasting imperial vision that played into the rhetoric of Brexit. Although the texts of the spycraze and the middlebrow rendering of the imperial world of the British Empire show significant differences with regard to their nature and reader reception, the former may still serve as an example of the ways by which literature can stir the imagination of an audience with notions and ideas that eventually translate into the political realm. An obvious difference lies in the fact

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that, according to Clarke, “the authors of these tales of the non-yet” (1) dabbled in the prophetic, imagining a future that perhaps felt too real not to come true, but was still in the future. The British Empire, however, was a very real and an existing institution. It determined the lives of millions of people; it defined their outlook; it inspired their hopes, sparked their aspirations and dictated their decisions. And still, it needed to be imagined; it needed to exist beyond its existence so that people in the metropolis could take an interest in it, would support the policies that ensured its growth and continuity and would want to become part of it. For this imaginative extension of imperial life into the metropolitan sphere literature played a significant role. The tales of empire that stocked the shelves of bookstores in ever vaster quantities from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards answered to a general desire for all things imperial. Writers right across the literary spectrum aimed to fuel the imagination of a public that was deeply entangled in the affairs and economies of empire, yet was also very often only superficially informed about it. While the thrills and the exoticism of the popular adventure novels of empire à la RiderHaggard entertained one segment of the market, the writers of the middlebrow imagined life on the colonial periphery for another. With the development of an ever-wider reading public after the educational reforms of the 1870s there emerged a kind of literature that operated between the avant-garde and the popular and which claimed an essential position in the emerging literary markets of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. An early German debate on the “Mittelware” (Weber 209) anticipates much of the criticism that would surface in Britain during the so-called “battle of the brows” in the interwar period. As early as 1912, the art critic and publisher Hans von Weber is the first to concern himself with the emergence of a “middling” sort of literature. Von Weber connects this development with the “growing intellectual demand” (207) of an ever-wider readership for stimulating books, yet goes on to criticise a particular branch of the publishing industry for undermining this desire with the dissemination of literature of questionable quality. Even though the books are well-presented, he warns in a semimocking tone that “Innen aber schlummert die bekannte für jede Entwicklung als Schlafmittel so gefährliche Mittelware, die dem künstlich immer noch niedergehaltenen Geschmack des geistigen Mittelstandes entspricht” (209). Although von Weber’s polemic raises issues of taste and aesthetic quality – which would go on to become the standard criticism of this particular literary ­segment – his association of what he calls the “gefährliche Mittelware” (dangerous middle fare) with a soporific is significant, since it shows that the problem von Weber identifies lies in the middlebrow’s propensity to a dangerously seductive cultural inertia.

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With regard to this it is necessary to clarify the subtle difference that lies between von Weber’s position and the later criticism of the middlebrow by the likes of Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf’s well-known denigration of the middlebrow for its intellectual opportunism and false aspirations displayed little disguised intellectual snobbery amidst the tectonic shifts in the socio-economic fabric of society during the first decades of the twentieth century. Where Woolf airs a sense of threatened exclusivity mingled with literary-status anxiety, von Weber directs his criticism at the stifling effect the aesthetic limitations of the middlebrow unfolds for the reader. However, one needs to be cautious with such judgements. Both von Weber and Woolf were highbrows, after all, and considered themselves to be part of the literary and intellectual elite. In consequence, they looked with a due sense of aversion at those writers who could not be easily disregarded as being simply popular. As von Weber’s critique shows, the middlebrow created a rather compelling taxonomical problem for their conception of literature. In the context of colonial writing, these difficulties are particularly prominent. Although it generally holds true that typical middlebrow engagement with the imperial theme aimed to familiarise its readers with colonial life and at the same time served to naturalise colonial rule, we should note that initially even Joseph Conrad was likely considered to be a proponent of the middlebrow. The output of Conrad as well as of Rudyard Kipling operated in a market segment in which the distinction between “the brows” was not always easily made (cf. Frost 37). As this shows, aesthetic categorisation is a shifting affair and, despite its generic constraints, middlebrow writing sometimes directly and often indirectly maps the inherent fissures in the colonial endeavour and its frequently disconcerting realities. With regard to such aspects as interracial contact or colonial legitimisation, middlebrow writing can be conceived of as a form of “anxiety management” (Ehland and Wächter 3) which allows unsettling issues to be raised while maintaining at least a superficial impression of narrative stability and security. Given that most authors and novels of the imperial middlebrow are nowadays largely forgotten, its cultural significance almost entirely escapes us. Yet, for almost a century it was these “plain tales” from the colonial frontier that settled in the unclaimed territory of their readers’ minds, all the while oscillating somewhere between a desire to know and actual knowledge. This collection of essays aims to ascertain both the strategies which guided middlebrow texts in their representation of colonial matters and the channels they used for propelling persuasive fictions of empire. The contributions seek to give an insight into the processes of formation and dissemination of discourses on empire which have proved seductively persistent over the decades.

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In this way, this collection of essays helps to shed light on some of the ways in which the British wanted to imagine, or actively imagined, their empire. The narratives of this imagination, as the contributions show, can be deeply ambiguous, if not downright disturbing. 2

Middlebrow Studies

Middlebrow studies are now well established as a literary-historical critical mode by which we can investigate the overlapping research areas of literature in the late Victorian age and the early-twentieth century as well as of more recent literary phenomena. The discipline has been formed around enquiries into such issues as the role of the publisher, reading taste, cultural dissemination, the creation of the canon, the notion of the literary gatekeeper, twentieth-century fashions in criticism, the feminist importance of middlebrow writing and streams of cultural production emerging concurrently with Modernism (e.g. Hapgood and Paxton 2000). Sparked by Nicola Humble’s seminal study of the feminine middlebrow novel (2001), the discussion has been taken further afield: it has been instrumental in elucidating how middlebrow authors, publishers, readers and texts established a strong cultural presence (e.g. Harker 2007, Brown and Grover 2012), developed a masculine mode of reading (e.g. Macdonald 2011), demonstrated a mediatory function between British literary cultures (e.g. Macdonald and Singer 2015), supported the testing of gender restrictions (e.g. Ehland and Wächter 2016) and helped to shape national identities (Habermann 2010). International interdisciplinary conferences on middlebrow have extended its study outside Anglophone literature (European Middlebrow, January 2013, Brussels), beyond gender normativity (Inventing the Middlebrow, St Paul, Minnesota, June 2014), beyond cultural hierarchies (Cultural Hierarchies and Middlebrow Practices, Amsterdam, January 2016) and into the discourses of the colonial world (Imperial Middlebrow, Reading, March 2017). The variety of the research fields is an indicator of the strength of the discipline, since research into the middlebrow has reached its maturity it is extending and testing its borders, and reassessing how the middlebrow corpus grew under diverse ­cultural influences. As Middlebrow is no longer solely Anglophone, it needs to be reconsidered as a product of international readerly desires and needs, as a  global project of authors and publishers alike. Recent studies have taken the Middlebrow beyond the historical time frame in which it originated and have raised questions about middlebrow tendencies in contemporary writing (cf. Driscoll; Edmondson).

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Our collection of essays follows two trajectories of renewing middlebrow studies: on the one hand, we investigate some of the hitherto neglected imperial dimensions of middlebrow texts in the first half of the twentieth century by adding a colonial discourse analysis approach to the field; on the other hand, we wish to demonstrate the usefulness of the middlebrow as an analytical category for the study of contemporary cultural and postcolonial productions, transcending both the temporal and geographical boundaries of the term’s established use. On the methodological meta-level of literary studies, we wish to make a case for the middlebrow as a polyvalent category, thus allowing for its contemporary significance in previously unexplored contexts. We argue for a new and creative phase of middlebrow studies by broadening its temporal and geographical scope, its subject matter and its methodologies. We proceed from recent forays into middlebrow studies that challenge the temporal and geographical dimensions of the field. In her study The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Beth Driscoll locates the new literary middlebrow in institutions like Oprah’s Book Club, the Man Booker Prize, etc. She focuses on continuities between historical and present manifestations of the middlebrow. While they both exist in a heavily mediated culture, they inhabit it in entirely new dimensions due to the internet where the middlebrow constitutes a dominant cultural force. Postcolonial contexts and issues, however, do not feature in Driscoll’s argument. A field that has been particularly significant to middlebrow writing and reading is the fictions of Empire. Middlebrow writing engaged with the realities and fictions of colonial life in a multitude of ways, and middlebrow writers catered for a readership eager to learn about and imagine the Empire. Feminist enquiries into the Anglo-Indian novel (cf. Moore-Gilbert 1996, Kapila 2010, Roye and Mittapalli 2013 etc.) have particularly helped to highlight its role for  the dissemination but also criticism of imperial ideology. Their research has revealed not only the large amount of often almost forgotten material available for the study of middlebrow writing on the Empire but also the subtle fault-lines that this engagement with the so-called colonial periphery often exhibits. In her study of the Anglo-Indian family romance, Shuchi Kapila reminds us of the fact the literary imagination and colonial policies formed a far closer relationship than might be expected when she writes, “[t]he nature of British rule in India was a significant factor in shaping the form and structure of these literary-political fantasies” (Kapila 3). Kapila draws particular attention to the strategies of “indirect rule” practised by the British in many of their colonies which fostered “a concern for social and educational reform” and “a belief in

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the superiority of British culture” (ibid.). Middlebrow authors were prone to reflect and propagate this “fantasy” (Kapila 3) of the general benevolence of a patriarchal ruling class of British colonial administrators and their families. Despite the fact that many middlebrow romances regularly show little concern for the subject races under British rule, they implicitly demonstrate to their audiences in the metropolis the dutiful and often altruistic acts of colonial administration by the British officials. Given the outstanding significance of the British Raj for the policies and economies of the British Empire and the sheer quantity of Anglo-Indian writing that attempted to capture and communicate this situation, it does not come as a surprise that much of the research so far has concentrated on the Anglo-Indian perspective. Nonetheless, the analytical strength of the discipline is perhaps most paradigmatically illustrated by the achievements of middlebrow inquiries into the Caribbean. Postcolonial studies have only recently adopted the middlebrow as an analytical category, as the work of two Caribbean studies scholars shows, thus challenging the geographical limits of the field. The first instance is the chapter “Withering Heights: Maryse Condé and the Postcolonial Middlebrow” in Chris Bongie’s Friends and Enemies. The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature (2008). Bongie reads the novels of Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe/usa) and Jamcaica Kincaid (Antigua/usa) as examples of what he calls “postcolonial middlebrow.” He juxtaposes Condé with the popular writer Tony Delsham (Martinique) in order to bring out the middlebrow qualities of the former. He starts from the assumption that postcolonial criticism is characterised by an “anxiously under-theorized relation to the empirical question of popularity and the ideological stakes that question raises” (283). Bongie then attributes the lack of interest of postcolonial studies in the popular and the middlebrow to its “modernist idea of the text” (289), pointing out: “When it comes to the production and positive evaluation of cultural texts the twin directives of modernism were, I would argue, as follows: aesthetic resistance (promoting stylistic difficulty) and political resistance (promoting social change)” (289). He continues: “[…] what holds [these two sides] together […] is an inability to come to terms with ‘compromised,’ ‘inauthentically’-popular texts, as well as the audiences who take pleasure in consuming those texts” (290). The phrase “‘inauthentically’-­ popular” refers to middlebrow forms of popularity (282) and suggests something “authentically popular” as the norm which Caribbean writers and critics alike have long located in the folk culture of the region. In the end, however, Bongie largely ignores the multi-layered findings of middlebrow studies. Conceptualising the middlebrow merely as a manifestation of the popular, his chapter does not fully do credit to the term’s analytical potential.

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This is the starting point for another Caribbean studies scholar, Belinda Edmondson, who focusses on the Anglophone Caribbean. In Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (2009), she continues Bongie’s revisionist agenda and rewrites Caribbean literary history from the perspective of the middlebrow. Proceeding from the “binary that is implicit in Caribbean ­societies – the binary between authenticity and middle-class status” (5), Edmondson frames her study of contemporary cultural practices with chapters on the development of Caribbean literature as the “origin(s) of Caribbean middlebrow culture” (3). She introduces a “‘brown’ aesthetic” (6) to refer to the increasingly self-confident and politically varied literary production of the brown middle classes in the region since the nineteenth century. The disputed notion of “a brown cultural identity as a national ideal” is used to reflect on “brownness” as “a central category for a discussion of middle-class Caribbean identity because it speaks directly to the middle-class issue of quasi-elite status and humble origins” (7). Following Bongie’s explanation of the hesitant postcolonial engagement with the middlebrow, Edmondson underlines “the role that popularity and pleasure play in determining the meaning of books” (9). Drawing on notions of class but neglecting power struggles, she sees “two axes to […] middlebrow culture: aspirational culture, or a desire for higher social standing; and authenticating culture, or a desire to connect with working-class culture” (10). The cultural agents are the “black, educated, propertyless” (12), i.e. the black and brown middle classes, who adopt modern (African) American professionalism as their cultural model (15f.), rather than the white “propertied and business classes” (12) or the black and poor working classes. The pleasure of middlebrow writing is its “accessibility” (15), renouncing the “thematic [and formal] complexity” of highbrow literature which in the Caribbean is associated with the white elite (ibid.). Unlike middlebrow studies, postcolonial literary studies focussing on the Caribbean have trouble with the openly affirmed bourgeois nature of middlebrow culture. To them, this affirmation signals a potentially conservative and colonial orientation. It subverts the emancipatory anticolonial and antiestablishment grounding of postcolonialism in working-class and (peasant) folk culture. Subsequently, Bongie’s category of the “‘inauthentically’-popular” and Edmondson’s “‘brown’ aesthetic” are both put into inverted commas which may be taken as signalling unease and even distrust. As contributors to this volume, Pardey and Stedman discuss the middlebrow as a contemporary cultural formation with international ramifications, reconsidering it as a product of international readerly desires and needs with writers and readers predominantly being located in UK and US. They highlight the specific cultural work of the middlebrow as a set of partly institutionalized

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practices of writing, distributing and reading a growing body of postcolonial texts in the digital age (cf. Driscoll). Despite the new means of distribution, the middlebrow fulfils the same function as at the beginning of the twentieth century: it continues to disseminate neo-colonial ideologies. It perpetuates colonial power structures by allowing metropolitan readers to imagine an affective community in which the cultural and social “Others” serve to adapt the ­middle-class emotional habitus to the conditions of an increasingly globalized market economy. It is our aim with this collection of essays to take the discussion of the imperial middlebrow further afield. Our advance into relatively unchartered literary territory will digress from the temporal and spatial dimensions usually still associated with the middlebrow. As the contributors engage with material rendering other areas of the Empire such as the Caribbean or the global diaspora they add significant detail to our understanding of the subtle differences one finds in the politics of representation of the colonial and postcolonial spheres in middlebrow writing. 3 Contributions In line with the recent developments in the discipline, the essays in this collection reflect our joint intention of enabling a wide-ranging reappraisal of the position of middlebrow writing in and contribution to the discourse universe of the British Empire. They explore the literary as well as the socio-political role that middlebrow writing and its markets and audiences played in the propagation and naturalisation of colonial matters and also in their critique. Setting the scene is Jochen Petzold: in his exploration of Britain’s expanding market for juvenile magazines during the second half of the nineteenth century, Petzold ventures into a field that early attracted the attention of scholars of the middlebrow. Sparked by the enormous appeal of “penny dreadfuls,” a number of middlebrow publications stepped in to stem the tide and offer morally more uplifting alternatives such as the widely popular Boy’s Own Paper (bop) published by the Religious Tracts Society. Diverting from a perspective which usually concentrates on the young male as the standard audience for such publications, Petzold turns to the bop’s sister publication, the Girl’s Own Paper. His discussion sheds light on the discourses of an imperial education aimed at Victorian teenage girls and shows that in contrast to magazines for boys which stressed empire-building male heroism, girls were being rather subtly advised about issues related to emigration. By telling their young female readers success stories of emigrants and stressing the need for further British

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settlement in the colonies, the magazines played their part in propagating an expansionist ideology of empire. The rendering of the Boer War in this context provides Petzold with a particularly complex example of how the traumatic as well as the dubious experiences of a colonial war are documented and integrated into what he calls the “utility-discourse” connected with the Empire. Following the narrow line between the popular and the middlebrow is Kate Holterhoff, who takes her readers in medias res with a detailed description of an uncaptioned illustration from Rider Haggart’s Alan’s Wife (1889) to introduce her topic: the role of illustrations for the construction of Africans in Haggart’s imperial romances targeted at an Anglo-American middlebrow audience. Concentrating on the Allan Quatermain-novels, Holterhoff combines the methodology of visual culture studies and colonial discourse analysis to explore the cultural and ideological work these illustrations perform. She argues that nineteenth-century illustrations “established ideas about what Benjamin Disraeli termed the Imperial idea, while also facilitating the creation of new and exoticized narratives about Africa.” The illustrations to Haggart’s imperial adventure stories allow us not only to understand the marketing strategies geared towards middle-class Western consumers but also how their mindsets were shaped by colonialist stereotypes. She investigates three motifs in the Allan Quatermain novels: the representations of the Zulu as noble savages, the incorporation of African bodies into African landscapes and the construction of African women as sexualized and powerful. As a first example, Holterhoff discusses three illustrations of the same scene from King Solomon’s Mines (1885), which contrast African and European upper-class masculinities and conceptualize the relationship between the Zulu warrior king Umslopogaas and the British colonizers. The second example deals with illustrations to Alan Quatermain (1887) and presents the elaborately described body and clothing of Masai warrior as part of the African landscape which, following Holterhoff, are a “technique to suggest African primitiveness, dangerousness, and otherness.” The anthropological details are drawn from a contemporary source and serve to exoticize the dangerous African for the middlebrow reader. Equally ambiguous is the representation of African women which make up the third example taken from illustrations to Maiwa’s Revenge (1888). It is here that the illustrator works with the desires of Anglo-American middlebrow readers for deviating sexuality combining the display of the female body and violence. With earlier publications on the Anglo-Indian middlebrow to his credit, Christoph Singer takes his readers into the world of Bithia Mary Croker’s AngloIndian novels and short stories. Rather than constructing the Indians as others, as might be expected from this kind of colonial middlebrow fiction, Croker’s ghost stories stage the fears of the British of not being powerful enough to rule.

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Based on four ghost stories published in 1893 and 1919, Singer discusses “how the all-pervasive fear of transgressing Anglo-Indian conventions is embedded in Croker’s rather conventional ghost stories” and focusses on the roles of women and their social networks in colonial India. The Anglo-Irish author of 44 novels and six short story collections has been compared to Rudyard Kipling until today, with critics paying increasing attention to the gender hierarchies in the Anglo-Indian communities and in the literary field where middlebrow writers such as Croker have been dismissed as authors of ladies’ romances. The ghost stories under scrutiny present few Indian characters, and those who do appear are more types than individuals; Singer reads this as a reflection on the memsahibs being subsumed under “their husbands’ positions and, by extension, the Empire at large.” What emerges from Singer’s parallel reading of Croker and Anglo-Indian household manuals and other non-fictional material, however, is the contradictory agency of these seemingly voiceless women. Their “paradoxical subject-position” as invisible wives, expected to rule visibly over their Anglo-Indian households complete with Indian servants, is a constant source of social insecurity and therefore of anxiety and fear. Singer condenses this into the fitting paradox of “conventional horror and the horror of convention” to study the narrative strategies of the texts concerning character and plot design in relation to their Indian setting. The latter serves as the main plot lever due to the position of women in the gendered hierarchy of social rank which is symbolized by the homes these fictional families take. The ghosts and concomitant tragedies point to the social transgression of the inappropriately chosen home which does not only cause jealousy and envy in the community but threatens the survival of the family as well as the Empire. Further expanding our knowledge of the world of the Anglo-Indian community in India, Samuel Caddick’s contribution to the collection deals with the special position held by fiction relating to the hill station of Simla in the context of Anglo-Indian writing. In looking at a number of shorter texts by Maud Diver and Jeanette Duncan, he situates the place in the general imagination of British India and points to the highly ambiguous representation of the socalled “summer capital” of the British Raj as “a place of instability and performance.” His discussion serves to highlight how Simla, the refuge of the British fleeing the heat of the Indian plains during the summer months, built a reputation for itself that emphasised not only its Englishness but also, and almost paradoxically, its position outwith normal social bounds. In fact, as Caddick shows, in their literary depiction of the hill community, writers explored its somewhat dubious character in terms of its flirtatious and carnivalesque ­behaviour. In the texts by Diver and Duncan, Simla emerges as a heterotopian  place where such fundamentals as the order of the class system and in

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c­ onsequence that of the colonial society are partly suspended or actively undermined by the protagonists. In these stories both art and the character of the artist become vehicles to test the boundaries of coded behaviour. If art and art appreciation in the stories offer the chance to destabilise and reorder the orthodox hierarchies of society by assuming intellectual superiority, the character of the artist functions as a social actor who is seen to move freely in and out of social norms as he chooses. Stepping outside the plotlines, Caddick detects in these stories an element of self-reflection by middlebrow authors, whose typical dependency on the book market hampered their artistic reputation. The short stories discussed in his chapter provide the opportunity for a subtle investigation into the nature of middlebrow writing torn between artistic aspiration and commercial necessity, if not indeed actively seduced by the latter. Stepping beyond the vested territories commonly featuring in middlebrow writing, the contribution by Jana Gohrisch widens the horizon of the discussion of imperial middlebrow beyond the Anglo-Indian context and adds the distinct viewpoint offered by the writing of middlebrow authors on the Caribbean. In her contrasting discussion of Augusta Zelia Fraser’s late-Victorian novel Lucilla (1895) and Margaret Long’s novel The Golden Violet (1936) she explores how middlebrow textual strategies of representing and utilising concepts of gender and race develop and change over the period. In doing so, Gohrisch sheds light on the fact that novels in the genre may simultaneously pretend to challenge and occasionally even undermine the conventional expectations associated with these issues while at the same time still offering fare of a normalising and stabilising nature for the imperial project. In her analysis of Fraser’s novel, she observes an appropriation of the colonial concept of an altruistic femininity. Far from subscribing unambiguously to the fear of race-mixing commonly voiced in the literature set in the region, Gohrisch shows how Fraser’s character constellations and plot designs subtly undermine the predominant images of degeneracy by creating a space that allows her to give agency to brown middle-class women in the colonial context. Driven by a feminist agenda of sorts that combines models of Victorian domesticity with the emancipatory impetus of the New Woman she advocates a new kind of colonial femininity aimed at redeeming a colonial project blinkered by its prejudices. Contrasting Fraser’s exotic domestic romance with Long’s calculatingly popular variant of the middlebrow, Gohrisch’s discussion exposes the textual and aesthetic strategies by which both authors cater for a largely metropolitan, female audience concerned with their own gendered and racialised identities. As Fraser did in her domestic setting, Long’s historical novel The Golden Violet employs comedy and sarcasm as a means of exploring if not exploiting the

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generic framework set by the colonial middlebrow novel. Driven by market forces and reader expectations that limit and define the possibilities of the aesthetic and literary achievement of the middlebrow novel, there are still significant differences between Fraser and Long, where the latter replaces the Victorian rhetoric of improvement by a “complacent complicity with enslavement, exploitation and their concomitant racist ideologies.” Writing as an expert on the female middlebrow, Cornelia Wächter discusses race, gender and sexuality in Victoria Cross’s imperial fiction. The prolific British writer Annie Sophie Cory wrote under a number of pen names and was noted publicly in 1895 with a story published in the avant-garde periodical The Yellow Book. Wächter proposes that this story “metonymically represents not just her status as a middlebrow writer but also anticipates the paradoxes and internal dissonances, the complicities and anti-complicities that pervade her oeuvre” which she then sets out to analyse in detail. Wächter does not limit herself to complicity critique because this common approach does not do justice to Cross’s works, as they “denaturalise imperialism, compulsory monogamy, heterosexism and patriarchy – particularly in their intersections.” Cross negotiates middle-class ideologies by challenging what can be said “about sexed, gendered and racialised love relationships” but simultaneously phrases her anti-imperialist stance in tropes of empire. Taking Cross’s ambiguity into account, Wächter argues that “it is necessary to look beyond her individual works at recurring themes, tropes and inter-­ textual references and to view them in interrelation.” To illustrate her point, she singles out Cross’s brand of New Hellenism which the writer deploys to design a language that transcends middle-class morality. Wächter studies its manifestations in Anna Lombard (1901) and Life of My Heart (1915), “two of Cross’s most subversive and progressive works as far as the interrelation of race and sexuality is concerned.” Anna Lombard subverts the conventions of the station romance by having the white middle-class protagonist secretly marry a lower-class Indian and take a white British husband in addition. Wächter’s reading then stresses the violation of the monogamy norm over interracial love theme claiming that the protagonist’s “racist words are largely instrumental, making use of imperialist thinking in order to excuse and explain her violation of the doctrine of compulsory monogamy.” Similar to Olive Schreiner, Cross appropriates New Hellenism for feminist intellectual ends going beyond its contemporary use as vindication of same-sex relationships by Oscar Wilde and others. Wächter demonstrates this with regard to Life of My Heart where an Indian character is likened to a Greek one and then returns to Anna Lombard and its Hellenistic elements that are used to translate the interracial love triangle for readers with some classical education.

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Both novels, however, contain their revisions of racial and sexual norms by eliminating the deviant forms. Thus they eventually affirm the dominant ideologies of their middlebrow readers and make Hellenism subservient to imperialism. Taking the discussion into the interwar period, Victoria Kuttainen offers an in-depth analysis of Rain, one of Somerset Maugham’s best-known short stories which was published in 1921 and was immediately adapted for both the stage and the screen. It features the Modern Girl Sadie Thompson, “an oceancrossing, platform-crossing, culture-crossing, and even race-crossing modern media sensation,” in a South Pacific setting and thus lends itself to being explored as an example of the imperial middlebrow. Kuttainen proceeds from the middlebrow story-telling pattern of “polished surfaces that conceal unexpected depths” as identified by Faye Hammill and argues that the story is “both a product of and commentary upon an increasingly image-based culture” and can be read “as a wry reflection upon the contingencies of cultural value, the gender of modernity, and the cultural dynamics of cross-colonial encounters.” The analysis takes the reader into the story which is set aboard a ship bound for British Samoa. Two middle-class characters, a British doctor and an American missionary’s wife, represent the colonizers sharing “an interest in the management of bodies and populations,” which suggests “Foucauldian themes of bio-power often associated with the imperial project of surveillance and control.” The story contrasts this with the protagonist who is an American single woman bound to take up a job as a cashier. She provokes the middleclass respectability of the other house guests in a boarding house in Pago Pago on one of the American Eastern islands until the missionary sets upon her to either have her prosecuted or to convert her instead of the Samoans. The story ends with the missionary dead and the protagonist accusing the doctor of complicity in exploiting her sexually. In what follows, Kuttainen discusses the play which is based on the short story but changes the representation of the Pacific into “a source of visual pleasure” against which the transgression of Sadie unfolds. She then presents Hollywood-style film versions based on the play to analyse how both play and films simplify the complexities of the short story and its politics of looking in favour of the male exoticizing and eroticizing gaze. Regarding Maugham as a writer, Kuttainen observes the “abject middlebrow” between popular esteem and intellectual rejection which “Rain” discusses through issues of “reputation, respectability, judgement, and appraisal.” The stylistic subtleties and ironic turns of his stories make him fit the category of middlebrow as outlined by Hammill. The imperial aspect of Maugham’s story resides in the transgression of colonial binaries due to the intersection of

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British and A ­ merican interests in the Pacific with Sadie as both “a figure of potential emancipation” and “a body requiring management and containment.” Melissa Edmundson takes readers into one of the most contentious and complicated fields of imperial writing, that on race relations. An issue of great psychological stress and social anxiety in the discourses of empire, the mixing of race was considered in predominantly negative terms with medical warnings of debilitation (cf. Tilt 1867: 3) and its overspill into fictional accounts of moral degeneracy as in Dickens or Trollope. Edmundson discusses the representation of Eurasians in imperial fiction and stresses the role female writers played in opening up the discourse to the possibility of a more positive image of interracial relationships. She does so by a close analysis of two Anglo-Indian novels, Fanny Emily Penny’s Caste and Creed (1890) and Mary Churchill Luck’s Poor Elisabeth (1901). From her readings there emerge the narrative strategies by which these texts make an attempt at subverting otherwise hostile perceptions of miscegenation. As Penny and Luck both rely on an alternative focalization which embraces rather than excludes the perspective of the biracial Other, their novels attempt to offer just that kind of “anxiety management” which characterises one of the subtler functions of middlebrow writing. With regard to this, they implicitly make their case for racial tolerance but keep it firmly embedded in the conviction of Britain’s civilising mission in the East. The result is a strategic ambivalence. If it holds true that the significance of the Anglo-Indian romance in this context lies in the fact that it helped to shape the British public’s perception of this particular angle of the racial dimension of empire, Edmundson’s discussion makes it clear that such more enlightened perspectives had to tread a rather fine line between the recognition of the readers’ deep-felt need of confirmation of racial prejudice and the authors’ attempt at a recalibration of race relations. A far more contained rendering of colonial matters can be found in the works of the Scottish writer A.J. Cronin, a household name in the 1950s and 60s. Robert Wirth dedicates his contribution to Cronin’s debut novel Hatter’s Castle (1931) which, in typical middlebrow manner, mixes narrative sub-genres to cater for a broad readership. First of all, Cronin challenges the conventions of the Scottish kailyard novel, interweaving it with strands of adventure fiction and travel writing. “India features in the novel not so much as a real place, but rather as a psychological space that exists primarily in the imagination of those characters who know the least.” These are the narrow-minded small-town Scots the anti-Kailyard mode shows up for its middlebrow readers. Wirth concentrates on the plot of this voluminous novel and its protagonist, whose downfall due to hubris and inability to adapt to economic change he reads as being modelled on the classic tragic hero. Realist strategies, however, d­ ominate,

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with which Cronin caters to an audience schooled in the nineteenth-­centurytradition domestic novel rather than following the modernist and Scottish Renaissance experiments of his contemporaries. The Indian setting, however, is present off-stage in letters, only serving as a career option for the protagonist’s son and, through him, as an economic remedy to the poverty of the Scottish family. In generic terms, “India, the ‘exotic other’ […] replaces what the big town or the city in the Kailyard school of literature represents, namely a space of inspiration and ‘getting on’ for some, and a location of sin, debauchery and moral corruption for others.” Wirth then presents in detail the character development which sees the lower middle-class clerk adopt middle-class habits which finally ruin him financially and make him dependant on his mother’s remittances. In the end, he goes to South America re-using his colonial experience in a new setting. Thus, the novel reconciles the generic critique with the imperial desires of its middlebrow readership on an even grander, global scale than colonial India. Where a writer such as Cronin catered with his 1931 novel towards readerly desires for fictions of stability and perseverance in the days before the dissolution of empire had really begun, the two final essays in this collection take the issue of imperial or colonial middlebrow into the twenty-first century and thus into firmly postcolonial territory. Gesa Stedman’s essay offers a passionate reevaluation of the mechanisms that define the success of the contemporary postcolonial novel. Looking at a core group of popular writers who fuel the genre of the so-called “postcolonial middlebrow,” to use Chris Bongie’s term, she observes a tendency to offer readers little more than superficial diversity as a garnish to repetitive and predictable plotlines. Driven by the logic and the necessities underlying an increasingly global and internationalist book market, writers of this new middlebrow scene sweeten their postcolonial message and provide their readers with emollients against unpleasant insights by introducing positive factors such as humour and happy endings. Stedman sets out to put to the test recent novels by Zadie Smith, the Booker Prize nominee Sunjeev Sahota, and newcomer Mahsuda Snaith. Her close-reading of these popular texts reveals the narrative strategies which render impotent the production of more than a stereotypical and clichéd extraction of the real concerns of postcolonialism. Like Gesa Stedman, Hannah Pardey also aims at opening the notion of the middlebrow to include present-day literary phenomena. Testing the temporal and medial boundaries of the concept, she follows scholars such as Beth Driscoll who recently discussed the applicability of the term for new forms of  reader engagement (cf. Driscoll). However, Pardey’s critical survey of what she calls “the middlebrow 2.0” ventures significantly beyond the kind

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of d­ emocratisation effect which the ubiquitous literary online communities seem ostensibly to suggest for the digital age. In fact, her research reveals that the particular reception patterns privileged by the new medial system foster a digital affect by which the literary text is turned into a product of international readerly desires and needs. Focusing on select examples of the New Nigerian novel, she situates her enquiry in the context of postcolonial writing and persuasively shows how the genre becomes subjected to the neocolonial power politics of an international book market dependent on an oligarchy of a few dominant internet and media corporations. With regard to this, her analysis of the corpus of reader responses helps to explain how the universalising tendencies of the affective online communities either smother the cultural and racial differences addressed by postcolonial writers or appropriate them to the implicit standards set by a metropolitan literary culture. Although her understanding of the imperial middlebrow in this context is apt to foreground the role it plays in naturalising and legitimising (neo-)colonial ideologies, her research documents the ways in which the literary middlebrow is absorbed in the ­inescapable as well as the all-encompassing logic of late-capitalist society of the t­ wenty-first century. Works Cited Blitz, James. “Post-Brexit delusions about Empire 2.0.” Financial Times, 7 March 2017. Web. Bongie, Chris. “Withering Heights: Maryse Condé and the Postcolonial Middlebrow.” Friends and Enemies. The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool UP, 2008, 280–321. Brown, Erica and Mary Grover, eds. Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Cannon, John, ed. The Oxford Companion to British History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Clarke, I.F. ed. The Great War with Germany, 1890–1914: Fictions and Fantasies of the ­War-to-Come. Liverpool UP, 1997. Dahlgreen, Will. “The British Empire is ‘something to be proud of.’” YouGov, 26 July 2014. Web. Driscoll, Beth. The New Literary Middlebrow. Tastemakers and Reading in the TwentyFirst Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Edmondson, Belinda. Caribbean Middlebrow. Leisure Culture and the Middle Class. ­Cornell UP, 2009. Ehland, Christoph and Cornelia Wächter, eds. Middlebrow and Gender, 1890–1930. ­Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016.

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Ehland, Christoph and Cornelia Wächter. “Introduction: ‘…All Granite, Fog and Female Fiction.’” Middlebrow and Gender, 1890–1930. Ed. Christoph Ehland and Cornelia Wächter. Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016, 1–17. Ferguson, Niall. The Pity of War: Explaining World War i. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Fox, Liam. “Commonwealth trade ministers meeting: towards a free trading future.” 9 March 2017. Web. Frost, Simon. “Public Gains and Literary Goods: A Coeval Tale of Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Francis Marian Crawford.” Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, ­1880–1930. Ed. Kate Macdonald and Christoph Singer. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2015, 37–56. Habermann, Ina. Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow: Priestley, du Maurier and the Symbolic Form of Englishness. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hapgood, Lynne and Nancy L. Paxton, eds. Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Harker, Jaimie. America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars. Boston and Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kapila, Shuchi. Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. Kumar, K. “Empire, Nation, and National Identities.” Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century. Ed. A. Thompson. Oxford, 2012. Macdonald, Kate, ed. The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr. Miniver Read. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Macdonald, Kate and Christoph Singer, eds. Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, ­1880–1930. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. McIntyre, W. David. “Commonwealth Legacy.” The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century. Vol. 4. Ed. Judith M. Brown and W.M. Roger Louis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 693–702. Milne, Seumas. “This attempt to rehabilitate empire is a recipe for conflict.” The Guardian, 10 June 2010. Web. Moore-Gilbert, Bart, ed. Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India. Manchester UP, 1996. Murphy, Philip. The Empire’s New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth. London: Hurst, 2018. Paxman, Jeremy. Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British. London: Viking, 2011. Roye, Susmita and Rajeshwar Mittapalli, eds. The Male Empire under the Female Gaze: The British Raj and the Memsahib. Amherst, New York: Cambria, 2013.

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Tharoor, Ishaan. “Brexit and Britain’s delusions of empire.” The Washington Post, 31 March 2017. Web. Von Weber, Hans. “Ullstein, Ramsch & Co.” Der Zwiebelfisch. Ed. Hans von Weber. München: Hyperionverlag, 1912, 207–13. Whyman, Tom. “Theresa May’s Empire of the Mind.” The New York Times, 15 February 2017. Web.

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A Girl’s Own Empire? Imperialism and the Girl’s Own Paper, 1880 to 1903 Jochen Petzold Abstract The Religious Tract Society created the Girl’s Own Paper in 1880 as a middlebrow alternative to “pernicious literature.” The magazine’s focus was on domestic issues but Imperialism and the British Empire did play a role in three fields: gop became increasingly supportive of emigration to the colonies; it presented the colonies as a location for (armchair) travelling; it supported the effort to maintain the empire’s integrity in the South African War (1899–1902).

Keywords Juvenile magazines – Girl’s Own Paper – emigration – travelling – South African War

1

Penny Dreadful Scare and the Middlebrow Alternative

As Sheila Egoff has pointed out, the Victorian period was “the hey-day of the magazine and particularly of the children’s magazine.” (“Children’s Periodicals” 4) In Britain, the dramatic expansion of the market for juvenile magazines during the second half of the nineteenth century was determined by a combination of push and pull factors. On the one hand, technological advancements in paper-making and printing (cf. Altick) as well as the abolishing of advertising tax and paper duty (cf. Fraser, Coming 228) brought down production costs and the railway network facilitated nationwide distribution, hence strengthening the supply side of the equation. On the other hand, the population of England and Wales more than doubled between 1840 and 1900, and educational reforms throughout the century meant that more and more working-class children could read (cf. Stephens 78), creating a vastly growing demand for reading materials. This demand was often met by the periodical press and according to Marjory Lang, “over one hundred new titles [of children’s periodicals] appeared in the 1860s and 1870s” (17). The financial viability of publishing for children received a further boost through the Elementary

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Education Act of 1870. Although the act did not make elementary education immediately compulsory,1 it was a clear signal that literacy rates would continue to increase and John Springhall suggests that the act “led firms such as Macmillan, Routledge, Nelson’s and Longman’s to set up their own juvenile departments” so that “over 900 new juvenile books were being issued annually and 15 secular boys’ periodicals were competing simultaneously” in the early 1880s (51). What could be applauded as a tremendous cultural development with great emancipatory potential was in fact met with considerable scepticism by Victorian commentators from the middle classes. Indeed, Springhall speaks of a “middle-class ‘moral panic’ directed at ‘penny dreadfuls,’” the latter being a “blanket term of condemnation by magistrates, journalists, clergymen and school-teachers, to designate penny-part serials and cheap weekly periodicals, devoted mainly to tales of historical adventure or contemporary mystery, illustrated with vivid woodcuts, which held a particular appeal for working-class youth” (48, 41).2 For example, in his analysis of Juvenile Literature as it Is, published in 1888, Edward Salmon voices a very low opinion of contemporary periodicals for “older boys and girls,” which he declares to be “in every sense of the word, dreadfuls” (148): It is not my intention to give the vile productions, sold in their hundreds of thousands every week, the gratuitous advertisement which castigation of them by name would involve, but I speak with only too much knowledge when I say that no element of sweetness and light ever finds its way into their columns, and that they are filled with stories of blood and revenge, of passion and cruelty, as improbable and often impossible in plot as their literary execution is contemptible. salmon, Juvenile 148f.

Some ten years earlier, in 1878, Lord Shaftsbury had warned in an address at the Religious Tract Society (rtc) that penny fiction was not only “creeping […] into the houses of the poor, neglected, and untaught, but into the largest mansions; penetrating into religious families and astounding careful parents by its frightful issues” (qtd. Springhall 48). These statements are indicative of the fear 1 As H.C. Barnard points out, the act “did not create a new national system of education, or a completely compulsory system, or a free system” but it was “a notable achievement” which gradually “‘fill[ed] up the gaps’ and so secure[d] a more adequate supply of schools” (117, 119). 2 For a summary of the “campaign against ‘penny dreadfuls,’” albeit with a focus on Boys of England, see Banham (248–80).

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that cheap, low-brow literature was not only tempting working-class children to a life of crime but that it could also corrupt boys and girls of the middleclasses. Importantly, people like Lord Shaftsbury were urging the rtc to do something about this threat. After considerable deliberation, the rtc decided to publish a weekly paper in order “to provide the lads of our own families and schools with wholesome, elevating reading” and “to supplant, if possible, some of the literature the injurious effect of which all so sincerely deplore” (qtd. Dunae 132). This paper was the Boy’s Own Paper, a decidedly middlebrow publication that tried to combine popular appeal with moral principles. The new paper was successful, ­although claims of a circulation of around 500,000 weekly copies in the 1880s (cf. Dunae 133) have been rejected as exaggerated in more recent criticism (cf.  McAleer 217–19). Whatever its exact sales figures, the magazine quickly won praise. Lord Shaftsbury said of the first number, “a more sagacious, more wise, and I may say, more gentleman-like production I have never read” (qtd. Dunae 133) and a decade later Edward Salmon called the bop the “one real antidote” to penny dreadfuls, because it is “the only first-class journal of its kind which has forced its way into the slums as well as into the best homes” (Juvenile 185, 186). Encouraged by the bop’s success, the rtc launched a sister publication, the Girl’s Own Paper, which first appeared on 3 January 1880.3 Arguably, the Girl’s Own Paper was even more respectably middlebrow than its slightly older brother publication. According to Salmon, the Girl’s Own Paper was one of only two girls’ magazines “that could be placed advantageously in the hands of anybody, to say nothing of young ladies in their teens,” and its great “merit is that it does not depend wholly on fiction for its success, but gives interesting articles on all kinds of household matters” (“What Girls Read” 520, 521).4 He particularly praised the prize competitions, because the objects created were given to charity: “For instance, in 1885, 700 mufflers and 1,224 pairs of cuffs sent in in competition were presented to occupants of London workhouses, after the prizes had been awarded” (Salmon, “What Girls Read” 520). Furthermore, the magazine’s first editor, Charles Peters, claimed that the Girl’s 3 From its very start, the bop was also read by girls, as the lists of entrants to prize competitions in the first volume make clear (e.g., see “Prize Competitions V”), and this cross-gender-barreading continued after the inauguration of Girl’s Own Paper. In a survey conducted by Welsh which was answered by some 2000 pupils (presumably of middle-class background), bop was the second most popular magazine named by girls, with gop coming in first place (see Salmon Juvenile 23). 4 The other magazine to find Salmon’s approval is Every Girl’s Magazine, but he points out that this is “hardly so much a girl’s magazine as a magazine of general reading for the household” (“What Girls Read” 520).

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Own Paper was aimed at helping “to train them [girls] in moral and domestic virtues, preparing them for the responsibilities of womanhood and for a heavenly home” (qtd. Reynolds 139–40). Working for charity, reading about household matters and being trained in domestic virtues – this bill of fare may not sound particularly alluring to a modern audience, but the magazine certainly became very successful, as the sales figures demonstrate: According to Hilary Skelding, by “the end of its first year, the g.o.p. had a readership of two hundred and sixty thousand, almost double that of […] the Boy’s Own Paper” (37). More importantly in our present context, these main concerns ascribed to the Girl’s Own Paper seem to have little to do with questions of empire and imperialism. Indeed, when critics began to examine the connections between imperialism and Victorian juvenile literature in the 1980s, they did by focusing on texts primarily aimed at male readers. Martin Green went as far as to claim that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, “Children’s literature became boys’ literature; it focused its attention on the Empire” (220), and he has suggested that “the adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe were, in fact, the energizing myth of English imperialism” (3). John MacKenzie also points out that in much juvenile literature of the late-nineteenth century the “locus of hero-worship moved from Europe to the Empire” (6), and in a similar vein Robert Dixon stresses the interconnections between ideology and literature, again pointing to the importance of adventure tales “of regenerative violence on the colonial frontier” (1). I do not want to suggest that these analyses of the importance of adventure fiction for Britain’s imperial project are wrong (although Green’s suggestion that children’s literature came to be equated with boys’ literature is an overstatement). But clearly their analyses cannot (and do not) claim to examine all connections between imperialism and juvenile literature, and in more recent years a number of studies have broadened the critical debate on late Victorian imperialism to include girls’ literature (or, more broadly, girls’ culture), most noticeably Michelle Smith’s Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture (2011). While magazines aimed at boys tended to include adventurous stories set in the colonies or in unexplored territories, the studies by Fraser et al. (2003), Moruzi (2011) and Smith (2011) suggest that the Girl’s Own Paper treated Empire primarily through the topic of emigration. In the following, I will examine how the British Empire and British imperialism feature in the Girl’s Own Paper between 1880 and 1902 – that is, from the magazine’s start to the end of the South African War (1899–1902). I will show that, while emigration does form the strongest link between the magazine and the Empire, the presentation of the topic is not quite as unanimously supportive as recent criticism has suggested.

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Rather, it will become clear that there is a certain development that leads to the gop’s positive treatment of emigration, a development which coincides with a more general willingness to present girls as active and adventurous. Furthermore, my analysis of how gop dealt with the South African war indicates that the widespread public interest prompted the Girl’s Own Paper to publish a number of pieces directly or indirectly connected to the war, thereby emphasizing its connection to the British Empire. 2

Developing an Interest in Emigration

During its first two years of publication, the Girl’s Own Paper had a very strong focus on domestic issues. This becomes particularly obvious when comparing the magazine to its slightly older brother publication. More than two thirds of the numbers of the first volume (1879) of Boy’s Own Paper open with an instalment of W.H.G. Kingston’s “From Powder Monkey to Admiral,” an adventure story that takes its central characters and its readers to distant lands, and many of the illustrations highlight the act of travelling. Furthermore, many of the articles contained in the first numbers of bop are concerned with adventurous journeys or are set in exotic locations. By comparison, 21 of the first 22 numbers of Girl’s Own Paper open on an instalment of “Zara: or, My Granddaughter’s Money,” a story about “morally upright characters who have made some bad, though entirely reversible, decisions and are in need of redirection” that is entirely set in England (Barger 48); generally speaking, travelling plays only a very minor role in the first numbers of gop (cf. Petzold “What is there”). Interestingly, emigration is mentioned in “Zara,” but clearly not as a desirable option. Talking about their plans for a picnic, the topic of emigration is introduced as a negative foil in a jocular way, but the mood quickly turns sombre: “[…] To see your solemn face one would imagine we were all about to emigrate to some lonely and desolate land, instead of going out to luncheon on ‘Rover’s Peak.’” […] “I don’t know that emigration is unlikely for me. I may have to go abroad to seek my fortune some day,” replied Paul, without a glimmer of a smile on his face. Annis looked up at him quickly, and her watchful eyes at once detected he was in bitter earnest; some mental worry or physical depression had clouded his brow and banished the colour from his face, the brightness from his eyes. He looked out of spirits, and even ill. “Zara” 162

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When Fred raises the topic, he does so with negative connotations – “lonely and desolate land” – meant as a joke. But for Paul, emigration is no laughing matter and he clearly does not see it as an opportunity but as a threat. Hence, the first time emigration is mentioned in the fiction of Girl’s Own Paper, this can hardly be perceived as an endorsement of emigration schemes. On the whole, emigration is not a particularly important topic in the first volume of gop. There are no non-fictional pieces connected to the topic and it is only raised three times in the Answers to Correspondents section,5 where the tone of the answers remains neutral: the editors provide the addresses of emigration societies without further comments. In the second volume (1880/81), gop runs a story that treats emigration to Canada, Isabella Fyvie Mayo’s “The Sister’s Journey,” published in three instalments (nos. 68–70). However, the story is also not particularly positive and cannot be read as a whole-hearted endorsement. The eponymous sister only follows her brother to Canada when it becomes clear that his emigration had been a fiasco that landed him in gaol. Her own journey includes a ship-wreck and a near-mutiny and shows her under the “dreadful strain of a constant nameless terror – a constant watching for what would happen when whatever could happen was almost sure to be for the worse” (Mayo, “Sister’s” 486). When she does arrive in Quebec, Ruth finds “lonely lodging hard by the prison” and “with hard labour she could earn her daily bread” (487). The series does end on a happier note but this is mainly due to the intervention of the captain of the emigrant ship, whose relatives give work to Ruth’s wayward brother after his release from prison, and who eventually marries Ruth. Thus, Ruth is rewarded for her selfless attempt at rescuing her brother, and emigration is the means to this end. However, the story rather overemphasizes the dangers and hardships of emigration and has very little to say about Quebec or Ruth’s life as an emigrant. The story does not actively draw a connection between emigration and the readers of the Girl’s Own Paper, and the topic is not presented in a very positive way. Thus, it is maybe not surprising that the story did not generate much interest in the subject of emigration. Indeed, no questions concerning emigration appear during or immediately after the publication of the series, and when a correspondent is given the address of the “Women’s Emigration Society” almost three months later there is no indication that the question was 5 Answers to Correspondents were a common feature of Victorian periodicals. Correspondents were invited to address queries to the editor, using a pseudonym. Only the answers would then be printed, again using the pseudonym. The Girl’s Own Paper regularly had about a page of these answers, set in fairly small print so that between 40 and 60 (and sometimes more) individual correspondents could be addressed.

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in any way prompted by the story (cf. “Adelaide”).6 When another correspondent offers to send photographs of the Australian cattle-station she is working at, and “sketches of Queensland life,” she is told that the magazine had “too many subjects of interest nearer home” although her short description of life on the farm (reprinted in the Answers to Correspondents section) is called “a pleasant peep into colonial life” (“m.l.m.”). Thus, it would seem fair to say that during its first two years, Girl’s Own Paper did not particularly promote emigration. It did not discourage correspondents to seek advice from emigration societies, but the editors did no more than pass on the appropriate addresses without encouraging remarks. This was to change with the magazine’s third volume. Starting on 3 December, 1881, Girl’s Own Paper ran another story by Isabella Fyvie Mayo, “The Other Side of the World.” Like “The Sister’s Journey,” it came in three instalments, but this time emigration (to Australia) is treated much more favourably, and the story is also placed much more prominently, since it opens numbers 101, 108 and 110. It is a story of two educated young women (nineteen and twenty years old) who do not find suitable employment in Britain and hence decide to emigrate. They do so with the help of the Women’s Emigration Society (wes), and their help is greatly praised; as Kristine Moruzi points out, “the wes is affirmed as the answer to the question of how young women can travel on a merchant ship to a distant colony” (183). However, the story is not as unanimous in its support of emigration as it may appear at first sight. Indeed, Mayo has one of her characters, Bell Aubrey, make the following observation: I cannot advise a flood of female emigration to this place under present circumstances. It may certainly be a good opening for sensible young women fit for hard work and willing to do it, or for women who have friends or connections here, or a little capital. Annie and I have been exceptionally fortunate, yet, you see, we are only just paying our way, with not a penny over towards those extra expenses which must come, even to the most economical. Others of our party have got nothing whatever to do yet! mayo, “Other Side” 290

As the last statement makes clear, even the support of the wes is no guarantee for success. Indeed, in a later letter Bell remarks that it is “not fancy-work ladyhelps who are wanted, but women who can really take a servant’s place, scrub, 6 Significantly, Ruth does not emigrate with the help of an Emigration Society, but this is not commented on in the narrative.

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wash, and cook,” and she adds that such women “could easily get a living in the old country without exile, with gentler surroundings, and with, I think, much better pay” (290). Thus, it would seem that Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston’s assessment that “The Other Side of the World” is “obvious late-century gendered pro-emigration propaganda” might be somewhat overstated. For an obvious propaganda piece, the story is too cautionary and also too critical of the “prejudices of English life” which makes it difficult for ­middle-class women to accept the kind of work in England which they would have to do in the colonies (290).7 However, despite these words of warning, the story is a success-story, and Bell also points out that she is glad that she came and that emigration “is the right thing for some women to do” (291, emphasis added). Furthermore, the fictional story can easily be read as explicit advice to its readers and the story clearly generated considerable interest, if the numerous entries on emigration in the Answers to Correspondence section are an indication. “The Other Side of the World” ran from 3 December 1881 to 4 February 1882; two weeks after the last instalment, on 18 February 1882, five individual readers were reassured that the story was “in every way reliable” (“Alys”). Interestingly, one of the correspondents seems to have thought the first two parts of the story too optimistic, and the editor points out that in the third part “due consideration has been given to her doubts,” and all correspondents are advised “to give the utmost attention to the suggestions and counsels” offered in the last instalment (ibid.). A month later, on 18 March 1882, gop included a whole section on emigration in its Answers to Correspondents (including four separate entries addressed to nine different correspondents), and the shift in tone is palpable. If earlier answers had done little more than provide the address of an emigration society, the editors now make positive comments. Thus, “Puzzled” is told that “Canada is now considered an excellent field for emigration,” and that as a dressmaker she would “find work very easily,” and “Edith Wynn” is equally encouraged: “we think you would do well to emigrate” (“Emigration”). Kristine Moruzi has argued that in its first two decades, “emigration was a common theme in the pages of the Girl’s Own Paper” and that readers were “encouraged to consider emigration as a suitable opportunity” regardless of their class; however, she also points out that the magazine told girls “that to be 7 When Fraser et al. state that in “The Other Side of the World” doubtful readers are reassured “that class-bound restrictions may safely be left behind” (141), they seem to be missing the point of Bell’s fictional letter. Indeed, Bell maintains that women who do not have the strength to emigrate “might have the moral courage to contend with the remnants of caste at home” (Mayo, “Other Side” 290), arguing that class prejudices could not only be left behind by emigration, but could instead be altered.

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successful they would need to work hard, be willing to take on any task and should travel under the protection of an emigration society” (190–91). Indeed, starting with the third volume (1882–83), gop’s general attitude towards emigration over the course of the next twenty years can be described as cautiously positive. There are not many articles or stories directly connected to emigration, but most of them depict success-stories, although in some stories the success is muted or dependent on a large stock of capital.8 Two non-fictional pieces are particularly encouraging: In “On Emigrating as Domestic Servants to New Zealand,” the anonymous author (only identified by initials, “e.b.s.”) claims s/he “can vouch for this much. If any servant, energetic and steady, goes out to the colonies, she will never repent it” (e.b.s. 11). And some six years later, Adelaide Ross declares that she “should be glad if the readers of the Girl’s Own Paper would co-operate in spreading a bright report of life in the Colonies” (487). In any case, the stories and non-fictional pieces on emigration obviously help to generate a steady stream of emigration-related queries on the correspondence pages. However, even Mayo’s “The Other Side of the World,” although frequently read as pro-emigration and obviously effective in stimulating interest in the topic, suggests that emigration is no patent remedy to problems of female employment in England, and that it is only advisable for those who know “exactly what will be expected from them” (291). In a similar vein, individual correspondents are frequently told that they should not try to emigrate with hopes of working as a governess (e.g., no. 289: 655; no. 292: 704; no. 317: 270; no. 323: 368), and sometimes correspondents are told not to emigrate at all (e.g., no. 207: 176; no. 264: 256; no. 363: 175). More importantly in our present context, while its treatment may not always be purely positive, the issue of emigration provides a continuous connection to the topic of the British Empire, more specifically as most queries concern emigration to one of Britain’s colonies. Hence, by encouraging this kind of emigration, the Girl’s Own Paper indirectly supports the expansion of the Empire and presents it as a social and economic asset.

8 For example, in “A Lady’s Journey to Texas and Back Again” (4 parts, vol. 4, nos. 167, 189 and vol. 5, nos. 245, 247) the “lady” has to return when her husband falls ill; “Life on a Transvaal Salt Farm” (vol. 17, no. 858) is described as rather bleak and desolate; and while Margaret Innes’s “Chronicles of an Anglo-Californian Ranch” (vol. 20, nos. 980, 982, 991, 993, 998, 1002, 1008, 1014, 1021, 1024, 1025, 1030, 1031) have a happy ending they could only be an inspiration to very few readers, since the family in question had enough money to buy a farm and to live off their savings for several years before it became really productive.

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Armchair Travelling and Colonial Adventure

If the first few volumes of Girl’s Own Paper had a particularly strong focus on domestic issues, this was radically altered, at least temporarily, in the fourth volume (1882–83). Arguably, this is the volume which creates the strongest and most explicit link to the British Empire and to the issues of colonization and empire building, and it does so with two series – one factual, one fictional – that take their readers on imaginary trips to distant lands. The first case in point is a series that came to total eleven instalments in the fourth volume and an additional two instalments in the seventh volume (1885–86) which presents “The Girl’s Own Tour” through British colonies, “Personally conducted by Mrs. Brewer,” as the subtitle of the first instalment informs its readers. The first seven parts, all under the title “The Colonies and Dependencies of Great Britain,” take their readers first to Canada and then to the West Indies. The imaginary journey then allegedly continues to “Our Australian Colonies and New Zealand,” but does not, at this point, actually take its readers to New Zealand. This only happens almost three years later, with “The ‘Girl’s Own’ Tour of the Colonies,” which introduces Tasmania and New Zealand. Interestingly the tour does not take its readers to India or to the African continent, so it cannot really claim to be a comprehensive tour of the British Empire. Why these areas are not visited is not explained. Although the series is supportive of emigration, this cannot have been the primary reason behind the selection process, since the colonies in the West Indies, which were visited, had “no special need of white immigrants” at the time (Brewer, “Australian” 805), while the Cape colony and Natal, which were not visited, still invited immigrants.9 Hence, the itinerary is likely to have been based on Emma Brewer’s personal knowledge of those colonies. Whatever may have been behind the selection process, at the very beginning Brewer creates an image of a benign empire: Our girls know already that Great Britain has possessions in all parts of the world. These possessions are called colonies or dependencies. Some of them we obtained by conquest, some became ours by discovery or purchase, and some were ceded or made over to us. These various colonies are like a family of children, our Queen being the mother of them. When they first become ours they have to be supported and taken care of by the mother country, and gradually they learn to go alone, till in time they 9 Information taken from a poster published by the Emigrants’ Information Office in 1888, see https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/product/image-library/581.

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become giants in their strength, and are kept in submission simply by the love they bear their Queen-mother and their mother country. brewer, “Colonies” 52

The military aspect of imperialism is not ignored (“conquest”), but it is clearly downplayed against four other options for acquiring colonies, options that hide the violence necessary to either subdue native inhabitants or to force European powers to “cede” or “make over” their “possessions.” Furthermore, in utilising the image of the empire as a family, Brewer genders the empire, underscoring female concepts of mothering and nurturing in the relationship between the imperial centre and the colonies – a relationship supposedly based on “love” and (albeit not explicitly) filial duty. Colonisation is here presented as a success story, and that theme is picked up again at the very end of the series: The colonies are a glory and a blessing to Great Britain; they add to her wealth and strength; they maintain her Empire on the seas, and they raise up for our Queen stalwart, courageous, and loving sons and daughters, on whom she may safely rely. And this is not all; with God’s blessing on our colonies, they will prove the instruments of establishing peace, extending civilisation, and spreading the knowledge of the Gospel throughout the length and breadth of the earth. brewer, “Girl’s Own” 632

Hence a frame is created in which the British Empire is explicitly praised in economic and political terms, but also in humanitarian and religious terms. This leaves little room for doubt or criticism, and it is hardly surprising that the series presents emigration to those colonies as an option for the readers of Girl’s Own Paper, and frequently offers information and advice. Indeed, statistical and practical information on all the colonies “visited” is summarized in the form of a table that appeared as part of the last instalment (Brewer, “Australian” 805). Amongst some statistical data on the colonies, the table provides information which colonies still “need” immigrants, which offer financial assistance for the passage, and which office in London will provide readers with additional information. Thus, the series clearly is part of gop’s ongoing engagement with the topic of emigration to colonies of the British Empire discussed above. However, the series does more. It invites its readers to extended armchair travelling, by giving detailed descriptions of different regions and their inhabitants, and it suggests that they could be the object of recreational travelling – this becomes particularly obvious in the sections on the West

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I­ ndies, “offering no special inducements to English girls to emigrate” (Brewer, “Colonies” 307).10 Furthermore, the series tries to justify British imperialism, although the arguments remain oddly inconclusive. For example, the narrator tells her readers that the “Indians” were “originally the undisputed owners of the soil of Canada, and obtained their title, as they themselves say, from the Great Spirit who created them on it” (115). She then praises their prowess as hunters and warriors but continues by stating that “they excessively disliked steady, persistent ­labour – perhaps, because they could obtain all that they required for subsistence without it; for their country gave out its supplies generously and without stint” (ibid.). Canada at the time of European colonial expansion is constructed as a modern-day paradise in which the native inhabitants did not have to work for their food, did not have to eat bread in the sweat of their brows. Perversely, this argument could be used to deny native Canadians their humanity, since they were not affected by God’s punishment of Adam and Eve as narrated in the Old Testament.11 Well might a reader “wonder how it was that the Indians failed […] to maintain their position before the new-comers, and how it was that they did not increase in prosperity and happiness” (Brewer, “Colonies” 115). Far superior weaponry of the European settlers had nothing to do with the “failure” of the “Indians,” it seems. Instead, readers are told that with a little thought they would “come to the conclusion that progress is the result of difficulties overcome; of struggles to reach a high aim; of steady, persistent industry; and, above all, a practical knowledge of the ‘old, old story’12 so familiar to the young of the nineteenth century” (ibid.). In other words, they failed because they were too complacent and because they had no “practical knowledge” of Christianity (whatever that may mean, exactly). For the narrator this seems to be sufficient justification for colonisation, which was achieved with “great difficulties” (ibid.), and which is presented as a success story. More

10 11

12

That the Empire might offer rewarding destinations for recreational or medicinal travelling is also emphasized in W. Lawrence Liston’s series “From Aden to Sydney” (vol. 12). J.M. Coetzee points out that this argument was used to justify claiming ancestral lands of the so-called Hottentots in the Cape Colony: “Condemning the Hottentot for his idleness, the early Discourse of the Cape effectively excludes him from Eden by deciding that, though he is human, he is not in the line of decent that leads from Adam via a life of toil to civilized man” (25). In the late 1860s, Katherine Hankey’s poem “The Old, Old Story” became popular as a hymn set to music by W.H. Doane (cf. Mable: 90–93). Mable gives “in, or around, 1868” as the publication date for Hankey’s poem, but the catalogue of the British Library suggests that she was known as the author of this text by 1867 (91).

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i­ mportantly, it is presented as a British success story. French efforts during the seventeenth century are said to have failed “for want of religious toleration,” which only allowed Catholic settlers (ibid.); and in present day Canada, the land “occupied by French Canadians […] does not look so prosperous as that” managed by English speaking settlers (116). Indeed, the narrator concludes: “where the French preponderate there progress is slow, where the Englishspeaking races prevail progress is rapid” (ibid.). Hence, the text justifies colonialism, at least partly on religious grounds, and it praises British colonialism for outstanding efficiency and prosperity. Clearly, the text shares the more general sentiment of popular imperialism that started in the late 1870s (cf. Dunae, MacKenzie, Dixon). The other text I want to briefly discuss here is less directly connected to the existing British Empire, but it presents a fictional narrative of colonisation by a female protagonist: Elizabeth Whittaker’s “Robina Crusoe, and Her Lonely Island Home” appeared in 27 instalments between 23 December 1882 and 21 July 1883. The titular heroine claims to be a descendant of “the world-famed Robinson Crusoe” (Whittaker 184), and it is her childhood’s dream to repeat the experience of her ancestor. She is given that chance when she is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, and she vastly outdoes her ancestor in terms of improving her “lonely island home.” Robina succeeds as a colonizer in the sense that she prospers on her island: she constructs various shelters, she is a successful huntress, she produces all kinds of household appliances, but also ink and powder (which Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe does not manage). She also displays bravery when she frightens off a band of thirty “savages” with a few, well-placed shots. Most importantly, she succeeds as a bringer of “civilization” when she adopts a native girl (whose mother was killed by the cannibals) and raises her as her daughter (cf. Doughty). In doing both, Robina displays knowledge and skills unusual for a Victorian “girl,” and she has to become active in a way that transgresses the boundaries of conventional Victorian gender norms, although Michelle Smith points out that Robina’s behaviour and the fact that she does not marry at the end of her story “can be read as further evidence of the accommodation of adventurousness within the realm of acceptable femininity from the end of the nineteenth century” (173). As Janis Dawson has argued, “Robina effectively blends emerging and traditional feminine roles; she is a New Girl who has not compromised her femininity. But she is also an imperialist who uses her New Girl attributes to further Britain’s imperial interests” (44). Importantly in our present context, her example suggests that women, or “girls,” can be successful colonizers, and this point is further underscored when Girl’s Own Paper prints two non-fictional articles on “real life” female Crusoes (“Female,” “Another Female”).

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If Robinson Crusoe and similar adventure stories formed “the energizing myth of English imperialism,” as Martin Green has claimed (3), then “Robina Crusoe” adopts this myth for a female audience. Probably few of the readers dreamed of literally following in Robina’s footsteps by becoming castaways themselves, but arguably the plucky fictional character could encourage girls to consider the less arduous step of emigrating to one of the established colonies. As Moruzi has pointed out, “[f]emale emigration required girls and women to choose action and take control over their lives” (178), and a character like Robina could well become a role-model for such girls. This connection is certainly suggested by the editorial choice to publish Brewer’s series on British colonies and Whittaker’s female robinsonade in the same volume of Girl’s Own Paper (although rarely in the same number, nos. 157 and 164 being the only exceptions). 4

Girl’s Own Paper and the “Needlework of Wartime”

As we have seen, the interconnected topics of emigration, armchair travelling and exotic adventure all imply an ongoing interest in the British Empire. Arguably, this is taken to new heights when the integrity of the Empire is severely threatened at the end of the nineteenth century, and readers of the Girl’s Own Paper are invited to participate in the war effort, at least emotionally, but potentially also practically. Although the Pax Britannica between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the outbreak of the “Great War” in 1914 has become proverbial, Harold Raugh points out that the term is in fact “a misnomer,” since between 1815 and 1914 “only six years – 1820, 1829, 1830, 1833, 1907 and 1909 – witnessed no major wars, campaigns, punitive expeditions, or other recorded military operations” (xiii). Indeed, Britain fought many colonial wars during the long nineteenth century, but not surprisingly, they are not reflected in a magazine aimed at female readers like the Girl’s Own Paper. Thus, for example, neither the first Boer War (1880–81) nor the Gordon Relief Expedition to Khartoum (1884–85) are mentioned in the Girl’s Own Paper.13 However, the Girl’s Own Paper did respond to the second Boer War (or South African War), which broke out in October 1899 and lasted until 31 May 1902. According to Raugh, it was “Britain’s longest […], most expensive (costing over UK £200 million), and bloodiest war (with about 22,000 British, 25,000 Boers, and 12,000 Africans losing their lives)” fought between the Napoleonic Wars 13

These examples were chosen because G.A. Henty found them important enough to publish novels on them, namely Young Colonists (1885) and The Dash for Khartoum (1892).

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and the Great War (51). Furthermore, the war was one of the first “media wars,” in which war correspondents like Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle reported to a large audience at home and in which photography (cf. Barnes) and even film (cf. Lee) started to play an important role. As Kathryn Castle has shown, the “[p]ublic debate over the Boer War found its way into the popular press for the juvenile market,” and her analysis suggests that it was mainly commercial magazines for boys that covered the s­ ubject (83). While her claim that “the Boy’s Own Paper expressed its reservations over the conflict by maintaining a profound silence during the war years” (Kastle: ­83–84) is slightly exaggerated,14 it is indeed surprising that the Girl’s Own Paper responded much more directly to the war. In our present context, this is again a clear indication of the importance placed on the British Empire in the gop. Throughout its 21st volume (1899–1900), the gop published a number of articles directly connected to the war, and it frequently suggests that its readers should be deeply affected by the conflict. This becomes most obvious in the very first response to the war, which came fairly quickly. Hostilities broke out when Boer forces invaded Natal on 12 October 1899. Some two months later, at the end of December, gop published an appeal to its readers, “The Needlework of War-Time” (de Blaquiere 207). The piece starts with the suggestion that British girls would (or should) want to help the war effort: “We have all been wanting to know, I am sure, what we can personally do for our brave soldiers in the way of work, and a great many of us have already been busy, almost day and night, in knitting helmets and socks for those already on their way” (ibid.), and offers advice on what to knit and where to send it. This is not the first appeal to readers of gop to help in various causes, but it is the first appeal to support a military operation, constructing a bond between the readers and their magazine and the “brave soldiers” either already stationed in South Africa or on their way to the war. It reconfirms traditional gender roles, casting the girls as altruistic dispensers of charity (the products are even to be sent at their donor’s expense), securing the physical comfort of the men who go out into the hostile world while the girls themselves can remain safely at home. The second piece connected to the war, “An English Girl in South Africa,” again starts with a statement constructing the readers of gop as part of a larger community – indeed, the community of all Englishwomen – who have to be emotionally involved with the war: “At the present time the sympathy and interest of every Englishwoman is stirred to the uttermost by the knowledge of all the suffering and privation that are being endured by English people in 14

As I have shown elsewhere, bop did not maintain “a profound silence” about the war, but references were few and far between (cf. Petzold, “Needlework” 483).

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South Africa” (e.h.j. 314). Not being “stirred to the uttermost” would suggest that one is no “real” or “good” Englishwoman, and the following description of Boer life “in times of peace” is not a reminder to love one’s enemies, but rather an exercise in character assassination. The farms of the Boers are said to be “curiously unattractive,” which is partly due to the “apathy of the Dutch girls with regard to their homes” (314f.). Indeed, they supposedly lead “an indolent quiet life” on the farms, since “the Kaffir servants do all the work” (315).15 Finally, the author declares that the Boers are “a very superstitious and ignorant race, not knowing, understanding or practising the most simple rules of hygiene” (ibid.). The description is accompanied by a letter to the editor of gop which highlights how the unnamed author (only identified by initials) and her family are directly and personally affected by the war, declaring that they shall be “deeply thankful when peace is restored” (ibid.), and there is little doubt that this will be brought about by “the great and noble deeds done by our brave soldiers” (314). Of all the pieces connected to the war, the most interesting is a series of letters that form a “Log of Voyage to the Cape, and Diary of Army Nursing in South Africa,” published in ten instalments between 24 February and 29 September 1900. The author of this diary in letters is not named and the whole series could, in theory, be fictional, but the impression created is certainly that of a non-fictional, true account. The series suggests, like the fictional “War Story”16 that appeared shortly after the series was started, that women could become involved in the war much more directly than by knitting socks, namely by becoming an army nurse. Importantly, the unnamed nurse of the diary in letters shows considerable eagerness to get to the front and see “action,” just as soldiers in war stories of the time are typically said to be eager to go into battle and show their bravery. While still in transit to South Africa, the nurse writes that she wants her posting to be “a camp hospital” and ensures us (and maybe herself) that she has not “a grain of fear, whatever happens” (“Log” 331). Once in the country, she envies a friend for a “chance of going straight to the front” (406), and when her chance comes she is “excited” and “want[s] to go dreadfully,” expecting to “see the smoke of conflict […] – terrible though it is” (459). The latter comes as an afterthought, as if she had to remind herself that her eagerness for action might be considered unseemly. Nonetheless, she later wishes for a Boer attack but expects “no such luck” since there are “8,000 ­British 15 16

As J.M. Coetzee has pointed out, the “sloth” of Boer farmers scandalized many British commentators in the nineteenth century (cf. 28–30). The subtitle of the short story “Hospital Jean” about a woman who follows her brother and her sweetheart to the front as a nurse. The story appeared in March 1900 (g.e.m. 360).

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soldiers in the neighbourhood, and Boers do not face a force like that” (554). When she hears of hard fighting nearby she exclaims “How I wish I could see something of it!” (555). She also leaves her readers in no doubt that “this is a righteous and necessary war” and declares that “England must be first here, and the colony will flourish” (ibid.). Thus, the unnamed nurse utilizes the discourse of bravery that would be expected from war stories with male protagonists, appropriating a position more commonly associated with fictional soldiers. Indeed, she has to find out that some of the real soldiers she meets do not conform to her idealising image of heroic warfare: “I’m half afraid the British soldier is not so keen on fighting for Queen and Country as of yore. So many say they ‘have had enough,’ and want to go home,” but she is quick to point out that others are “equally eager to get to the front again,” and underscores her own bravery by suggesting that she will have “stirring tales to tell” should she “get to the front, and perhaps actually close to the battlefield” (459). Hence, the overall impression of her diary is clearly that of a woman eager to prove herself under fire, who sees the waging of a “righteous and necessary war” as honourable and potentially glorious, sentiments typical of imperial adventure stories more commonly associated with male protagonists. The last instalment of the diary was published in the last number of ­volume 21, but there is no sense of an ending. Readers must have expected the diary to be continued in the 22nd volume, but this expectation was to be disappointed, the series simply stops without further comments. Had the unnamed nurse died in South Africa, a short but rousing obituary would have seemed a likely response by the editor of gop, but no such note appears. Rather, it seems as if the gop had suddenly lost all interest in the South African War. In the 21st volume, 17 of the 52 numbers contain pieces directly related to the war; in addition, five numbers contain Rose Bourdillon’s “Weighed in the Balance,” set in South Africa, but “written a few years ago,” as the editor informs his readers in a footnote (345). Thus, throughout the volume South Africa is continuously held at the focus of attention. By contrast, South Africa is practically not mentioned at all in the 22nd volume. This apparent loss of interest could be (partly) due to the fact that after initial setbacks the might of the British Empire was gaining ground against the Boers: the sieges of Kimberley and Ladysmith had been broken in February, that of Mafeking in May of 1900; Johannesburg and Pretoria were taken soon afterwards and by September 1900, the end of the war must have seemed imminent for many observers. But the war did, in fact, drag on for another 20 months of mainly guerrilla fighting and the military situation cannot really explain the sudden termination of the nurse’s diary. Hence, it would seem more likely that the Religious Tract Society was exerting some pressure on the editor of the Girl’s Own Paper to show more reserve about a war which was, after all, fought against another Christian people of European descent. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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Whatever the reason, gop ceased its “war reporting” and all but stopped referring to South Africa over the next two years. Three notable exceptions occurred in the 23rd volume (1901–02): In January 1902, gop asked for “Girl Volunteers for South Africa” (no. 1151: 243–44). The Board of Education was looking for volunteers to “teach the little Boer children how to read, write, and spell” (243). What might, at first sight, seem like a purely benign enterprise contains a darker side since it is revealed, in passing, that at first the volunteers would be teaching in “concentration camps” (244).17 This particular situation is not commented upon, but the piece suggests that there will be “plenty of occupations for hundreds of more girls” once the colony is “in a more settled condition” (ibid.). In a similar vein, some two months later a correspondent is advised to wait until hostilities have ceased (“Emigration to South Africa”). While the signing of the peace treaty at Vereeniging on 31 May 1902 is not mentioned in gop, in September a correspondent is told that “South Africa, which is likely to suit you from the point of view of climate, has the advantage that the emigration thither of educated girls is just now being thoroughly organised” (“Teddy”). Thus, after the war has ended emigration to South Africa is again promoted by the editors of gop, reintegrating the colony into the utility-discourse connected to the British Empire. 5 Conclusion On the whole, it is fair to say that in its non-fictional pieces, the Girl’s Own Paper is mainly concerned with domestic issues and that much of its fiction is “primarily concerned with affective relationships and domestic scenarios” (Reynolds 139). However, as Margaret Beetham has pointed out, magazines are often marked by “radical heterogeneity,” refusing “a single authorial voice” (12). The treatment of the British Empire in the Girl’s Own Paper is a case in point. In itself, the topic presents a certain departure from the domestic sphere that provides the mainstay of reading matter in the magazine. Furthermore, there clearly is no “authorial voice” at work when treating colonial issues, although the magazine does present a general consensus as to the general importance and desirability of the British Empire. As my analysis has shown, the magazine only developed its more positive stance towards emigration in the third ­volume, and while the topic never completely disappears, in many volumes its presence is limited to the correspondence pages. Furthermore, while the

17

Concentration camps were set up to maintain women and children (mainly) whose farms had been razed as punishment or to deprive Boer commandoes of shelter (cf. Raugh 108). - 978-90-04-42656-6

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­readers of gop were consistently told to seek the help of emigration societies and not try to go it alone, some of the adventure fiction presents a much more daring and plucky “girl” as potential role-model for would-be emigrants, Robina Crusoe being a prime example. Importantly for our discussion of Girl’s Own Paper as a middlebrow publication, these “daring” women who show a certain degree of independence do not seek to overturn the gender inequalities of the social status quo in Britain, and they remain within the bounds of Victorian propriety. Indeed, as Moruzi points out, “the magazine was attempting to support emigration” for women of middle-class and of working-class backgrounds, but “was also interested in differentiating the tasks to be performed by these girls in colonial locations. A ‘superior’ class of women was required to improve the quality of colonial life, yet working-class girls were also required to fill the need for domestic servants” (184). As we have seen, throughout much of the first twenty volumes of gop British colonies and the British Empire are presented either as exotic locations for armchair travelling and fantastical adventure, or as a possible destination for girl emigrants. At the turn of the century, when the integrity of the British Empire and the effectiveness of its military are tested by the “Boer War,” gop becomes even more supportive of imperialism and suggests that all its readers can become actively involved. The more traditionally timid can help by doing the “needlework of war-time” from the safety of their homes, the more daringly adventurous are presented with role-models of army nurses, or are asked to become volunteer teachers in what could now be called an effort of re-education and nation building in a (former) war-zone. Thus, the Girl’s Own Paper becomes an active participant in the imperialistic discourse in many different ways and on many different levels.

Works Cited



Primary Sources

“Alys, Aster, Bessy Jones, A Well Wisher, Rochedale.” Girl’s Own Paper. Answer to Correspondents 3.112 (18.02.1882): 334. “Adelaide and Melbourne.” Girl’s Own Paper, Answers to Correspondents 2.82 (23.07.1881): 688. “Another Female Crusoe.” Girl’s Own Paper 4.185 (14.07.1883): 646. Bourdillon, Rose. “Weighed in the Balance.” Girl’s Own Paper. 5 parts, vol. 21, nos. 1053 (03.03.1900) to 1057 (31.03.1900): 345–403, passim. Brewer, Mrs. “The Colonies and Dependencies of Great Britain.” Girl’s Own Paper. 7 parts, vol. 4, nos. 148 (28.10.1882), 152 (25.11.1882), 157 (30.12.1882), 158 (06.01.1883), 164 (17.02.1883), 174 (28.04.1883) & 178 (26.05.1883): 52–540, passim. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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Brewer, Mrs. “Our Australian Colonies and New Zealand.” Girl’s Own Paper. 4 parts, vol.  4, nos. 187 (28.07.1883), 190 (18.08.1883), 192 (01.09.1883) & 195 (22.09.1883): ­676–807, passim. Brewer, Mrs. “The ‘Girl’s Own’ Tour of the Colonies.” Girl’s Own Paper. 2 parts, vol. 7, nos. 337 (12.06.1886) & 341 (10.07.1886): 584–652, passim. de Blaquiere, Dora. “The Needlework of War-time.” Girl’s Own Paper 21.1044 (30.12.1899): 207. E.B.S. “On Emigrating as Domestic Servants to New Zealand.” Girl’s Own Paper 6.249 (04.10.1884): 11. E.H.J. “An English Girl in South Africa.” Girl’s Own Paper 21.1051 (17.02.1900): 314–15. “Emigration.” Girl’s Own Paper. Answer to Correspondents 3.116 (18.03.1882): 399. “Emigration to South Africa.” Girl’s Own Paper 23.1161 (29.03.1902): 410. “A Female Crusoe.” Girl’s Own Paper 4.172 (14.04.1883): 439. G.E.M. “Hospital Jean: A War Story.” Girl’s Own Paper 21.1054 (10.03.1900): 360. “Girl Volunteers for South Africa.” Girl’s Own Paper 23.1151 (18.01.1902): 243–44. “Log of Voyage to the Cape, and Diary of Army Nursing in South Africa.” Girl’s Own Paper. 10 parts, vol. 21, nos. 1057 (31.03.1900), 1060 (21.04.1900), 1061 (28.04.1900), 1063 (12.05.1900), 1066 (02.06.1900), 1070 (30.06.1900), 1074 (28.07.1900), 1078 (25.08.1900) & 1083 (29.09.1900): 330–822, passim. “M.L.M.” Girl’s Own Paper. Answers to Correspondents 2.85 (13.08.1881): 735. Mayo, Isabella Fyvie. “The Other Side of the World.” Girl’s Own Paper. 3 parts, vol. 3, nos. 101 (03.12.1881), 108 (21.01.1882) & 110 (04.02.1882): 145–291, passim. Mayo, Isabella Fyvie. “The Sister’s Journey.” Girl’s Own Paper. 3 parts, vol. 2, nos. 68 (16.04.1881) to 70 (30.04.1881): 456–87, passim. “Prize Competitions V.” Boy’s Own Paper 1.33 (30.08.1879): 528. Ross, Adelaide. “Life in the Colonies.” Girl’s Own Paper 12.592 (02.05.1891): 487. “Teddy.” Girl’s Own Paper. Answers to Correspondents 23.1185 (13.09.1902): 800. Whittaker, Elizabeth. “Robina Crusoe and Her Lonely Island Home.” Girl’s Own Paper. 28 parts, vol. 4, nos. 156 (23.12.1882) & 157 (30.12.1882), 159 (13.01.1883) to 173 (21.04.1883), 175 (05.05.1883) to 177 (19.05.1883), 179 (02.06.1883) to 182 (23.06.1883), 184 (07.07.1883) to 186 (21.07.1883): 184–669, passim. “Zara: or, My Granddaughter’s Money.” Girl’s Own Paper, 23 parts, vol. 1, nos. 1 (03.01.1880) to 23 (05.06.1880): 1–358, passim.

Secondary Literature

Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Banham, Christopher. “Boys of England and Edwin J. Brett, 1866–99.” PhD Thesis University of Leeds, 2006. Etheses. January 2018. Barger, Judith. Music in “The Girl’s Own Paper”: An Annotated Catalogue, 1880–1910. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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Barnard, H.C. A History of English Education from 1760. 2nd ed. London: University of London Press, 1969. Barnes, John. Filming the Boer War: 1899. London: Bishopsgate, 1992. Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. London & New York: Routledge, 1996. Castle, Kathryn. Britannia’s Children: Reading Colonialism through Children’s Books and Magazines. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Coetzee, J.M. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. Dawson, Janis. “Our Girls in the Family of Nations: Girls’ Culture and Empire in Victorian Girls’ Magazines.” Internationalism in Children’s Series. Ed. Karen SandsO’Connor and Marietta Frank. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 38–55. Dixon, Robert. Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-­ Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. Doughty, Terri. “Deflecting the Marriage Plot: The British and Indigenous Girl in ‘Robina Crusoe and Her Lonely Island Home’ (1882–1883).” Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840–1950. Ed. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 60–78. Dunae, Patrick. “Boy’s Own Paper: Origins and Editorial Policies.” The Private Library 9.4 (1976): 122–58. Egoff, Sheila. “Children’s Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century: A Survey and Bibliography.” Library Association Pamphlet 8 (1951). Fraser, Hamish. The Coming of the Mass Market. London: Macmillan, 1981. Fraser, Hilary, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston. Gender and the Victorian Periodical. Cambridge: CUP, 2003. Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Lang, Marjory. “Childhood’s Champions: Mid-Victorian Children’s Periodicals and the Critics.” Victorian Periodicals Review 13 (1980): 17–31. Lee, Emanoel. To the Bitter End: A Photographic History of the Boer War 1899–1902. London: Viking, 1985. Mable, Norman. Popular Hymns and their Writers. London: Independent Press, 1945. McAleer, Joseph. Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. MacKenzie, John. Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. Moruzi, Kristine. “‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies.” Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in NineteenthCentury Literature. Ed. Tamara Wagner. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. 177–91; 249–52.

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Petzold, Jochen. “‘The Needlework of War-time’: The South African War in Magazines for Young Readers.” Anglistentag 2008, Tübingen: Proceedings. Ed. Lars Eckstein and Christoph Reinfandt. Trier: WVT, 2009. 481–90. Petzold, Jochen. “‘What is there that women cannot do?’ Ambiguities of Gender, Genre and Representation in ‘Our Tour in Norway’: A Travelogue in the Girl’s Own Paper.” Victorian Periodicals Review. Forthcoming. Raugh, Harold. The Victorians at War, 1815–1914: An Encyclopedia of British Military History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2004. Reynolds, Kimberley. Girl’s Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, ­1880–1910. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. Salmon, Edward. Juvenile Literature as It Is. London: Henry Drane, 1888. Salmon, Edward. “What Girls Read.” The Nineteenth Century 20:116 (October 1886): 515–29. Skelding, Hilary. “Every Girl’s Best Friend?: The Girl’s Own Paper and its Readers.” Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities. Ed. Emma Liggins and Daniel Duffy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 35–52. Smith, Michelle J. Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Springhall, John. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830–1996. London: Macmillan, 1998. Stephens, W.B. Education in Britain, 1750–1914. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998.

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Picturing Africa: Illustration in the Allan Quatermain Adventure Fictions of H. Rider Haggard Kate Holterhoff Abstract This contribution uses illustrations from Haggard’s Allan Quatermain series to consider how the visual legacy of adventure fiction served to construct ideas about Africa formative to the “‘moderate,’ aesthetic and intellectual expectations” which typified middlebrow taste. While a number of visual culture and illustration studies scholars have begun to research the role of images in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British middlebrow publications such as newspapers and gift books, I examine the understudied role of illustration for fictions of Empire. By assessing illustrations created to accompany several romance novels set in South Africa by H. Rider Haggard I am able to argue that literary and visual culture continued established ideas about what Disraeli termed the Imperial Idea, while also facilitating the creation of new and exoticized narratives about Africa.

Keywords Illustration – Fictions of Empire – H. Rider Haggard – Visual Culture – Africa

1 Introduction An uncaptioned illustration from H. Rider Haggard’s Allan’s Wife (1889) depicts South African big game hunter Allan Quatermain at the moment of shooting an attacking Zulu warrior. While his horse watches patiently and his first assailant’s corpse lies stretched full-length in the background, Quatermain shoots this second Zulu warrior point blank so that he “sprung high into the air, and fell against my horse dead, his spear passing just in front of my face” (Haggard, Allan’s Wife 63). Illustrator Maurice Greiffenhagen’s (1862–1931) expressive lithograph shows the excitement and violence of Haggard’s text well. Although it seems physically unlikely that this man will in the next instant fall onto the horse (he seems to be propelled away from and not towards

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426566_004

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Figure 1

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Illustration by Maurice Greiffenhagen for Allan’s Wife

­ uatermain), the spirit of Haggard’s text carries over to this image. The thrill of Q this moment is economically contained within the narrow rectangle of the picture plane. The spear crossing the gun barrel makes a visually arresting X, while

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the contorted and leaping Zulu reveals the closeness of Quatermain’s escape. At the same time, viewers never truly worry about the safety of Haggard’s protagonist. First, the picture is set after the death of Quatermain’s assailants is certain. Second, unlike the weirdly contorted Zulu with his back to the viewer, the posture of Quatermain and his horse is erect and stable. By facing the viewer and bracing themselves courageously, audiences know they represent confidence and goodness. Finally, the spear’s thin shaft appears flimsy against the hunter’s thicker and more deadly rifle. This visual depiction of Haggard’s hero signals his position as an emblem of firmness in the most primeval and dangerous regions of South Africa in the 1840s. As an emblem of British competence and bravery during the period when Zulus, Boers, and Britons warred over control of this region, Greiffenhagen’s image speaks as loudly about British perceptions of Africa and its inhabitants as about Quatermain. Although recent visual culture studies have begun to discuss the role of illustration to the ideological work of imperialism, predominantly in She (1887), in this contribution I will use illustrations from Haggard’s Allan Quatermian series to consider the visual legacy of adventure fiction for constructing ideas about Africa. Haggard invented his iconic hunter to appeal to the fancies of boys in Britain and the United States, but Quatermain also served as a sort of alter ego and ideological mouthpiece for the novelist. In his autobiography The Days of My Life (1926) Haggard wrote that Quatermain “is only myself set in a variety of imagined situations, thinking my thoughts and looking at life through my eyes” (Haggard, The Days ii: 85–86). The iconic hunter made his first appearance in the 1885 African romance King Solomon’s Mines (ksm): a book composed expressly to attract the same readership as Robert Louis Stevenson’s juvenile adventure of pirates and buried gold, Treasure Island (1883). ksm was extremely popular, selling 56,000 copies in its first two years of publication (Pocock 63‚ 68), and this does much to explain why throughout the remainder of his career Haggard composed novels developing Quatermain’s character and biography. This series began with Allan Quatermain (1887), the immediate sequel to ksm, but expanded to Maiwa’s Revenge (1888), Alan’s Wife (1889), The Holy Flower (1915), Heu-Heu (1924) as well as the so-called Zulu trilogy of Marie (1912), Child of Storm (1913), and Finished (1917). Although he is typically depicted as worldly and practical, Haggard also wrote a number of novels in which Quatermain has supernatural and metaphysical experiences, such as The Ivory Child (1916), The  Ancient Allan (1920), and She and Allan (1920). This adventurer’s legacy extends well beyond Haggard’s lifetime. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil reinvent ­Quatermain as an opium addict in the graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–Present), and this hunter has inspired later ­archaeologist-adventurers in popular cinema, graphic novels, and video games

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such as Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. In adaptations and adventure fictions alike Quatermain remains an important figure in Western culture, particularly as he appears in visual media. Pictorial elements always played a large part in the print history of Haggard’s fictions, and especially those concerning Quatermain. For instance, Cassell’s produced several illustrated editions of ksm in response to its popularity, including an 1888 edition illustrated with nine engravings by Walter Paget, a 1905 edition illustrated with 32 black and white lithographs by W. Russell Flint, and a 1912 edition illustrated with eight color lithographs by A.C. Michael. ­Illustrated periodicals serialized many Quatermain stories prior to their publication in book form. For instance, Thure de Thulstrup illustrated the 1888 twopart serial of Maiwa’s Revenge published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine; in 1887 Atalanta Magazine published the novella “A Tale of Three Lions” in three parts accompanied with illustrations by Heywood Hardy; and Greiffenhagen illustrated The Holy Flower for The Windsor Magazine from December 1913 through November 1914. Owing to their ubiquity, literary historians must examine the role illustrations played in cultivating sentiments like that of Graham Greene, who remarked of Haggard’s novels: “he fixed pictures in our minds that thirty years have been unable to wear away” (Greene 209). My project addresses the question of what role Haggard’s numerous illustrators played in establishing the pictorial appeal of these influential imperial romances. While a number of visual culture and illustration studies scholars have begun to research the importance of images for late-nineteenth- and early-­ twentieth-century middlebrow British publications such as periodicals and gift books (Golden; Goldman and Cooke; Kooistra; Maxwell), the role of illustrations in fictions of Empire remains less studied. This is particularly problematic Stuart Sillars explains in Visualisation in Popular Fiction 1860–1960 (1995) because, “illustrations have a major function to preform, by selecting key points of the action, conveying a sense of suspense and progress, and in drawing our sympathies towards the central character” (Sillars 79). Although Sillars only mentions Haggard in passing, illustrations have a tremendous impact within the domain of Haggard scholarship, not only because the majority of his novels were illustrated, many of them repeatedly and by the best artists of the period, but also because so many critics make Haggard’s imaginativeness a touchstone for their researches. Importantly, numerous scholars have noted that when Ayesha, or She-who-must-be-obeyed, claimed that her “Empire was of the Imagination,” Haggard managed to articulate the locus of the British Empire’s power (see Brantlinger 227; Rodgers 103). Yet, despite widespread recognition of his instrumentality to forming the Victorian imperial imagination, I know of very few studies considering how the illustrations that accompanied

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Haggard’s fictions informed the ways in which Britons imagined the Empire.1 For instance, illustrations are absent from Ruth Mayer’s Artificial Africa (2002), which examines the legacy of ksm particularly in cinema (34–40); Lindy Stiebel’s study of landscape in Haggard’s African romances titled Imagining Africa (2001) contains no illustrations beyond two maps; and although Patrick Brantlinger’s classic study Rule of Darkness (1988) includes an illustration from She by E.K. Johnson, an historical or aesthetic critique of this graphic is absent (227). In fact, in this and later studies it has become conventional to use Haggard illustrations as decorations rather than problematic autonomous artworks invested with significance and ideologies (see Pearson 218–57). Placing illustrations within a critical edition or article without context supports the notion that illustration studies scholars in recent years have labored to discredit: that illustrations are mimetic glosses. As Paul Goldman points out, while “clarification, explanation, elucidation and illumination” all factor into the history and significance of illustrations, “interpretation […] is what I believe to be the central purpose” (Goldman 15). In order to trouble the intersections of image and text, my project offers a close reading of several illustrations from Haggard’s Allan Quatermain romance novels. The illustrations that accompanied Haggard’s fictions had a tremendous impact in establishing what Western audiences thought about the Empire, and South Africa especially. Although novels like She and ksm surpassed the limits of credibility, Haggard’s illustrated fictions enabled Victorians to imagine the furthest flung corners of the globe. Lost kingdoms, powerful witch-doctors, exotic landscapes and animals, grand and exciting scenes of battle, and titillating half-clothed Zulu, Amahaggar, and Kukuana maidens all exceeded the day-today lives of London schoolboys – not to mention the experiences of most South African colonists. Nevertheless, as Harvey Darton wrote in Children’s Books in England (1932), unlike Stevenson’s romance fictions, Haggard “gave English boys a better idea of the potential wonders of the Empire than could be had from any school-task” (Darton 304). For American and British readers, Quatermain curated a potential version of the Empire at its most wonderful, heroic, lucrative, and exciting. Illustrations offered much needed concrete visual information about the British colonies, however unreliable their source. Unlike the graphics that accompanied Thomas Hardy’s novels, which a­ ccording 1 Recent articles concerning E.K. Johnson’s illustrations serialized in the Graphic’s publication of She, have noted the importance of paratextual visual content such as advertisements and illustrated ethnographic articles for conflating fictional and nonfictional ideas about Africa. These graphic elements both expressed and revealed the mechanism of British imperialism (Fischer 266–87; Reid 152–78).

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to Arlene Jackson’s study were created to appeal to “an audience who mixed gentility with their interest in realism” (Jackson 29), Haggard’s illustrators attracted a middlebrow audience by exercising their imaginations. Assessing illustrations created to accompany several of Haggard’s romance novels enables me to argue that literary and visual culture continued established ideas about what Benjamin Disraeli termed the Imperial Idea, while also facilitating the creation of new and exoticized narratives about Africa. Illustrations taken from Haggard’s popular early Allan Quatermain adventures, beginning with ksm, but extending to Allan Quatermain and Maiwa’s Revenge, illuminate not only how Britain’s colonialist policies were marketed to middleclass AngloAmerican consumers, but also how images constructed influential ideas and stereotypes about these colonized peoples. In the space of this chapter I will closely read illustrations to better understand three motifs prevalent in fictions featuring Haggard’s famous adventurer: (1) Zulus as noble savages; (2) African bodies incorporated into the landscape; and (3) depictions of sexualized and powerful African women. 2

The African as Noble Savage

Haggard’s esteem for Zulu culture is well documented if patronizing and not uncomplicated (Coan 17–58; Monsman 371–97). In a 1908 article for the Pall Mall Magazine titled “The Zulus: the Finest Savage Race in the World” he notes that “[t]hey are a people with splendid qualities, honest, single minded, soldiers who fear not death” (Haggard, “The Zulus” 764). Beginning in his earliest journalism, Haggard chronicled experiences with this culture that he would later plumb for inspiration in his romances. The witch-hunt and the character Gagool from ksm, for instance, appear in Haggard’s 1877 article “A Zulu War Dance” published by Gentlemen’s Magazine (101). The great Zulu warrior M’Hlopekazi, or Umslopogaas, inspired Haggard’s own fictional Umslopogaas, a companion to the eponymous hunter in Allan Quatermain and, breaking with literary conventions relegating non-white characters to servants or sidekicks, a protagonist in Nada The Lily (1892). Since the late-nineteenth-century Anglophone readers have credited Haggard with possessing an authentic, deep, and sympathetic understanding of the Zulu people. As Roger Lancelyn Green, a member of the University of Oxford literary discussion group focused on fantasy and myth called the Inklings, put it: “Haggard understood the Zulus as probably few white men have ever done, and not one of his characters seems ever to be out of place, or lacking in harmony with the whole conception” (Green 147). While the sincerity of his admiration for this culture is u ­ ndeniable,

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European prejudices and assumptions overwrote Haggard’s observations of Zulu customs. Illustrators were instrumental in forwarding Haggard’s romantic ideal of the uncorrupted and therefore Noble Savage at the same time they perpetuate monolithic ideas about race and Empire.2 The illustrations created to accompany ksm, the novel that began Haggard’s tradition of portraying Zulus as not only Noble Savages, but also heroes, complicated Victorian ideas about native African peoples. How illustrators have elected to portray the rightful King of the Kukuana people, Ignosi, is particularly revealing. Before setting off on an expedition to find Sir Henry Curtis’s brother George, and possibly the diamonds rumored to occupy the mysterious mines of King Solomon, the English adventurers Quatermain, Curtis, and Captain Good must decide whether to allow an enigmatic Zulu, Umbopa (the assumed name of Ignosi and the name I will use in this close reading), to join their party as an unpaid servant. Quatermain – always quick with folksy-­ maxims – begins by ignoring Umbopa, because “if you rush into conversation at once, a Zulu is apt to think you a person of little dignity or consequence” (Haggard, 2007: 38). Following Umbopa’s enigmatic explanation that he is “of the Zulu people, yet not of them,” and an account of his martial exploits, fighting first with and later against Cetewayo, the Englishmen eagerly accept the services of the tall, handsome man who expresses a wish to join their party, but not until after a curious scene in which the Zulu offers his services to the group: Sir Henry told me to ask him to stand up. Umbopa did so, at the same time slipping off the long military great coat which he wore, and revealing himself naked except for the moocha round his centre and a necklace of lions’ claws. Certainly he was a magnificent-looking man; I never saw a finer native. Standing about six foot three high he was broad in proportion, and very shapely. In that light, too, his skin looked scarcely more than dark, except here and there where deep black scars marked old assegai wounds. Sir Henry walked up to him and looked into his proud, handsome face. “They make a good pair, don’t they?” said Good; “one as big as the other.” “I like your looks, Mr. Umbopa, and I will take you as my servant,” said Sir Henry in English.

2 The term “Noble Savage” is loaded, frequently anachronistic, and ideologically complex (Ellingson 4). However, this formulation exemplifies Haggard’s romantic treatment of the attractive and heroic, but always animalistic and barbaric Zulus that populate his fictions.

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Umbopa evidently understood him, for he answered in Zulu, “It is well”; and then added, with a glance at the white man’s great stature and breadth, “We are men, thou and I.” haggard, 2007: 40

This complex interaction evidently made a significant impact on three of ksm’s illustrators – Walter Paget, Russell Flint, and A.C. Michael – but with vastly different results. While these all show Umbopa’s muscular beauty and romanticized savagery, his agency as a character and merit as a hero relative to Quatermain, Curtis, and Good differ dramatically. Walter Paget’s 1888 illustration captioned “I like your looks, Mr. Umbopa” depicts the back of this man with his arms outstretched towards three English auditors (Haggard, 1888b: 48; Paget). All the accouterments of his outfit are present: he wears a moocha and lion claw necklace, and the great coat is crumpled on the floor. Captain Good, with his eyeglass and impeccable suit, stands in the background, while Curtis – identifiable by his “yellow hair” and “thick yellow beard” (Haggard, 2007: 12) – sits across from Quatermain at a rustic table. The scene is a still life of manly sport and adventure, from the mounted animal heads on the wall, one of which serves as a gun rack, to the animal skin beneath Quatermain’s feet, to the spare and sensible carafe and cups on the table. Although Umbopa is the center of Quatermain’s, Curtis’s, and Good’s attention, his position in this image is peripheral. Audiences can see little of Umbopa’s expression from his profile, so that what we know about this Zulu must be gleaned from the ­meditative expressions of these Englishmen. In this ­respect, the illustration

Figure 2

Illustrations by Walter Paget, Russel Flint, A.C. Michael for King Solomon’s Mines

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e­ xemplifies Haggard’s narrative strategy in ksm, which relies on Quatermain’s practical and often aphoristic perspective rather than, say, Curtis’s aristocratic and heroic point of view, or the perspective of Umbopa, as he sets into motion a daring plot to overthrow the illegitimate King Twala, and reclaim the Kukuana throne. More dismally, Umbopa’s posture also hearkens back to images of slave sales, in which a crowd of white men appraise black bodies.3 The position of Umbopa’s hands in their attitude of seeming supplication causes this image to read as a sort of slave block vignette. Rather than a powerful warrior and King, Paget’s Umbopa reads as a passive object of judgment. Sir William Russell Flint’s subtly modeled aestheticist illustration “I never saw a finer native” could not have approached Haggard’s text more differently (Flint; Haggard, 1907: 37). Although the lion’s claw necklace, greatcoat, and moocha appear faithful to Haggard’s written description, instead of observing the scene objectively from a distance, as we do with Paget, Flint situates his audience in the position of Umbopa’s appraisers. Viewers participate in the action, possibly as the caption’s speaker Quatermain. The Zulu stands alone and centered in Flint’s elongated picture frame. His upturned and tilted chin, demurely wandering gaze, and hands grasped loosely behind his back holding an elegant drapery train, all contribute to making Umbopa appear feminized. The penetrating gaze of his white male judges, although not shown explicitly, is suggested by the modest but in no way shrinking carriage of this “magnificent-looking man.” His face and torso are shown to full advantage, so that the model’s pose resembles fashionable portraits of young women from the period by James Abbott McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent. Additionally, Flint’s “I never saw a finer native” in many respects epitomizes the kind of figure painting for which he would become famous. This artist’s notoriety for depicting “an unchanging and perfectly proportioned female type in various exotic guises” (O’Mahony par. 5), exemplified by the bare-breasted and flirtatious Kukuana women he depicts in several of his other ksm illustrations, extends to Haggard’s comely and almost-nude Kukuana King. Yet, this stylistic choice is not purely aesthetic; it contains racial and gendered ideological cultural value. Unlike the white men that must remain respectably clothed, Haggard’s disrobing tableaux provided Flint with the opportunity to illustrate a male form that is no less gorgeous than those of his more recognized women. However, ­Umbopa’s nakedness objectifies and femininizes him as a handsome African savage. 3 For instance, the 1854 engraving “Inspection and sale of a negro” reproduced in American author Brantz Mayer’s Captain Canot, or Twenty Years of an African Slaver (1854) shows a slave in a very similar posture to that of Umbopa (Canot).

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In A.C. Michael’s color lithograph “We are men, thou and I” (Haggard, 1912: 46; Michael), Curtis and Umbopa stand shoulder to shoulder in a dark interior. There is a manly symmetry to the figures owing to their posture and the composition’s balanced warm tonality. As was the case with Flint’s image, our perspective is that of Good or possibly Quatermain, although the observer stands, rather than sits, to perceive the scene at or just below the height of his subjects. This compositional choice highlights the power of these men. The breadth of their chests seems to push against the picture plane, visually confirming Good’s observation, “They make a good pair […] one as big as the other” (Haggard, 2007: 40). Michael’s illustration uniquely makes a theme of masculine equality between Umbopa and Curtis and thereby, simultaneously, between the black and white races. Why did three artists between 1888 and 1912 approach the same scene from ksm in such dissimilar ways, and how might cultural studies scholars compare these artworks to better understand Umbopa’s role as Noble Savage? It is worth first pausing on the captions for these images, as a different character speaks in each one. Curtis states Paget’s caption, “I like your looks, Mr. Umbopa”; Quatermain is responsible for Flint’s, “I never saw a finer native”; while “We are men, thou and I” is Umbopa’s phrase, translated from Zulu to English by Quatermain. It is reasonable to guess that Haggard’s illustrators each chose a different speaker to distinguish their illustrations from those of their predecessors.4 Yet, how closely these illustrations followed Haggard’s words varied. Paget’s image diverges furthest from ksm’s prescribed text, which ought to portray Curtis standing before Umbopa. As Michael’s composition more accurately demonstrates, Haggard uses this moment of Curtis and Umbopa’s meeting to allow these heroes to exchange services in a warm, frank, and manly way. While these men rely upon Quatermain to translate their words to one another, both state their approval of the other – a partiality they will later confirm on the battlefield. Although Quatermain “rather mistrusted” Umbopa for his mysterious air and, more troublingly the commercially-minded hunter suggests, “his offer to come without pay” (40), Curtis and Umbopa forge an immediate and seemingly instinctual bond that Michael alone portrays. Flint’s illustration certainly conveys Umbopa’s handsomeness, but his aesthetic style does little to psychologize this character or deepen the plot. Portraying Haggard’s Kukuana King in

4 Although some authors like Charles Dickens selected specific captions and even dictated designs to their illustrators I have found no evidence that Haggard determined the graphic components for his novels in this heavy-handed fashion.

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the pose of an exotic ingénue rather than a seasoned warrior aligns Flint’s illustration with Paget’s by casting the relationship between Umbopa and the English adventurers as a hierarchical one between master and servant, subject and object, self and other. By positioning Umbopa as a striking object of white consumption Paget and Flint subject him as the representative noble savage to the post-colonial gaze in which, as Edward Said famously explained, “There is very little consent to be found” (Said 6). Unlike Michael’s illustration, Paget and Flint’s textual interpretations diminish the central tension in ksm of whether Haggard is writing ironically or in earnest when Umbopa makes his democratizing proclamation: “We are men, thou and I” (Haggard, 2007: 40). Paget and Flint’s illustrations make Umbopa’s words seem ridiculous in a way that Haggard’s text and Michael’s illustration do not – especially in light of later events. Umbopa’s transformation from servant to King compliments the central question of ksm: What does it mean to be a gentleman? Therefore, Umbopa’s racially egalitarian sentiment “We are men” – the closing words of ­chapter three – anticipates and makes problematic the gradual social leveling of the rightful King of Kukuanaland with British aristocrat Sir Henry Curtis. Paget, Flint, and Michael’s illustrations all depict Umbopa differently in order to e­ xpress their varied attitudes and prejudices regarding this question. ­Quatermain – who later self-identifies as “a bit of a coward,” and spends the majority of the battle against Twala’s army unconscious after a blow to the head – ­begins his narrative with the question “am I a gentleman? What is a gentleman? I don’t quite know” (10). The meeting between Umbopa and Curtis should be interpreted as continuing Quatermain’s framing question because this section permits Haggard to suggest that, in Africa at least, the Noble Savage Umbopa is as much a man – and possibly gentleman – as Curtis, Haggard’s most physically powerful and nobly born English adventurer. By the novel’s end Haggard intends for readers to identify the irony in Quatermain’s early displeasure with Umbopa for not treating the three Englishmen with adequate deference. On the evening before the adventurers’ journey into the desert Umbopa responds to Quatermain’s concern about his lack of respect by rejoining: “How dost thou know that I am not the equal of the Inkosi [meaning chief] whom I serve? […] He is of a royal house, no doubt; one can see it in his size and by his mien; so, mayhap, am I. At least, I am as great a man” (52). Less than a decade after Britain’s demoralizing defeat at the Battle of Isandlwana (22 January 1879), part of the Anglo Zulu War, Umbopa brings back into focus the stakes, repercussions, and reality of equality between Zulus and Englishmen. While Haggard’s imperialist feeling and patriotism causes him to reject the

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idea of ­leaving Zulu territories self-governed, unlike many of his contemporaries H ­ aggard was less quick to rank all Africans together as degenerate and ­evolutionarily lower. In Allan Quatermain, the sequel to ksm, for instance Quatermain even goes so far as to state that “in all essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical” (Haggard, 1995: 10). Although Haggard’s novel toys with the idea of interracial equality between great men, the illustrators of ksm were sometimes less willing to depict Umbopa being “as great a man” as Curtis. Comparing three artist renditions of a scene showing Umbopa as an attractive and heroic Noble Savage underscores the ideological content of these illustrations. Although Haggard’s text is ambiguous on the point, and issues of style, editorial direction, and creative liberty must also be taken into consideration, the implications for Britain’s imperial project that Michael alone has opted to visualize Curtis and Umbopa as twinned heroes recognizing mutual strength and bravery within each other, rather than as an African entreating the European Inkosis to enter their service, are manifold. 3

The African as Landscape

Many of Haggard’s illustrators objectified African bodies by rendering them as part of the landscape. In this section I expand my discussion of the Noble ­Savage – the attractive African who combines savagery with heroism – by pointing to the role that compositional framing and perspective played in illustrations to generate ideas about African people and places at their most picturesque and “natural.” Showing African bodies intertwined with the landscape served as a subtle, but not meaningless technique to suggest Africa’s primitiveness, dangerousness, and otherness. By close reading these images and considering their debt to late-nineteenth-century illustrated ethnological and travel books, I identify the sophisticated pictorial strategies adopted by Haggard’s illustrators to dehumanize African bodies by rendering them a part of the setting. Longman’s Magazine serialized Allan Quatermain in 1887, although it was not illustrated until the first book edition published the same year. In Haggard’s sequel to ksm the adventurers Good, Curtis, and Quatermain return to Africa, this time in search of a mysterious “great white race” (Haggard, 1995: 18). Among the dangers encountered on this mission, Masai warriors attack the expedition party in their canoes while traveling down the Tana River – an attack they anticipate after seeing a Masai Elmoran, meaning young warrior, shaking his spear at them in an “ominous way” (33).

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Although Quatermain claims he did not at the time take in all of the details of the Masai’s dress and equipment, his description of this fearsome c­ ombatant is meticulous. In the lengthy paragraph that follows, Quatermain describes his physical appearance (“enormously tall […] and beautifully, though somewhat slightly, shaped; but with the face of a devil”); his weapon (“a spear about five and a half feet long, the blade being two and a half feet in length, by nearly three inches in width, and having an iron spike at the end of the handle that measured more than a foot”); attire (“a huge cape of hawk’s feathers” and “a headdress of ostrich-feathers”); and so on (31). Haggard paints a detailed mental picture of the Masai Elmoran so that no aspect of his dress or demeanor is left unstated. In fact, this characterization serves as a sort of anthropological ekphrasis, transforming the Masai into a gorgeous if terrifying and primitive work of art. Quatermain sounds very much like the curator of an ethnological museum owing to the extensiveness and specificity of his description – a fact compounded when the hunter credits his familiarity with the Masai’s outfit to having “had plenty of subsequent opportunities of becoming acquainted with the items that went to make it up” (32). Pausing to include this encyclopedic account of the warrior acts as a narrative break to aid Western readers in imagining the exotic Masai. Rather than maintaining a universally fast-moving and action-driven plot, Haggard’s scene combines aesthetic impressions with social science realism. The discrete artifacts composing the Masai’s dress all merit study, although at this point in the plot Quatermain admits to being “taken up with the consideration of the general effect” (32). Here Haggard suggests that he perceived and interpreted the Masai along two registers that would inspire his illustrators: the detailed anthropological view and the general impressionistic one. There can be no question that Joseph Thomson’s Through Masai Land (1885) informed Haggard’s anthropological characterization of the Masai warrior. In the “Authorities” section that follows the conclusion of Allan Quatermain, Haggard states his “indebtedness to Mr. Thomson’s admirable history of travel ‘Through Masai Land’ for much information as to the habits and customs of the tribes inhabiting that portion of the East Coast, and the country where they live” (284). Haggard’s debts to Thomson are particularly apparent in his account of the Masai’s outfit. Consider Thomson’s description of the Masai headdress as, “a remarkable object formed of ostrich feathers stuck in a band of leather, the whole forming an elliptically-shaped head-gear. This is placed diagonally in a line beginning under the lower lip and running in front of the ear to the crown” (Thomson 435). This description varies little – even in terms of word choice (“remarkable,” “ellipse”/“elliptically”) – from Quatermain’s own statement, “perhaps the most remarkable feature of his attire

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c­ onsisted of a headdress of ostrich feathers, which was fixed on the chin, and passed in front of the ears to the forehead, and, being shaped like an ellipse” (Haggard, 1995: 31). Although Haggard expands on the “diabolical” effect of this headdress more readily than Thomson (31), both authors contribute to what Mary Louise Pratt described as a “planetary consciousness” (15). Although one writes fiction and the other non-fiction, both follow Carl Linnaeus in his project of systematizing nature because “[n]atural history called upon human intervention (intellectual, mainly) to compose an order” (31). This eighteenth-century impulse to systematize the natural world proved significant to Britain’s imperial project during the Scramble for Africa. By positioning Western ethnologists at the vantage of an Archimedean point to study and categorize human beings, these scientists were able to effectively interpret the Empire’s native inhabitants not as sovereign or autonomous individuals that deserve rights, but rather as part of the landscape’s unformed and raw material. Just as Thomson’s expedition for the Royal Geographic Society contributed to Haggard’s fictional description of the Masai, the illustrations in Allan Quatermain also bear comparison with those created for Through Masai Land. Printed graphics – maps, charts, photographs, and illustrations – played a significant role in the discourse of the human sciences. As Nicolas Mirzoeff notes, “anthropology created a visualized system of cultural difference whose effects are still with us long after its ‘scientific’ basis has been discredited” (Mirzoeff 130). Like many mid- and late-nineteenth-century travel narratives set in Africa such as Paul du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861), H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (1890), and Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897), illustrations accompanied Through Masai Land to help middlebrow Anglo-American readers to envision a continent that most would never see in person. The illustrations that supplemented Haggard’s adventure fictions lent anthropological realism to his romances at the same time that they enabled readers to imagine the wild and dangerous scenarios he invented. In his illustration captioned “A Masai Elmoran,” Charles Kerr, the first illustrator of Allan Quatermain, depicts a monumental warrior holding a spear in his right hand outstretched above an elaborate headdress, and backlit by a primordial-looking sun (Haggard, 1888a: 24; Kerr). In several ways Kerr’s fearsome warrior resembles the striking, anonymously created frontispiece of Thomson’s text captioned “On the War Path In Masai Land” (Thomson, Frontispiece; On the War Path) Both show Masai warriors wearing nearly identical outfits and holding similar weaponry; and both illustrations underscore the Masai’s aggressiveness. Although singular, these are not portraits of specific

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Illustration by Charles Kerr for Allan Quatermain

i­ndividuals because each represents an entire people that ostensibly dress, act, and look alike. Virginia Richter calls this mode of depiction the “generic ­African” which, when used in ethnographic illustrations like those from H.M. Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone (1872), “enhances the central ­opposition

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­ nderlying the text: between the white master and the subordinate race” u (Richter 187). This ­convention, adopted from travel and anthropological writing, f­unctions ­meaningfully in the plot of Allan Quatermain. Although only one warrior appears to the white adventurers, there is never any doubt that a band of unseen but equally aggressive Masai accompanies him. As is the case with Thomson’s detailed and scientific descriptions and frontispiece, Quatermain condenses an entire tribe into one meticulously rendered exemplar. Yet, unlike Thomson’s visual, which focuses on the details of the Masai’s costume apart from narrative and setting, Kerr uses a thoughtful yet ambiguous composition that accentuates the overall ominousness of Haggard’s scene. Kerr seems to have taken inspiration in equal measure from Thomson’s nonfiction account and Quatermain’s feelings regarding this Masai Elmoran: “I do not think that I have ever before seen anything quite so ferocious or awe-inspiring” (Haggard, 1995: 31). The illustrator conveys the explorer’s terror at the Masai’s specter-like appearance on a hillock beside the Tana River, but in the most anthropologically accurate way possible. Kerr’s warrior looks larger-than-life, and his position beside a gigantic sun – a celestial elaboration upon Haggard’s text – is an effective means of invoking a similar sense of amazement and fear in audiences. Kerr’s image achieves its psychological impact in large part through the composition’s dramatic because horizontal and enlarged framing. The

Figure 4

Illustration by Charles Kerr for Allan Quatermain

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­ erspective seems to be that of Quatermain and his companions. Looking p upward at the Masai from their canoes, this figure towers within the frame. Instead of ­emphasizing the vastness of the landscape – a convention in imperialist literature which Pratt termed the “monarch-of-all-I survey” mode (Pratt 201) – the Masai dwarfs his surroundings by extending his spear beyond the picture plane. This warrior fills the viewer’s eyes and mind. His contrapposto stance, clear from his thighs downward, hearkens to that of elegant Classical warriors like the Doryphoros of Polykleitos. Yet, above the hips, this warrior does not read as fully human. His uncanny animal fur and feather costume makes him appear strange and, in Quatermain’s words, devilish. Backlighting accentuates his form as a dark monolith against the light. The upwardly angled spear, shield, and headdress triangulate this Masai so that he resembles a human-faced mountain. In fact, his weird animal coverings look like nothing so much as the textured grass in the foreground that conceals his feet, suggesting that this warrior has become part of his environment. He is Legion because the Masai tribe is limitless, its members interchangeable, they reproduce i­ nfinitely – possibly beyond the measurable limits of Western science and political economy. Flora and fauna grow upon him because he is a natural, or perhaps supernatural, part of Africa’s never wholly understandable surroundings. Kerr’s visual framing techniques have the effect of reifying Quatermain’s sentiment heralding this vignette as “an ominous incident” (Haggard, 1995: 30). This terrible warrior’s appearance precipitates the Masai attack on Quatermain’s boat, which results in the death of a Wakwafi servant, and the brutal severing of one of his assailant’s arms. Whether or not the dismembered Masai is the same individual spotted on the riverside does not matter. In the minds of readers this scene emasculates the Masai metonymically en masse and demonstrates Quatermain’s martial superiority. However, as Kerr’s theatrical and dream-like illustration reveals, no white man may wholly conquer or even comprehend this Genius of Africa. While Quatermain characterizes his encounter with the Masai matter-offactly, and with the gloss of ethnological scientism, the misty clouds that form a backdrop to Kerr’s illustration permits readers to imagine this scene at its most disturbing. Kerr’s illustration underscores the psychological terror that so many European authors describe when writing about African river journeys. Critics have noted the influence of Haggard’s Allan Quatermain romances, and Allan Quatermain specifically, on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness (Dryden 183–84; White 155). The dark because foreboding quality of Quatermain, Good, and Curtis’s expedition up this Central African river to reach ­Reverend Mackenzie’s mission station almost literally mirrors Marlow’s voyage to meet Kurtz. In both fictions barely-seen native antagonists occupy

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the Tana  and Congo riverbanks, respectively, to intimidate and attack the white p ­ rotagonists and their native servants. Long after observing the Masai Elmoran, a feeling of impending danger keeps Quatermain from sleeping at night. A ­ lthough he professes to have “the most complete and entire scorn and disbelief, […] of presentiments,” he nonetheless, “was all of a sudden filled with and possessed by a most undoubted presentiment of approaching evil” (Haggard, 1995: 34–35). When a band of Masai warriors attack the travelers that night while they sleep in their canoes, Quatermain is vindicated for his unease but readers are encouraged to read the incident supernaturally. Clearly some miraculous agency inspired the hunter to remain conscious to save the party from certain death. Kerr’s illustration bridges Quatermain’s two emotional encounters with the Masai – the first overlaid with awe, dread, and ethology; the second with extrasensory presentiments followed by actual ­violence – to cultivate fear through the unseen. Although Richter claims that the most common type of illustration in travelogues captures “the anecdotal value of a scene, at the expense of ethnographic precision,” in order to “steer the text from the factual to the narrative mode” (Richter 187), Kerr’s “A Masai Elmoran” represents the garb of a real tribe inhabiting Central Africa with scientific accuracy, but he extrapolates this quasi-magical vision out of Quatermain’s disturbed psyche. Because Quatermain is a notoriously unreliable narrator (his abuse of Umbopa in ksm reveals less about the Zulu’s character than the hunter’s own insecurity about whether or not he qualifies as a gentleman), Kerr’s illustration might actually provide not only a paratext to the plot and nonfiction references for Allan Quatermain, but also the most accurate depiction of the hunter’s mental state. Although Quatermain adopts ethnographic objectivity to contain and diminish the impact that this terrible Masai dressed “in his savage war-gear” had on his nerves (Haggard, 1995: 31), Kerr uses exaggeration and theatrical staging to convey this encounter’s psychological impact. Like Marlow’s description of the Congo River’s “formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders” (Conrad 14), the Masai Elmoran’s unexpected emergence from the wilderness flanking the Tana River signals Africa’s un-orderable strangeness and dangers. The extraordinariness of this scene seems distinctively well suited for visual mediums. In fact, Kerr’s illustration anticipates ambiguous modern and postmodern cinematic treatments of Empire and river travel exemplified by Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and James Gray’s The Lost City of Z (2016). In the uncanny wilds of Africa, Haggard leaves the awfulness of this scene either buried or implicit in his text; Kerr, however, uses his medium to draw out and emphasize Quatermain’s terror.

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The Powerful African Woman

Haggard was never chary of mentioning sexual relations between white and black characters. Although tabooed by many of his contemporaries, interracial desire peppers Haggard’s fictions without his taking a stance on its scientific and political implications. But perhaps no character was as conflicted about marriage between the so-called black and white races as Quatermain. In ksm, for instance, Quatermain states his agreement with the Kukuana maiden Foulata’s dying proclamation to her lover Good: “I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as I am, for the sun may not mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black” (Haggard, 2007: 206). And yet back in England Good continues to favor Foulata above white women, declaring that, “he hadn’t seen a woman to touch her, either as regards her figure or the sweetness of her expression” (232). In Haggard’s Marie, the young Quatermain seems to characterize interracial marriage as a sign of desperation, describing Port Natal as, “a miserable place,” where “such white men as dwelt there had for the most part native followings, and, I may add, native wives” (Haggard, “Marie” 290). The hunter’s own attraction to “the wicked and fascinating Mameena, a kind of Zulu Helen,” in Child of Storm suggests that black women can possess sexual attractions for even the most seasoned and pragmatic of Englishmen (Haggard, Child xiii). Haggard’s openness to interracial unions in his Allan Quatermain fictions might be an extension of his esteem for some black persons, and the Zulus especially. His attraction to African women might also stem from his personal experience in South Africa, as biographers conjecture that Haggard took a black mistress in the late 1870s (Higgins 35–36). Regardless of his inspiration, terrifying but beautiful African women are a recurrent and necessary component of Haggard’s imagined Africa. Unlike civilized European women, which were ideally constrained in their dress and manners, and educated to act as self-effacing helpmates to men, Haggard conceived of numerous African women in his fictions that were intelligent, passionate, uninhibited, self-interested, and sexually desiring and desirable. As John Brian Harley explains in The New Nature of Maps, “Female sexuality in depictions of African women […] is often explicit for the benefit of male-dominated European societies” (76). Andrew Libby attributes Haggard’s singular delight in this sublimely savage type of womanhood to the facility with which it “open[ed] up space for the male protagonists to recuperate masculine power without compromising the delight they find in wild, untamed Africa” (Libby 4). It is for this reason that so many illustrations of African women, and especially those by Russell Flint and Charles Kerr, show partially clad and shapely Zulu Venuses intended to titillate audiences. The women Haggard

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invented provided readers with the mystery and adventure they craved, but they also continued racist stereotypes suggesting the innate brutality of black people and black women especially. Illustrators of Allan Quatermain stories were quick to follow Haggard’s lead in creating African heroines that appear vivacious and wild. For this final section I will consider an illustration that depicts the beautiful and warmongering African matron Maiwa, who Quatermain admires and even dreams of marrying. Harper’s Monthly Magazine serialized Maiwa’s Revenge in 1888 in an edition illustrated by Swedish-American artist Thure de Thulstrup. In this African adventure, narrated by Quatermain years later from the safety of the Yorkshire countryside, Maiwa convinces the hunter to deviate from a hunting expedition in order to avenge her infant son. With Quatermain’s help she successfully persuades her father Nala, chief of the Butiana tribe, to declare war on her husband, the wicked chief Wambe. Like the mythic-historical Shaka Zulu (Chaka in Haggard’s Nada the Lily),5 Wambe murders his children to keep them from becoming rivals. Although Quatermain initially professes to be uninterested in revenging Maiwa’s son, he readily agrees to help upon discovering that Wambe holds captive John Every, his friend, and an Englishman. While Quatermain’s intentions are honorable, Every assures his liberator, “You won’t come for nothing, for the stockade of Wambe’s private kraal is made of elephants’ tusks” (Haggard 1888c: 204). Quatermain’s role in the plot is that of an observer, mediator, and adviser rather than an active hero. It is Maiwa who orchestrates the war that deposes her husband, and Thulstrup’s expressive illustrations demonstrate her furious energy. In the illustration “Follow me, children of Nala!” Thulstrup shows Haggard’s eponymous heroine rising out of a seething mass of African bodies that crash together in battle (Haggard, 1888d: 355; Thulstrup). Thulstrup knew more about warfare than most late-nineteenth-century commercial artists. Educated at the Swedish National Military Academy, he joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in the Franco-Prussian War. After training in Boston at the Prang chromolithography company, Thulstrup became well known for his military depictions of the American Civil War – expertise he used to invigorate Haggard’s African battle scene. Thulstrup depicts the exciting moment when Maiwa rouses Nala’s army into an offensive charge. Her hand reaches above the distant mountain, suggesting her bravery and command. Unlike the erotic because predominantly nude depictions of Maiwa that Charles Kerr created for the 1891 edition of Maiwa’s Revenge (not entirely an exaggeration as 5 “This was the rule of the life of Chaka, that he would have no children, though he had many wives. Every child born to him by his ‘sisters’ was put away at once” (Haggard 1895, 37).

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Figure 5

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Illustration by Thure de Thulstrup for Maiwa’s Revenge

­ uatermain describes her as “a very handsome and dignified native girl” [HagQ gard, 1888c: 202]), Thulstrup’s Maiwa serves to emphasize her single-minded aggressiveness. Standing atop the wall Maiwa motivates her army through insults and questioning their masculinity: “‘Slay, you war-whelps […] Are you

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afraid, you women, you chicken-hearted women! Strike home, or die like dogs! What – you give way! Follow me, children of Nala’” (Haggard, 1888d: 356). Evidently, Maiwa’s words had quite an effect on these men as not one now appears cowardly or seems to fall back. Encouraged by Maiwa’s insults and her willingness to lead the charge, Nala’s soldiers advance fearlessly. Thulstrup makes a spectacle of combat. The violent maneuvers of these skilled warriors are balletic rather than gruesome, and the surge of men is sublime in its infinitude. By depicting an endless army enlivened by dramatic vignettes – a fallen man on the left shields his face; a running soldier on the right prepares to stab a fleeing man in the back – Thulstrup’s illustration celebrates violence. Bent on Wambe’s destruction, not Christian forgiveness or “natural” maternal softness, Maiwa will take any measures to mete out justice for her son’s murder. This concern perhaps explains why Thulstrup’s composition resembles Eugène Delacroix’s famous allegorical history painting Liberty Leading the People (1830). Both Liberty and Maiwa are garbed in a light-colored, one-­ shouldered, and classical-looking drapery that swirls around their figures dramatically. They stand upon barriers but seem to levitate supernaturally above the battle surrounding them. With one hand they reach upward and with the other they hold weapons: Liberty a rifle, and Maiwa a spear. Both women act as beacons of hope inspiring the men around them to fight. They promise freedom from the bonds of tyranny if their causes prevail. Yet rather than the elevated thoughts and philosophic meditations on death and honor signified by the enlightened Liberty, Maiwa’s vengeance and anger are instinctual and brutal. Unlike the placid and virtuous face of Delacroix’s feminine allegory, Thulstrup’s heroine wears a hard and furious expression. She is the archetypal devouring mother red in tooth and claw. Although both seek to overthrow a tyrannous ruler, neoclassical style – like civilized sentiments – has little place in primeval Africa where bestial instincts and brute strength prevail. Quatermain, who has little patience for the niceties of civilization, which he decries as “only savagery silver gilt” (Haggard, 1995: 10), is favorably impressed by Maiwa’s impassioned if destructive courage. Even as she brutally interrogates Wambe, immobilized by a lion trap, with questions like “hath a woman’s vengeance found thee out and a woman’s wit o’ermatched thy tyrannous strength?” Quatermain continues to voice his admiration for “her fierce beautiful face fixed like stone” (Haggard, 1888d: 359). No diminutive or helpless maiden, Maiwa is desirable because she is unyielding and pugnacious. Yet, Maiwa is not entirely without a heart, and therefore conforms in part to Western expectations about middle-class femininity. Importantly, as a mother Haggard’s heroine is in large part blameless for loving her murdered child above herself and others almost to the point of madness. In addition, Every reveals that he

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“should have died if it hadn’t been for the girl Maiwa, who nursed me by stealth” (Haggard, 1888d: 360). Maiwa is ruthless by circumstance, not by nature. In fact, Quatermain vindicates her cruel justice after discovering that Wambe whipped Every, and he used the lion trap to murder hundreds of people. Although Quatermain insisted that the tyrant’s execution be swift, Every’s testimonial rouses him to make the ungentlemanly and unchristian proclamation, “I wish I hadn’t interfered; I wish I had left him to the same fate” (Haggard, 1888d: 361). Every and Quatermain agree that it is Maiwa who metes out fitting because corporal “justice” on Wambe (Haggard, 1888d: 361), however divergent her jungle court from civilized English law. Her function is not merely to instigate bloodshed; rather, it is to hand down Africa’s savage but fair dictums. Echoing the sentiments of his readers, Quatermain finds the Empire’s powerful non-white women simultaneously terrifying and erotic. Although it is never entirely clear whether or not Quatermain acts on his attraction, sexual tension pervades the hunter’s encounter with Maiwa (like his later adventures with Ayesha and Mameena). Most tellingly, Quatermain reports that the night following his narration to Good and Curtis he, “dreamed that I had married Maiwa, and was much afraid of that attractive but determined lady” (Haggard, 1888d: 363). By labeling the warlike Maiwa a “determined lady” Quatermain diminishes Maiwa’s exploits by equating them with the frivolous projects and campaigns of middleclass Victorian housewives. His droll phrasing equates her with what Vernon Lee mockingly called “the bouncing, well-informed, model housekeeper, electioneering, charity-organising young lady” (Lee 114). In despite of Quatermain’s dry ripostes at Maiwa’s expense, it is evident that he remains enraptured with her long after they parted company. It is not enough to publically witness the vengeance of Maiwa: Quatermain also wonders what it would be like to share her life and her bed. Maiwa numbers among Haggard’s numerous beautiful, commanding, and often wicked viragos. Many feminist critics have interpreted Haggard’s powerful African women, and especially Ayesha, as a reaction against the New Woman (Auerbach 36–37; Heller 55–66; Showalter 83–89). As the movement of first wave feminism advanced, the need to delineate proper spheres became an increasingly pressing concern for patriarchal conservatives like Haggard. Racial identities complicate the link between the New Woman in England and the beautiful and dangerous heroines that Haggard invented to populate his romantic Africa. Although most Africans, male and female, that Haggard positioned as sexually attractive tend to have light complexions and European features, they were still objects for sexual excitement and never respectable subjects of marriage. Authoritative women are somehow acceptable in Africa’s primordial forest as the vestige of an enticingly free and premodern era. ­Fiction

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permitted Haggard to expand on his ideas and anxieties about gender and race as they relate to female power. In his fictions African women generally achieve positions of power not on their own merits, but rather through persuading men using words (Maiwa), magic (Ayesha), or sometimes both (Gagool), and in this way they confirm a male-centered version of history. It is for this reason that ambitious women are frequently cast as manipulative villains that rob men of their free will, and who in the end receive their just deserts in the form of madness or death. In fact, after berating Wambe in the lion trap even Maiwa faints away under the stress, so that his execution is left to Nala’s soldiers. Time and time again a woman’s clout can only be as robust as the men she influences, a fact that Thulstrup’s illustration of Maiwa encouraging the troops envisages well. Picturing intelligent and powerful but nonetheless flawed women – consider Punch’s “Donna Quixote” caricature (1894) – was much on the minds of Haggard’s contemporaries. It is significant that Maiwa’s Revenge was serialized the year that, at the height of her fame, Ellen Terry portrayed Lady Macbeth at London’s Lyceum Theatre, and the following year John Singer Sargent painted Terry’s portrait in her famous iridescent green beetle wing dress. For all the anxiety they produced, imagining and picturing gorgeous, exotic, and powerful women was en vogue during the late 1880s. In the wake of She’s success, Haggard and Thulstrup both recognized the aesthetic potentialities of Maiwa’s triumphal revenge. The heroine’s savage bloodiness compliments her sexual attractions. Maiwa is a destroying goddess; she floats above her masculine followers as their terrifying, bellicose but sexually exciting muse. 5 Conclusion In this contribution I have examined the role that illustrations depicting African characters played in three Allan Quatermain fictions. For fin de siècle middlebrow Anglo-American readers, the quality, variety, and beauty of the illustrations that accompanied serial and book publications of romance fictions acted as strong marketing devices that may reveal more about reader’s expectations and desires than an author’s text alone. Future illustration studies of Haggard or other adventure fiction authors might continue the task of comparing one or more illustrations from a select text – a particularly illuminating exercise when several illustrators depict the same scene repeatedly. Because illustrators “talk back” to authors as well as previous illustrators, the graphic paratexts that accompanied romance fictions expanded on an author’s words and promoted new and often unique interpretations. Although I limit this

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study to Allan Quatermain adventures and the study of British imperialism in South Africa, illustrations contextualize a multitude of ideas in nineteenthcentury print history in important and complex ways. The impact of visual culture on Haggard’s oeuvre, not to mention the genre of adventure fiction more generally, has gone mostly ignored, but this chapter shows that illustrations had significant impact on how Victorians imagined the Empire. By close reading illustrations by a range of illustrators I push back against text-centric interpretations of Haggard; a disruption that is in no place so necessary as within the discourse of imperialism. Although visual culture studies scholars like Mirzoeff have argued that “Photography was a key tool in visualizing colonial possessions and demonstrating Western superiority over the colonized” (Mirzoeff 139), the illustrations created to accompany Haggard’s romance novels suggest that fictional graphics offer a compelling alternative “key” for understanding imperialism’s complex ideological mechanisms. Illustrations combined ideas about scientific objectivity with creative and affective artistry to picture the Africa that British imperialists desired, rather than the reality of the native Africans that actually inhabited this region. Works Cited Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge UP, 1982. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Canot, Theodore. Inspection and Sale of a Negro. From Captain Canot, Or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver: Being an Account of His Career and Adventures on the Coast, in the Interior, on Shipboard, and in the West Indies. Thirteenth Thousand. New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1859. P. 94. Engraved print on paper, 1859. Coan, S. “‘When I Was Concerned with Great Men and Great Events’ Sir Henry Rider Haggard in Natal.” Natalia 26 (1997): 17–58. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Edited by Paul B. Armstrong. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Darton, F.J. Harvey. Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Cambridge UP, 2011. “Donna Quixote.” Punch 106 (April 1894): 194–95. Dryden, Linda. “Heart of Darkness and Allan Quatermain: Apocalypse and Utopia.” Conradiana 31 (1999): 173–98. Ellingson, Ter. The Myth of the Noble Savage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

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Fischer, Pascal. “The Graphic She: Text and Image in Rider Haggard’s Imperial Romance.” Anglia – Zeitschrift Für Englische Philologie 125.2 (2009): 266–87. Flint, Sir William Russell. I Never Saw a Finer Native. 1907. Lithograph print on paper. Visual Haggard. Web. Golden, Catherine, ed. Book Illustrated: Text, Image, and Culture, 1770–1930. New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2000. Goldman, Paul. “Defining Illustration Studies: Towards a New Academic Discipline.” In Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room, edited by Simon Cooke and Goldman. London: Routledge, 2012. Goldman, Paul, and Simon Cooke, eds. Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room. London: Routledge, 2016. Green, Roger. “The Romances of Rider Haggard.” English 5 (1945). Greene, Graham. Collected Essays. New York: The Viking Press, 1969. Haggard, H. Rider. “A Zulu War-Dance.” Gentlemen’s Magazine 243 (September 1877): 94–107. Haggard, H. Rider. Allan Quatermain. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1888a. Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. London: Cassell, 1888b. Haggard, H. Rider. “Maiwa’s Revenge.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 77.458 (1888c): 181–209. Haggard, H. Rider. “Maiwa’s Revenge.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 77.459 (1888d): 345–63. Haggard, H. Rider. Allan’s Wife and Other Tales. London: Spencer Blackett, 1889. Haggard, H. Rider. Nada the Lily. London: Longmans Green and Co., 1895. Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. London: Cassell, 1907. Haggard, H. Rider. “The Zulus: The Finest Savage Race in the World.” Pall Mall Magazine 41 (June 1908): 764–70. Haggard, H. Rider. “Marie.” In Cassell’s Magazine. 53.3, London: Cassell & Co., 1911. Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. London: Cassell & Co., 1912. Haggard, H. Rider. Child of Storm. London: Cassell & Co., 1913. Web. Haggard, H. Rider. The Days of My Life: An Autobiography. Edited by C.J. Longman. 2 vols. London: Longmans Green, 1926. Haggard, H. Rider. Allan Quatermain. Edited by Dennis Butts. Oxford UP, 1995. Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. Edited by Robert Hampson. New York: Penguin, 2007. Harley, John Brian. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Heller, Tamar. “The Unbearable Hybridity of Female Sexuality: Racial Ambiguity and the Gothic in Rider Haggard’s She.” In Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature. Ruth Bienstock Anolik, ed. Jefferson: McFarland, 2007. 55–66. Higgins, D.S. Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller. London: Cassell, 1981.

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Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman, 1981. Kerr, Charles. A Masai Elmoran. 1888. Engraved print on paper. Visual Haggard. Web. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2014. Lee, Vernon. “Oke of Okehurst, or the Phantom Lover.” In Hauntings: Fantastic Stories. 2nd ed. London: John Lane, 1906. 109–91. Libby, Andrew. “Revisiting the Sublime: Terrible Women and the Aesthetics of Misogyny in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and She.” CEA Critic 67.1 (2004): 1–14. Maxwell, Richard, ed. The Victorian Illustrated Book. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2002. Michael, A.C. “We Are Men, Thou and I.” 1912. Color lithograph on paper. Visual Haggard. Web. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. “Transculture: From Kongo to the Congo.” In An Introduction to Visual Culture. Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Monsman, Gerald. “H. Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily: A Triumph of Translation.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 47.4 (2010): 371–97. O’Mahony, Claire I.R. “Flint, Sir William Russell (1880–1969).” In The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford UP, 2004. On the War Path. 1885. Engraved print on paper. Museum/Collection, City. Paget, Wal. “I like Your Looks, Mr. Umbopa.” 1888. Engraved print on paper. Visual Haggard. Web. Pearson, Richard. “Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality Beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000. 218–57. Pocock, Tom. Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire. London: Weidenfeld, 1993. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reid, Julia. “‘Gladstone Bags, Shooting Boots, and Bryant & May’s Matches’: Empire, Commerce, and the Imperial Romance in the ‘Graphic’s’ Serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s ‘She.’” Studies in the Novel 43.2 (2011): 152–78. Richter, Virginia. “Wild and Gorgeous: Images of Africans in 19th and 20th Century Travelogues and Discovery Narratives.” In Anglistentag 2003 Munchen: Proceedings, edited by Christian Bode. Trier: WVT, 2003. 183–92. Rodgers, Terence. “Empires of the Imagination: Rider Haggard, Popular Fiction and Africa.” In Writing and Africa, edited by Mpalive-Hangson Msiska and Paul Hyland. London: Longman, 2001. 103. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 2003.

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Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: ­Virago, 2001. Sillars, Stuart. Visualisation in Popular Fiction 1860–1960: Graphic Narratives, Fictional Images. London: Routledge, 1995. Thomson, Joseph. Through Masai Land: A Journey of Exploration Among the Snowclad Volcanic Mountains and Strange Tribes of Eastern Equatorial Africa. Being the Narrative of the Royal Geographical Society’s Expedition to Mount Kenia and Lake Victoria Nyanza, 1883–1884. London: Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1885. Thulstrup, Thure de. “Follow Me, Children of Nala!” 1888. Engraved print on paper. Private Collection. White, Andrea. Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject. Cambridge UP, 1993.

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“Cramful of snakes and ghosts”: B.M. Croker’s Anglo-Indian Ghost Stories Christoph Singer Abstract While the plot of Bithia Mary Croker’s Anglo-Indian ghost stories is often conventional, their unsettling horror lies in the depiction of social pressure British memsahibs encountered upon their arrival in India. Here, they were introduced into communities, which were ruled by minute social requirements. In doing so Croker’s ghost stories not only translate middle-class values into an Indian setting, they also illustrate the volatility of the imperial mind-sets British memsahibs had to navigate.

Keywords Bithia Mary Croker – Anglo-Indian ghost stories – memsahib – precedence – Raj

1 Introduction In Bithia Mary Croker’s Anglo-Indian Romance In Old Madras (1900) readers are quickly advised to avoid the dangers of the Indian hinterland. Mrs. Dixon, a memsahib who has spent many years in India, advises the novel’s protagonist Captain Tallboys Mallender against visiting a place called Panjeverram. Panjeverram, she asserts, is “just an overgrown, forgotten old place, and cram full of snakes and ghosts” (Croker, In Old Madras, 170). This warning, which elicits only a laugh from the naïve newcomer, can also be read as a self-depreciating description of Croker’s Anglo-Indian ghost stories. Often set outside the British mainstays in bungalows and other temporary abodes, they are haunted by spectres, snakes and scorpions. Whereas Rudyard Kipling asserts in “My Own True Ghost Story” that “[n]o native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black” (Kipling 61), Croker’s ghost stories are more inclusive. She presents frightful and sometimes deadly apparitions of Indians and British alike.

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Her ghost stories do invite a number of readings, such as interrogations of otherness, discussions of gender issues, and as negotiations of the Indian Mutiny which “was still in collective memory of the people of northern India as the unfinished business of empire haunted both the British and Indians” (Edmundson, “Bithia” 111). Yet, the fear and terror these stories evoke is not exclusively that of the colonized other. After all, as Benita Parry argues: “there are so few Indian characters in [Croker’s] books” (Parry 82). These stories are rather obsessed with the British themselves, reducing the India outside of the station to an exotic setting. This paper will discuss how this setting serves as a backdrop in Imperial Middlebrow fiction to discuss and elucidate on constructions of British identities. A dominant anxiety expressed in Croker’s narratives is the fear of social embarrassment, of transgressing the social rules that govern the Anglo-Indian communities. To be a British expat in India meant to be part of a continued performance of power. “British women, along with their men,” as argued by Margaret MacMillan, “were forced onto a stage in India. They had the leading roles in the imperial pageant. As long as they knew their lines and did not falter, the Indians would tolerate their rule” (MacMillan 11). Not knowing your lines would lead to major embarrassment inside and outside the fort. And the resulting ridicule from Indians and Anglo-Indians alike would be regarded as a threat to the standing of oneself and the Empire. This article will discuss how the all-pervasive fear of transgressing AngloIndian conventions is embedded in Croker’s rather conventional ghost stories. After a short introduction to Bithia Mary Croker, this article will focus on the role of Anglo-Indian women – the memsahibs – inside their social networks. The focus will be on the related fears and anxieties as expressed in Croker’s short stories “The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor,” “The Khitmatgar” and “To Let” from the 1893 short story collection To Let as well as “The Red Bungalow” from the 1919 anthology Odds and Ends. This perspective may help to elaborate on a neglected field in histories of the Empire. After all, as Nupur Chaudhuri argues: “historians of colonial India have paid little attention to the inner dynamics of the memsahibs’ private sphere in the colonial environment” (Chaudhuri 518). 2

Bithia Mary Croker and Kipling’s Ghost

In the anthology Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Roger Luckhurst states that Bithia Mary Croker was an “extremely popular novelist in her lifetime” (Luckhurst xxiv). While not completely forgotten, biographical information about Croker

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is as sparse as her publications are extensive. She was born in Ireland to Reverend William Shepphard. Later she married John Stokes Croker, who was an officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers and the Royal Munster Fusiliers. At the age of 29 she moved with her husband to Madras and later to Bengal, to retire – after 14 years in British India – in Folkestone, England. The repeated biographical alignment of Croker to the men in her life (“daughter of,” “wife of”) is echoed in her short stories, as will be discussed below. Many of Croker’s works were written in the hill station of Wellington, resulting in an extensive oeuvre of 44 novels and six short story collections. An early review of her work in the Saturday Review was puzzled concerning Croker’s gender: “We cannot confidently say whether B.M. Croker may be a lady or gentleman, and in intimating as much we pay him – we shall assume the male sex for convenience – a very high compliment” (Saturday Review 1896, 1). This treatment connects Croker to a number of female authors, as Mary Condé claims: “The first thing to be said is that the Englishwomen were not necessarily interested in presenting their female gaze as female: Charlotte Despard wrote anonymously; Bithia Mary Croker started writing as ‘B.M. Croker,’ Alice Perrin as ‘A. Perrin,’ […] J.E. Muddock, Sydney Carlyon Grier, Maxwell Gray, John Travers, I.A.R. Wylie, C.M.K. Phipps, J.M. Graham, MJ. Colquhoun, H.M. Cadell, E.W. Savi were all women” (Condé 14). Whether this was not partially due to the publisher’s influence is hard to say in Croker’s case. But, as will be shown, hers is a very female perspective, regarding the themes and topics of her stories, most notably her representation of a memsahib’s role(s) inside a patriarchal society. A review of the “Village Tales and Jungle Tragedies” in the Athenaeum, preceeding the short story collection In the Kingdom of Kerry, is an early example of how Croker repeatedly has been perceived in relation to another AngloIndian writer: “Mrs. Croker has already achieved a secure foothold in that temple of Anglo-Indian fiction whereof Mr. Rudyard Kipling is the high-priest” (Anon, Athenaeum 2). Douglas Sladen, 19 years later, is more generous of the contributions of Croker and her peers: “It is natural to mention Mrs. [Flora Annie] Steel, Mrs. [Alice] Perrin and Mrs. Croker together, for they long divided the Indian Empire with Rudyard Kipling as a realm of fiction. Each in her own department is supreme” (Sladen 121). As recently as 2005, Rudyard Kipling remains the main point of comparison to place Croker in the literary canon. Roger Luckhurst attests that “[i]n some ways, she can be seen as a female ­Kipling” (Luckhurst xxiv). However, he also hints at the fact that Croker has encouraged this comparison. Her 1897 novel Beyond the Pale evokes Kipling’s short story from 1888. And in 1920, Croker published a novel called Her Own People, which recalls Kipling’s Mine own People from 1891.

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To show how Croker is “more than simply a ‘female Kipling’” as Melissa Edmundson Makala argues in response to Luckhurst (Edmundson, Women’s 164), it is important to expand on this very notion of a “female Kipling.” Her own gender as well as gender roles in her writing are of importance considering the hierarchical position many women held in the minutely stratified British communities in British India. Melissa Edmundson argues in regard to female ­Anglo-Indian authors, such as Croker: These authors were dismissed as ‘lady romancers’ while ignoring what their works can reveal about how the British saw themselves and those they colonized. In effect, what these women authors often did was complicate the traditional notion of the colonial gaze, using their own status as marginalized and objectified subjects within the British social system to look sympathetically upon Indian natives, who were likewise marginalized by the British. edmundson, “Bithia” 130

While I agree with Edmundson concerning the complication of a colonial gaze in a novel like In Old Madras, matters are a bit more complicated when it comes to Croker’s ghost stories. As argued above, Indians hardly figure in her stories, which recalls Margaret MacMillan’s argument that Anglo-Indian memsahibs “lived in a world in which there were few Indians” ­(MacMillan 42). Furthermore, the Indian characters we encounter in Croker’s short stories are not exactly varied in their representation. At least in the ghost stories discussed here, the Indians often border on caricatures and are often reduced to types: the ayah, the khitmatgar or the khansama.1 In defense, I would argue that this reduction of individuals to their social positions is similar to that of the memsahibs and their incorporation into their husbands’ positions and, by extension, the Empire at large. Unsurprisingly, the ideology of incorporation found its way into a number of domestic novels. These novels, Alison Sainsbury argues, “married the ideology of patriarchy to the ideology of imperialism and merged the story of love and marriage and the story of European civilisation, subsuming all relations to an identity rooted in imperialism” (Sainsbury 170).

1 Hobson Jobson’s Glossary of Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (Yule and Burnell, 1903) defines these words as follows: An “ayah” is a “native lady’s-maid or nurse-maid.” (42), a “kitmutgar” is “one rendering service” (486) and a “khansama” or “conshuma” is “the title of the chief table servant and provider” (246).

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If Croker’s short stories illustrate one thing, it is that: the memsahib was more than a stereotype herself. As Nupur Chaudhuri argues, memsahibs “[h] aving no legal voice and no particular political or economic power, they are seldom visible in official documents or records. Hence, until recently the image of memsahibs presented by Rudyard Kipling has been taken for granted” (Chauduri 517). A memsahib’s position was almost paradoxical in the sense that she had to negotiate two contradictory subject positions, which is illustrated in the oft-quoted statement from Flora Steel’s and Grace Gardiner’s manual The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook: “[A]n Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire” (Steel and Gardiner 9). The memsahib, on the one hand, was the angel in the house, the home-maker and care-taker. On the other hand, she was expected to rule over an extended household including a minimum of three Indian servants. This paradoxical subject-position is reflected by the term memsahib itself. Freely translated it means the “master’s woman.” In consequence, the memsahib can almost be considered a figure of the third, a go-between. The memsahib is a person with a complex social position vis-à-vis her Indian staff, the Anglo-British community, and the British homeland. Such a life, especially for newcomers, was very difficult to navigate. A first impression of a memsahib that just arrived in India is quoted in Margaret MacMillan’s study Women of the Raj: “[I]t was like walking over broken glass barefoot to steer one’s way socially when I first went out to Poona” (MacMillan 156). This experience of social insecurity is a major source of fear and anxiety in Croker’s ghost stories and the portrayal thereof allows readers to “glimpse into pockets of silence” (Kapila 53) if read in conjunction with official sources, as Shuchi Kapila claims. The female protagonists’ sense of being out-of-place in a world that resembles their own, yet is remarkably different, finds expression in a literary simile in “The Dâk Bungalow.” Upon seeing the Indian murderer of a British Civil Servant staring through her bungalow’s window, Julia is terrified: “‘He reminds me of the Cheshire Cat in ‘Alice in Wonderland,” said Julia with would-be facetiousness, but I noticed that she looked rather pale” (“The Dâk Bungalow,” 131). In the logic of this simile, Julia is Alice, a young girl in a world where everything is different, strange and threatening. As such, this simile evokes genres like the Bildungsroman and coming-of-age narratives. The Anglo-Indian reader may recognize her- or himself in the inexperienced newcomers, all other readers may prove to be as naïve as the protagonists they observe.

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Conventional Horror and the Horror of Convention

The allure of Croker’s ghost stories lies in an idiosyncratic perspective on the conventions of a memsahib’s life in combination with conventional hauntedhouse-plots. In 1903, the conventionality of Croker’s writing was pointed out by The Bookman: In taking up a new novel by Mrs. Croker the reader feels pretty certain of knowing the kind of story to expect. It will be what is called ‘bright,’ with a brisk and fairly exciting plot, with much easy and natural dialogue, and a shrewd, if not very profound handling of worldliness and worldly people. (150) Croker was aware of the stereotype of the lady romancer in conjunction with her own writing. And she was self-depreciating enough to laugh about it. Regardless of the fact, whether the following description from In Old Madras is self-referential or not, the stereotype of the Anglo-Indian lady-romancer, however, seems to the point: Well, the little elderly lady with a face like a piece of wash-leather, lemon coloured hair, and diamonds, is Mrs. Fiske, widely known as ‘The Acidulated Drop.’ Her chief talent is fiction […] she achieves distinction by the number and variety of her stories. Her late husband had a fine appointment, and she has a fine pension; her daughters are satisfactorily settled out here, she infests the hills, and knows everything that goes on – on Hills or plains. croker, In Old Madras 58

In line with this quotation, In Old Madras shows Croker’s awareness of what makes a conventional plot. Early on in the novel, a side-character offers a comment on Captain Mallender’s intentions: “if I must give an opinion, I say, that your idea would make a valuable plot for a sixpenny shocker, but that is all there is in it” (11). Considering that this is a comment on the eventual, unfolding plot of the novel, one may read this statement as a meta-commentary by Croker on her own writing. How conventional are Croker’s ghost stories? For one, they are all classic haunted-house-stories subdivided in two intertwined narratives: that of the haunting ghost and that of the haunted lodgers. The lodgers are mostly families that move, despite warnings to do otherwise, into haunted bungalows. As

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foreshadowed, the spectres appear, terrify and scare the protagonists away. In two cases the haunting ends deadly. Less conventional is the fact, that the ghosts in Croker’s stories are exclusively male. This gains significance in contrast to the protagonists who are predominantly female: we follow the classic plot of women looking for and setting up a home somewhere in India. While their husbands are sporadically mentioned and appear occasionally, they remain mostly irrelevant. Apart from the gender differences between ghosts and the haunted, a second distinction is related to the importance of India as a setting for the plot. Concerning the plot surrounding the ghosts, India as a setting is reduced to mere decoration. For the female protagonist’s quests, however, Anglo-India is essential. Certainly, India’s otherness does add an air of the exotic and the unknown. But, strictly speaking, when it comes to the ghosts and their past, India could easily be exchanged for another setting, without affecting the plot. Surely, certain discourses, such as interrogations of colonialism, would be silenced. The love-sick horse-rider in “To Let” could fall to his death in the Scottish Highlands or Croker’s native Ireland. The murdered khitmatgar could be replaced by an English servant. The civil servant in “The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor” may as well find his demise at the hands of a greedy English robber, rather than an Indian dacoit – “a robber belonging to an armed gang” (Yule and Burnell 290). In all cases the plot would remain the same, and the ghosts could go about their vengeful business to a similar gothic effect. However, what would happen, if one were to exchange the narrative present related to the female protagonists? How important is India for their stories? Such a substitution would alter the plot remarkably. The depicted life in the stations, including the memsahib taking on special responsibilities and powers that were unlikely to be granted in the English motherland, provides the very essence of the plots at hand. The fear of social transgressions and missteps inside the Anglo-Indian community proves constitutive for many of the protagonists’ actions and reactions. And the fact that many memsahibs adapted to these rules is not surprising, considering that many did not come to India for India’s sake. They came, the great majority, to be wives; and they found in existence a tightly-knit community which gave them the simple choice of joining or staying outside. It was not much of a choice. Outside meant loneliness or India, and India frightened them. MacMillan 8

The tightly regulated fort and its own set of rules and reprimands may be preferable to being a social pariah. A related warning, found in Croker’s In Old

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­Madras, may be read in this light: “if one leaves the beaten road, – one has to pay!” (272). 4

The Ghosts of Social Embarrassment

The extent to which the Anglo-Indian society relied on a constant (over-) performance and affirmation of their imperial identity is hinted at in another middlebrow narrative about India. Louis Bromfield’s novel The Rains Came offers an American outsider’s view on the behaviour of Anglo-Indians in their stations. And it is not a sympathetic one: There was no temptation to leave, for he had no desire to go to Simla or Darjeeling or Ootacamund to be with the small people with their small ambitions, the army officers and the civil servants with their wives and brats, their precedence and their snobbery, their clubs and their sub­ urban British manners. He had tried that twice and found that it was intolerable – far more intolerable than the monsoon. bromfield 8

Two related concepts are of central importance here: “precedence” and class. Bromfield’s protagonist refers to the fact that the social behaviour of the British was largely governed by one’s social rank. MacMillan argues: “In between were minute gradations of rank almost invisible to outsiders but of the utmost importance to the British themselves. Social status depended almost entirely on what one did, or in the case of married women, on what one’s husband did” (MacMillan 47). In Croker’s short stories the memsahibs may appear like the matriarchs in power, but this power derives from the social status of their husbands. This tight relationship of the memsahibs to their husbands is a repeated theme in Croker’s short stories. Despite the husbands’ physical absence, they are very much present as markers of their wives’ identities. In “The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor,” for example, the female protagonists are first introduced in relation to their husbands: “Mrs. Duff, the wife of our deputy commissioner” (114), “Mrs. Goodchild, the wife of the police officer” (ibid.) and “myself, wife of the forest officer” (ibid.). Interestingly, the husbands’ names are omitted, they are also reduced to their role and function inside and for the Empire. For the wives the repeated attribute “wife of” almost serves the function of an Homeric epithet. It indicates the protagonists’ social rank inside the community. Nupur Chauduri argues: “The memsahib in India, like her counterpart in Britain, ­commonly

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derived her status from her husband’s occupation; her social position was clearly defined by her husband’s rank in the colonial administrative system” (Chauduri 519). The Warrant of Precedence published in Thacker’s Indian Directory or The India List and India Office List, both released annually, listed in detail where every member of the Civil Service and the armed forces was to be found in said hierarchy. Croker’s short stories repeatedly stress the respective rank and class of their characters. Mrs. Starkey, for example, is the wife of the “cantonment magistrate” (“To Let” 15) as opposed to Aggie, whose husband works in the “irritation office” [probably a pun on irrigation office] (3). Naturally, their setting up shop in a former colonel’s bungalow is eyed suspiciously. As a consequence of this strict observance of rank, the relationship amongst the memsahibs could be intimate, troubling, or intimately troubling: “It is whispered that in small and isolated stations the fair sex are either mortal enemies or bosom-friends” (“The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor” 115). In Croker’s stories leaving one’s place in the precedence has consequence. As said, the stories’ basic plots are structured as follows: a family is looking for a new (temporary) home. Their choice of abode is eyed critically by the older memsahibs. In the short story “To Let” the warning is frank and direct: “It’s haunted. There you have the reason in two words” (“To Let” 18). The warnings are neglected; yet they turn out to be justified. In consequence, the respective families quickly vacate the premises, dead or alive. So, wherein lies the transgression? All of these stories are built around the notion that the choice of lodging is not merely problematic because of their being haunted. Rather these spaces are socially inappropriate. The rented bungalows are too big or too luxurious relative to the social status of the lodgers. In the short story “The Red Bungalow,” for example, Netta, is worried why nobody had rented the bungalow at offer: “‘Why has it stood empty? Is it unhealthy?’ asked Netta.” The vendor’s answer is straightforward: “‘Oh not, no. I think it is too majestic, too gigantic for insignificant people.’” (“The Red Bungalow,” 146) That these implicit transgressions become discernable for the reader is due to Croker’s definitions of proper behaviour. These Croker presents either “ex negativo” or by highlighting (mostly) commendable characters. A definition “ex negativo” relates to the protagonist in “The Khitmatgar” who is “a girl without education, without energy, and without a penny” (“The Khitmatgar,” 93). A shining example of womanhood Croker’s narrator finds in Aggie, the protagonist in “To Let,” who is described as such: “Her children, her wardrobe, her husband, are all models in their way […] she is the ruling member of her family” (“To Let” 2). What is more, Aggie fulfils yet another ideal memsahibs were burdened with. As Mary Procida argues: “Anglo-Indian women were incorporated

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wives who supported their husbands’ careers by subsuming their own ambitions, ideas and identities to the demands of their spouses’ work” (Procida 43). This commitment to an husband’s position, which defines the wife’s own position is illustrated by Aggie who “knows all about his [Tom’s] department, his prospects of promotion, his prospects of furlough, of getting acting appointments, and so on, even better than himself” (“To Let” 3). His career, after all, is her career. Most of Croker’s characters share a general understanding of these rules, while overlooking some minute details. And the fear of a misstep is palpable and haunts the stories. Nobody wants to “become the laughing stock of a station with a keen sense of the ridiculous” (“The Red Bungalow” 148). Mistakes cause strong reactions from the other memsahibs, “jealousy” being an oftrepeated keyword in Croker’s ghost stories. In “To Let,” a memsahib’s warnings are misread and disregarded as signs of envy: “Horrid old frump! […] She is jealous and angry that she did not get Briarwood herself” (“To Let” 20). In “The Khitmatgar” two of the female characters get into a vicious fight over who leads the most impressive household, resulting in the following verdict: “She’s jealous of the grand big house, and fine compound, fit for gentry” (“The Khitmatgar” 107). At the same time, nobody wants to appear envious: “[…] I, the Colonel’s wife, might be a little jealous that the new arrival had secured a far more impressive looking abode” (“The Red Bungalow” 151). Envy and constant judgement haunt these stories, and the rules require a careful eye on the part of the characters as well as the readers. In the story “To Let,” the protagonist Aggie misjudges the unbearable, scolding heat of the premonsoon season in Lucknow and is late at booking an abode in the cooler hill stations, “called (for this occastion only) ‘Kantia,’” (“To Let” 7). One of the earliest information the reader receives about Aggie’s husband Tom is that his lower position, at the “Irritation Office” comes with a reduced holiday: “Tom could only get two months’ leave (July and August)” (“To Let” 4). This fact becomes important later when Mrs. Starkey, a matron at Kantia, advises Aggie to rent one of the remaining flats in the undesirable Cooper’s Hotel before “the rush up here in July, by the two month’s people” (“To Let” 19). Not only is Mrs. Starkey’s dismissive tone indicative of her view of these two-month’s-people. Additionally, she expects that the “two month’s people” belong into the small Cooper’s Hotel rather than the expansive Briarwood bungalow. In the hotel, she advises Aggie, “I believe you can have that small set of rooms at the back. The sitting-room smokes – but beggars can’t be choosers” (“To Let” 30). In a way, Croker’s stories resemble Greek tragedies if only in the sense that the newcomers always express a clear sense of hubris concerning their own status. This leads them to live above their own status and, in the end, social

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ridicule. A slight exception is the case of “The Khitmatgar,” which ends with the husband’s death. Yet, as opposed to the other short stories, the narrator doesn’t express an ounce of sympathy for the main protagonist called Mrs. Fernanda Jackson. Fernanda Jackson was born as Fernanda Braganza, “a girl without education, without energy, and without a penny” (“The Khitmatgar” 93). The name Braganza, intentionally or not, evokes connotations with the Portugese princess, and later wife to Charles ii, Catherine of Braganza. The name also suggests that Fernanda is of Luso-Indian descent. Upon renting the long abandoned Bhootia Bungalow in Panipore she “was convinced that she was positively about to be ‘a lady at last’” (100). The self-appointed status quickly goes to her head, and upon visiting a neighbour she feels the sting of envy. The “unexpected grandeur” of the neighbour’s house “was a blow to Mrs. Jackson” and “it seemed to her that Mrs. Clark also set up for being quite the lady, although her husband was not a gentleman” (103). At this point in the story, Fernanda may have adopted the name of her husband, but her maiden’s name Braganza still rings true. Both, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Clark “played a fine game of brag” (ibid.), a game she looses despite her extended household, which consists of “a couple of grimy servants” (93). Maybe it is in light of this “game of brag” and Mrs. Jackson’s desperate search for a subject position above her own that one has to read the story’s epithet taken from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Whence and what art thou, execrable shape?” (91) This quote from Book ii, line 681, of Paradise Lost may apply to the undead Indian servant haunting Bhootia Bungalow. After all, the addressee in Milton’s quote is Death, guarding hell’s gate. On the other hand, the addresser, Satan, is the first social upstart in all of Biblical history, dissatisfied with his place in the social hierarchy of heaven and looking for a new home. Hence the question – “Whence and what art thou, execrable shape?” – applies also to Mrs. Jackson, who is constantly on the move, displaced, outcast and rather wretched as a result. More precisely, Mrs. Jackson belongs nowhere. She is a “half-caste wife [with] a couple of dusky children” (93). In line with Paradise Lost’s main themes – degradation and the fall from grace – due to her husband’s drinking problem the family “for twenty years […] fell from one grade to another” (92). Looking out of her newly rented bungalow, she only finds reminders of a paradise, dead and gone, the former splendour relegated into brackets by the author: “Behind these ruins stretched an immense overgrown garden (with ancient, dried-up fruit trees, faint traces of walks and water-­ channels, and a broken fountain and sundial)” (98). This presentation of a lost paradise is reminiscent of Croker’s novel In Old Madras. Panjeverram, the place in question, is “just an overgrown, forgotten old place, and cram full of snakes, and ghosts” (170). Here lives an equally

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d­ estitute family on the far-off-fringes of Anglo-Indian life. There is one major difference. Major Rochfort, who lives a double-life in this place “was extraordinarily happy” (143). The short story’s narrator, however, offers no sympathy for Mrs. Jackson and her lot. Her deep desire to be a “lady” is mocked, regardless of the alcoholic husband being the source of all trouble. What is noteworthy though, is how this family is initially represented. The introduction resembles a speaker beginning to share some gossip: Perhaps you have seen them more than once on railway platforms in the North-West Provinces. A shabby, squalid, weary-looking group, sitting on their battered baggage […] I mean Jackson, the photographer, and his belongings. Jackson is not his real name, but it answers the purpose. There are people that will tell you that Jackson is a man of good family, that he once held a commission at a crack cavalry regiment, and that his brother is Lord-Lieutenant of his county, and his nieces are seen at Court balls. “The Khitmatgar” 90

Here Croker’s narrative voice adopts the snarky tone of a burra memsahib. As MacMillan explains, the “burra (‘great’) memsahib, the social leader of the station, was the lady whose husband occupied the most senior post” (MacMillan 47). Firstly, the reader is directly addressed as “you.” Secondly, the reference to “people that will tell you” goes hand in hand with the gossipy tone of this introduction. Thirdly, the fact that “Jackson is not his real name” furthermore evokes the notion of gossip being exchanged in a way that pretends to maintain the face of everyone involved. With this tonality, address, and hedging the story starts like the beginning of a conversation in an intimate setting. If we accept that Croker emulates a judgmental burra memsahib, it has to be stressed that these are not idealized either. Croker’s other narrators repeatedly add the occasional quip against these dominant ladies by changing the focalization through which these are being perceived. In “To Let” one character ironically addresses the absent, know-it-all memsahibs: “Tell me this, ye Anglo-­ Indian matrons?” (“To Let” 4) In the same story a parrot mimics a memsahib and her husband’s unflattering voices: “He [the parrot] called ‘Qui hye’ so naturally, in a lady’s shrill soprano, or a gruff male bellow, that I have no doubt our servants would have liked to have wrung his neck” (“To Let” 22). Especially the association of the memsahib with a “shrill” voice is indicative, considering this description is repeated in “The Khitmatgar”: “but he [a servant] soon learned his mistake from the voluble, shrill-tongued mem-sahib” (97).

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These changes of focalization add a different perspective to this performance of British rule, and illustrate the servants’ perceiving their superiors as shrill, which is echoed by MacMillan, who also attributes the stereotype of the memsahibs with “ringing voices” (1). Despite these mockeries, one should not overlook the power these burra memsahibs had, power they often used to interfere with the lives of the memsahibs they deemed inferior. Mary Procida argues Such interference could become especially troublesome in smaller stations, where there was no escape from the narrow society of the AngloIndian community. As late as the Second World War, some spouses of junior officers felt intimidated by these ‘burra mems’ and were inhibited in their actions for fear of damaging their husbands’ careers. (44) What complicates matters, however, is the fact that in the short stories, the burra memsahibs, despite their rather negative portrayal, are without fail correct in their predictions. And in hindsight, every piece of advice turns out to be helpful, putting the newcomers into their place: “Aggie bore Mrs. Starkey’s insufferable ‘I told you so’” (“To Let” 38). 5

Critique or Affirmation

This leaves us with the question whether these short stories are an affirmation or critique of the existing status quo, especially in regard to the Imperial Middlebrow. On the one hand, Croker’s stories do support Kapila’s argument that “[p]opular forms of writing and representation often express unacknowledged fears, anxieties, and preoccupations” (53). On the other hand, Croker’s short stories share a general aversion of exaggerated self-importance, rather than a direct critique of the status-quo that leads to such a behaviour. Croker’s imperial middlebrow fiction neither seems to attempt a deconstruction nor a blind affirmation of imperial ideologies. The short stories seem to be very aware of the expected behaviour and rules of conduct, and she does critique a failure to adhere to these rules – due to ambition or neglect. At the same time, these stories are emphatic enough to appreciate that these expectations, especially for newcomers to the Anglo-Indian cosmos, are often impossible to live up to. Yet, in line with Kapila’s statement, there seems to be a deeper fear permeating these haunted-house-stories. According to Anne Williams, “the word ‘house’ has two meanings relevant to Gothic fictions – it refers both to the building itself and the family line” (Williams 45). And the houses in Croker’s

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stories are haunted in both senses of the word: on the one hand, the respective ghosts haunt the bungalows and abodes of the protagonist. On the other hand, the family line, as represented by the children, is always at risk in these stories, which gives a distressing insight into the realities of Anglo-Indian mothers: “Children could die with appalling suddenness. Steel and Gardiner offer a chilling list of what they describe as common ailments – abscesses, bites of wasps, of scorpions, of mad dogs and of snakes, colds, cholera, colic, dysentery, fever, indigestion, itch, piles, sunstroke. They might have added malaria, typhoid and smallpox for good measure” (MacMillan 1988, 127). Another, anonymously published handbook for women in India – The Englishwoman in India of 1864 – is more optimistic, despite stressing that the probability of child-mortality is related to one’s class: “In many respects, India is a more healthy country for very young children than England. How rarely is there an instance of bronchitis, croup, or any lung disease […]. Of course these remarks do not apply to the children of European soldiers, among whom, from many causes, the mortality is fearful” (95). The decay of the family-line is most explicitly represented in “The Khitmatgar” where the narrator does not even bother to specify the number of Mrs. Jackson’s children. They are “a couple of dusky children” (“The Khitmatgar” 93) and it is their very complexion that renders them unimportant for the Empire’s cause as only white children “were a sign that the British were established in India, that the community was ‘sound.’ And the presence of white children showed that the British men had firmly abjured the bad old practice of keeping Indian mistresses” (MacMillan 125). The family line of Aggie and Tom in “To Let” seems at first sight sufficiently healthy. The focus here is rather on the bungalow’s former Anglo-Indian owners who lose their suicidal daughter Lucy, and thus see their family line end. Yet, if one looks closer at Tom and Aggie’s family it becomes quickly clear that the children’s health is a major factor. As MacMillan asserts, India’s “heat drained away their children’s strength, leaving pale and listless shadows” (12). This quote very much mirrors the description of the children falling ill in Croker’s “To Let”: “and presently Bobby and Tom began to fade: their little white faces and listless eyes appealed to Aggie […]. Then Bobbie had a bad go of ­fever – intermittent fever; the beginning of the end to his alarmed mother; the end being represented by a large gravestone” (“To Let” 6–7). The narrator’s tone may sound slightly ironic, but the danger was very real. As such the fear of ending the family line can be read quite literal as well as an indication of the Empire’s impending demise. In Old Madras is equally concerned with both of these houses falling apart. The main protagonist’s family is anything but thriving: “unfortunately, like

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other old families, the race was almost extinct” (Croker, In Old Madras 16). Statements like these go hand in hand with a repeatedly expressed doubt concerning the Empire’s legacy: “No, and I dare say there won’t be much sign of us after a couple of thousand years. We shall leave no great monuments, temples and fortresses, such as still recall ancient Hindostan” (202). This negative outlook is supported by the natives’ declining respect for their imperial rulers. The following description links Croker’s novel to her gothic short stories: “there is the grave of an English officer about twenty miles out, with the date 1809; I’ve seen it. He is worshipped as a demon, and natives bring him brandy and cheroots. […] but I think they only offer arrack, and bazaar tobacco now” (192). If the natives are not even afraid of a dead demon anymore, this does not bode well for the future of the living Brits. In light of these and similar depictions Kapila reads Croker’s writing as a “critique of upper-class British life associated with England and its praise of homeliness even in a mixed home, Croker’s romance breaches the boundaries of the unspeakable” (Kapila 77). Especially when it comes to the fear of this homeliness disintegrating and the Empire falling apart, it is this fear of the unseen that permeates Croker’s short stories and the novel In Old Madras alike. In the novel, a young “half-caste” girl is being sent to the English homeland to be educated. Because of her blonde hair and fair complexion – her twin brothers are “two copies in black” (Croker, In Old Madras 144) – her father does not expect any problems. Captain Mallender, however, is worried about the girl’s mother’s influence, invisibly hidden behind the girl’s looks, to become visible in the future: “‘[…] no one would ever suspect the child of anything but pure English blood.’ That was true, thought Mallender, but her children? – what of them? They might resemble her brothers, or her grandmother!” (164–65). When it comes to the end of the family line, of homes being destroyed, the most unsettling of Croker’s ghost stories is “The Red Bungalow” published in 1919, that is, 26 years after the short story collection “To Let.” “The Red Bungalow” superficially adheres to the same plot structure and set-up as Croker’s earlier stories. Yet, this story is also remarkably different in its almost modernist fashion. Where Croker’s older short stories were always upfront about the reality of their ghosts, and very specific about their looks, histories and behaviour, “The Red Bungalow” remains remarkably ambiguous: “The maddening part was that they would give no definite name or shape to their fears – they spoke of ‘It’ and a ‘Thing’ – a fearsome object that dwelt within and around the Bungalow” (“The Red Bungalow” 153). Additionally, the short story recalls Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw in its ambiguity regarding the ghost’s reality. Whether this is a ghost or a phantasm remains unanswered. But it has a tragic effect on the family-line, especially on the two children. Whereas I find C ­ roker’s

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other ghost stories rather amusing, “The Red Bungalow’s” climactic moment stands out in its illustration of the children’s terror in the face of something invisible to the parents: There, huddled together, we discovered the two children on the table which stood in the middle of the apartment. Guy had evidently climbed up by a chair, and dragged his sister along with him. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun streamed in upon them, and the room as far as we could see, was empty. Yes, but not empty to the trembling little creatures on the table, for with wide, mad eyes they seemed to follow the motion of a something that was creeping round the room close to the wall, and I noticed that their gaze went up and down […]. “The Red Bungalow” 155

The tragic part lies not only in the parents’ helplessness, and their inability to see what their two children are seeing. This event marks the very end of the family-line: the son, Guy, dies of “brain fever” (ibid.) and the daughter, Baba, “remains dumb for the present day” (“The Red Bungalow” 156). Croker didn’t publish enough ghost stories towards the end of her career to allow for a larger argument concerning the looming end of Empire and the related representation of gothic terror and threat. It is noteworthy, however, that while in “The Red Bungalow” the family-line does end in traumatic silence the haunted bungalow is ready to be let by “anyone desirous of becoming a tenant” (“The Red Bungalow” 157). In line with the horrifying convention, the horror continues. Croker’s contributions to the Imperial Middlebrow may not be a denunciation of British Imperial ideologies per se. But they seem selfaware enough to hint at the belief that the translation imperii will eventually see the end of British rule in India.

Works Cited



Primary Sources

Anon. Athenaeum, Review of Village Tales and Jungle Tragedies, quoted in B.M. Croker, In the Kingdom of Kerry and Other Stories. London: Chatto, 1896, 2. Anon., Review of “Her Own People,” The Bookman, 1903, 150. Anon., Review of “Pretty Mrs. Neville,” Saturday Review, quoted in B.M. Croker, In the Kingdom of Kerry and Other Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1896, 1. Anon. The Englishwoman in India, by a Lady Resident. London: Smith, 1864. Bromfield, Louis. The Rains Came. New York: Grant, 1937.

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Croker, Bithia Mary. In Old Madras. London: Hutchinson, 1900. Croker, Bithia Mary. To Let. 1893. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1906. Croker, Bithia Mary. Odds and Ends. London: Hutchinson, 1919. Kipling, Rudyard. “My Own True Ghost Story.” 1888. Ed. S.T. Joshi. The Mark of the Beast and Other Horror Tales. New York: Dover, 2000, 61–66. Steel, Florence Anne, Grace Gardiner. The Complete Indian Housekeeper & Cook. London: William Heinemann, 1909.

Secondary Literature

Chaudhuri, Nupur. “Memsahibs and Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India.” Victorian Studies 31.4 (Summer, 1988), 517–35. Condé, Mary. “Grounded in Fiction: Women Inscribing the Indian Landscape.” Eds. Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Pier Paolo Piciucco. Studies in Indian Writing in English. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2001, 14–42. Edmundson Makala, Melissa. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013. Edmundson Makala, Melissa. “Bithia Mary Croker and the Ghosts of India.” The CEA Critic 72.2 (Winter 2010), 94–112. Kapila, Shuchi. “The Domestic Novel Goes Native: Bithia Mary Croker’s Anglo-India.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 26.3 (2004), 215–35. Luckhurst, Roger. Late Victorian Gothic Tales. Oxford UP, 2005. MacMillan, Margaret. Women of the Raj. New York: Thames, 1988. Parry, Benita. Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930. London: Verso, 1998. Procida, Mary A. Married to the Empire: Gender and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947. Manchester UP, 2002. Sainsbury, Alison. “Married to the Empire: the Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel.” Ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert. Writing India, 1757–1990–1998: The Literature of British India. Manchester UP, 1996, 163–87. Sladen, Douglas. Twenty Years of my Life. London: Constable, 1915. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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“An artificial little community which has climbed eight thousand feet out of the world to be cool”: Sara Jeanette Duncan, Simla, and Middlebrow Aesthetics Samuel Caddick Abstract Set in the summer capital of the British Raj, Sara Jeannette Duncan’s short story “An Impossible Ideal” is a narrative that is directly engaged with concepts of high and low art in the colonial context. “An Impossible Ideal” provides Duncan with the opportunity to interrogate concepts of taste, distinction, and pretension in the colonial c­ ontext. This chapter reads “An Impossible Ideal” as both a colonial fiction that is concerned with cultural capital and also a middlebrow work explicitly contending with artistic value.

Keywords Sara Jeannette Duncan – Simla – Middlebrow – British Raj – art

1 Introduction In Maud Diver’s second novel of Anglo-Indian life, The Great Amulet, the French artist Michael Maurice visits his sister Quita Lenox and rails against the suggestion of marrying his sweetheart. The artist argues that matrimony would cause him to “profane the sanctuary of my soul, to corrupt my Art, by becoming a mere breadwinner, a slave of the hearth-rug” (Diver, The Great 179). In his mind, Michael sees the monetary income required for matrimonial life as a threat to his artistic integrity. In this moment, Diver highlights what Pierre Bourdieu would later identify as “the anti-‘economic’ economy of pure art,” the theory that the production of true art is compromised by the pursuit of economic success (Bourdieu, The Rules 142). The attempts of middlebrow authors such as Diver to produce works that are both commercially successful and at

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least gesture towards an artistic integrity makes the intersection of so called “pure art” and commerciality a potent topic for authors of middlebrow fiction to explore. It is this same concern that is at the core of Sara Jeanette Duncan’s short story “An Impossible Ideal” (1903) which uses the fickle Anglo-Indian society of Simla to explore the troublesome intersections between artistry and economic success. 2

Art and Artists in Sara Jeanette Duncan’s Domestic Fiction

“An Impossible Ideal” is not only a work of middlebrow, imperial fiction it is also an interrogation of the concept of artistic value in the cultural arena. The story follows the arrival of an artist to the city of Simla in northern India. Although championed by two residents to the city, his work is largely overlooked until he wins a major prize for a new work. His initial supporters view this prize-winning work as a decline in his skill while the artist uses the success to ingratiate himself into the city’s society. At the conclusion of the narrative, the artist leaves the city and in the process discards his newfound popularity in favour of returning to his earlier, superior work. “An Impossible Ideal” is a work of middlebrow fiction that directly engages with the “popular” versus “high” art diametric as well as the concept of commercial success being in some way deleterious to artistic success. In this respect the narrative of “An Impossible Ideal” presents a conception of the same cultural marketplace that it itself is involved as a piece of literature. Duncan’s short story appears in The Pool in the Desert, a collection of short stories focused on the society of Simla, the summer capital of the Raj and the eponymous pool in the social, cultural, and often literal “desert” of India. Satire of Simla social life has a precedent in Raj fiction, with Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills being the most significant of the genre. Duncan’s Simla is positioned as a space of artifice and performance, whether it be through the false identities and bigamy of “The Hesitation of Miss Anderson” or the ­pretension found in “An Impossible Ideal.” Due to the temperate weather during Simla’s summer months, the city gained the reputation for possessing a sense of character that was innately English. This Englishness was augmented by the employment of European architectural styles such as the Mock Tudor in the architecture of the Simla Mall and the Viceregal lodge, and the Gothic in the case of Simla Cathedral. Accounts of the city attest to this English character, with the artist Val Princep quipping that to be in Simla was to “fancy oneself in Margate” (Princip 264) while the novelist E.M. Forster recalled “all the time I was in Simla, I forgot I was in India” (Forster 159). This sense of Simla acting

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as an English village resonates throughout works of Anglo-Indian fiction set in the summer capital with character’s tastes, marriages, and identities also being in some way performative in nature. In literary depictions this sense of performance makes Simla an extremely unstable space. This instability erupts in the narrative in numerous ways, such as the exposure of a fraudulent identity as in J.M. Fleming’s A Pinchbeck Goddess, the interruption of government business as in Kipling’s “Tods’ Amendment,” or Ingersoll Armour’s sudden ascension to and then rejection of polite society in “An Impossible Ideal.” Sara Jeanette Duncan was one of the many of the European women to stay in Simla during their time in India. Duncan became a fixture in the local literary community of the capital and would eventually host E.M. Forster in his 1912 tour of the subcontinent that would go on to form the basis of his greatest work, A Passage to India. In The Other Side of the Latch, a brief biographical essay of her convalescence in the city following a bout of tuberculosis, Duncan acknowledges the apparent unreality of the summer capital as “an artificial little community which has climbed eight thousand feet out of the world to be cool” (Duncan, On Other 8). The image of Simla that emerges from Duncan and other authors of fiction set in the summer capital is that of a space that was physically and culturally separate from India as a whole. This image of Simla as England appears in “An Impossible Ideal” itself with Mr. Philips asking the reader to imagine “a small colony of superior – very superior – officials of British origin and traditions” who remain isolated from India at large (52). It is this relaxation of the strict social rules of the Anglo-Indian community that gave Simla the reputation of being a space resplendent with what Maud Diver tactically christens “domestic tragedies” (Diver, The Englishwoman in India 22) and Kanwar more bluntly observes to be “picnics and adultery” (Kanwar 9). The sense of performativity found in “An Impossible Ideal” arises directly from Simla’s reputation as a space where Anglo-Indian social codes may be relaxed. “An Impossible Ideal” is typical of Duncan’s oeuvre in that it depicts the contradictions and hypocrisy of Anglo-Indian society in a light-hearted manner. This capacity to view Anglo-India from a distance arises from Duncan’s lack of initial connection to the community. Born in Canada, 1861, Duncan had a comfortable childhood thanks to her father’s prosperous furniture business and training as a teacher while at the same time writing works of poetry and journalism, the first of which begin to appear in print when she was twenty. By the mid-1880s, Duncan was financially comfortable with regular columns in both the Toronto Star and The Washington Post. In 1888 Duncan resigned as a ­journalist and commenced a world tour. In India she met Everard Coates, a British Civil Servant working at the Calcutta museum, who proposed to her

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and the couple were married in India a year later upon Duncan’s return to the ­subcontinent. Duncan then proceeded to split her time between England and India until her death in England in 1922. Duncan’s most enduring novel, The Imperialist, focuses on small town Canada during the closing years of the nineteenth century and still provokes academic discussion especially in relation to concepts of gender and imperial citizenship. The majority of Duncan’s work, however, are works of Raj domestic fiction, a genre that is fundamentally interested in the mundane and everyday problems of the Europeans living in India rather than the adventure stories set in the Raj such as Kipling’s Kim. Despite these pieces of Raj fiction being most typical of Duncan’s output, it is largely overlooked when compared to The Imperialist. It is in this genre that “An Impossible Ideal” is operating. Duncan’s short story confronts the complexities of aestheticism and the appreciation of art in the colonial context. The narrative opens on the work an artist named Ingersoll Armour that is displayed at the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition. “Hanging in the least conspicuous corner and quite the worst light in the room” (Duncan, The Pool 42) and largely dismissed by the Simla establishment as the work of “a child of ten” (45), Overlooked during the exhibiton, the work does finally attract the attention of two Simla residents, Miss Dora Harris and Mr Philips, the narrator of the story. The duo are attending the exhibition to “chiefly amuse [themselves] by scoffing” at the mediocre quality of the AngloIndian artwork on display (42). Over the next series of weeks, Harris and Philips introduce themselves to Armour and discover that he arrived in Simla to paint portraits of local Indian princes. Due to Armour’s unorthodox style and the conservative tastes of the princes his clients are dissatisfied with his art and Armour’s frustrated employer refuses to extend his soon to be expired contract. Without a source of income, Armour would be forced to return to Europe, an event that would deprive Harris and Philips of his singular artistic vision. Harris and Philips attempt to increase the painter’s popularity in Simla but they are largely unsuccessful. Shortly before Armour is forced to leave India he submits a final piece to the next exhibition that is met with an ecstatic response from the guests and goes on to win the Viceroy’s Gold Medal. Despite Armour’s newfound success, however, Philips and Harris find themselves alienated from the new painting asking, “What – on earth – has he done with himself?” (89) Armour becomes the hit of the Simla season where he “dined out four or five times a week, and learned exactly what to talk about” and becomes a darling of the society which had once rejected him (95). At the conclusion of the short story Armour is offered a position as director of the prestigious art school in Calcutta. The artist leaves Simla ostensibly to assume take up the position but instead boards a ship to Colombo with his artistic friends.

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Harris and Philips then suddenly marry and reflect on Armour’s bohemian nature. In order to grasp the humour of the short story it is essential to understand the social and cultural reputation of Simla in the Raj and in works of Raj fiction. Simla’s location in the temperate Himalayan foothills made the city an extremely desirable space during the hot Indian summers that made the more southerly plains uncomfortable for the British ruling class. During this period, the government and bureaucracy of the Raj would decamp from the sweltering plains to the relative cool of Simla. Known as the “Simla Season,” the city became the centre of Anglo-Indian cultural and social life that lead to a proliferation of works of Raj fiction set in the city most famous being Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills. During the “Simla Season,” the city would be inundated not only by the families of the men who occupied the higher echelons of the Raj but also “large numbers of British wives and their offspring” whose husbands’ remained on the searing plains (Allen, Kipling 134). In addition to these wives and children, the city played host to the members of the so-called “Fishing Fleet,” British women who ventured to India for the sole purpose of finding a husband. (cf. De Courcy) During the season, Simla became a unique city in the Raj were “the British womenfolk […] outnumbered the menfolk several times over” (Allen, Kipling 134). This had an impact on the image of the city, as British women in India were considered detrimental to the imperial project as a whole. The common wisdom that “the biggest mistake the British made in India was to bring their women out” who were “usually bored, invariably gossiping viciously, prone to extra-marital affairs” endured and was extrapolated onto the reputation of Simla (Hyman 118f.). The city became to be viewed as a space of snobbery, pretension, and frivolity that threatened to distract from the serious, masculine, business of imperial governance. Maud Diver’s guidebook The Englishwoman in India (1909) succulently presents this image of the summer capital as a space where “the social atmosphere [is] accountable for half the domestic tragedies in India […] here frivolity reaches its highest height, and social pleasures are, to all appearance, the end and aim of every one’s existence” (Diver, The Englishwoman 23ff.). This description of Simla creates the image of a space that not only threatens the morality of those who visit the city but also jeopardizes the ethical justification of the imperial project itself. Although Simla fiction does not engage with the city with the same febrile intensity as Diver, the tropes of marital transgression, the lively social scene, and a sense of performance was routinely employed by novels set in the capital. The supposed enclave of an English character that was believed to be found in Simla allowed for a destabilisation of the English class system that was

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a­ lready being to lose its rigidity in the colonial context. As Alan Johnson acknowledges in Out of Bounds, a substantial number of the Anglo-Indian community were from the “lower and middle classes,” their self-proclaimed racial and national superiority meant that they “lived far better than they could have back Home” (Johnson 47). With its supposedly English character and its exclusive position as a political and social capital, the Anglo-Indian residents of Simla were able to perform this class movement to a higher degree. Duncan acknowledges the heights of pretentiousness that is encouraged by the city in “The Hesitation of Miss Anderson” another short story appearing in The Pool in the Desert collection which features “ridiculous little white-washed house[s] made of mud and tin, and calling [themselves] Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford” (Duncan, The Pool 105). The snobbery and condescension towards their fellow residents that is displayed by Harris and Philips in “An Impossible Ideal” is another example of Simla’s capacity to encourage a self-consciously superior and unavoidably performative class position to arise. The duo at the centre of “An Impossible Ideal” – Mr. Philips and Miss ­Harris – are excellent examples of the cultural pretension and class snobbery that was encouraged in Simla. The pair visit the exhibition with the express purpose of belittling the entries of the competition. The pair lament the winning paintings as being “thick as blackberries” while the “perfectly fresh, original, admirable” work of Armour is ignored with Harris stressing that such philistinism is “just like this place” (45). Later Philips laments the provincial backwardness of Simla as a place that is “years and miles away from literature, music, pictures, politics” and exists “like a harem on the gossip of the Viceroy’s intentions, and depending for amusement on tennis and bumble-puppy” (52). Though claiming to hold a greater understanding of “taste” than their neighbours, Harris and Philips view themselves as possessing a larger amount of cultural capital and thus holding a superiority over their shallow neighbours. In this instance, Philips and Harris are enacting Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that “explicit aesthetic choices are in fact often constituted in opposition to the choices of the groups closest in social space” (Bourdieu, Distinction 53). The artistic taste that Philips and Harris claim to possess is actually formed in opposition to the prevailing taste of their fellow residents; their aesthetic taste comes from a desire to be distinct from their neighbours – they like what others overlook – rather than a formal appreciation of art. There are several suggestions throughout the short story that the taste that Philips and Harris claim to possess is in actuality a pretence that allows them to feel superior to their neighbours. Mr Philips’s narration reveals to the reader the disparity between his genuine and purported knowledge of the artworks that he judges. He incorrectly insists to Miss Harris that Armour’s work must

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have been sent out from home only to be contradicted by Dora who notices the “Simla subjects” throughout the painting (Duncan, The Pool 42). Soon after Harris chides Philips for his accidental use of the word “taste” which he assumes Harris will “store up and produce to prove that [he] was not, for all [his] pretensions, a person of the truest feeling” (43). Ironically, although Harris and Duncan lament what they see as the tastelessness of Simla, the word taste and thus the ability to question what good taste actually means is anathema to them. Without an actual interrogation of the concept of taste and cultural value (Harris prefers the more nebulous term “intensity”) the duo reveal the limits of their capacity as appreciators of the arts. In line with the performative nature of Simla society, Harris and Philips assume the identity of connoisseurs of art. By assuming the role of the elite art critic the couple are able to entertain themselves through disparaging their fellow residents. Through this performed snobbery, Harris and Philips use their professed cultural capital to disrupt the class hierarchy of Simla and place themselves in a socially superior position to members of a class higher than them. It is only through Philips’s narration that the reader becomes aware that the duo’s snobbery is merely a performance and a method for the couple to view themselves as distinct from the rest of society. In positioning the proclaimed cultural tastes of Harris, Philips, and the Simla community at a large it is vital to explore the descriptions of the various pieces of art with varying levels of purported artistry. Duncan describes the initial work that attracts Harris and Philip as being “half a dozen studies hanging in the least conspicuous corner and quite the worst light in the room” (Duncan, The Pool 42). Perhaps surprisingly, it is this apparently superior work that receives the least detail in the short story especially when compared to the later, apparently lesser works. There is much more detail paid to Lady Pilkey’s painting that takes an award from the exhibit with its warm “blaze of colour in […] the middle distance” and a “torrent in the foreground” (47). Armour’s later, more successful but apparently lesser, work also receives more description than his early work. Harris relates how it was a painting of: An old Mahomedan priest with a green turban and a white beard exhorting a rabble of followers […] very well painted indeed, very conscientiously painted […] the expression on the fire-eater’s face was extremely characteristic; his arm was flung out with a gesture that perfectly matched. (89) The noticeable difference between the two pieces is that although the later one is described as being well painted, Duncan provides description of the ­narrative

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of the painting. One of the judges of the exhibit remarks that the orientalist scene provides the work with a “general feeling” of “an incident in one of Mrs. Steel’s novels” (90). The depiction of the imam rousing a mob suggests that the novel referenced is Steele’s hugely popular mutiny narrative On the Face of the Waters. It is this suggestion of popularity through the intertextual reference to Steele’s middlebrow fiction that turns Harris and Philips against Armour’s work. The pair attempt to use their professed cultural taste to place themselves as culturally above their fellow Simla residents and thus any suggestion of popularity or a mainstream acceptance would threaten their cultivated performative identities. With more description given to Armour’s second piece than the supposedly superior first painting, there is a suggestion that it is the capacity to view a narrative in the painting what makes the painting so popular and potentially the aspect of the work that Harris and Philips object most to. The sense of a narrative drive diminishes the couple’s perception of the work, suggesting that the artistic validity arises from a rejection of narrative in favor of abstraction. In the considerations of Harris and Philips Armour’s artistic output moves from a superior almost abstract depiction of a landscape to a lesser, more realist, form that has a narrative built into the artwork. In discussing Armour and his paintings it is important to consider the cultural capital possessed by oil painting, Armour’s medium of choice. Oil paintings of Indian subjects are often employed in works of Raj fiction such as Maud Diver’s Lilámani. In that particular novel, the protagonist Neville Sinclair is able to save his ancestral home through the sale of his own work. As John Berger notes in his critique of European art, the oil painting is intrinsically linked to the marketplace due to the form’s “special ability to render the tangibility of the texture, the luster, the solidity of what it depicts. It defines the real as that which you can put your hands on” (Berger 88). Through connecting the oil painting to the emergence of capitalism and the bourgeois, a connection can be established between oil paintings and the realist middlebrow mode employed by Raj fiction with the genre’s focus on realism and the marketplace along with its aversion to abstraction. In the colonial context, the realism of the oil painting also becomes a method of depicting the Indian body as well as the more intangible Indian spirituality that is rendered into a “tangibility of texture.” This capacity to depict becomes a method of control, especially of the otherwise inaccessible sphere of Indian religion. In works of Raj fiction, the image of the oil painting serves a twofold purpose. Through a celebration of the production of an art form the texts are able to present themselves as being in sympathy with these artworks and the creative process. The oil painting ­bestows a degree of cultural capital upon the text while the purported accuracy of the medium imparts a sense of authenticity onto Duncan’s fiction.

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As well as the performative nature of the two protagonists of the novel, who pose as highbrow art connoisseurs, it is also worth analysing Armour with a similar approach. Armour is significant in the novel as he, like Duncan herself, is a stranger to both the Anglo-Indian society and the supposedly English character of the summer capital. Armour arrives in Simla from Wisconsin “by way of a few years in London and Paris” (Duncan, The Pool 56). It is from this New World background, like Duncan’s own, that Mr Philip’s identifies the source of Armour’s supposed artistic talent believing that “he could never have been the product of our limits and systems and classes in England” (57). It is this separation from the English class structure that permits Armour to experience Simla and its performative atmosphere in a different way to the other characters in the short story. Where Harris and Philips’ identities are constantly constructed in relation to the class standing of themselves and their fellow residents, ­Armour – as a French trained American artist – is able to exist outside the class boundaries that riddle Simla society. His separation from the rigid class boundaries of England also gives Armour an exotic appeal to Harris and Philips, who champion the outsider as a method of distinguishing themselves from the wider community. Throughout his early introduction in the short story, Philips’ narration pays particular attention to Armour’s unconventionality in Simla. One such example is Armour’s refusal to paint his name on his bungalow, instead marking it with a card that is “at the mercy of the wind and weather” (53). This eccentricity allows Philips to fixate on Armour’s exoticness to reason that “Mr Armour seemed to imagine himself au quatrième or au cinquième somewhere on the south side of the Seine; it betrayed a rather ridiculous lack of conformity” (53). The artist’s rejection of Simla manners continue when Philips once again encounters Armour “ambling alongside on the leanest most ill-groomed of bazaar ponies” while wearing a bowler hat, a piece of clothing considering to be unfashionable in the summer capital (58). If Armour’s nonconformity in such things as clothing his familiarity with all class levels of the English community of Simla is another signifier of his separation from the wider community of the summer capital. His rejection of the class boundaries of the capital is most apparent when Philips first visits Armour’s bungalow. Upon arriving at the studio, Philips is initially confused with his subordinate, Rosario, who also often visits the artist. Armour’s inability to assimilate into Simla society arises from his nature as a national and cultural outsider to the local Anglo-Indian community but also a self-consciously desire not to conform to the society. Arriving as an American with Parisian artistic training, Armour is at once separate from the insular and – according to Harris and Philips – philistine populace of the city with an

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indisputably bohemian air about him. Armour takes advantage of his background to distinguish himself in Simla by flouting the fashions of the city. Duncan draws a connection between the distinction of Simla and the distinction of bohemianism, viewing the two as methods of gaining a superiority over conventional society. Bourdieu’s conception of bohemianism is in many ways similar to descriptions of the Simla, both are “separated from the people,” that exist as “an art of living that defines it socially” that is situated closer to the tastes of the “aristocracy or the grande bourgeoisie” than to the respectable middle classes. This art of living also allows and encourages “experiments on a large scale with all forms of transgression” (Bourdieu, The Rules 56f.). With this link between bohemianism being both a form of transgression, experimentation, and the privilege of the aristocratic classes it is possible to view the Simla season as being a space where the Anglo-Indian community are able to perform both a form of living as an aristocratic class as well as a transgression against the narrow Anglo-Indian social code. That is not to argue that the participants in the Simla season are bohemian, but rather that the space of Simla encourages a performance of distinction that is in many ways similar to the bohemianism as defined by Bourdieu and performed by Armour in the short story. Like everything in the Simla of “An Impossible Ideal,” the bohemianism of the summer capital is merely a shallow performance. The art fair is a nest of philistinism most tellingly signified with the “crazy china” exhibit that proves popular with many of the residents. The reaction of Philips and Harris to Armour’s refusal to conform to the fashions and manner of the summer capital is further suggestion that their own professed superior artistic taste is itself a performance. Indeed, although the city may encourage the performance of unconventionality, Simla society actually works to smother any expressions of bohemianism. When Armour finally wins the second exhibit with his supposedly lesser work, he becomes the toast of Simla. Bourdieu’s concept of “the anti-‘economic’ economy of pure art” becomes extremely pertinent to the narrative. Duncan explores the relationship between economic success and acceptance into wider society with the newly financially secure Armour. Once he wins the prize Armour discovers that he is now able to become accepted and conform to society: The cheque stood for so much more than its monetary value. It stood for a possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place in the stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to become a taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. The Pool 91

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It is his financial, rather than aesthetic success that allows Armour to integrate into the polite society of Simla. The winning of the prize gives Armour the potential to achieve the successes that constitute the typical middlebrow narrative, namely a happy marriage and an acceptance into bourgeois society. The prospect of Armour as a husband suddenly emerges in the narrative due to his newly attained success in Simla society with a jealous Philips realising that Armour is “wanted” by Dora (93). In addition to this prospect of marriage, Armour is also awarded a position at the prestigious Calcutta School of Art and the actualisation of the conventional narrative of Raj fiction seems to be on course to be realised. Armour’s behaviour also undergoes a change during his time in the summer capital that suggests that his bohemianism is in some sense performative. After being accepted by the Simla community, Armour discards his artistic unconventionality and instead allows him to be subsumed by polite Simla society. His prize money not only grants him the material capital to live in the city it also provides him with the cultural capital that is required to engage in the Simla social scene. While the season may offer some Anglo-Indians an escape from the codes governing their behaviours, Armour instead allows himself to conform to the expectations of Simla society. One of these expectations is gaining a wife and the narrative of the short story suggests that Armour will marry Miss Harris. This resolution to the narrative, however, is problematic when one considers the character of Philips. Although he is written in the wry, detached voice frequently used by Kipling’s narrators in the Plain Tales from the Hills, Philips is actually also an active character in the story. It is he who first makes contact with Armour and who first learns of the vacancy at the Calcutta Art School. The active narrative presence of Philips in the short story complicates the potential of a marriage between Armour and Harris as he himself is close to Harris, he expresses shock at hearing Armour’s designs due to the fact that “it had seemed for a long time eminently proper that anybody who wanted Dora should ask her of me” (93). This love rivalry, invoked so late in the narrative, threatens to derail the conventional arc of middlebrow fiction that conclude with a marriage between the two protagonists. This late narrative marriage conundrum is resolved through Armour’s realisation that respectability will stifle his artistry and a reversion back to his bohemian behaviours upon leaving the socially anxious atmosphere of Simla. Armour’s time as a popular member of Simla society however, is a complex form of a performance that is part of the excited atmosphere of the Simla season. First he behaves unconventionally to highlight his bohemian credentials before settling into a respectability after being accepted by the community.

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Inverting the paradigm found elsewhere in Simla fiction which sees the AngloIndian perform the role as a bohemian in the summer capital, Armour’s stay in the city sees the once ostracised artist increasingly performing as a respectable gentleman after his success allows him to be accepted into Simla society. Once he leaves the confines of the summer capital to take the position at the Calcutta Art School his performance as a member of polite society ends and he resumes his bohemian identity, in a similar manner to the reversion back to respectability that is found when other Anglo-Indian characters return to the plains at the conclusion of Simla fiction. Not only does this moment highlight that the performative nature of Simla is governed by the limits of the town, it also reveals the difficulty in being truly distinctive in the summer capital. Those who attempt to be – such as Harris and Philips – are pretentious poseurs while those who have the capacity to possess an artistic temperament such as Ingersoll Armour – allow themselves to be subsumed into a respectable society that controls and limits his unconformities. 3 Conclusion Although Simla fiction is a subgenre of Raj fiction, it remains a distinct literary subgenre in its own right. This is due to the unique space that was formed by these literary representations of Simla. In works of Raj fiction, Simla exists as a space of instability and performance. The supposed English character of the city allowed residents to consider themselves as a space that was closer to Home than elsewhere in India. The English atmosphere of the summer capital meant that the strict social codes that governed Anglo-Indian society were relaxed. A common trope in works of Simla fiction is the change in the behaviour of characters once they arrive in the confines of the city. Duncan’s short story “An Impossible Ideal” is a potent examination of this phenomenon as it uses this concept of the Simla performance alongside an exploration of artistic and aesthetic taste. Through the characters of Mr Philips and Miss Harris whose artistic tastes are predisposed to be contrary to the wider community’s, Duncan comments on artistic value as something that is both fickle and nebulous. In “An Impossible Ideal” Duncan also explores the paradoxes that exist between artistic success and economy through the character of Ingersoll Armour, a character who assumes a unique performative identity during his stay in the city. Once his work becomes both popular and economically successful, Armour is welcomed into the Simla community that had once rejected him. In this respect, and in the inverse to Philips and Harris, Armour uses the Simla season as an opportunity to perform as a respectable, middlebrow, member of

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society and it is only upon his leaving of the city – which is the moment when characters usually revert observing the codes of society – that he is able to reassume his identity as an artist and a bohemian.

Works Cited



Primary Sources

Diver, Maud. The Englishwoman in India. London: William Blackwood, 1901. Diver, Maud. The Great Amulet. London: William Blackwood, 1916. Diver, Maud. Lilámani: A Study in Possibilities. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1928. Duncan, Sara Jeanette. The Pool in the Desert. London: Penguin, 1994. Duncan, Sara Jeanette. On Other Side of the Latch. London, Methuen, 1901. Duncan, Sara Jeanette. The Imperialist. Toronto: The Copp Clarke Company, 1904. Fleming, J.M. [née Alice M. Kipling]. A Pinchbeck Goddess. New York: Appleton, 1897. Forster, E.M. Selected Letters. London: Arena, 1985. Perrin, Alice. East of Eden. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2011.

Secondary Literature

Allen, Charles. Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. London: ­Abacus, 2008. Allen, Charles. Plain Tales from the Raj. London: Abacus, 2013. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. Trans. by Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 2010. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art. Trans. by Susan Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. by Richard Nice. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Collingham, E.M. Imperial Bodies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. De Courcy, Anne. The Fishing Fleet. London: Pheonix, 2013. Hall, Catherine, and Sonya Rose. At Home with the Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s–1950s. Oxford UP, 2007. Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality. Manchester UP, 1999. Johnson, Alan. Out of Bounds. University of Honolulu Press, 2011. Jones, Robin D. Interiors of Empire. Manchester UP, 2007. Kanwar, Pamela. Imperial Simla. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1990. Kennedy, Dane. The Magic Mountains. University of California Press, 1996. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Morris, Jan, and Simon Winchester. Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj. Oxford UP, 1983. Paxton, Nancy. “Mobilizing Chivalry.” Victorian Studies (Fall 1992): 5–26. Paxton, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. Oxford UP, 1987. Paxton, Nancy. “Reconsidering Colonial Romance: Maud Diver and the ‘Ethnographic Real’” in Outside Modernism. Nancy L. Paxton and Lynne Hapgood (eds). London: Macmillan, 2000. 180–99. Paxton, Nancy. Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination 1830–1947. Rutgers UP, 1999. Princip, Val. Glimpses of Imperial India. Delhi: Mittal, 1974.

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Imagining the British West Indies in Middlebrow Fiction Jana Gohrisch Abstract Combining a gendered postcolonial with a generic approach, this essay demonstrates how the British Empire is being domesticated and normalised in middlebrow fiction about the British West Indies from the end of the nineteenth century until the late 1930s. In their novels, Augusta Zelia Fraser and Margaret Long merge the conventions of domestic realism and the Bildungsroman as well historical romance, Gothic and crime to translate imperial concerns about gender, social class and race into the language of their white and female middle-class readers in the metropolis.

Keywords British West Indies – Augusta Zelia Fraser – Margaret Long – domestic fiction – ­historical romance – white and brown femininities

1 Introduction In those far off days Dr Livingstone was to me not a celebrity, but simply one of my dear father’s most intimate friends […] from their first meeting in the wilds of Africa far from all conventions […] My recollections show him, not as the great explorer and missionary, but as in our daily home life at Newstead he appeared to the eyes of an observant child unaware of his fame. fraser, Livingstone vii–Viii

In her account on Livingstone and Newstead, Augusta Zelia Fraser recalls her childhood memories of David Livingstone’s stay at her family home of Newstead Abbey in the mid-1860s, a large manor house in Nottinghamshire, which earlier had belonged to Byron. Scheduled to tie in with the centenary of Livingstone’s birth in 1913, Fraser’s eulogy retrospectively casts one of the most

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s­ ymbolic figures of empire in the role of a homely visitor. Augmented by the perspective of the innocent child interested only in the family man and his daughter, this move draws attention to the conceptualisation of the imperial in domestic terms on the eve of the First World War when the British empire was at its peak in size and power comprising “one-quarter of the world’s population and one fifth of its land” (Steinbach 59). The Bulletin of the American Geographical Society values Fraser’s tale on behalf of “all who love Livingstone for the gentle, great man he was and for the potent influence he still is in the uplifting of Africa” (review 775). With this image, the reviewer both rehearses in 1913 the tropes of “an aggressive, self-aware imperial mission” (Said 128) and, following Fraser, constructs the Scottish missionary of working-class origin as a wellmeaning gentleman fittingly housed by the English gentry. In her earlier fictional works, however, all of which she had published under the pseudonym of Alice Spinner, Fraser does not take her female readers into “the wilds of Africa,” where her big-game-hunting father had met Livingstone in the early 1850s; rather she takes them to the West Indies, where she had followed her (Scottish gentry) husband on his commission as colonial administrator in 1892.1 Frasers’s novels and short stories employ the conventions of domestic fiction, Bildungsroman and romance in their scrutiny of the civilising mission and domesticate the empire for metropolitan readers by their very genres. Fraser’s narratives firmly anchor the empire at home keying in with the “persuasive means, the quotidian processes of hegemony” (Said 131) that normalise and stabilise imperial rule. In the vein of Said, Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose explore the “everydayness” and “the taken-for-grantedness” of empire since the late-eighteenth century (Hall and Rose 2, 23) with their edited collection At Home with the Empire. Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (2006). In their introduction, they refer to imaginative literature as one of the practices that help to make empire appear as something ordinary to the majority of Britons in the metropolis (29, 21).

1 Attesting to the upper-class position of the couple, “The marriage of Miss Webb” to Affleck Fraser of Reelig, Inverness, was described in The Nottinghamshire Guardian with details on the ceremony itself and the persons present including a meticulous list of the varied gifts they received from family, friends and servants. As Nancy Cunard, left-wing political activist and heiress to the fortune her father and grandfather had amassed with the Cunard Line shipping businesses shows being a member of the establishment does not necessarily make for conservative politics. Fraser’s writings, however, do neither reveal doubts in the British class system nor in empire building with their concomitant ideologies but are ingrained with the views of a British upper-middle-class woman looking down at both racially and socially inferior colonial “Others.”

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Said defines imperialism comprehensively as “the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory” (Said 8). Rather than emulate Said or Hall’s and Rose’s equally broad understanding of imperialism as “the process of empire building” (Hall and Rose 6), I shall follow Eric Hobsbawm’s periodisation in the second volume of his trilogy on the “long nineteenth century,” The Age of Empire 1875–1914 ­(Hobsbawm 60). I use the term “imperialism” as a historically specific reference to the period from the 1880s to the First World War, that is, for the decades during which the European powers ever more aggressively competed with each other to enlarge their colonial possessions (cf. Livingston 277). The fiction of this period (and the following two decades) is characterised by a conspicuously gendered recourse to genres, narrative conventions and geographical regions. Whereas the meanwhile canonised male writers Conrad, Haggard, Kipling and Stevenson favour the adventure-based imperial quest romance but hardly ever set it in the Caribbean, lesser-known women writers like Fraser concentrate on the West Indies and opt for different modes, including semi-fictional ones such as travel writing in Winifred James’s The Mulberry Tree (1913). Fraser’s generic and thematic choices, political outlook and inscribed readers echo mid-Victorian realist Bildungsromane such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Henrietta Camilla Jenkin’s Cousin Stella: or, Conflict (1859), which is set during the 1831 Sam Sharpe Rebellion in Jamaica. Fraser’s novels Lucilla. An Experiment (1895, 2 vols.), A Study in Colour (1896, 1 vol.) and the stories collected in The Reluctant Evangelist (1896) cater to a largely female middlebrow readership in the metropolis. Drawing on the conventions of realist domestic fiction and the Bildungsroman, Fraser’s texts explore white European middle-class femininities in a colonial West Indian setting by contrasting them with post-emancipation black and brown femininities of both middle- and working-class origin. This thematic and generic focus remains central to the few middlebrow writers who explore the colonial West Indies later like Margaret Long in The Golden Violet. The Story of a Lady Novelist (1936) and Mary Gaunt in Harmony. A Tale of the Old Slave Days in Jamaica (1933). Like Fraser and other “Women Writing Empire” (cf. Regan) they produce texts that are marked by the tension “between resistance and complicity with imperial ideology” (Regan 252). Whereas Fraser published only on Jamaica and later on Livingstone, Long (under various pen-names) was a very prolific professional writer of (down-­ market) mass fiction like historical romances, crime and horror stories.2 The 2 She is known as Marjorie or Margaret Bowen, George Preedy, Margaret Campbell (her maiden name) or Joseph Shearing, which she employed for The Golden Violet (cf. Malpezzi).

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Golden Violet is a hybrid of historical and imperial romance, mixed with elements of Gothic and crime. It appeared in the same year as Winifred Holtby’s feminist novel South Riding and Margaret Mitchell’s American middlebrow blockbuster Gone with the Wind. Set in the American South during the Civil War and – with regard to The Golden Violet – during a hotchpotch of anti- and post-slavery rebellion in Jamaica, the two novels define white heterosexual femininity for readers in post-slavery societies. With their respective settings, Mitchell’s and Long’s historical romances register the ramifications of racialised societies at moments of national and imperial crises (cf. Hall and Rose 23). Moreover, with their time of publication during the Great Depression they are themselves part of a historical moment characterised by intense political struggles on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in the Caribbean. Having come out forty years earlier at the fin-de-siècle, Fraser’s Lucilla is neither set nor was it published during an immediate political crisis but illustrates all the same “how race was naturalised, made part of the ordinary” for the readers in the metropolis (ibid.). For well-off Britons, the image of the region began to change at the end of the nineteenth century as steam ship companies advertised pleasure cruises to the West Indies in newspapers with Jamaica “beginning to rival Egypt and the Riviera as a winter resort” (Hodgson 26). Public lantern shows like W.B. Hodgson’s temptingly titled A Romance of the West Indies (1904) sponsored by Rowntree’s, were produced to help recruit personnel in Britain to work for the companies’ branches in Jamaica – including women as “Rowntree girls are the ‘new women’” (38). In her comprehensive introduction to The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950. What Mr Miniver Read (2011) Kate Macdonald summarises the extensive debates on the phenomenon of English middlebrow literature but mentions its colonial and imperial dimensions only in passing (11f.). Unlike British and American studies, postcolonial studies have been more than hesitant to deal seriously with middlebrow writing. To them, the openly affirmed bourgeois nature of middlebrow culture signals a potentially conservative and colonial orientation which contradicts the emancipatory anticolonial and anti-establishment grounding of postcolonialism in working-class and (peasant) folk culture. In Caribbean studies Chris Bongie and Belinda Edmondson are two exceptions that prove the rule. Convincingly, Bongie explains the field’s conspicuous restraint with the “modernist idea of the text” (Bongie 289), which determines its research agenda: “When it comes to the production and positive evaluation of cultural texts the twin directives of modernism were […] aesthetic resistance (promoting stylistic difficulty) and political resistance (promoting social change)” (ibid.). This results in “an inability to come to terms with ‘­compromised,’ ‘inauthentically’ popular texts, as well as the audiences

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who take p ­ leasure in consuming those texts” (290).3 Therefore, the commitment of postcolonial studies to resistant post/colonial folk cultures has long prevented it from taking seriously the local lower middle-classes and their aspirational tastes, which are central to Belinda Edmondson. Her category of a “‘brown’ aesthetic” (Edmondson 6) challenges “the high/low culture distinction that obscures the middlebrow” (ibid.) and points to its cultural agents who are “black, educated, propertyless” (12), i.e. the black and brown middle classes rather than the white “propertied and business classes” (ibid.) or the black and poor working classes.4 Based on gendered postcolonial and middlebrow studies and focussing on the Caribbean, I will argue that the cultural work of “the feminine middlebrow” (Humble) can only be adequately assessed by bringing the concepts of class, race and imperialism to bear on it in conjunction with the categories of literary analysis usually reserved for “high-brow” literature. This combined methodology will enable me to reveal the generic hybridity of imperial middlebrow novels which serve a socially diverse female metropolitan readership. Moreover, the combined approaches will help to unravel the ambiguous affiliation of “the feminine middlebrow” and – some of its criticism – with imperial ideology, which reinforces imperial property relations and racialised power structures. 2

“[D]ead-alive place” and “this our land”: The West Indies in Fraser’s Lucilla. An Experiment

Fraser’s texts were received well by the British newspapers such as the conservative London-based Morning Post and The Standard, the outspokenly ­upper-class liberal Pall Mall Gazette as well as the equally liberal Glasgow Herald. With a broad range of readers across the political spectrum in mind the 3 He discusses Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua/New York) and Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe/New York) attributing the “resistant connotations” of the texts to their postcolonial moment and the “assimilative implications” to the middlebrow (Bongie 282). He reads Condé’s Caribbean adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, La migration des cœurs (1995), Windward Heights (1998), as “a self-consciously (ab)errant ‘pastiche’ of postcolonial revisionism” characterised by “strategic unoriginality” because it “engages with multiple audiences” (Bongie 308). 4 Referring to contemporary English-speaking Caribbean culture, Edmondson writes: “There are two axes to what I am terming middlebrow culture: aspirational culture, or a desire for higher social standing; and authenticating culture, or a desire to connect with working-class culture” (Edmondson 10).

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­reviewers of Lucilla. An Experiment praise both the novel’s topic and its artistic treatment. The Standard describes Fraser’s “successful” first novel as “a book with a problem, the problem being the relationship of the white and the ‘coloured’ population in the West Indies” (The Standard, May 03, 1895, 2). According to The Pall Mall Gazette “[w]e are introduced to that strange intermixture of white with colour, the marriage of an English girl with a native, which as an experiment so rarely succeeds” (June 30, 1896, 3). After rating the novel “above average,” The Morning Post draws a parallel to the United States after abolition as described by American writers: “But it is less generally known that emancipation of far older date in the West Indian islands has scarcely been more successful in bringing about the social amalgam of the two races” (May 03, 1895, 7). Oscillating between a first-person and an authorial narrator with changing points of view, Lucilla relates the story of such an attempted amalgamation. In doing so, it relies on the well-worn colonialist tropes, which portray the West Indies as obsessed with an irrational fear of racial mixing. In her seminal study Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939. “A Hot Place, Belonging to Us” (2004), Evelyn O’Callaghan identifies “the trope of a corruption of blood” that pervades literary texts about the region well into the twentieth century (127). “In the cosmology of these narratives, slavery is the crime and miscegenation its accursed legacy, punishing the innocent mulatto offspring of licentious planters” (ibid.). Although Lucilla illustrates that “no good can come of racial mixing” (126), O’Callaghan equally admits that in the texts she studied “racial admixture is not in itself a recipe for moral degradation” (131). Here, she briefly mentions Liris Morales, the young mixed-race middle-class woman from Lucilla just returned from Europe, whom she sees as being driven “to despair and failure” by “the contempt and social marginalization coloured characters must endure” (ibid.). Summarizing, O’Callaghan contends that “the role of these narratives in the naturalization of imperial rule appears straightforward” (146). Disagreeing with O’Callaghan’s reading of mixed-race women in Lucilla, I argue that, through its character conceptions, character constellation and plot design the novel not only vindicates brown female subjects but positively suggests a space for brown middle-class women as social agents in the colony. This results in two opposing images of the middle-class West Indies that are circumscribed by gender and race, an issue later explored by Belinda Edmondson. The character constellation of the two-volume novel rests on a set of easily identified parallels and contrasts appreciated already by the reviewer for The Standard: “the good and bad people are fairly distributed between the two races” (May 03, 1895, 2). This aesthetic choice caters to the novel’s readership occupied with issues of class but in need of guidance and orientation. Illustrating the ideological flexibility of middlebrow fiction (cf. Humble 3), the novel

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uses easily accessible contrasts to challenge the dominant images of degeneracy and decay in metropolitan representations of the West Indies. The conceptions of the female characters are influenced by the middle-class ideology of domesticity and the equally middle-class but more recent concept of the New Woman. Whereas the former allocates women to the private and men to the public sphere, the New Woman challenges the limits this ideology imposes on middle-class women by articulating their claims for extended economic, political and cultural liberties. Lucilla intertwines the central motifs of domestic and New Woman Fiction – courtship and marriage on the one hand, and ­women’s gainful employment on the other. Both concerns are mapped onto a ­multiracial post-emancipation colonial society with a mixture of irony and ­sarcasm, suggesting judgemental detachment and a feeling of superiority as reception strategies to the text’s metropolitan readers. The uses of these tropes, however, vary on a gendered and racialised scale. The most scathing irony is reserved for the male characters with the good-natured funny sort being applied to the white expatriates of the professional middle classes. The derogatory, sarcastic kind is directed at the text’s local brown middle class and landed gentry represented by Mr Morales and da Costa as well as at the few black servants. Mild, corrective irony shading into compassion is used for the white female expatriates – the eponymous protagonist Lucilla and her professional superior, the school’s principal Miss Gale, as their respective telling names indicate. Irony recedes, however, when it comes to the characterisation of the two prominent brown women Liris Morales and her aunt Teresa de Souza. It is with these characters and their self-help ideology, based on renunciation and sacrifice, that the text presents a potential way to improve the colony locally for the brown middle-class. It is in this light that the reviewer for The Morning Post praises “the spiritual enthusiasm that inspires Liris Morales and her aunt,” who are “movingly drawn” (May 03, 1895, 7). The (ironized) aesthetics of improvement and the conventions of realism, however, indicate an educated and established late Victorian audience, which can afford an altruistic interest in the social good. In Lucilla, the ironic tone is struck in the opening paragraphs by the firstperson narrator, who mimics the reliable observer and commentator of realist fiction, when she declares: “I am English, and therefore I count” (Fraser, Lucilla vol. 1, 1). Introducing the troubling issue of race with mock-disruptive parataxis, she continues: “The black and brown individuals [living nearby] do not, except as votes, although in numbers they are, at San José, in about the proportion of forty to one” (ibid.). Before the readers meet any of the novel’s characters, they are introduced to the setting, Grove Hill College, “that temple of modern culture […] for the better teaching and training of native girls […] a

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Government scheme, paid for by Government money and under Government control” (5). The repeated invocation of colonial administrative authority supported by local “red tape” (7) signals the novel’s critical take on the civilizing mission, which is symbolised by the educational institution for natives run by English women professionals. Then, the narrator explains the double meaning of the novel’s title, which exemplifies the authorial desire to guide the readers and reduce the ambiguity that comes with an ironic mode. The narrator depicts Lucilla St. John, “the new English music mistress,” as a “disturbing influence” (6) and prophesies (again with mocking parataxis) that she “should prove a mistake, for she was, like the college itself, an experiment, and experiments are generally mistakes unless they succeed when they are straightway hailed as strokes of genius” (ibid.). Reminiscent of the middle- to low-brow Empire romance (cf. Melman), the protagonist journeys from genteel poverty in England to the West Indies to earn her keep. There she joins the English staff of the government college headed by the disillusioned Miss Gale (13), who had made the same journey years earlier to “do her best, and add her atom to the work of amelioration” (236). The verbal irony used to describe her civilising work is matched by the exaggerating comic elements employed to characterise the well-meaning teachers with Miss Knox’s outstanding “passion” for entomology (60) as a prime example. While Miss Gale is away in England to recover and find herself a husband, Lucilla rashly quits her teaching job to marry Isidore da Costa. His illegitimate daughter Idalia is one of the “native girls,” who quite resourcefully resist colonial education. Fraser’s choice of a fictional island with a Spanish colonial background and the post-emancipation-nineteenth-century as setting accounts for some distance from the political and economic realities of Jamaica after abolition. This distance is augmented by the cultural value system of the British landed establishment Fraser brings to bear on her analysis of the colonial middle-class continuum stratified by race and gender.5 Situated at the upper end of it is the Postmaster-General Mr Macleod, who complains about “this dead-alive place” (127) because “the isolation and the narrowness of the little island’s ideas weighed on him and […] took away […] some of his own liberal ideas” (128). In 5 In his essay on “Augusta Zelia Fraser in Jamaica: The Case for Racial Separation” (the only other source on Fraser’s texts I was able to locate) Patrick Bryan attests to her a “relatively accurate presentation of life in Jamaica at the end of the 19th century” (13). He claims that Fraser adopts “a somewhat superior attitude towards Empire” (13) and “scoffs at the ‘imperial mission’ of imported bureaucrats” (14) whom she deems cynical because they do not believe “in their mission to spread civilization among the coloured masses of the Empire. To some extent her work is also a critique of imperial trusteeship, which she rejected in favour of separate development of the races” (ibid.).

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comparison, his Creole wife Effie, ironically called Postmistress General, was “protected from all such troubles by her own circumscribed horizon. San José, its affairs, its society, and its politics, to her meant the world” (ibid.). This shows that the real opposition is not located between the races but within the middle classes along their access to Western, metropolitan culture, be it British or French as in the case of Teresa de Souza, the aunt of Liris Morales. Both women are set apart from their social group by their cosmopolitan European education acquired with the financial capital of their families, which are linked through an ancestor of Spanish blood, a common enough trope referring to light-skinned mixed-race people. Whereas the narrator, reporting local wisdom, describes Teresa de Souza and Liris as near-white (147), the women identify themselves as coloured (Fraser vol. 2, 66), which on de Souza’s part serves to publicly acknowledge her link to the Morales family (Fraser vol. 1, 147). Mr Morales is both the richest and – due to his skin colour – the most ostracised man on the island. This illustrates the resentment of the brown middle class that developed in post-emancipation West Indian societies and with which the whites competed for influence and power. “He owned half the island, and practically the whole of its little sister isle, Santa Rosa; for, by some strange fatality, into his broad brown hands had gradually fallen the remains of one of the most magnificent West Indian heritages of the olden times” (137). Mocking the racist narrow-mindedness of the white islanders, the narrator uses alliteration to draw attention to race and to reveal how Mrs and Mr Morales “longed so much to be part and parcel of [the island’s] little narrow society” (139). With irony and some condescension, the narrator describes their nouveau riche manor house blaming them for not belonging to the upper class they mimic: “Truth to tell, neither of them cared in the least, personally, for such vanities, and their fine English furniture and richly decorated rooms only represented their futile and half-pathetic attempts to worship the ideal, in other words, the English life around and beyond them” (138). Shading almost into compassion, the narrator suggests that emulating the culture of the English upper class is not the way to social acceptance for brown people in the postslavery West Indies. With a feminist and a social bias, the novel then gives credit to Teresa de Souza and her niece, the heiress to the Morales fortune, as alternatives to the colonial impasse encoded in Lucilla’s professional and domestic failure. The novel uses showing for the younger and thus livelier Liris (who features as protagonist in the first third of the second volume) and telling for the older and already somewhat disillusioned Teresa de Souza. Both the character’s name, her funding of and collaboration with a charitable Catholic convent on the island as well as the melancholic tone in which she propounds her views and

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goals allude to “The Prelude” of Middlemarch (1871/72). Here, George Eliot’s authorial narrator juxtaposes the heroic times of Saint Theresa to the profane and ordinary present of the early 1830s. Other than in the “epic life” of the Christian saint, the “later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul” (Eliot 25). Despite the elegiac overtones, both Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke and Fraser’s two women characters work altruistically for the common good and the well-being of others – in their case the coloured people. “If we, who know the faults of this miserable race – if we, who really spring from them, who are tied to them by blood, do nothing but try to ignore our tie, whom on earth can we expect to help them?” (Fraser, Lucilla vol. 2, 69; also 104) In this sentence Teresa de Souza moves from the inclusive “we” to the oppositional “them” indicating her divided loyalties to race and class, which brings her close to despair seeing herself and Liris as “[e]xiles in their own land” (325) at the end of the novel. Whereas the older woman is cast in “the trope of a corruption of blood” (O’Callaghan 127), the younger one is drawn more optimistically, adopting her aunt as role model. “Aunt Teresa, you are right. Shall we all abandon this our land and these our own people?” (Fraser, Lucilla vol. 2, 111) Providing the answer to her melodramatic question herself, she declares: I am weak, and except you, I am alone; but I will not rest, no, I will not escape from the burden of my race and fate, without trying at least to do my best for my own kind […] At least it will show me I need no longer ask what I was created for. It is from such as we are that the real help, if help there be, must come – not from the English. (111–12) To enhance the message of female self-empowerment across the social and racial divide, the novel closes with a detailed and suspenseful depiction of female solidarity when Miss Gale and Mrs Clarke (socially ostracised because she married a brown tradesman) set to work helping Lucilla after her escape from her brown husband Isidore da Costa. Unlike his helpful mother and (­illegitimate) daughter Idalia, he degenerates “into the darker side of negro life” as the narrator later on remarks with racist sarcasm (330). Meanwhile, both white middle-class and brown working-class women provide a practical illustration to the lofty declarations of rich Liris Morales, whose only real action shown is deciding not to get married to the fortune-hunting aptly named Captain Despart. By establishing Teresa de Souza as a widow (and mother of a long dead son) and Liris Morales as a single woman, the text sets up female renunciation of familial and sexual fulfilment, along with independent wealth, as central elements of its new brown middle-class femininity. Generically, it

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touches upon some elements of the Bildungsroman to make this point – ­self-reflexivity as the basis of the female character’s development and the female mentor to guide the young woman on her quest. At the novel’s end, the male oxymoronic conceptualisation of the West Indies is amended by Liris’s enumeration of contradictory adjectives, which opens up to a moderate vision of change: “This poor island, so beautiful, so lonely, and so forlorn, I should like to leave it, God helping, a little better than when I found it” (304). She then resolutely spells out her political agenda, namely to raise the self-confidence of the brown middle class: We have to learn that we are not ashamed of our own birth; that if we have been handicapped by it hitherto, that we can and will surmount it; that we shall become respected not by trying to be white, not by taking short cuts, not by pretence, but by showing what we can do, what we can be. (ibid.) This may not exactly bring about the “social amalgam of the two races” (The Morning Post, May 03, 1895, 7), but it will at least – for the moment – stabilise colonial rule and leave its economic, political and social power relations intact. To conclude: Fraser’s concept of middle-class femininity combines the values of Victorian domesticity and the New Woman to replace the established type of white English women going out to civilise “native girls.” In Lucilla, the fictional West Indies are entrusted to a new kind of “colonial” New Woman, who will redeem and improve the colony: she is light brown, cosmopolitan, cultured, determined, single and yet rich enough to do woman’s work without being remunerated. This middlebrow model of female empowerment with an imperial purpose is made easily accessible by the conventions of the realist Bildungsroman espousing a belief in reason and progress. 3

“[T]he gorgeous, detestable island”: The West Indies in Long’s The Golden Violet

In the following, I shall contrast Fraser’s representation of the West Indies in Lucilla with Margaret Long’s The Golden Violet. The Story of a Lady Novelist. Published after the caesura of the Great War, which destroyed the identityforming middle-class narrative of history as progress,6 Long’s novel employs a 6 In The Bourgeois. Between History and Literature (2013), Franco Moretti more radically understands the First World War as a decisive factor that contributed to the disappearance of the

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mixture of realism and romance, Gothic and crime. It tells the story of yet another young white woman moving out into the colony but breaks with the earlier pattern in two respects. Ideologically, The Golden Violet forsakes Fraser’s Victorian ideal of altruistic femininity in the service of colonial middle-class society and the imperial project. Generically, it challenges the conventions of nineteenth-century domestic realism and the Bildungsroman but shuns the modernist mode at the same time. As the novel’s American reception in the late 1930s shows, The Golden Violet asks to be read as a middlebrow text because it straddles the divide “between the low pleasures of romance and simple narrative fulfilment and more elaborate intellectual satisfactions” (Humble 32). The novel’s dominant romance mode signals a concern with individual female (sexual) desire, which places it in the tradition of middlebrow novels written by women since the 1880s. They employed romantic love relationships to define female identity through sexuality (Pearce 111, 118ff.) until “romance […] had become the vehicle for the actualization of a sexually transgressive self-identity” (158) by the 1920s and 1930s. Margaret Long’s The Golden Violet. The Story of a Lady Novelist was first published by Heinemann in London and Toronto in 1936. Attesting to its popularity in the Anglophone world, it was reissued in New York twice and in short succession – in 1941 by Smith & Durrell and in 1943 by The Press of the Readers Club, a prime promoter of the American middlebrow. In his Foreword to this edition, Sinclair Lewis hyperbolically praises the novel as an outstanding achievement in the recent vogue of crime fiction, ranking Margaret Long, “that enchanting brewer of dread” (Lewis 5), above the genre’s champion Dorothy L. Sayers. With Agatha Christie, Sayers is one of the foremost proponents of “the ‘Golden Age’ of the whodunnit” in interwar Britain; a term “coined in the 1930s to describe a type of fiction in which the puzzle or mystery element was the central focus” (Scaggs 35). Lewis links Long not only to Sayers but also to “Dostoievsky and Dickens” (Lewis 5) constructing a literary tradition of “delightful shocks of murder, cruelty to children, and the long hatred between man and woman” (ibid.). He then claims that Long “has given us a new quality of exquisite shivering, of sophisticated naïveté” (ibid.) “with a very fine murder promised toward the end” (6). Drawing attention to Long’s preference for “the spectacle of a Victorian lady,”

bourgeois, a concept that underlies Fraser’s character and plot design. He writes: “What has evaporated is the sense of bourgeois legitimacy: the idea of a ruling class that doesn’t just rule, but deserves to do so […] Power, justified by values” (20).

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he declares the “War between the Sexes” to be the dominant theme of this “grand story” (a phrase he repeats three times, ibid.). Lewis, however, does not comment on Long’s obvious deviation from the conventions of the whodunnit: The Golden Violet neither poses an intellectually intriguing murder mystery nor does it sport a detective whose work of gradual discovery would create suspense for the unknowing reader. Instead, the novel is a hyperbolic realisation of the “Fair Play”-rules that British and American crime writers had set up at the end of the 1920s (cf. Scaggs 27, 36). It grossly exaggerates the principle that the readers should have access to the same information as the detective to enable them to solve the case themselves. Long’s novel goes well beyond informing its readers by making them eyewitnesses of the crime that is set in a locked room, thus playing with yet another hallmark of British “Golden Age” crime fiction. Going to extremes, The Golden Violet shows in detail how the protagonist twice attempts to murder her Jamaican-English planter husband in revenge for his involvement in putting her lover to death. Deviating from the rules of crime fiction again, there is no investigation – on the contrary: neither murderess nor helper are found out and subsequently go unpunished. Completing the crude parody of “Golden Age” crime fiction and its mode of re-­ establishing the “upper middle-class status quo” (Scaggs 47), the protagonist is rewarded with yet another marriage that takes her even further up the social ladder – into the English peerage. Intertwining the conventions of romance and crime fiction, Long’s text mocks the “upper middle-class, property-­owning, bourgeois ideology” of Agatha Christie and her “respectable suburban” and often female readers (Scaggs 38) – and affirms it at the same time with marked racist and imperial overtones. Reviewing the 1941 edition for The Saturday Review of Literature, which ­according to Rubin was an important patron of the American middlebrow (Rubin xi), Phil Stong (like Sinclair Lewis) is taken by The Golden Violet: “The author does everything well – distinct and credible characters, vivid incident, suspense as good as Stevenson’s, and if the backgrounds incline to the exotic, so did Stevenson’s” (7). Similar to Lewis, he enjoys the “central and changing character” that “is so ineffably silly at the beginning of the book” only to become “an intelligent, attractive, and resourceful woman” (ibid.). To Stong, the story “does not rest on tricks at all but on solid, logical development” and is completed by a “sardonic postlude” (ibid.). Unlike Lewis, Phil Stong (using mild irony only) judges from within the matrix of realist domestic fiction, which Evelyn O’Callaghan adopts as well in the early 2000s. Interestingly, her feminist interpretation of The Golden Violet does not take into account the novel’s ironies, which had so delighted the two earlier – male – critics but takes them seriously. In The Golden Violet “the romance genre is mercilessly satirized” (104)

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to warn about “the dangers of mistaking romantic fantasy for actuality” (ibid.). O’Callaghan studies the novel in the context of the El Dorado myth with the West Indies “as a venue in which adventure, wealth and pleasure might be enjoyed by virtue of exploring and mastering ‘virgin territory’” (105). Following the pattern of a “female rite of passage” (ibid.) the novel charts the protagonist’s journey into the “new territory” of “the female body” and serves as one of the rarer examples of “an empowering rite of passage into self-knowledge” (106). Concluding her analysis, O’Callaghan remarks on the novel’s ambivalence: “In this tale of passion and cruelty breeding passion and cruelty there are no likable characters, but neither are there easy moral judgements” (137). Thus, the “ridiculous” and “sinister” protagonist comes out “victorious” getting away even with murder (ibid.). This prompts the critic to ask: “Is the narrative endorsing her transformation or deploring her degradation?” (ibid.). Bearing in mind O’Callaghan’s aim, the only answer she can give is that “the inscription of West Indian ex-slave society as pathologically corrupted […] is of a piece with the earlier texts discussed” (ibid.). Whereas Nicola Humble, Kate Macdonald and Lynne Pearce leave aside issues of race and empire as they concentrate primarily on subject matter and genre, reader and mode, O’Callaghan marginalises the generic implications reading the novel mainly for images of the West Indies. Taking their findings further, I will examine how the novel’s hybridized generic conventions and aesthetic means shape its representation of the West Indies, making The Golden Violet a particular case of imperial middlebrow fiction. As already demonstrated with regard to its crime element, I argue that hyperbole as the dominant trope destabilises the ideological meanings of the central motifs of the subgenres with which The Golden Violet caters to a potentially large and diverse readership: courtship and marriage from domestic fiction, female sexual desire prominent in romance, self-reflexivity and individual development structuring the Bildungsroman and, finally, the preservation and restoration of the social order important to all of them but particularly to Gothic and crime fiction. Despite its ideological ambiguity, the novel is unambiguous when it comes to the function of the imperial for the domestic. Its protagonist Angelica Cowley (also called Angel but renamed Mary by her domineering first husband) is made to register the contradictions of the imperial moment on the level of tropes with the repeated metaphor of Jamaica as home of the dead and with an oxymoron that is juxtaposed to an over-alliterated Englishness making nonsense of both: “She pictured the mausoleum with deep fear; it seemed worse than death to have to lie there for ever; she wanted to escape, to flee from the gorgeous, detestable Island, to cower again into the safe shams, the cosy comforts of England” (Long 286). This island-antithesis is resolved on the levels of

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character and plot following the imperial pattern: Jamaica and its brown ­people are the raw material to be exploited by the white colonial writer to serve her entrepreneurial aims – making money on the established metropolitan market for romance and its newly expanding segment for middlebrow crime fiction (cf. Humble 13). From the beginning, the authorial narrator points to the theme indicated by the novel’s subtitle: the literary field of the feminine middlebrow intertwining production, distribution and reception (Long 7, 29, 97, 146). With overstatement, the narrator describes the fictional author’s “successful novels […] as so popular in the circulating libraries” and then attests to her productivity by a hyperbolically long list of kitschy titles (Long 7). If she was not a beauty, neither was she a genius; she earned easily a thousand pounds a year, and she received a fair amount of praise and flattery, but to the learned, the witty, the gifted, she was known only as an amusing instance of the lamentable taste of the subscribers to circulating libraries; she never faced this opinion, of which she was vaguely aware. (ibid.) The conception of a shallow protagonist devoid of self-reflexivity and intellect makes it difficult for the readers to identify with her. The text later resorts to the same strategy with John Seba Gordon’s sudden demotion from devoted lover to patriarchal brown weakling (237), which, in retrospect, proves the protagonist’s racist attitudes right (48ff, 147, 150, 175, 197). I contend that The Golden Violet read as The Story of a Lady Novelist both tells of making sexual, emotional and financial profit through empire and simultaneously embodies the tale. It unashamedly presents itself as a commercial venture exposing the logic of the market and following it all the same. For this purpose, Margaret Long – first and foremost – usurps the history of black and brown resistance against enslavement and post-emancipation injustice: the 1831 Sam Sharpe Rebellion and the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. In addition, she plunders the oeuvre of the popular Regency writer Letitia Elizabeth Landon for titles such as The Fate of Adelaide (mentioned in the paratext preceding the novel), The Troubadour (Long 7) and The Golden Violet (1827) itself. From this poetry collection, Long lifts Landon’s construction of chivalric masculinity symbolised by the troubadour figure on which she then moulds the character of John Seba Gordon in his role of romantic lover and tragic hero (Long 61). His name, his fictional fate and some of its details (as his farewell letter) draw on George William Gordon, the brown land owner, member of the Jamaican Assembly and supporter of the black peasantry in the Morant Bay Rebellion, who

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was unlawfully court-martialled and hanged under Governor Eyre.7 In Long’s historical romance, however, Gordon supports black interests during a slave rebellion, which clearly sets the novel before abolition, i.e. before 1834/38.8 Even more of a conservative cliché, Long’s Governor Sir William Hayes is recalled to London only to be acquitted (and made a peer) without the threat of prosecution, which his historical counterpart Edward John Eyre had to face in the late 1860s (during the Eyre Controversy). The Golden Violet is set in the 1830s as indicated by the framing paratexts (also 40, 52), which were supposedly published in La Belle Assemblée, a journal whose title Long pilfered from a fashionable Regency magazine for ladies. They contain reviews of and advertisements for the protagonist’s novels and announce her two marriages concluding with a mock-heroic praise for the protagonist: “The lines of the poet written for another example of female excellence may be quoted as appropriate to Lady Hayes, or as thousands still delight to call her, Angelica Cowley” (Long 321).9 The hyperbolic characterisation of the protagonist as the epitome of the Victorian angel of the house finally turns into a farce as her Jamaican story is one of adultery and murder in the service of gaining economic, social and thus symbolic capital. The novel closes pointing to the publication of The Golden Violet, “this beautiful romance” by this “beautiful example to her sex” (320), condoning yet again the strategy of cashing in on the empire, which the protagonist had already expressed in direct speech at the very end of the narrative proper: “‘Yes, I shall go on writing,’ said Angel, lowering her crape veil, ‘though I no longer believe in any of it. You see, it’s an easy way of earning money.’” (319). 7 The Morant Bay Rebellion is also the subject of Herbert George de Lisser’s historical romance Revenge. A Tale of Old Jamaica (1919). De Lisser belonged to the brown middle class but supported the interests of the conservative white business elite. He demonized black lower-class militancy in the 1860s to warn against its resurgence at the novel’s time of publication. Writing middlebrow fiction from a British perspective for a metropolitan audience during the 1930s, Long, however, does not demonise the agents of the rebellion but romanticises them. In addition to Gordon, she recycles the name of Cuffee for the leader of the rebellious maroons, which is reminiscent of Cuffy’s Rebellion in Berbice in 1763. Thicknesse, the surname of the protagonist’s first husband may allude to Philip Thicknesse (1719–1792), who published the memoirs of his life in Jamaica in 1788. 8 Interestingly, O’Callaghan does not comment on the ambiguity but simply states: “Long’s novel is set in 1865, and constructs post-abolition Jamaica as a hotbed of physical and moral infection” (136). 9 “The example of female excellency” is Sarah Fielding, the sister of Henry Fielding. The poem is yet another unacknowledged quotation, this time from the monument in Abbey Church in Bath frequently mentioned in local guidebooks.

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The (not so) New Woman of the 1930s surfaces in the characterisation of the protagonist to whom “(h)er work meant money, perhaps independence and freedom” (146). The journey to self-knowledge and a place in middle-class society familiar from the Bildungsroman spirals the female writer-protagonist forward to romance-like sexual fulfilment. Challenging the middle-class domestic ideology on the plot level, The Golden Violet imagines marriage as a loveless and boring business arrangement and allows its protagonist to compensate this through a love affair with a rich and near-white planter and slave owner. He is loyal to both sides of the racial and political divide and provides her with the longed-for self-esteem (5ff, 85ff) in her roles as a white middleclass woman and middlebrow writer. Instead of exploring the utopian implications of cross-racial love in (post-)emancipation society, The Golden Violet employs hyperbolic situational irony to end the affair twice over: first, when the racist protagonist realises the mixed-race origin of her lover (212f.) and mourns him as “her dead beautiful love” (213) long before he is actually killed and second, when he is hanged for treason having negotiated with the rebellious maroons. The novel shows how the eponymous “lady novelist” claims the island and its serviceable brown inhabitants as her own. Her brown lover is one of the helpers on which the protagonist’s simulacrum of self-awareness depends with race adding a Gothic thrill to the story. Similar to Fraser’s Lucilla, Long’s Golden Violet refuses to give black characters a voice, offering brown characters as spokespersons instead. In contrast to Fraser, Long includes a brown lower-class enslaved woman, Luna, and casts her in the role of accessory before the fact. This mode of exploitative empowerment presupposes the brown woman’s willingness to support the white woman’s criminal struggle for power and unlawful accumulation of capital. Ideologically, the text justifies this denigrating appropriation of brown anti-slavery politics with an allegedly natural female solidarity against patriarchy and repeatedly underlines the protagonist’s “native female duplicity” (Long 67, also 81, 144, 205): “she had something of the instinct of those slaves whom she found so alarming and detestable; she might gain her interests by subtleness and intrigue; she turned over in her limited armory all the weapons of the weak” (68). Casting the brown enslaved Luna as superior to Angelica, the wife and lover of slave owners, the text bends the real-life power relations of (post-)slavery Jamaica beyond recognition. The white woman’s initially ambiguous relation to Luna caused by envy for “her beauty, her insolence, her freedom” (113) is replaced by “a bond between them” (244): “I like you. I believe I’m the same kind of woman really” (245f.).

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Margaret Long constructs a Jamaica that serves the emotional as well as ­ olitical interests of her white, female and middle-class readership in the p ­metropolis of the later 1930s. In line with the feminine middlebrow, she employs the conventions of romance and crime fiction and fuses them with elements of the realist Bildungsroman simultaneously subverting and affirming their patterns and motifs. Her tropes oscillate between distancing hyperbole and titillating oxymoron serving to displace the political upheavals both in Britain and Jamaica onto the romantic level. The text endorses the capitalist exploitation of the region on the character and plot levels and symbolises it by being a profitable commodity itself. 4 Conclusion Commercially, generically and politically, Nancy Cunard’s voluminous collection Negro. An Anthology (1934) resides on the other end of the divide of writing about the Caribbean in the period. The journalist, modernist poet and antiracist civil rights campaigner Nancy Cunard (1896–1965) had assembled it in close collaboration with George Padmore from Trinidad and, in 1932, had travelled to Jamaica and Cuba to gather material. She funded the publication herself, which appeared in just 1,000 copies (Moynard 66, 70) and which went largely unnoticed until it gained recognition with the advent of African American and postcolonial studies. Along with literary and nonliterary texts by African American and Caribbean writers as well as whites from both sides of the Atlantic, Cunard includes her own essay “Jamaica – the Negro Island” in which she revisits Jamaican history to advocate decolonisation and independence. At the beginning she posits self-confidently relying on grammatically incomplete sentences to indicate the as yet unfinished project: “And the Jamaica of today? Evidently and most essentially a land of black people” (Cunard 117). She concludes her essay, which is indebted both to Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism and to left-wing political ideas of the 1920s and 30s (Moynard 39), by naming the race and the class of those to whom the land should belong because they work it: “That is the Jamaica I saw. It culminates into a certainty that comes like a voice out of the soil itself. ‘This island is the place of black peasantry, it must be unconditionally theirs. It belongs undividedly and by right to the black Jamaican on the land’” (Cunard 126). Cunard’s anthology (which clearly deserves more detailed study) shares with Fraser and Long a commitment to generic hybridity and functionalises it for a politics that is designed to attest to the creativity especially of African

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Americans in the face of racist discrimination and to promote the struggle against racialised imperial exploitation. The two middlebrow writers, however, use the established genres and tropes for different purposes. Irony, oxymoron and hyperbole serve to sell the West Indies to a metropolitan, largely female readership interested in negotiating their own privileged racialised and gendered class positions. Whereas Fraser ironizes the realist Bildungsroman infused with established middle-class gender roles and those in the making, Long’s down-market historical romance, mixed with elements of Gothic and crime, takes these conventions to extremes. It transforms Fraser’s aesthetics of improvement into an aesthetics of sale and replaces the earlier writer’s racialised late-Victorian conception of benevolent femininity by a complacent complicity with enslavement, exploitation and their concomitant racist ideologies. Whereas Cunard was marginal then, Fraser and Long occupy marginal positions today. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to analyse the textual strategies with which they catered to their middlebrow audiences to understand their success and the longevity of such positions.

Works Cited



Primary Sources

Cunard, Nancy. “Jamaica – the Negro Island.” Essays on Race and Empire. Ed. Maureen Moynagh. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002. 97–126. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871/72. Ed. W.J. Harvey. London: Penguin, 1985. Fraser, Augusta Zelia [Alice Spinner]. Lucilla. An Experiment. 2 vols. London: Kegan Paul, 1895. Fraser, Augusta Zelia [Alice Spinner]. Livingstone and Newstead with Portraits and Illustrations. London: John Murray, 1913. James, Winifred. The Mulberry Tree. London: Chapman and Hall, 1913. Hodgson, W.B. A Romance of the West Indies. Rowntree’s “Elect” Lantern Series. London: S.H. Benson, 1904. Long, Margaret Gabrielle Vere [Joseph Shearing]. The Golden Violet. The Story of a Lady Novelist. New York: Smith & Durrell, 1941.

Secondary Literature

Bryan, Patrick. “Augusta Zelia Fraser in Jamaica: The Case for Racial Separation.” Caribbean Quarterly 48:4 (2002): 12–26. Bongie, Chris. “‘Withering Heights’: Maryse Condé and the Postcolonial Middlebrow.” Friends and Enemies. The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool UP, 2008. 280–321.

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Edmondson, Belinda. Caribbean Middlebrow. Leisure Culture and the Middle Class. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009. Fraser, Augusta Zelia [Alice Spinner]. Livingstone and Newstead. Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 14.10 (1913): 774–75 [review]. Hall, Catherine, and Sonya Rose. “Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire.” At Home with the Empire. Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World. Ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose. Cambridge UP, 2006. 1–31. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire 1875–1914. 1987. London: Abacus, 2002. Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s. Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism. Oxford UP, 2001. Kaplan, Cora. “Imagining Empire: History, Fantasy and Literature.” At Home with the Empire. Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World. Ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose. Cambridge UP, 2006. 191–211. Lewis, Sinclair. “Foreword.” Joseph Shearing. The Golden Violet. The Story of a Lady Novelist. New York: The Press of the Readers Club, 1943. 4–6. Livingston, Robert Eric. “Discourses of Empire.” The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. Vol. 1. Ed. F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi. Cambridge UP, 2004. 255–88. Macdonald, Kate. “Introduction: Identifying the Middlebrow, the Masculine and Mr Miniver.” The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950. What Mr Miniver Read. Ed. Kate Macdonald. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 1–23. Malpezzi, Frances. “Long [née Campbell], Margaret Gabrielle Vere.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. Web. http://www.oxforddnb.com.460264923.erf.sbb .spk-berlin.de/view/print. Accessed 9 February 2016. Melman, Billie. Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties. Flappers and Nymphs. Houndmills, Basingstoke, London: Macmillan, 1988. Moretti, Franco. The Bourgeois. Between History and Literature. London, New York: Verso, 2013. Moynard, Maureen. “Introduction” and “Nancy Cunard: A Brief Chronology.” Nancy Cunard. Essays on Race and Empire. Ed. Maureen Moynagh. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002. 9–63 and 64–8. “News – Five New Novels.” The Standard. May 3, 1895. 2. O’Callaghan, Evelyn. Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939. “A Hot Place, Belonging to Us.” London, New York: Routledge, 2004. Pearce, Lynn. Romance Writing. Cambridge, Malden (MA): Polity, 2007. Regan, Lisa. “Women Writing Empire.” The History of British Women’s Writing, 1­ 920–1945. Vol. 8. Ed. Joannou Maroula. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 250–63. Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. [1993]. London: Vintage, 1994.

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Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. London, New York: Routledge, 2005. Steinbach, Susie. Understanding the Victorians. Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London, New York: Routledge, 2012. Stong, Phil. “The Girl Grew Bolder. The Golden Violet. By Joseph Shearing.” The Saturday Review of Literature. September 20, 1941. 7. “The Marriage of Miss Webb.” The Nottinghamshire Guardian. August 10, 1889. 5. “Two Novels.” The Pall Mall Gazette. June 30, 1896. 3.

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“Intimacies of complicity and critique”: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Victoria Cross’s Imperial Fiction Cornelia Wächter Abstract This chapter is concerned with the entanglements of narrative critique of and complicity with racism and sexism in two imperial middlebrow novels by the Anglo-Indian author Victoria Cross (Annie Sophie Cory): Anna Lombard (1901) and Life of My Heart (1915). The author specifically considers the role of Hellenism in Cross’s narrative defamiliarisation with the dominant racial and gendered ideologies of her time.

Keywords Annie Sophie Cory – Victoria Cross – Hellenism – Anna Lombard – Life of My Heart

“Victoria Cross” is the most prominent and final of several pen names which the Anglo-Indian author Annie Sophie Cory (1868–1952) adopted over the course of her writing career. Cross first came to public attention in 1895, when she published “Theodora, a Fragment” in the periodical The Yellow Book – an illustrated quarterly easily recognisable by its titular yellow cover, featuring art-nouveau-style illustrations, originally by Aubrey Beardsley. As Laurel Brake observes, the periodical’s “dramatic poster-art graphic design signalled an alliance with the avant-garde art press and French poster art, while simultaneously involving paperback novels published in France and British railway fiction” (Brake 84). This fusion of opposites was mirrored by the “heterodox and contradictory” discourse contained in its pages (85). In its, often conflicting, combination of the “high” and the “low,” the subversive and the complicit, the periodical deliberately blurred boundaries, invited very different reading perspectives and catered to a distinctly middle-class readership. In Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s sardonic words, The Yellow Book was part of John Lane’s marketing strategy to “entic[e] a broad middle-class spectrum into believing they were an elite group of cultivated purchasers” (Kooistra n.p.). Cross’s first publication thus metonymically represents not just her status as a middlebrow writer but also anticipates the paradoxes and internal dissonances,

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the ­complicities and anti-complicities that pervade her oeuvre. – “Theodora, a Fragment” originally formed a chapter of the novel Six Chapters of a Man’s Life, which Cross had completed at the time, but which was only published in 1903. John Lane, the publisher of both The Yellow Book and the Keynote series in which Cross’s first novel, The Woman Who Didn’t (1895), was included, apparently considered Six Chapters to be too controversial. It was the US American editor and co-founder of The Yellow Book, Henry Harland, who eventually persuaded Lane to at least include the “[t]hird ­chapter – that splendid chapter” of this “work of genius” in their periodical (qtd. in Mitchell 17). As Jane Eldridge Miller points out, “[m]any of the men and women published in The Yellow Book exemplified, in their writings and in their lives, the kind of blurring gender distinctions that, in the 1890s, increasingly came to be seen as a threat to the British nation, if not to the future of the human race itself” (Eldridge Miller 53). Much of Cross’s oeuvre indeed “posed a threat” – not just to Victorian ideals of gender and sexuality but also to imperial notions of racial superiority. – Victoria Cross’s work thus belies summative accusations of complicity with the hegemonic status quo, i.e. dominant ideologies and the correspondent social injustice, which were routinely levelled at the “popular,” the feminine and the realist during the modernist period, as well as in subsequent criticism. If one follows the arguments of, for instance, the Frankfurt School, only the avantgarde achieved the necessary imaginative break from the clutches of ideology and offered alternative insights and alternative perspectives. Since the 1990s, this view has been widely challenged and complicated. In the first wave of “new modernist” criticism, the sweeping glorification of avant-garde writing as a form of complicity critique (in spite of its ostensibly apolitical stance) was replaced by its opposite: critics deploying complicity as a critical lens directed at the avant-garde so as to reveal collusion with, most notably, sexism, classism, imperialism, and authoritarian regimes (McCarthy 3). At the same time, “new modernist studies” challenged the androcentric exclusivity of avant-garde modernism, as well as any stable notion of “the brows,” and placed the canon under erasure. Concomitantly, critics of previously neglected or marginalised texts shifted their gaze from complicit aspects of these texts to the multifarious ways in which realist and popular modes of writing effected their own version of defamiliarisation and performed what I would call “narrative complicity critique.” Since the 2000s, approaches which are “conscious of modernist ‘complicity,’ but committed to interpreting artifacts as constituted by the complex mediations of their culture” dominate the field of modernist studies in the wider sense (McCarthy 3). Such approaches “[treat] the artifact as embedded – embedded in a culture, embedded in a body of prejudices, embedded in the tensions of a nation’s self-definition” (ibid.). – Accordingly, manifestations of

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complicity with imperialist and patriarchal discourse – however ­problematic from a contemporary perspective – are not particularly ­noteworthy in a bestselling author writing in the modernist period; nor is the narrative transgression of class, ethnic or other social boundaries. Robert Young goes so far as to maintain that such transgressions are perhaps “the dominant motif of much English fiction” (Young 160). For that reason, complicity may paradoxically lie precisely in narrative transgression, since the transmigration entailed in “meeting and i­ ncorporating the culture of the other” is “the form taken by colonial desire, whose attractions and fantasies were no doubt complicit with colonialism itself. The many colonial novels in English betray themselves as driven by desire for the cultural other, for forsaking their own culture” (ibid.). Young goes on to aver that “even what is often considered a founding text of English culture, Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), is predicated on the fact that English culture is lacking, lacks something, and acts out an inner dissonance that constitutes its secret, riven self” (ibid.). – The complexity of entanglements of complicity in and critique of oppressive social structures derives not least of all from the fact that the latter are naturalised. Complicity critique, including narrative complicity critique, can render these structures visible in order to open up a space for their contestation. If, however, as Joel Pfister cautions, critique only searches for evidence of complicity, other evidence of the dynamics of cultural power and its political possibilities may be unnoticed or underestimated” (Pfister 129). Cross’s work carries the stamp of her time, and the transgressions she depicts unambiguously bear the marks of complicity that Young criticises. What renders Cross’s work noteworthy and surprising, however, are the degree and the quality of the challenges to what her implied authors deem as deleterious, unjust moral and social constraints. In many respects, Cross’s works denaturalise imperialism, compulsory monogamy, heterosexism and patriarchy – particularly in their intersections. It is for this reason that Charlotte Mitchell asserts: “‘Victoria Cross’ belongs on the map of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and if her career is ignored, our understanding of the whole landscape will be distorted” (Mitchell 2). – In Complicity: Criticism Between Collaboration and Commitment (2016), Thomas Docherty reads complicity as a form of linguistic reduction – a restriction of what can be said or thought at a given point in time. This kind of reduction leads to the assertion that the existing conditions in which we live constitute something called ‘reality’; and it rests on the assumption that the existing dominant language captures and represents that reality ­perfectly. It follows that any other language […] is inherently ‘idealistic’ or, as it is usually said, simply ‘unrealistic.’ docherty 19

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The ideologies Cross contests are precisely such linguistic reductions in their limitation of what can be thought and said – in this case about sexed, gendered and racialised love relationships. Docherty maintains that c­ ountering such linguistic reductions requires the invention of new languages. Otherwise, we become guilty of “complicity with stasis, so to speak”; guilty of a complicity “with an idea that the world is too big to fail, that it can’t be changed by my actions – and thus I become complicit with the refusal to accept responsibility for trying to change a bad situation” (ibid.). Cross’s works certainly do not remain silent, they speak out and invite open resistance to the restrictions imposed by dominant ideologies. Critically assuming the moral high ground and focussing on Cross’s complicities only would thus fail to acknowledge the multiple ways in which her works made substantive contributions to the facilitation of cultural change. This is not to disavow that even Cross’s most daring texts are frequently complicit in precisely the ideologies they contest; and some of her texts are surprisingly or even shockingly so, especially when compared to her most subversive work. Borrowing Alissa G. Karl’s evocative words (regarding Virginia Woolf), we can speak of an “intimacy of complicity and critique” in Cross’s narratives (Karl 43). As far as imperialism is concerned, what Karl observes with regard to Woolf equally holds true for Cross: “such complexities place her texts in a contested middle ground, relying upon the very textual tropes of empire to formulate an anti-imperialist literature” (ibid.). I argue that in order to fully assess Cross’s oscillations between complicity and anti-complicity, it is necessary to look beyond her individual works at recurring themes, tropes and inter-textual references and to view them in interrelation; it requires the reconstruction of the author’s ethos (Schmid 21) based on features shared by the implied authors of different works by Victoria Cross. What has been overlooked so far, even in criticism approaching Cross’s work from the perspective of narrative ethics, is the central function of New Hellenism and especially the preoccupation with Plato. As I will demonstrate, Cross’s particular brand of “New Hellenism” serves, on the one hand, to make sense of some of her complicities and is, on the other hand, key to realising the full extent of her commitment and her attempts at inventing a “language” outside middle-class and imperialist Victorian morality. I will discuss these issues by way of two of Cross’s most subversive and progressive works as far as the interrelation of race and sexuality is concerned: Anna Lombard (1901) and Life of My Heart (1915). Whereas the Orient had featured prominently in works published prior to Anna Lombard, the qualitative nature of the depiction is fundamentally ­different. In true Orientalist fashion, Six Chapters of a Man’s Life (1903), for instance, is a white British love story which utilises an Oriental setting for the ­exploration of alternative, fluid gender roles and non-monosexual identities - 978-90-04-42656-6

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(cf. ­Dierkes-Thrun, Macdonald and Wächter). The Orient itself functions as an eroticised catalyst and finally provides a disastrous narrative turning point in the form of a gang rape. Even though the violation of a white woman by a group of Egyptian men ultimately serves to highlight an emphatically British misogyny, the narrative is complicit in the Orientalist projection of sexualised violence and pollution onto the “racial other.” Anna Lombard is the first of Cross’s novels to depict an interracial relationship between an upper-class Englishwoman and a lower-class Indian man as one of the two relationships at the heart of the narrative. This aspect alone renders the novel exceptional for its time. Martin Hipsky describes Anna Lombard as “a novel whose psychosexual iconoclasm, at once racially ambivalent and uncharacteristically daring for a writer of Cross’ era, still astounds today” (Hipsky 119), and he goes on to observe that, “[f]or all of its melodrama, this popular romance, which eventually sold more than six million copies, offers a complex staging of what we might have supposed ideologically unthinkable to the common British reader of 1901” (ibid.; emphasis added). I argue that a close reading of the novel, taking account of the Hellenist elements, reveals that Anna Lombard is even more daring than most critics, including Hipsky, give Cross credit for, and that it anticipates the far more explicit criticism of imperialist racism in Life of My Heart. By opening with the arrival of the ingenue who has been educated in England and now joins her family in India, the novel strongly evokes the tradition of the station romance that had dominated literary British India throughout the second half of the nineteenth century (Sen 72–73). In the standard plot of the station romance, the heroine arrives from England, makes friends with the staple figure of the “station flirt,” is tempted into (ultimately harmless) ­flirtation – only to be finally turned into the ideal memsahib by means of her marriage to the hero, whose masculinity corresponds to the Anglo-Indian ­ideal: physically powerful, athletic, anti-intellectual and willing and able to fight. Indrani Sen speaks of “the familiar trajectory of the heroine’s journey from ignorance to knowledge and from moral disorder to order, almost mapping, as it were, an imperial rite of passage […]” (Sen 74). While Anna Lombard invites its readership to activate the expectational framework of the station romance, much of the novel’s effect lies in the violation of precisely these expectations. Anna does arrive, fresh-faced and innocent, from England but when her love interest leaves her asleep in a rose garden, the temptation this rose garden symbolises encompasses far more than harmless flirtations among the exclusively British community of the station. In Hipsky’s words, “[t]he first few pages of Cross’s novel thus function as a discursive matrix, generating a Victorian hologram of femininity along the vectors of upper-class status and racial superiority. However, Cross projects this hologram to serve the ends of narrative irony” (Hipsky 124). - 978-90-04-42656-6

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By the turn of the twentieth century, India and other parts of the Empire had become charged with associations of sexual license for women in the British imagination. And indeed, as Sen points out, in some respects, conventions regarding female sexuality were less strict in the realms of the Empire than they were back in metropolitan England (Sen 33). Nevertheless, the flirtation that so dominated the imagination, as expressed in the station romance, largely constituted a fin-de-siècle variety of the Renaissance “courtly love” tradition (84). Unlike the heroines of the station romance, however, Anna does not limit her erotic exploits to flirtation and fantasy. Instead, she enters into a secret marriage with a “native” man of the lower class; and in subsequently agreeing to marry the narrator without leaving her first husband, she effectively turns her monogamous into a polygamous relationship. Conveniently for Gerald Ethridge (the English narrator), Gaida (Anna’s Pathan husband) dies; and Anna finally decides to kill the baby born of this union. While I by no means suggest that this ending is not highly problematic, I will argue in the following that placing undue emphasis on it and simply reading it as a case of narrative containment and the reaffirmation of white racial superiority would mean to overlook the elements of criticism that anticipate a more radical narrative critique in her later work. Anna Lombard sets the narrative frame for a renegotiation of the intersections of gender, race and sexuality by sending the narrator to a remote station in Burma soon after he has met Anna. He is presented with a selection of p ­ otential (extremely young) Burmese “wives” whom he rejects on moral grounds – to the scorn and incomprehension of his fellow Englishmen. The implied author thus emphasises that this kind of relationship was still common practice in the remoter parts of the Empire, where Englishmen lacked opportunities of finding “suitable” mates of their own race and class. Gerald explicitly criticises the hypocrisy involved in “the modest Anglo-Indian Government that will not have the word prostitution printed in the newspapers, and yet countenances such things as these” (Cross Anna 32). Significantly, Gerald’s abhorrence is not provoked by the interracial nature of these relationships but by the practice of taking and then discarding women and the ensuing children; by privileging heedless amusement over responsibility (55). For women to take “native” partners, however, was regarded as entirely unacceptable under any circumstances. Just how much a relationship between an Englishwoman and a “native” man was tabooed becomes readily apparent in Anglo-Indian fiction. Subsequent to the mutiny of 1857, “native” men had been either constructed as the looming threat of sexual violence against the white woman, or they were virtually banned from the text. Sen speaks of “a kind of narrative ‘purdah,’ a textual racial segregation around the white woman in Anglo-Indian colonial fiction” (Sen 84). Those few contemporaneous - 978-90-04-42656-6

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novels which do explore an Englishwoman’s sexual relationship with a “native” provide containment by ending the relationship in disaster. In Gerald’s words, “Married to a native! One needs to have lived in India to fully understand the horror contained in those words” (Cross Anna 104). Even for men, the tacit acceptance of taking “native wives” did not extend beyond remoter outposts. Within station life, interracial relationships had become entirely unacceptable by the end of the nineteenth century. The first and most prominent of Cross’s stories in Five Nights (1908) is daring in this respect since the married male narrator settles unashamedly with his “native” lover in the vicinity of the station. The station itself, however, remains barred to the couple. Viewed in this light, Anna performs a threefold transgression – firstly by claiming a convention that was (within the mentioned limitations) acceptable to the other sex only, secondly, by having this relationship within the confines of the station (albeit secretly), and thirdly by allowing herself to be carried away by physical beauty and the passion it provokes in her. Gerald, by contrast, is reduced to the passivity all-too-frequently enforced on women. In the words of W.T. Stead, “Ethridge, almost ideal hero, plays the part which is so normal to women as never to call for remark, while Anna abandons herself to the force of a passion to which men succumb so often as seldom to call for comment or censure” (qtd. in Mitchell 5). The first crucial aspect in conceiving the challenge to imperial racism that is – albeit obliquely – contained within this narrative lies in the considerable distance between the implied author and the narrator. At first glance, the triangular relationship between Anna, Gaida and Gerald is entirely in line with Orientalist discourse: the white, educated, upper-middle-class male, representing the mind and a relationship based on intellectual harmony and stimulation, is contrasted with the dark-skinned, uneducated, lower-class male, representing the body and physical passion. The former objectifies the heroine, the latter is objectified by the heroine – in a power relation that places the white male at the top, the white woman in the middle and the dark-skinned man at the bottom. This reading is reaffirmed by the ending. Examining the text more closely, however, it becomes obvious that the dichotomy between mind and body – between a pure, unsullied love and mere animal instinct – is constructed by Anna’s and Gerald’s words only. Reading between the lines of Gerald’s reported thoughts and his conversations with Anna reveals an implied author clearly in support of interracial as well as non-monogamous relationships.1 It suggests that Anna loves both men and that the qualitative nature of 1 Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, Cross’s preoccupation with and explicit criticism of compulsory  monogamy in much of her work has been entirely overlooked in criticism so far. (“Fashions”). - 978-90-04-42656-6

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that love, to her, is not racially inflected. Instead, as I am going to show, the racist framing is a (clearly misguided) tool deployed in challenge to Western compulsory monogamy. When Gerald first confronts Anna after having seen her with Gaida, he asks: “Do you mean you are in love with two men at the same time?,” and she replies: “I suppose it must be so, unless you recognise that what I feel for him is only passion, not love – not love at all” (Cross Anna 93). In terms of attribution theory, Anna’s response is likely to provoke a fundamental attribution error or a correspondent inference (cf. Ross 184), i.e. readers are invited to attribute her utterance to her disposition rather than to circumstantial factors and thus to read her words as a disavowal of love for Gaida. Her utterance ostensibly separates love from passion, privileging the former over the latter, and in its racial distribution, this is affirmative of Orientalist discourse. Anna even goes so far as to compare Gaida to “a tame leopard or panther that I loved, even a dog, say – oh, you don’t know how passionately I love anything that I love at all – yet you would not dream of objecting to that, and Gaida is little more to me” (Cross Anna 96). As Edward E. Jones and Keith E. Davis point out, however, “correspondence of inferences declines as the action to be accounted for appears to be constrained by the setting in which it occurs” (Jones and Davis 223). Anna’s words are spoken to an Englishman fully immersed in the ideology of compulsory monogamy, who has discovered that his fiancé is married to another man. Gerald is consumed with jealousy and seriously contemplates ending his relationship with Anna. It is therefore much more likely that Anna’s first utterance is an appropriation of a very common explanatory (and supposedly at least partly exculpating) framework for unfaithfulness, usually deployed by men. Anna draws upon this familiar (imperialist) framework in her attempt to console Gerald, so as to be able to maintain both relationships. The operative part of the second utterance, which dehumanises Gaida, is “you would not dream of objecting to that.” Misguided though it obviously is, the blatant racism here arguably serves the function of articulating that one love does not necessarily take anything away from another love. It casts polyamory in terms of a framework that may render it “thinkable.” Multiple instances throughout the novel suggest that, while Anna tries to make Gerald think otherwise to deflect his jealousy, she does love Gaida as a partner, not in the dehumanising terms she deploys vis-à-vis her fiancé. The much more significant challenge to compulsory monogamy and imperial racism, however, lies in Cross’s appropriation of Hellenism. The love of beauty and knowledge inspired by education in the Classics serves the defamiliarisation and contestation of the shackles of middle-class morality and imperial racism in both novels under discussion here. Thus, for instance, when

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Gerald is confronted with the fact that his fiancé is not only married to someone else but to a “native” at that, he reminds himself of his teaching in the Classics and his own “extraordinary superiority over all other candidates in Greek” (Cross Anna 98), which lead him to “[look] at the whole matter with different eyes from the average young Englishman” (98). Gerald’s perception, shaped by training in the Classics, even allows him to experience a homoerotic moment when, in true Platonic2 fashion, he is struck by Gaida’s “almost superhuman” beauty, with a face “of the Greek type” (Cross Anna 110). The Pathans, as Petra Dierkes-Thrun points out, “are genealogically linked to the Greeks, and Cross’s choice of Gaida’s ethnicity has both aesthetic classical relevance (notions of beauty) and homoerotic potential” (Dierkes-Thrun 2016, 216, fn. 68). Hamakhan in Life of My Heart is equally described as possessing a decidedly Greek type of beauty. Thus, what Mark Sanders observes concerning Olive Schreiner’s work, is equally true for Cross’s imperial novels, namely that “Hellenism is linked to evolutionary racism” (Sanders 39). Ralph Crane and Radhika Mohanram speak of “[t]he Europeanizing of Hamakhan” and argue that “in likening him to an ancient Greek form, Hamakhan is rendered archaic and unthreatening” (Crane and Mohanram 123). They moreover maintain that the repetitive references to Frances’s preference for Greek forms, aesthetics, and philosophy functions problematically in the text, because, in a skewing of vision, when she sees her Indian, she sees a Greek instead. Finally, the radical nature of cross-racial love that the narrative seems to advocate is rendered less radical than at first glance. (ibid.) While this is certainly a valid point to make, another possible reading – ­corroborated by other texts in Cross’s oeuvre – is that drawing upon ancient Greece serves to render something thinkable and comprehensible that lies ­beyond the ideologically possible of a world in which, as Gay Wachman observes, the British both at home and abroad were “educated […] into a sense of racial and national superiority that was essential to the maintenance of both the empire and the class system” (Wachman 8); and this is interwoven with gender in that “[t]he myth of feminine innocence – that upper- and middleclass white women have no sexual desire – was basic to imperialist patriarchal hegemony” (10). Virtually all of Cross’s works are suffused with references to Ancient Greece, and unusually extensive education in the Classics serves as the explicit basis 2 “Platonic” here denotes corresponding to the notion of love as represented in the Symposium and in Phaedrus – not the Christian inflection of the term that reads it as non-erotic.

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and reference point for most of her central characters and the relationships they develop. At the time of Cross’s writing, an increasingly self-aware ­homoerotic community at Oxford, famously represented by Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds, appropriated Hellenist thought in the service of self-affirmation (Dowling 79–81). It aimed to cast same-sex attraction into socially acceptable terms at a time when sex between men was illegal. Even though New Hellenism ultimately sublimated physical same-sex passion in pursuit of mutual intellectual stimulation – in line with the “progression of love” outlined by Diotima/Socrates in Plato’s Symposium – it nevertheless served the facilitation of boundary crossings hitherto conceived of as socially unthinkable. Hellenist conceptions of (intellectual) friendships and love relationships were predominantly concerned with relations among men. Nevertheless, Cross was not the only female writer of her time to take contemporaneous Hellenist idea(l)s beyond male homosocial and homoerotic bonds and to appropriate them for feminist ends. Schreiner, for instance, adapted Platonic ideas to negotiate a space for female intellectuals. Cross similarly deploys Hellenist frameworks to construct her male and female characters as intellectual equals. In The Woman Who Didn’t (1895), Cross’s first published novel, the female protagonist – tellingly named Eurydice – accuses the narrator, when he speaks of “the marriage of true minds”: “That is what a man always says to a woman who is decent looking and young; but those things do not last, and a girl’s time is not long enough for her to make her choice in. […] You men only care for youth and beauty! Character, intellect, virtue, they are practically as nothing to you” (Cross Woman 68). Much of Cross’s subsequent writing proceeds from a criticism of the status quo to an alternative vision of gender relations. Drawing explicitly and extensively upon Ancient Greece, this new vision substitutes intellectual homosocial bonds with a relationship between New Man and New Woman as intellectual, and often artistic partners. Cross’s heroines are intellectually superior to virtually all other characters, except for the male protagonist, and it is Hellenist thinking that allows both to recognise each other as equals beyond racial and gendered lines and to see through and beyond the naturalised artificiality of Victorian morality. Thus, for instance, in Self and the Other (1911), the male protagonist and narrator is struck by his future partner’s Oriental beauty – but it is ultimately the pursuit of knowledge which unites them. The heroine expresses the conviction that “there is only one thing worth having in this world – knowledge,” and the narrator proclaims: “That sentence of hers was the keynote, the basis of all that followed […]. It was spoken with such suppressed and concentrated enthusiasm that it seemed to be the utterance of an unshakeable conviction, and it was as an echo from my own mind;

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the sentence might have been mine” (Cross Self 23). Accordingly, the relationship turns out to be a meeting of “true minds.” Significantly, it is not only in racial terms that a Greek type of beauty serves as an aesthetic that facilitates moral defamiliarisation in Cross’s writing. Thus, for instance, in Five Nights the (intellectual and artistic as well as physical) passion between an English New Man and an English New Woman is sparked when the heroine poses as a Greek goddess for a painting, and the ensuing relationship revolves around a radical renegotiation of heterosexual love relationships, not least of all concerning compulsory monogamy. In Anna Lombard, Gaia’s beauty not only leads Anna to fall in love with him, but the homoerotically charged moment also allows Gerald to comprehend Anna’s emotional involvement in terms he recognises and appreciates. Gerald explicitly casts his own feelings for Anna in Hellenist terms by referring to an epigram often attributed to Plato: “Kissing Agathon, I found my soul at my lips. Poor thing! It went there, hoping / To slip across” (qtd. in Hubbard 290). Gerald states: “I too seemed to feel my soul slipping through my lips and being drunk in by hers when I kissed her” (Cross Anna 99). The force of passion – not for another man, as in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus – but for a woman and a “racial other,” respectively, here translates the Platonic pursuit of beauty into heteroerotic and interracial terms. In Anna Lombard, Cross stops short of allowing Anna to be stimulated by more than physical passion for Gaida – or so Anna tries to make Gerald believe and Gerald accordingly relates to the implied reader. By contrast, the interracial couples in Self and the Other and Life of My Heart are united by a form of mutual intellectual stimulation that obviously draws upon Plato, more specifically, Socrates’ report of his conversation with Diotima in the Symposium. Diotima explains to Socrates that Love is a spirit who inhabits the world between gods and mortals and, having been born at Aphrodite’s birthday party but not possessing any beauty himself, he is driven by the pursuit of beauty (Plato 1980, 203c) – he is driven by lack. Moreover, since “[w]isdom […] is extremely beautiful, and since Love loves beauty, he must also love wisdom and be a philosopher” (Plato 204b). In both Life of My Heart and Self and the Other, it is the highly trained appreciation of beauty, the product of a particularly refined mind, which gives rise to physical passion in combination with intellectual stimulation, and this appreciation and stimulation occur across gendered and racial lines. To turn to Life of My Heart in more detail, the heroine, in line with Young’s observation, perceives her own culture as fundamentally lacking and thus ­directs her desire elsewhere. Frances possesses youth, beauty, riches and is the object of male desire – and yet, she is unhappy: “There is a threefold hunger in

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the human species. When the animal has satisfied his bodily hunger he is ­content; but for man there remain two appetites still, those of brain and heart” (Cross Life 34–35). British men, to Frances, simply do not suffice: The average young Britons, possessed of neither beauty nor gifts, what arts have they with which to captivate the brilliant, cultivated intelligence of a woman like Frances? who weighed their moral character and mocked at it; who, possessing an artist’s eye, despised their personal appearance, comparing it secretly with the Greek model, and who detested their stupidity. (35) It is only when she finds a man who lives up to the Greek model in Hamakhan that she falls in love. France’s admiration of Hamakhan’s beauty is explicitly related to Plato: How well old Plato hit it off, three thousand years ago, when he said that at the sight of physical beauty the coarse, untutored mind feels nothing save a desire to despoil, but in the pure and elevated soul there arises an indescribable awe and reverence, and it feels oppressed and humiliated in the owner’s presence. cross, Life 12–13

Almost ready to give in to her passion, Frances holds herself back thinking: “Love-making is short, straight, quick work in the East, and with all their versatility it is hard for the Easterns to understand the Western fashion” (37). Frances’ thoughts are indicative of Orientalist thinking – the narrative, however, belies this stereotype. Unlike the constantly derided unfaithful Englishmen mentioned in Cross’s work, Hamakhan will turn out to be entirely faithful to her. Cross activates the stereotype only to call it into question and finally to render visible ideological structures that serve to oppress both women and “racial others.” Unlike other Hellenists of her time, Cross does not ultimately transform love of beauty and physical passion into the pursuit of pure beauty to the exclusion of the body. In fact, she is famous for her frank depictions of female sexuality, which Dierkes-Thrun describes as “popular trailblazer[s] for writers such as D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce” (Dierkes-Thrun 205, fn. 11). It is noteworthy here that “while Plato is often read as advocating a higher form of nonerotic love of the good this clearly originates in erotic intimacy” (Secomb 6); or, in Michel Foucault’s words, “[i]n Greece, truth and sex were linked, in the form of pedagogy, by the transmission of a precious knowledge from one body to

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another; sex served as a medium for initiations into learning” (Foucault 61). Cross affirms the potential of erotic intimacy to facilitate intellectuality in many of her novels, irrespective of her protagonists’ ethnicities. While not disembodying love, Cross does emphasise in several of her works that art, mutual intellectual stimulation and the pursuit of beauty are the most important aspects of a love relationship. Diotima asserts that “[l]ove […] is the love of possessing the good forever” (Plato 206a), i.e. the pursuit of immortality, and its “function is reproduction in the beautiful, both in body and in soul. [A]ll men are pregnant in both body and soul, and when we reach a certain age, our nature desires to give birth” (206c). Giving birth is human beings’ only means of approximating immortality. The crucial aspect for both homosexual aesthetes’ appropriation of Plato’s work and for New Woman writers like Cross, who narratively envisioned female roles that are not tied to the maternal role, is the fact that this desire to give birth does not need to be a birth of the body. Some people, according to Diotima, are “more pregnant in soul than in body, who conceive and give birth to the things of the mind, such as knowledge and excellence of the type that poets and inventors beget” (Plato 208e–209a). What is ultimately privileged in Cross’s depiction of the relationship between New Woman and New Man is the “brainchild” that Diotima considers to be infinitely superior to the physical child born of man and woman, since “such lovers have a far stronger intimacy than ordinary parents because the children they share are more beautiful and also immortal” (Plato 209b–d). Cross uses this conception of love, which was associated with intimacy between men, for the reconception of relationships between men and women, propagating that “far stronger intimacy” that bears children of the mind. Accordingly, in many of her texts, biological children are either not possible or not wanted in the first place (as in the case of Theodora in Six Chapters), or they are an unintended and often undesired by-product of the couple’s love. It is as such that the child can then be casually abandoned (as in Life of My Heart, when the parents have to flee) – or even killed (as in Anna Lombard). While Anna Lombard does not provide much narrative access to the interracial relationship, and ultimately eliminates it and its Eurasian offspring, Life of My Heart explores the possibility of an interracial relationship that finds (at least personal) fulfilment, when the upper-class and extremely wealthy English girl leaves her privileged life behind and elopes with her lover and eventual husband Hamakhan. Even though the two die in the end, France’s sister tellingly wonders whether an early death after fulfilment in love might not be preferable to her own sensible but loveless marriage to an Englishman. Mitchell observes with regard to this novel: “While [its] themes – the importance of freely experiencing sexual pleasure, the narrow-mindedness and materialism

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of the British middle class, the lack of understanding and casual cruelty shown by the British to their Indian subjects – are not new in her work, it is probably her most explicit attack on racism and conformism” (Mitchell 6). The novel is, however, no less pervaded by racial stereotypes than Anna Lombard. What remains, though, is the very obvious attempt at transcending what can be thought and said about race, sex and gender at the time. To return to Docherty’s conception of complicity as a linguistic reduction and his call for the invention of “new languages,” Cross finds such a “new language” in the appropriation of an “old language” and thereby borrows some of the latter’s claim to the “realistic.” Her vision is precisely not entirely new and therefore also more “realistic” and more accessible. She moreover draws upon the cultural capital represented by an education in the Classics – a capital that was distributed unevenly across genders. For precisely that reason, Virginia Woolf was notoriously ambivalent when it came to Hellenism. She frequently criticised it as masculinist but, on the other hand, deployed it in her exploration and affirmation of female same-sex desire (cf. Lamos 149–50). For Woolf, “Greek is, as it were, a catachresis, the enigmatic mark of the untranslatability of love” (Lamos 162). For Cross, it is a means of translating ideologically unthinkable versions of love into thinkable forms. Very significantly, she does so within middlebrow romance frameworks. Nicola Humble famously conceives of “the brows” in terms of reading practices: highbrow reading entails “sitting forward,” poised, pen in hand, scrutinising; middlebrow reading means “sitting back,” relaxing, reading for pleasure and relaxation (Humble 57), with the boundaries between the two notoriously unstable. The novels under discussion in this chapter offer escapist pleasures when sitting back – but, especially in following the traces of Hellenist intertextuality, “sitting forward,” they afford a challenge to Victorian imperialism and social norms regarding love relationships that is far more pronounced that a reading “sitting back” reveals. Cross thus answers the avant-garde call to “make it new” within the framework of imperial middlebrow fiction. Works Cited Brake, Laurel. “Aestheticism and Decadence: The Yellow Book (1894–97), The Chameleon (1894), and The Savoy (1896).” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxford UP, 2009, 76–100. Crane, Ralph, and Radhika Mohanram. Imperialism as Diaspora: Race, Sexuality, and History in Anglo-India, Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines. Liverpool UP, 2013. Cross, Victoria. Anna Lombard. New York: Kensington, 1901.

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Cross, Victoria. Life of My Heart. New York: Macaulay, 1915. Cross, Victoria. Self and the Other. Colonial Edition. London: Laurie, 1911. Cross, Victoria. Five Nights. Fairfield: 1st World Library, 2009. Original edition, 1908. Cross, Victoria. The Woman Who Didn’t. London: John Lane, 1895. Dierkes-Thrun, Petra. “Victoria Cross’s Six Chapters of a Man’s Life: Queering Middlebrow Feminism.” Middlebrow and Gender, 1890–1945. Ed. Christoph Ehland and Cornelia Wächter. Leiden; Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016, 202–27. Docherty, Thomas. Complicity: Criticism Between Collaboration and Commitment. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Cornell UP, 1994. Eldridge Miller, Jane. “The Crisis of 1895: Realism and the Feminization of Fiction.” Modernism. Ed. Tim Middleton. London: Routledge, 2003, 38–68. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Hipsky, Martin. Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925. Ohio UP, 2011. Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Jones, Edward E., and Keith E. Davis. “From Acts to Dispositions: The Attributional Process in Person Perception.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Ed. Leonard Berkowitz. New York: Academic, 1965, 219–66. Karl, Alissa G. Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen, Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2009. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. “Introduction to The Yellow Book (1894–1897).” Ryerson University, 2011. Web. Lamos, Colleen. “Virginia Woolf’s Greek Lessons.” Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture. Ed. Laura Doan and Jane Garrity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 149–64. Macdonald, Kate, and Cornelia Wächter. 2016. “Beyond the Subversion/Containment Binary: Middlebrow Fiction and Social Change” Ed. Ingo Berensmeyer. REAL – ­Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 32 (2016): 101–20. McCarthy, Jeffrey Mathes. Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel 1900–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Mitchell, Charlotte. Victoria Cross (1868–1952): A Bibliography, Victorian Fiction Research Guides. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2002. Pfister, Joel. Critique for What?: Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies, Great Barrington Books. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006.

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Plato. The Symposium. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Ed. M.C. Howatson and Frisbee C.C. Sheffield. Cambridge UP, 2008. Sanders, Mark. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, Philosophy and Postcoloniality. Duke UP, 2002. Schmid, Wolf. “Implied Author.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, 2013. Ed. Peter Hühn, et al. Hamburg University. Web. Secomb, Linnell. Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture. Edinburgh UP, 2007. Sen, Indrani. Woman and Empire: Representations in the Writings of British India, 1858– 1900, New Perspectives in South Asian History. London: Sangam Books, 2002. Smedley, Audrey, and Brian D. Smedley. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. 4th ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 2012. Wachman, Gay. Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001. Wächter, Cornelia. “‘Some Fashions in Love’: Victoria Cross and the Contestation of Compulsory Monogamy.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies, forthcoming. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

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Cross-colonial Encounters and Cultural Contestation in Somerset Maugham’s “Rain” Victoria Kuttainen Abstract This chapter analyses Somerset Maugham’s most spectacular sensation – Sadie Thompson, within the context of Americanised, commercial mass culture as it expands across the Pacific in the 1920s. While acknowledging the complex colonial dynamics at stake in Somerset Maugham’s famous story “Rain” in which Sadie features, this chapter argues that Maugham knowingly deploys the colonial Pacific, and the female body, as sites of spectacle and projection. In this way, Maugham’s ironic narrative of the fast-talking, hooch-drinking, lipsticked American Modern Girl can be read as a commentary about the ways that her body becomes a site of contestation, as with those of others absorbed by the logic of the imperial project and commercial, touristic desire. Moreover, as Maugham’s understated ironic narrative style is subsumed by the growing commercial market for his works adapted to stage and screen, Maugham’s creation becomes increasingly caught between new regimes of judgment, in ways that cleverly parallel the transformation of his own literary reputation from “England’s playwright” to “commercial hack.”

Keywords Modern Girl – Modernity – Media – Middlebrow – Pacific

…

“Can you wonder that when we first went there [to Samoa] our hearts sank? You’ll hardly believe me when I tell you it was impossible to find a single good girl in any of the villages.” She used the word “good” in a severely technical manner. “Mr Davidson and I talked it over, and we made up our minds the first thing to do was to put down the dancing. The natives were crazy about dancing.” “I was not averse to it myself when I was a young man,” said Dr Macphail.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426566_009

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“I guessed as much” [pronounced the missionary’s wife], “when I heard you ask Mrs Macphail to have a turn with you last night” maugham, “Rain” 339

∵ 1 Introduction Personal observations, cultural values, and character judgements structure and suffuse Somerset Maugham’s most famous short story, “Rain.” Set aboard ship, and then in a small guest house in quarantine, in the American naval outpost of Jazz-era Pago-Pago in Samoa, the story deploys the colonial, modernising Pacific as the setting for a clever tale that reflects upon colliding worldviews propelled by tumultuous changes of the first decades of the twentieth century. As various regimes of bio-political management are projected upon the island natives and displaced onto the body of the iconic Modern Girl Sadie Thompson, she – like the Pacific upon which the travels – becomes a site of spectacle, surveillance, control, and cultural contestation. First appearing in April 1921 in the story “Miss Thompson,” published in The Smart Set magazine, Sadie quickly migrated from the page to stage and silver screen, where a string of re-castings and re-enactments earned her the status of one of the most recognisable types of the modern era. Re-titled “Rain” when it appeared in Maugham’s collection The Trembling of a Leaf: Stories of the South Sea Islands later that same year, the story of Sadie was reprinted dozens of times in both Britain and America. The stage version, dramatised by Colton and Randolph (1923), met acclaim in London’s West End and ran for three years on Broadway where American theatre critics reviewed it as a “supreme dramatic triumph” (Johnson 354). Film adaptations, based on the play, proliferated: from Gloria Swanson’s starring role in the silent film Sadie Thompson (1928) and Joan Crawford’s interpretation of Sadie in Rain (1932), to the 1946 race film Dirty Gertie and a 1953 3D musical starring Rita Hayworth, Miss Sadie Thompson (1953). Sadie was an ocean-crossing, platform-crossing, culturecrossing, and even race-crossing modern media sensation. Yet just as she attracted unprecedented attention, the character of Sadie Thompson has also been repeatedly dismissed and contained in ways that uncannily repeat tropes built into the dynamics of the tale.

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Prevailing readings of Sadie Thompson reduce Maugham’s compelling character to a one-dimensional type and accuse the story of exoticism. This essay considers her more thoroughly and takes a panoramic look at the fictional woman who captured the attention of the world in the aftermath of the Great War and held it until well after World War ii. It argues that one reason she has been taken up by modern print and performance cultures so thoroughly is that she appears to be purpose-built for interpretation, adaptations, and projections. Like the Pacific on which she travelled, endlessly evoked as a fantasy by scores of colonial travel writers, Sadie serves as a screen upon which observers cast their imagination. Yet rather than serving up a mere rehashing of timeworn colonial fantasies of the Pacific, Maugham’s story can be read, in part, as a knowing commentary upon them. Writing for and alongside the ascendance of Hollywood, Maugham was intensely aware of the way in which the increasing traffic in images drew upon fantasies of seductive starlets and beguiling tropical scenes. While distancing himself from the perceived exclusiveness of rarefied, intellectual, modernist literary circles, he was equally conscious of the way his own reputation, because of his association with cinema, was downgraded from serious writer to “commercial hack pandering to the tastes of middlebrow audiences” (Calder 262). However, in its shrewd observations of cultural pretensions and appetites, “Rain” may be understood as a paradigmatic example of what Faye Hammill calls the middlebrow’s characteristic sleek “polished surfaces” that “conceal unexpected depths” (Hammill 6). As both a product of and commentary upon an increasingly image-based culture, the story of Sadie can be read as a wry reflection upon the contingencies of cultural value, the gender of modernity, and the cultural dynamics of cross-colonial encounters. 2

Sadie’s Story

Maugham’s short story opens with deck-board reflections and conversations such as the one used in the epigraph to this essay, as the first-class passengers lean upon the rails in anticipation of their eventual arrival at Apia, the capital of British-controlled Samoa. Their ship steams toward the islands that figure as a source of interest and much discussion, but attention soon shifts to Sadie Thompson, a single woman from the lower decks. The shipboard exchange occurs between Dr Macphail, newly deployed to Apia to treat tropical diseases, and the missionary wife, Mrs Davidson, who has served many years in remote islands in northwest Samoa with her husband, the Reverend Mr Davidson. The travellers are impelled toward the islands on various campaigns of population management. As pillars of the church, the Davidsons represent an older, - 978-90-04-42656-6

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e­ cclesiastical campaign by which they take it upon themselves to forbid dancing and police dress codes (outlawing the customary lava-lava garment, replacing it with trousers and the Victorian Mother Hubbard dress). As an emissary of modern medical science with more liberal, relativistic viewpoints, Macphail defends dancing. He also represents the ambivalence to modernity so typical of Britons in the interwar era, as described by Paul Fussell in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars. On the one hand, Macphail’s travel to the tropical South Pacific is motivated by an anti-modern quest to escape the horrific conditions that modern warfare had imposed on the European soldiers he had treated. On the other hand, he is being comported by the very advancements in shipping and technology that had been in some part responsible for the large-scale slaughter of the Great War in the first place. Moreover, his modern medical training has been honed in the theatre of war, and he notes that he is keen to put his medical expertise to practice on the rarer cases of tropical disease he has only read about so far. Cueing readers to differences in class and taste, as well as the judgement of others, all of which become thematic preoccupations of the story, the narrator notes that the relationship between these two couples “was the intimacy of shipboard, which is due to propinquity rather than any community of taste” (Maugham, “Rain” 234–35). Further, “their chief tie was the disapproval they shared of the men who spent their days and nights in the smoking-room, playing poker or bridge and drinking” (235). Mrs Davidson is shrill in her disapprobation of the lax morals and habits of the locals, particularly at the American outpost where the steamer touches down. When Dr Macphail opines that Mrs Davidson must feel she is nearing home as they approach the harbour, she is quick to differentiate the “volcanic” port of American Pago-Pago (236) from the “Davidson’s district” (237) to the northwest.1 “Fixing the glasses on her nose,” as “she looked upon the green island with a ruthless stare” (“Rain” 237), she responds: I’m glad we’re not stationed here […] They say this is a terribly difficult place to work in. The steamers’ touching makes the people unsettled; and 1 The Samoan islands were strategically important to a number of imperial powers and became a site of international rivalry between them. Britain ceded Western Samoa (including the largest island with Samoa’s only city – Apia) to the Germans from 1900 to 1914, when British control was restored via a New Zealand mandate. The less populated Eastern islands became American Samoa, which included the strategically important deep harbor of PagoPago, a whaling and naval station. In “Rain,” British-controlled Western Samoa is a Europeanised zone south of the British Gilbert Islands, identified by Maugham as home of the Davidsons (A Writer’s Notebook 87); in contrast, American-controlled Eastern Samoa, and ­Pago-Pago in particular, is represented as a frontier contact zone (“Rain” 237). - 978-90-04-42656-6

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then there’s the naval station; that’s bad for the natives. In our district, we don’t have difficulties like that to contend with. There are one or two traders, of course, but we take care to make them behave, and if they don’t we make the place so hot for them they’re glad to go. (237) Mrs Davidson “spoke of the depravity of the natives” with a “vehemently unctuous horror” (237) especially regarding their “shocking” marriage customs (238). Macphail, on the other hand, not only engages in dancing himself, but also notes with his characteristic pragmatism that the lava-lava seems “suitable enough to the climate” (240). As they approach the harbour, Dr Macphail is fascinated: he looks upon the tropical scene with “greedy eyes” (236). Further, as he surveys the bodies of indigenous Samoans who gather on the shore to meet the ship, men and women going about in sarongs with their limbs ­exposed, “his professional eyes glistened when he saw for the first time in his experience cases of elephantiasis” (240). Despite their different attitudes, the Macphails and Davidsons share an interest in the management of bodies and populations, which impels their travel to Samoa. These interests suggest Foucauldian themes of bio-power often associated with the imperial project of surveillance and control, principally concerned with the regulation of race, class, sex, delinquency, and disease (Foucault 56, Stoler 112). As the natives soon fade into the background of the narrative, these preoccupations are transferred to the subject of Sadie Thompson, a “second class passenger” (“Rain” 245), who had been among those enthusiastically engaged in the evening’s shipboard dancing whom the missionary wife so thoroughly reviled. The rising action begins promptly after the ship’s arrival in the harbour. An epidemic of measles, “a serious and often fatal disease amongst the Kanakas” (242) has broken out on the island and a case has developed in one of the crew of the schooner set to take them onward to Apia. Quarantined in Pago-Pago, the Macphails and the Davidsons find rooms in the upstairs quarters of a primitive boarding-house run by the “half-caste” trader (243) Joe Horn and his native wife, across the bay from the Governor’s residence. When Sadie, a single woman “of twenty-seven perhaps, plump, and in a coarse fashion, pretty” ­enters the boarding house in the company of the quarter-master (245), Mrs Davidson recognises her from the party of dancers on the ship. She is a fasttalking, “hooch” drinking American girl, “loud-voiced and garrulous” (256), who earns Dr Macphail’s admiration in bartering with the trader for a cut rate on her accommodation (246). The guests learn that she is en route to Apia to take a job as a cashier. She attracts immediate scorn from the wives: “I w ­ ondered at the time what she was. She looked rather fast to me,” remarks Mrs Macphail as they recall her dancing with the quartermaster the night before (249), later

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pronouncing her “extremely common” (255). “Not good style at all,” agrees Mrs Davidson (249). While the first-class passengers set up their rented rooms by taking precautionary measures to protect their bodies from disease-carrying mosquitos, sewing up holes in the nets above their beds, and discussing the need for the ladies to use pillow-slips to cover their lower extremities, Sadie welcomes the freedom of the tropics: her unpacking involves a hastily assembled gramophone, uncorked liquor, and an open door. Her short skirt exposes her legs that “bulged over the tops of her long white boots” (245). Almost immediately, she begins to crank out jazz and to attract sailors, which develops into raucous parties in her lower rooms. Suddenly recalling that she boarded the ship at Honolulu, which harbours the notorious mixed-raced suburb of Ilewei – “The plague spot of Honolulu! The Red-Light district […] a blot on our civilization!” (258) – the missionary concludes that Sadie is a prostitute “carrying on her trade, here!” (258). Davidson’s island crusade to manage the bodies and souls of the native population is therefore instantly transferred to the project of exhorting Sadie to repent of her loose ways, and his campaign is focused upon the containment of her transgressive body. First, he threatens to ruin the trade of Joe Horn if the trader does not insist that Sadie closes her rooms to visitors. Then, he warns the governor that he will damage the governor’s reputation in Washington if Sadie’s prompt deportation is not arranged. Eventually, Reverend Davidson cuts off her hope of escape further westward across the Pacific toward future freedom and self-reinvention in Sydney, by determining that Sadie must return eastward to face “the law” in San Francisco. There, she admits, there is a warrant for her arrest: “I beat it before they could get me […] If the bulls grab me it’s three years for mine” (281). As the relentless rain suggests an atmosphere of oppression, the determined Reverend Davidson focuses his intensity on Sadie’s religious conversion, a mission he equates with the relinquishing of her moral laxity regarding sex, drink, and jazz. The missionary’s equally unrelenting proselytizing finally achieves its goal of wearing her down, though only after Dr Macphail has administered to her a “hypodermic injection” (282). The story then delivers its final twist and denouement: the morning after Davidson’s all-night prayer session, when newly repentant Sadie is due to board ship to San Francisco where she is apparently wanted for unspecified crimes, Davidson is found dead on the beach with a razor in his hand and his throat slit. Scarlet-lipped Sadie, once again “the flaunting queen they had known at first” (246), resumes her lifestyle of jazz and drinking. When Dr Macphail forcefully enters her rooms to question her, her concluding lines suggest Davidson’s sexual and moral hypocrisy, and hint

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at her appraisal of Macphail’s complicity: “You men! You filthy, dirty pigs! You’re are all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!” (295). 3

Sadie’s Critics

Certainly, the character of Sadie and the story “Rain” itself are not without obvious flaws, and the morally dubious attitudes that she and it embody have attracted a regular stream of critical dismissals. Justin Edwards names “Rain” as one of many problematic and culturally insensitive neo-colonial narratives that draw on themes of “eroticism and sexual emancipation in the context of travel” (Edwards 13), in which the “contact zone between cultures” is “presented in erotic terms” (14). He identifies the tale as an exemplar of the Western fantasy of Polynesian paradise structured on the logic of escape and authority that “bind[s] eroticism to imperial control through an assertion of mastery over the primitive body which is linked to the female” (18). Christopher Balme observes in it Maugham’s “condescending attitude to the native characters” (Balme 159) and its superficial portraiture of Samoans. “Rain” is, Balme concludes, a narrative of displacement that shifts the missionary zeal’s principal concern with colonial life onto the figure of the American woman, largely transferring “native depravity onto Sadie” and reducing Samoans to “little more than a shadowy presence” (158). Further, as Katie Johnson has commented, the narrative “catered to Orientalist and colonialist desires, during a period of waning empire,” and indulged readers in an “exotic locale” which it created as “a space where puritanical Anglos could unleash sublimated desires” (Johnson 354). Samoa is, in Maugham’s story, a foil for Maugham’s vision of “the South Sea Islands as relentlessly malevolent and sexually forbidden” (357). These criticisms are not without merit. Until recently, most readings of Sadie have been equally critical, accepting the stereotype of her that was rehashed in the countless plays and films adapted from the story, which stage her as a “prostitute character,” or as Johnson has put it, “a hooker-with-a-heart-ofgold” (351). As Jeffrey Meyers has observed, however, in fact Sadie “does nothing immoral in Pago Pago” (2), and character judgements pronounced on her behaviour derive entirely from speculation. Critical readings such as these therefore repeat the dynamics of scrutiny, judgement, and surveillance that are at the heart of the tale. Further, the character described as most unsettled – “trembling like a leaf” (“Rain” 293) – in Maugham’s story is the hard-edged, self-assured, and ultra-critical Mrs Davidson, after the suicide of her husband. Despite its e­ xotic themes and dismissive treatment of indigenous subjects, the tale centres on the topic of the degradation of the white man in the tropics, the exposure - 978-90-04-42656-6

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of sanctimonious hypocrisy and complicity, and the fragility of the colonial ­project. The baselessness of “the assumption of cultural and moral superiority by the British colonial elite” and their reliance on “a condescending racism” that is “easily upended” (McGuire 18) is a theme that John Thomas McGuire traces in several of Maugham’s short stories and other works. C ­ ertainly these aspects of racism are easily discernible in “Rain,” just as Maugham’s  non-­ fiction travel narratives, such as The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) also ­reflect the ­prevailing ethnocentricism of the period. However, as Brian M ­ usgrove ­observes, Maugham’s writing is also consistently peopled by profoundly unsettled European, “wavering between two worlds” – by no means the self-assured colonist, but rather the unstable imperial subject, “poised to split and unravel” (Musgrove 39). After all, Maugham’s tour of Polynesia in 1916 and 1917, the first of many journeys that were to establish Maugham’s reputation as a chronicler of the dying days of empire, culminated in the novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919). Its principal character Charles Strickland, loosely based on the modernist painter Paul Gauguin, is perhaps the most loathsome Maugham creation of all time. Maugham was hardly a celebrator of or apologist for Europeans in the tropics. 4

Reading and Looking

However, “[o]ne of the most interesting things about Maugham’s story,” Amy Lawrence has noted, “is that most of the action takes place ‘off-stage’ – the story is based around absences and enigmas” (Lawrence, Echo 41). The limits of knowledge about Sadie extend to what is actually going on in her boarding house room with the sailors whom she welcomes into it, what Sadie was really doing in Honolulu or would be working as in Samoa, why exactly she is reluctant to return to San Francisco (including the exact nature of the crimes she is wanted for), and the event which takes place between her and Reverend Davidson that precipitates his suicide. In contrast, the play, as Lawrence further observes, “dramatizes almost every one of the scenes ‘reported’ to Macphail in the story” (Lawrence, Echo 44), a significant point given that it is Macphail’s perspective through which the story is largely focalised. Discursive speculation about Sadie’s character and about actions that take place “off-stage” in the story is replaced, in the play, by “on-stage” spectacle. This dynamic extends to the way in which the Pacific is represented. While the luxuriant tropical scenery is a product of Macphail’s “greedy eyes” (“Rain” 236) in Maugham’s original story – a subtle commentary upon Macphail’s imperial gaze, in the play the Pacific and its islands becomes a source of visual pleasure for the entire audience, specified clearly in the script directions: - 978-90-04-42656-6

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Hard by the rail of the verandah, bright green palm trees lift their branches, and brilliant flowers grow in riotous confusion. At the lifting of the curtain, the scene is bathed in the tense sunlight of early morning. Insects buzz and birds sing, every aspect is luxuriously, opulently drowsy. The sky and the water meet in a ring of magic silence. In the distance we hear the low chanting murmur of native voices singing at their work. This is broken by the steamer’s whistle. The stage is empty as the curtain rises until a native girl enters the scene from the verandah. She carries on her head a basket of pineapples. She wears the lava lava, the native costume of the South Seas – a cotton swath hanging from her breasts to her knees in a knotted L. She walks indolently and gracefully. colton and randolph 3

The primitivism that is only suggested in the tale is replaced by an opening “Polynesian Interlude” in Colton and Randolph’s adaptation, including a “Witch Doctor of Tangabura” (xiii), and detailed stage directions specifying the sordidness of Sadie’s rooms that help establish her character: “bedraggled,” “in general bleakness,” and “covered with greasy matting” (2). Additionally, the measles of the story, which many readers may have associated with the flu pandemic of 1918 from which no country was spared (and which exacted a particularly heavy toll upon Samoa), is changed in the play to cholera, a disease more directly associated with the tropics. This change makes the link between sordidness and the South Pacific more direct in the stage play, and therefore much less indirectly suggested than it is in the original story. In the play, the transgressiveness of Sadie and of the tropics become spectacles for visual display and consumption. In contrast, in the story, the activities of the Europeans looking, and their speculation about what they see, are focalised. In fact, the act of visually surveying both the natives and the travelling girl regularly receives comment. In the first paragraph alone, four separate acts of looking are described in a tight economy of seven sentences: “in sight,” “searched,” “he saw,” and “and you saw” (“Rain” 234). In the second paragraph, three acts of appraisal occur across four sentences: disapproval, flattery, and carping (“Rain” 235). Looking translates to judgement across the whole tale and is a thematic trope built into the narrative structure, in which projection and interpretation – and the related dynamics of what is seen as opposed to what is said, or what is presumed in contrast to what is certain – offer themselves up as topics for enjoyment or analysis. But the very visuality of the dramatic and filmic adaptations mean that directorial decisions interpret bodies and scenes for the audience, resolving

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a­ mbiguities and replacing absences with presence. Calder notes, “Maugham’s irony, […] often subtle and devastating on the printed page, is frequently the quality that film-makers could not capture or deliberately chose to eliminate” (266). Shades of rainy grey on the printed page become black-and-white or garish and bright on the stage or screen, and this dynamic intensified in the years and adaptations that followed the play. While Calder notes that Maugham’s “tolerance” for both men and women’s “follies and vices” had “appealed to many readers in the Twenties” (263), these ambiguities were “stamped out” in subsequent dramatizations, paralleling the way the missionary Davidsons have put an end to native dancing and other behaviour they cannot abide. As many critics have noticed on more than one occasion, producers of films based on the Sadie Thompson story, all of which were modelled on the stageplay rather than Maugham’s story, found themselves making changes to characters, either in anticipation of or in response to censorship codes. “One of the Hays Office dicta being that the clergy should not be represented in a pejorative way” (Calder 264), Reverend Davidson was transformed into a mere moral crusader. Further, the character of Sergeant O’Hara was introduced to rescue the single woman, Sadie, through his proposal of marriage and to offer a tidy resolution to the drama. This resolved what Andrée Lafontaine identifies as a new social problem in the 1930s that characters such as Sadie embodied: the “woman adrift – the unattached, young, working woman” (Lafontaine 5). Yet perhaps most remarkably, whilst – as Calder notes – typically “[Maugham’s] stories were made blander, safer, and more narrowly moralistic than he had ever conceived them” (Calder 263), when this story was adapted to film, the character of Sadie was made into a more exaggerated strumpet than in the original tale. As the word is displaced by the image in the translation of Maugham’s work from print to stage and then screen, spectacle replaces speculation. The language by which readers principally come to know Sadie, through the recognition of her own brand of snappy American slang or by the description of the looking and judging of others that comes to fill narrative absences is, as Lawrence observes of most speech in the story, “displaced in favour of visual representation” (Lawrence, Echo 35). “[W]ith each change,” Lawrence continues, “the way woman is represented” in the embodiment of Sadie Thompson also undergoes transformations that reflect dominant social attitudes about “the cultural position of women from the period of one adaptation to the next” (39). As Jonathan Schroeder notes, following the observations of Laura Mulvey in her seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” “[f]ilm has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from the male point of view” (Schroeder 208).

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In the “Rain” films, this means not only that the woman is given fewer opportunities to speak, but also that her inner life is penetrated and opened out for all to see. In the Gloria Swanson silent film Rain (1928). Sadie’s repentance and conversion scene, which takes place “off-stage” in the story, and which is not directly narrated for the reader, is made into a public spectacle through the intensity of a fast cross-cutting montage series that focuses on Sadie’s facial expressions as mimetic of her psychological state. In her analysis of the complex transnational entertainment circuits that criss-crossed the Pacific in the interwar years, Angela Woollacott observes that even as actual mobility increased across this last ocean basin to open up for travel in the first decades of the twentieth century, rather than increasing understanding, the appetite for exoticised and eroticised imaginings of areas and peoples associated with this region fed a market for highly racialised and gendered images associated with star personas (xx–xxi). Red-lipped starlets such as Dolores Del Rio became pin-ups for films that promoted the region in terms of libidinal desire. The spectacle of the Pacific was, as Anne Rees has noted, made alluring to modern audiences because of its “saturation in Hollywood imagery” which “mediated the travel experience” and fuelled cross-cultural misunderstanding (Rees 49). By the interwar period, the Pacific had become the on-location set and fantasised backdrop of what Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon have called “Hollywood’s South Seas.” The Pacific of the interwar period was a fabled region fuelled by fantasies of glamour, romance, and escape. It was equally regarded as a site of disease and primitive darkness. These two opposing sets of images propelled actual travel there for tourism and on-location filming, or for missionary colonialism and medical anthropology. Maugham stanges the collision of these opposing imaginaries of the South Pacific as a struggle between different worldviews and ways of being. 5

The Clash of Representational Systems and Regimes of Value

Maugham himself was exquisitely conscious of the vicissitudes of reputation and critical judgement. A favourite of the Broadway stage, he was also a writer for Hollywood whose name lent films cachet when the medium of cinema was still unstable and regularly drew upon the cultural capital of the literary world for credibility. During the period that witnessed the rise of the star authors, Maugham was one of the brightest. But this association with commercial theatre and film downgraded his literary repute in the eyes of serious literary critics.

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As Selina Hastings has observed in her 2010 biography, Maugham was initially regarded with respect as a promising young member of the literary intelligentsia, “an honourable condition” Maugham explains in his own words, “which some years later, when I became a popular writer of light comedies, I lost” (Hastings 84). While Maugham began his early career with serious literary ambitions as an author, and as the editor of the highbrow literary journal The Venture (84), by the interwar period he focused his ambitions on a wide audience, only to discover that as he faced increasing commercial success and fame, his reputation amongst the literati waned. “I was not satisfied with the appreciation of a small band of intellectuals” he wrote in his own autobiography The Summing Up, “I wanted no such audience as this, but the great public” (Hastings 111). So great was his public success in London’s West End, with his first smash hit Lady Frederick, that he was dubbed “England’s dramatist” by the press, and the play ran for more than a year, marking a turn away from the serious dramatists of Galsworthy and Shaw into something fresh, that was immediately snapped up on Broadway (Hastings 108). On his arrival in New York, Maugham was an instant celebrity, and directly became the target of vociferous attacks from the intellectual elite. The literary critic Edmund Wilson called Maugham “a half-trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious readers, who do not care much about writing” (Calder 262). Even if on its immediate reception writing was received as a contribution to high culture, as Hammill has explained in her work on literary celebrity between the wars, commercial success was often regarded as a sign of artlessness, and served to condemn many writers whose work came to be associated with the middlebrow (Hammill 2007, 3). The career and reputation of Somerset Maugham might serve as one of the most paradigmatic examples of these dynamics that beset writers of the modern period. The problem of the abject middlebrow – in Virginia Woolf’s famous words “betwixt and between” (156) mass entertainment and highbrow culture – is ultimately a problem of social and cultural positioning, thematised in Maugham’s story “Rain” by the issues of reputation, respectability, judgement, and appraisal on which the action turns and character development hinges. “Rain” is also a story that reflects upon a rapidly changing modern scene: “the harsh notes of the mechanical piano” (“Rain” 234), “the pitiless clamour of the pneumatic drill” (236), “telegraphic instructions” (242), and “the sound of a gramophone, harsh and loud, wheezing out a syncopated tune” (254) threaten both Macphail’s fantasy of idyllic escape and Davidson’s controlled project of civilising and purging the islands of “sin.” In Jill Julius Matthews’s estimation, the emerging forces of modernisation, globalisation, commerce, and

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­ mericanisation – which imbued mass and middlebrow cultures – were perA ceived by cultural elites everywhere as threats to and incursions on cultural ideals. In literary domains, these forces were regarded as an assault on “the pursuit of truth and beauty, unsullied by the vulgar claims of commerce” (Matthews  19). Yet, as Matthews continues, “modernity refused that segregation, promiscuously mingling culture and commerce, the beautiful and the vulgar” (19). As Matthews further observes: “Representing that fusion most visibly were young women” (19). A closeted homosexual, Maugham may have been particularly attuned to the dynamics Rita Felski has called “the gender of modernity.” As Felski shrewdly observes, “images of femininity were to play a central role in prevailing anxieties, fears, or hopeful imaginings about the distinctive features of the ‘modern age’” (Felski 19). According to Janice Radway, similar dynamics operated around the cultural status of the middlebrow and informed its active exclusion from serious culture by literary elites. Drawing on the metaphor of the “fertile, sexualised body” that Radway claims has “been traditionally used to demonize the materials and processes of popular culture” (Radway 210) she notes that “bawdy, extravagant entertainments” were understood in such terms as a “distinct social threat to the reign of the recognized, legitimate authority of culture” (210). The middlebrow, Radway explains, with its tendency and ability to make incursions on high culture from below, was “understood precisely this way” (211). “Traditional symbols and embodiments of beauty,” Radway explains, “young women now engaged in selling and buying” came to “symbolise commercial pleasures” (19) of dubious value that endangered their social respectability and threatened to tarnish their worth. Sadie, the “cashier” who is appraised as “brazen, brazen” by the upper class women (“Rain” 263), is linked with both trade and promiscuity, and is treated by the Davidsons in ways very similar to their treatment of traders: “We take care to make them behave, and if they don’t we make the place so hot for them they’re glad to go” (237). The half-caste trader Joe Horn, as with other traders discussed by the Davidsons, is associated with mixed-race sex, which is perhaps also the greatest threat represented by both Ilewei – where men and women “of all nationalities” mixed (259) – and Sadie herself. The cultural mixing that is represented in the threat of miscegenation is a symbolic correlative of the cultural promiscuity embodied in the figure of the Modern Girl, who, as Matthews notes, “became the subject and the metaphor at the heart of international modernity” (19). This dynamic was particularly potent in the icon of the independent travelling woman, as Sarah Galletly has argued (Galletly 2017, 72). In the type Galletly calls the “spectacular traveling

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woman,” whose image splashed across magazines and film screens throughout the 1920s and 1930s (Galletly 70), the very indeterminacy of her nature facilitated her rapid incorporation into cultural images such as films and advertisements. In these domains, she became a screen against which numerous fantasies and anxieties were projected against backgrounds of primitive escape or cultural sophistication. In shipboard stories, of which “Rain” may be considered one, these fantasies and anxieties take on added intensity. Whereas social distinctions are policed in an intensified way through separate first-class and second-class accommodations aboard ship, the collision of cultures and movement across various domains that occurs through travel threatens the logic of these segregations. Social mobility and geographical mobility collide in these narratives in the figure of woman-at-sea, an often particularly transgressive and culturally indeterminate form of Lafontaine’s “woman adrift” (Lafontaine 5). What Matthews observes about the modern young women in general could equally be said of Sadie Thompson in particular: “She was simultaneously the sign of all that was wrong with the direction that society was taking and the promise of a brave new world” (19). Her theatre, the Pacific, is either a zone of primitivism and vulgarity – which must be civilised and made to behave – or a new frontier where self-reinvention is possible and the Modern Girl can be free of the shackles of the past. A product of the increased visuality of modern culture, the “modern appearing woman,” Liz Conor has argued, was both the subject and object of an internationalising modern culture increasingly obsessed by spectacle. Women were empowered as subjects by their ability to adapt and manipulate new images of themselves. They hailed these opportunities for self-invention and determination as new freedoms. Yet in the increasing association between images of woman and ocularcentric culture, women were also disempowered, increasingly affected by paternalistic controls and censorship, judged as objects of scrutiny, or consumed and exchanged in an accelerating traffic of images. Revealingly, the 1923 play by Colton and Randolph was often deliberately staged as a melodrama, and New York audiences booed or hissed at Davidson or Sadie as if they were characters in a pantomime (Balme 2007, 162), acting out internal cultural tensions “between the ‘liberated’ Charleston generation and the still-strong Puritan heritage in the United States” (Balme 163). Yet the film adaptations, displaced in time and place from the era of flappers and the milieu of post-war freedom and frivolity that characterised the metropolitan scene of the “Roaring Twenties,” removed this element of audience participation, and deepened both the moralistic interpretation and immoral intensity of Sadie as prostitute rather than a subject of dramatic debate.

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As an author of magazine fiction, whose stories were regularly adapted for stage and screen, and as a writer for film and commercial theatre, Maugham was deeply associated with the market. Yet his subtle, understated stylistics and his literary reputation fit the description Faye Hammill has offered of authors whose project was “not wholly aligned with either high modernism or popular culture” (6). Maugham can be connected with those authors in whose writing Hammill traces a thematic contestation of cultural values, as well as a “preoccupation with style, taste, imitation, and social performance” which she tentatively associates with a “middlebrow perspective” (5). These suffuse Maugham’s work as a writer highly attuned to the way that the figure of the Modern Girl was similarly demonised by highbrow culture or made the sweetheart of market modernity. 6

The Space Between

Maugham was also acutely aware that the dynamics that structured modern acclaim and approbation often played out in terms of the collision of the culture of letters with the rise of commercial image-based entertainment in ways that were often loosely translated as a culture war between the traditional, aristocratic English values and ascendant American popular culture. These dynamics were woven into the original story. As a foundational premise of postcolonial literary studies, Abdul JanMohamed has pointed out that by revealing the structual logic of the unequal binarisms that underpin the imperial project (self/other, white/black, man/ woman, and civilised/primitive) some narratives can subvert it (Ashcroft et al. 6). In JanMohamed’s formulation, the colonialist dynamic itself is one entirely based on projection and spectacle, in which the imperialist imposes a fantasised image upon the other which is actually the mirror image of himself: a figure JanMohamed connects to Lacan’s “imaginary.” In contrast, the “symbolic” intervention of self-conscious language, he argues, can allow a text to manipulate, critique, or redeploy these codes. In “Rain” Maugham draws attention to a series of binaries that underpin the imperial project in the Pacific: for instance, “natives” (238) versus “white ­people” (239), and “depravity” (237), “wickedness” and “sin” (252) versus “moral” (240), “Christianised” (241), “civilisation” (258). Further, a series of centres and peripheries structure the plot. Among them, the Europeanised Apia is positioned in contrast to the American naval outpost of Pago-Pago, and the New England origin of the Davidsons (249) is positioned against the old England of

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the Macphails, who have left behind the “soft English rain” (265). These binaries, largely structured around ideas about new and old worlds, also contain their own chronotopes. The missionaries represent an earlier form of colonialism, and the doctor and his wife its modern equivalent. As Felski explains, “the modern was deeply implicated from its beginnings with a project of domination,” and in “discourses of colonialism […] the historical distinction between the modern present and the primitive past was mapped onto spatial relations between Western and non-Western societies” (14). Yet, Maugham redeploys the Pacific, and particularly Samoa – halfway between “Sydney” and “Frisco” (“Rain” 274), as an ambiguous borderland, a space between competing regimes of value and culture. In his conception, as the new American “frontier” expands westward across the Pacific and encounters older forms of Europeanised colonialism, the neat logic of these binaries is undone. If the missionary couple presented an early project of modernisation there, they now represent a relative “past.” The Davidsons have been labouring in the Pacific for many years (249) while the rest of the world has been further modernising. Their attitudes about dancing, jazz, and sex appear somewhat outdated. Dr Macphail, in particular, finds Davidson’s dogmatism “vaguely troubling” (242), and urges him to consider that “there may be difference of opinion about what is right” (271). Rather than condemning Sadie as Davidson does, Dr Macphail “found Miss Thompson’s effrontery amusing” (264) and “admired the effrontery with which she bargained” (246). In Maugham’s Pacific, where east and west meet, the old and the new also collide and co-mingle. The contest of competing values takes place in an interpretive struggle and representational challenge over the body of the American Modern Girl. This, embodied by Sadie, becomes in this environment particularly ambiguous and somewhat inscrutable: a figure of potential emancipation on the one hand, or a body requiring management and containment, on the other. By drawing attention to the acts of judgement and appraisal undertaken by the Macphails and the Davidsons upon the islands of Samoa and the body of the woman, Maugham allows the story to become a subtly ironic commentary upon the grammar that structurally underpins the mythos of the region, where the logic of binarisms upon which the European relies to order his vision is stretched its furthest frontier, and the categories of primitive and modern, ­vulgar or advanced, and bad or good threaten to collapse. Maugham selfconsiously crafts Sadie as a fast-talking, hooch-drinking, jazz-listening, lipstickwearing working and traveling woman. He also carefully positions her within the context of an accelerated culture of spectacle: a highly visualised, consumer-­ driven, fast-past twentieth-century style of life represented by an incursive,

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feminising mass marketplace of Americanised commercial culture that is overtaking the backward or idyllic Pacific Island of Samoa. Sadie may in fact be a prostitute, or she may only be a Modern Girl: the recognised, legitimate authority by which appraisal or judgment can take place collapses in this space. Chris Dixon and Prue Ahrens argue that “[t]he Pacific, as Westerners understood it, was always more imagined than real, signifying a fantasy rather than an understanding of the region” (1). Across the story collection The Trembling of a Leaf in which “Rain” was printed, Maugham often engages the Pacific as a setting for drawing attention to the mechanics of projection, interpretation, and evaluation. Increasingly the subject of feminised celluloid images in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Pacific emerges in this tale as a mirror-space for a culture increasingly obsessed with spectacle and fantasy. In this way it is perhaps not just ironic but also appropriate that Sadie was subsequently made the subject of so many stage and film interpretations. In each instance, the medium of film intensified the embodied visibility of the character, invited the “inscrutable Pacific” to be gazed upon, and forced ambiguities into resolutions. A succession of “scarlet-lipped” actresses and SouthSeas loving filmmakers thus “showed” Sadie and the exotic Samoan setting to the audience, re-enacting the culture of consumption, entertainment, display, regulation, adjudication, and dismissal out of which this creature and her story first emerged. In this process, Sadie Thompson became a screen for the anxieties and fantasies of her time, set upon no more appropriate stage than that very in-between oceanic space of the modern Pacific, where old became new in Hollywood fantasies that offered a “primitive” and “exotic” world up for consumption. 7 Conclusion Maugham’s story of Sadie is set at the expanding frontier of the New World amidst an expanding culture of surface images, snap judgements, and quick interpretations, at the interface of their collision with older, more authoritarian and less relativistic but somewhat antiquated values. His narrative is focalised through the perspective of Dr Macphail, a “timid man” (“Rain” 250), who serves as a go-between figure to mediate between different regimes of taste and judgement: the “low” character of Sadie and the “high” handedness of the “exclusive” Reverend Davidson (“Rain” 235). But just as Sadie’s interpreters fill the space of spectacle with their own speculations and projections, and as she then becomes a mirror of their worldview, a similar dynamic is replicated and intensified as she is translated from page to screen. Her figure is interpreted for consumption, and her complexity cast aside. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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Whereas Maugham’s story may be read as a commentary upon those who judge or appraise her behaviour, whose roles are also to correct souls and manage native bodies, the visual economy of stage and cinema reduces her complex character to spectacle, and Maugham’s subtle irony to sensation. In writing from the space of the middlebrow, Maugham drew in large audiences for his work whilst also developing a sleek, polished magazine style that belied his literary complexity. The story of Sadie Thompson may be seen as a parable of taste, interpretation, culture, class, and judgement. Yet elements of the tale that allow it to serve as a clever critique of the very operations of judgement and spectacle from which its author himself had attracted both scorn and success are eclipsed by the story’s own absorption within the dynamics of mass consumption and cinematic pleasure.

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. “Issues and Debates: Introduction.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. 7–11. Balme, Christopher. Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Brawley, Sean, and Chris Dixon. Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Calder, Robert L. “Somerset Maugham and the Cinema.” Literature/Film Quarterly 6.3 (1978): 262–73. Colton, John, and Clemence Randolph. Rain: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923. Conor, Liz. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2004. Dixon, Chris, and Prue Ahrens. “Traversing the Pacific: Modernity on the Move from Coast to Coast.” Coast to Coast: Case Histories of Modern Pacific Crossings. Ed. Chris Dixon and Prue Ahrens. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 1–7. Edwards, Justin. “Polynesian Paradises: Explorations in Hollywood Island Drama.” American Studies in Scandinavia 33.1 (2001): 1–25. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979. Ed. Michel Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Galletly, Sarah. “The spectacular traveling woman: Australian and Canadian vision of women, modernity, and mobility between the wars.” Transfers 7.1 (2017): 70–87. Hammill, Faye. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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Hastings, Selina. The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham. London: John Murray, 2009. JanMohamed, Abdul R. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory.” 1985. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 18–23. Johnson, Katie N. “Before Katrina: Archiving performative downpours and fallen women named Sadie in ‘Rain’ and ‘The Deluge.’” Modern Drama 52.2 (2009): 351–68. Lafontaine, Andrée. Sink or Swim in Liquid Modernity: The Chronotope of the Modern Woman in Early 1930s Hollywood. Diss. Concordia University, 2014. Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Lawrence, Amy. “Rain: Theorising the Transitional Film.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11.4 (1989): 21–3. Matthews, Jill Julius. Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity. Sydney: Currency, 2005. Maugham, Somerset. “Miss Thompson.” The Smart Set 64.4 (April 1921): 3–26. Maugham, Somerset. “Rain.” The Trembling of a Leaf. 1921. London: Heinemann, 1974. 234–98. Maugham, Somerset. A Writer’s Notebook. London: Heinemann, 1949. McGuire, John Thomas. “Rending the Veils of Illusion: W Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Letter’ and its Two Definitive Film Interpretations.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 53.1 (2012): 7–21. Meyers, Jeffrey. “Tis a pity she’s a whore: Conrad’s Victory and Maugham’s ‘Rain.’” Notes on Contemporary Literature 42.1 (2012): 1–2. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: ­Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford UP, 1999. 833–44. Musgrove, Brian. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. London: Zed, 1999. Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Rees, Anne. “Stepping through the Silver Screen: Australian Women in the United States, 1920s–1950s.” Journeys 17.2 (2017): 49–73. Schroeder, Jonathan. “Consuming Representation: A Visual Approach to Consumer Research.” Representing Consumers: Voices, Views and Visions. London: Routledge, 1999. 193–230. Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Raleigh, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Woolf, Virginia. “Middlebrow.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth, 1942. 112–19. Woollacott, Angela. Race and the Modern Exotic. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2011.

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Revising the Romance: Depictions of Biracial Women and Mixed Marriage in Anglo-Indian Popular Fiction Melissa Edmundson Abstract This chapter examines two Imperial romance novels that focus on female biracial characters and how these characters are viewed by Anglo-Indian society. It begins with an overview of biracial characters in nineteenth-century British literature and discusses the tendency of British women writers to present more complex, multi-dimensional mixed-race characters in their fiction. The chapter then moves to a comparison of Fanny Emily Penny’s Caste and Creed (1890) and Mary Churchill Luck’s Poor Elisabeth (1901).

Keywords Imperial romance – Anglo-Indian fiction – mixed-race characters – Fanny Emily Penny – Mary Churchill Luck (“M. Hamilton”)

Despite renewed scholarly interest in their work, British women writers of the Imperial romance, or “adventure romance,” have been relegated to one of two categories: those who advance the rape narrative that proliferated in AngloIndian fiction following the 1857 Indian Uprising, and those who challenged such narratives. Women writers have likewise been accused of upholding the Imperial ideal by creating one-dimensional characters who either fall into the role of English hero/heroine or uncivilised Indian Other. Yet, there is a body of literature – most notably by women writers – within the genre of ­Imperial romance that remains neglected among scholars of Anglo-Indian middlebrow literature but which nonetheless represents an integral period in race relations between the Indians and the British around the turn of the twentieth century. These are romances centering on depictions of biracial characters whose cultural indeterminacy came to symbolise the troubled union of Great Britain and India. These mixed-race “Eurasian” characters appear in many works of nineteenth-century fiction, but their portrayals are typically limited to

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­ ndeveloped supporting roles and unflattering stereotypes. After the cultural u trauma of the Indian Uprising, positive portrayals of biracial characters became even more uncommon. Still rarer are depictions of female Eurasian main characters who are given detailed personalities that make them more than one-dimensional, stereotypical set pieces that exist on the fringes of the narrative. This chapter examines two culturally significant novels that advance and challenge traditional notions of race relations in Anglo-India. A rare instance of a Eurasian heroine can be found in Fanny Emily Penny’s Caste and Creed (1890), an Anglo-Indian romance novel in which Zelma Anderson, the daughter of a Scottish merchant and his Brahmin wife, exhibits positive qualities of both races. She is born in India, educated in England, and then returns to India a seemingly perfect balance of sense and sensibility. Zelma is devoted to her father, but grows increasingly disheartened by what she sees as her mother’s less-disciplined habits and religious superstitions. Zelma’s character and manners ensure that she is wholeheartedly accepted by the Anglo-Indian community, and she achieves a successful, mutually-loving marriage with the Englishman Percy Bell. A far less flattering (yet still sympathetic) depiction of a Eurasian protagonist is the title character in Mary Churchill Luck’s Poor Elisabeth (1901). Well-liked and popular while at school in England, Elisabeth Murray has no idea that her mixed-race background has already cast a social stigma on her identity. Her attempts at social acceptance within Anglo-Indian society is constantly checked by the ultra-rational and prejudiced British colonials who make up her family and community and who alternately feel either pity or hatred towards her. Elisabeth’s eventual doom is a direct comment on wider Anglo-Indian society’s failure to make room for people who do not conform to their strict standards of “proper” behavior for women of her age and class. Considering these authors’ involvement with issues of gender, race, and empire gives readers a new dimension through which to understand the cultural implications of their writing at the height of the British Empire. These narratives subvert and complicate perceived negative stereotypes of mixed-race people and are important attempts to imagine greater acceptance of Eurasians within the Anglo-Indian community. Anxieties about racial boundaries naturally found their way into Imperial fiction written by both men and women. According to Abena P.A. Busia, these novels inscribe within them several fictions […] and however ‘innocent’ such stories as those by Henty or Haggard may appear to be, their effect is to encode in the popular mind the superiority of the white male dominant class, against the inferiority of the colored peoples of the earth. (362)

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Likewise, Shompa Lahiri identifies a “biological determinism” that predominated racial understanding in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In much of Anglo-Indian literature, Indians living in ­England inevitably “reverted to racial type.” Thus, efforts to break away from ridigly-­defined racial categories often resulted in “discord and ultimate tragedy” (Lahiri 103). The representation of characters of different racial backgrounds and their interactions with one another made Imperial novels important c­ ritiques of empire. Phillip Darby claims that Anglo-Indian fiction “takes personal relationships as its point of reference – which is to say that political issues are broached through the depiction of personal feelings and behavior” (Lahiri 79). Anglo-Indian popular fiction was integral to shaping the British public’s conception of race relationships with those they colonised. Darby claims, “[f]or the British there was a sense of vulnerability and a determination to shore up the foundations of power, and hence strict limits to the extent the two peoples could relate” (82). Essential to the “shoring up” of this power, British novelists typically emphasised stability over reform and “social distance between ruler and ruled” (Darby 90). Consequently, “the fiction of the period marginalised and depersonalised the colonial subject” (90). Yet, Anglo-Indian romance novels, particularly those written by women and which focus on interracial relationships, frequently complicate this notion. As the nineteenth century progressed, issues surrounding race and empire increasingly influenced the work of women writers. According to Suvendrini Perera, novels written in the first half of the nineteenth century portray the socio-political workings of empire “as productions of the defining oppositions between center and margins” (3). The increased emphasis on empire in fiction writing coincided with the growing number of British women living within colonial regions, especially India. As more women gained firsthand knowledge of the subcontinent, they began to turn their experiences into fiction, which led to the birth of the Anglo-Indian romance in the 1880s, a genre that foregrounded women’s place within the Imperial system. Anne McClintock believes that because the “architecture of Imperialism was gendered throughout by the fact that it was white men who made and enforced laws and policies in their own interests,” women were “barred from the corridors of formal power” and thus “experienced the privileges and social contradictions of Imperialism very differently from colonial men” (30). These varied perceptions were reflected in the literature of the time. Susan Meyer claims that though male writers such as Dickens and Trollope frequently link white women with non-white colonised subjects in order to highlight anxieties connected to British moral degeneracy, women authors utilise this link in order to call attention to general limitations of gender shared by both white British women and those colonised

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by the British (Meyer 7). Sarah Bilston has likewise recognised the political implications in Anglo-Indian fiction set within the domestic space. She notes that “as historians and critics have uncovered the Englishwoman’s role as a ‘civilising’ agent in the Imperial project, so too they have recognised that lateVictorian British women used Imperialism as a means of developing a ‘legitimate’ political role” (Bilston 321). Building on these critiques of the importance of empire within Victorian fiction, Shuchi Kapila, in her study of what she terms the “Anglo-Indian family romance,” seeks to highlight the importance of interracial relationships between Indian women and British men within the Anglo-Indian romance genre and what these fictional relationships can tell us about the cultural politics of the time in which they were written. Kapila recognises these narratives as “more than simple love-stories” (Kapila 4) because interracial romances “reconfigure adventure and domestic fiction by engaging with racial difference, interracial desire, and miscegenation” (4). The AngloIndian popular romance novel thus gives readers something that the Victorian domestic novel does not: a more fully realised exploration of the blending of Eastern and Western cultures. This makes these romances “a necessary supplement to the Victorian novel” (9). Kapila rightly notes that a major part of the cultural significance of AngloIndian fiction – when read against British adventure or domestic fiction – is that it consistently places non-European women at its narrative centre and allows them to be a more integral part of British life in India (52). Yet there are still relatively few examinations of the social position of biracial women within Anglo-Indian literature. One major exception is Indrani Sen’s analysis of how Eurasian women functioned in the British imagination and symbolised “deep-rooted colonial anxieties” (Sen 86). In addition to being a perceived threat to the Imperial hierarchy since, by blood, these women belonged to both cultural groups, Eurasians were repeatedly depicted as ‘intruders’ who constantly strive to be on equal terms with the British ruling class (86–87). Because they contained a mixture of ‘black’ and ‘white,’ biracial women were thought to be inferior to both Indian and British women: “the factors of race, class and sexuality inflected the cultural constructions of Eurasian women with greater sensuality, weaker will power and, by inference, more proneness to ‘immorality’ than the ‘native’ woman” (48). With these perceived “weaker” genetic qualities, Eurasian women were viewed as a threat to the established cultural and racial superiority of the British because they had the ability to attract, marry, and eventually produce children with British men without having to reveal themselves as biracial: European in her appearance as she is, the Eurasian woman, in a sense, signifies the black ‘face’ behind a near-white ‘mask’ and the marriage of - 978-90-04-42656-6

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the white man with the almost-white Eurasian woman is seen as a more immediate threat to Anglo-Indian Imperial and ethnic identity. (88)1 This attitude also points to deeper gender anxieties, as genetic deficiencies that derived from racial mixing were believed to originate in the Indian mother rather than the English father. Eurasian characters in much of nineteenth-century fiction are usually relegated to supporting roles that ultimately reinforce widespread cultural stereotypes.2 Heroic Indian women have fared somewhat better, with a prominent example being Philip Meadows Taylor’s Seeta (1872). Beautiful and intelligent, Seeta sacrifices herself to save her English husband during the Indian Uprising of 1857. One of the earliest portrayals of a female Eurasian character is Anne Berners, the title character in William Browne Hockley’s “The Half-Caste Daughter” (1841). Although largely ambivalent about race and empire, Hockley examines the social dynamics of the Anglo-Indian community and its resistance to allowing mixed-race members to enter British society in India. A more sympathetic picture of a biracial heroine can be found a decade later in Dinah Mulock Craik’s portrayal of Zillah Le Poer, the title character in her novella The Half-Caste (1851). Taken from India after the death of her English father and Indian mother, Zillah suffers a life of hardship and deprivation in the household of her uncle, where she is treated as a servant until the family can claim her inheritance. The narrative ultimately offers Zillah a happy ending, however, in the form of both a loving marriage to a kind and respectable Englishman, as well as her inheritance, which she remains in control of even after her marriage. As the nineteenth century progressed and Indo-British relations became more complicated, these types of characters that symbolised the biological and social union of India and Britain likewise became more multidimensional. These characters are almost invariably created by British women with firsthand experience in India. Fanny Emily (Farr) Penny (also known as “F.E. Penny” and “Mrs. Frank Penny”) spent over twenty years in India as the wife of a British missionary working in Madras, and beginning around the turn of the century, she steadily published Anglo-Indian romances almost every year until her death in 1939. After arriving with her husband in the Nilgiris District, Penny 1 For a discussion of how this anxiety regarding biracial women continued into twentiethcentury Anglo-Indian fiction, cf. D’Cruz 33–5. 2 An exception to this general rule is the portrayal of Ezra Jennings in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). It is also interesting to note that this more nuanced characterisation of a biracial character appears in a sensation novel, a genre which, like Anglo-Indian fiction, has historically been relegated to the status of “popular” fiction and only until recently has been the subject of serious study by literary critics. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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formed a friendship with fellow Anglo-Indian novelist Bithia Mary Croker, who encouraged her to take up fiction writing (Holland 192–93). Many of Penny’s novels deal with issues of racial identity and cultural intermingling, including A Mixed Marriage (1903) and A Question of Colour (1926). In a 1921 interview, Penny stressed the continuing importance of the “Eurasian question” within Anglo-Indian society, saying that the community has “many difficulties to contend with and as time goes on […] the English in India will be less able to help them” (Holland 193). Penny’s first novel, Caste and Creed (1890) is centered on Zelma Anderson, the daughter of a Scottish merchant and his Brahmin wife.3 Penny stresses in the Preface that her aim in writing the novel is to raise awareness of the Eurasian social status, a subject “that now-a-days forces itself on the notice of our Anglo-Indian countrymen, and cannot be ignored.” Her intended focus is how “the force of heredity” impacts the lives of her mixed-race protagonists, and by drawing attention to this community she hopes that “more compassionate sympathy and kind consideration may be extended to them than, in my own experience, they have hitherto received from British residents in India” (“Preface”). Like many narratives with biracial protagonists, Caste and Creed spends its first chapters examining Zelma’s birth and childhood, focusing particularly on her appearance and intellectual/emotional potential. Her Indian mother takes pride in her marriage to a British man and even greater pride in giving him a “white” child, telling other women “that no Englishwoman could have borne her husband a fairer child” (Penny: Vol. 1, 23). Yet she insists on calling her daughter “Ahmonee” instead of “Zelma,” and switches her baby with another child to escape the Christian baptism planned by Anderson. As she grows, Zelma inherits distinct traits of both parents: her father’s “strong will” and “active, persevering spirit” and her mother’s “hot, passionate temperament” (Vol. 1, 28). Penny is careful to stress that these traits are not at odds in the child but are 3 After its initial publication by F.V. White in 1890, there were new editions of Caste and Creed published by Chatto & Windus in 1906, 1909, and 1913. According to the February 1921 issue of The Bookman, the novel “was one of the last novels published in the old two-volume form at one guinea” and “was afterwards rewritten and issued at six shillings” (193). By 1906, Chatto & Windus was advertising the novel as one of its “New Six-Shilling Novels” (Athenaeum, 27 January 1906, 117). In October-November 1921, Penny, her literary agent A.P. Watt, and Percy Spalding of Chatto & Windus came to an agreement to pursue interest in film rights to nine of Penny’s novels. These include The Inevitable Law (1907), Dilys (1905), Caste and Creed (1890), The Tea Planter (1906), The Rajah (1911), The Unlucky Mark (1909), Dark Corners (1908), Sacrifice (1910), and The Malabar Magician (1912) (Fanny Emily Penny Letters, A.P. Watt Records #11036, Box 244, Folder 229.13, Rare Book Literary and Historical Papers, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

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instead “linked,” a conjunction that gives her “force and courage” (Vol. i, 28).4 Yet, these emotions eventually lead to temper tantrums, which allow the narrative to explore the differing cultural attitudes of the parents. After witnessing one such tantrum, a shocked Anderson confronts his wife, who responds that Zelma is allowed to do whatever she wants because she simply will not obey her. Anderson responds that this freedom will “ruin” their daughter, who must be sent to England for proper education. During her ten years at a Kensington girls’ school, Zelma learns both “selfcontrol and self-repression” (Vol. i, 49) and identifies herself as British, telling her schoolmates, “I [belong] to my father and his country […] my mother is a foreigner” (Vol. i, 47). She is also quick to correct the other young women who suggest that she will one day “marry some handsome dark prince,” insisting instead that she loves England and will only ever love an Englishman (Vol. i, 47–48). With this self-repression come additional layers of masking based solely on Zelma’s biracial heritage. Though her classmates treat her with respect and reverence – due largely to her beauty and friendly disposition – Zelma increasingly feels her cultural difference, a difference that exists not so much in her outer skin colour as in her inner emotional potential. In a chapter titled “Strong Prejudices,” Penny spends several pages examining this personal conflict. Zelma feels things more deeply than the other young women around her. This emotional side is seemingly a more mature outgrowth of her earlier temper tantrums, but Zelma has learned too well that she must keep such emotions under control, which also causes her to stifle any outward feelings towards others. The “latent warmth of her heart” thus frightens Zelma who decides to “bury her emotions […] where she covered them with the cold heavy stone of English common-sense and propriety” (Vol. i, 50). In other words, the Indian side of her must be hidden (kept in check) by the British. Yet this proves to be a constant battle for Zelma. Later in the narrative, she admits; “It was as though my father’s and my mother’s nature warred within me […] As long as I live I shall feel my father’s calculating nature dogging the footsteps of my mother’s impulsive emotion” (106).5 4 Reviews of Caste and Creed were largely positive and recognised the social critique at the heart of the novel. While most reviewers found Zelma a likeable heroine, there were some that found the character almost too good, rendering her less realistic. For instance, the Graphic pointed out that Zelma was far too “angelic” as a heroine, which, combined with her being the daughter of a “Scottish merchant of the best type and a Brahmin lady,” ultimately make her a “far too exceptional product of exceptional parentage to excite interest in a class to which she assuredly does not belong” (13 September 1890, 295). 5 Sarah Bilston sees echoes of New Woman fiction in Zelma’s inner conflict and need for emotional freedom. Linking Penny’s novel with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856)

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The chapter also introduces readers to Percy Bell, a British civil servant who is returning to India aboard the same ship as Zelma and her English friend, Minnie Beaumont. Percy serves as an important Anglo-Indian cultural counterpoint to Minnie’s strictly English point-of-view. Though he prides himself on “always working for the general welfare of the Indian community” (63), Bell also readily admits his prejudice towards the Indian people, criticising their “feeble, nerveless character” (64). He also quickly dismisses Minnie’s praise of Zelma, concluding that no matter how “beautiful and clever,” Zelma “will nevertheless have all the failings of her race, which no amount of education can eradicate” (66). Representative of her racial community (as well as subject to the widespread racial stereotypes held by the majority of Penny’s readers), Zelma becomes someone whom Percy Bell immediately tries to label and classify (and thus to limit and culturally lessen), but who resists any mould in which he tries to place her. Bell is simultaneously frustrated and intrigued by Zelma’s refusal to fit within his pre-established cultural belief system: Percy tried to find the native mother in her face, but could not. He judged only by past experience. The East Indians whom he knew were generally the offspring of the lowest, blackest, Tamulian women, and of Englishmen of low tastes, if not of low birth. The better class of East Indians were those who intermarried amongst themselves, or were united to English mechanics, clerks, and soldiers […] He had known East Indians who had claim to a Cleopatra-like beauty; but he had never come across a beauty like this, a refined, tropical loveliness, that plainly bespoke a child of the South, and as plainly reflected the intellect of the North. (85–86) According to Anjali Arondekar, it is Bell’s failure to find the genetic Indian mother in Zelma’s physical appearance “that ultimately sanctions” (161) his romantic relationship with her, suggesting that biracial characters can only be happy “through their successful mimicry of whiteness, either chromatically or and Mona Caird’s Whom Nature Leadeth (1883), Bilston posits that through Zelma’s selfawakening, “Caste and Creed may therefore be related to a corpus of fin-de-siècle literature that utilised the correlation between woman, nature, and the south […] to articulate and justify young women’s extra-social needs” (332). Likewise, Nancy Paxton has commented on the connection between the emergence of the liberated woman and more widespread explorations of cross-racial romances in novels of the 1890s, stating that “these little-known AngloIndian novels about cross-cultural marriages reveal some of the ideological changes at the turn of the century that undermined basic assumptions about women’s sexuality and gender identity” (193–94). For more on this topic, cf. Paxton 193–228.

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sociologically” (160). Yet, what is important to remember in considering the above passage in the context of Bell’s preconceived racial notions and Zelma’s biracial heritage is that Bell appreciates her beauty precisely because she is different and unusual. And this difference is dependent on not only her beauty but also her intellect, a quality of mind that apparently shows in Zelma’s outward demeanour. While aboard ship, Percy has several chances to observe Zelma and continues to be frustrated at her unconscious ability to disrupt his preconceived notions of Eurasians: He watched her closely with an eagerness he was ashamed of, hoping and fearing at the same time to find those very traits he considered were the blemish of her race. He interested himself in her daily doings, expecting to hear that she slept and idled half the day away; he was disappointed and pleased to learn that she led a far more busy life than her friend Minnie. He noted her liking for jewels, and congratulated himself upon having discovered one Oriental feature in her character; but again he was astonished when he noted her disregard for dress […] she showed herself utterly indifferent to her frocks. Minnie, on the contrary, would appear in three or four different costumes in the day. penny, Vol. i, 89

Sarah Bilston sees the passenger ship in Anglo-Indian fiction “as a transitional space which is (to varying degrees) free from conventional British constraints” (326), and this space between the two cultural worlds allows Penny to “profoundly [unsettle] contemporary beliefs about race during the passage to India” (327). This is partly achieved in the above quotation by Penny setting the habits of Minnie against those of Zelma. Not only does Zelma show little sign of her Indian heritage, but she conducts herself in a more “English” way than her fully English friend. The unsettled nature of Percy’s attraction to Zelma, brought about by his repeated, clandestine gaze, is also apparent in his conflicted feelings. He is at once eager and “ashamed,” hopeful and fearful, “disappointed and pleased.” In addition to Percy Bell’s impression, Penny uses the Anglo-Indian residents of Trichinopoly as another source of commentary on Zelma’s precarious social standing within the community when she first arrives. Minnie’s aunt, Mrs. Beaumont, the wife of a British colonel and someone who is, like Percy Bell, more fully acquainted with Anglo-Indian society, is reluctant to accept Minnie’s enthusiasm for Zelma’s arrival at the Anderson home. She worries that Zelma might “prove vulgar” or show “the country-bred foibles of her race,” which would lead her to become a social outcast and give her no option but to

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return to her mother’s people (Penny: Vol. i, 184). Yet, as with Bell, Mrs. Beaumont is immediately impressed by Zelma’s “perfect manners” and “natural dignity” (Vol. 1, 184). Like many of her contemporaries, Penny relies on a stereotypical Indian villain and a plot to steal Zelma’s valuable jewels in order to propel many of the major events in the narrative. Most significantly to this contrived plot, however, is the fact that Zelma’s mother is taken in by her brother, Rutnam, a Brahmin who convinces his sister that Zelma stands to inherit all of Anderson’s estate, leaving Mrs. Anderson destitute. In addition to advancing the plot, the presentation of Zelma’s mother as someone who is tempted to steal from her own daughter in order to make an offering to Vishnu at a nearby temple and secure her own financial wellbeing serves to provide a convenient way to establish the cultural/moral distinction between Zelma’s parents. The Scottish Anderson is presented as a trustworthy, loving, and proud parent, while his wife is portrayed as conniving, superstitious, and selfish, living in separate rooms from the rest of her family and refusing any contact with the British community she married into. This view is upheld by Anderson himself, as he warns his daughter not to become too close to her mother, a woman who “in no way resembles the English lady of her age and position at home” and who “falls far short of the English woman’s standard” (Vol. 1, 227). This emphasis on the perceived negative aspects of the Indian character, represented in Mrs. Anderson and Rutnam, clearly situates the novel within a British Imperialist point of view, and Penny makes it clear to her readers that Zelma must be rescued from such “native” connections. After she is tricked by her mother and uncle into being present at a religious ceremony, and Percy appears at the Indian temple to save her, Zelma, who stands at the threshold of the temple, is literally pulled between two opposing forces. She is repelled by seeing her mother covered in ceremonial oil and ashes with her eyes “burning” with “fanatical madness” (Vol. 2, 183). Faced with this vision, Zelma “shudder[s]” and “[clings] to Percy” (ibid.). With Zelma’s rejection of her mother, followed by the death of her father, Percy steps in to claim her both for himself and for England. Yet, in Percy’s view, much like Anderson’s earlier in the narrative, Zelma’s future is conditional on her leaving all connections with India behind her: She shall rise to better things on the memory of the dead father. She shall say farewell to India itself for ever, and she shall adopt her father’s country. There she will never again be subjected to the evil influences of her mother’s people, and together we will work afar off for India’s good. (204–05)

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The reader’s final image of the newlywed couple is again on board a ship, this time bound for England. In words that are reminiscent of Anderson to his young Indian wife at the beginning of the novel, “my beautiful lotus-flower” (Vol. 1, 22), Percy combines both East and West in the description of Zelma, calling her, “My sweet rose! My beautiful lotus! My own wife!” (Vol. 2, 220). The combination of the English rose with the Indian lotus suggests that, unlike her mother, Zelma represents a balance that will ensure a much happier marriage and future. Written a decade after Penny’s novel, amid increasing prohibitions to interracial relationships in British India, Mary Churchill Luck’s Poor Elisabeth (1901) presents a much bleaker picture of the life of a biracial woman but remains no less profound in its critique of the consequences of racial prejudice.6 Luck wrote under the pseudonym “M. Hamilton,” and after her marriage to Churchill Arthur Luck, a British Army officer, in Lahore, Bengal, in 1898, she spent the next twenty years living in India before settling in England.7 Many of Luck’s novels highlight women’s experience within Anglo-Indian society, a society that frequently proves restrictive and narrow-minded. As Lynne Hapgood notes, “The mismatch between social institutions and conventions and the emotional and sexual needs of individuals is Mary Hamilton’s chief concern” (159). Elisabeth’s life is ultimately doomed by her intellectual simplicity and her one-sided love for Robert Kennedy, a cold and unsympathetic Anglo-Indian who barely manages to hide his intense dislike for Indians and Eurasians, including Elisabeth. Their tempestuous relationship is introduced while the two are on a voyage to India, with the entire first chapter devoted to Kennedy’s insults regarding Eurasians. He calls biracial women “the curse of India” (Luck 3, cf. Hamilton) and asserts, “[i]n a proper state of society that girl would never have been born, or being born, she would have been quietly put away. It would probably have been kinder to her, and certainly better for the world” (2). Later, he thinks to himself that “a lethal chamber in childhood would have been more merciful” (84). Kennedy is equally adamant in opposing marriage ­between the two races. He tells a friend, “[a] man who marries a Eurasian is a fool, and a criminal fool. He had better cut his throat, for then he alone would 6 The English Catalogue of Books for 1901 lists the price of Poor Elisabeth at six shillings (154). There are no records of any subsequent editions of the novel. 7 The reviewer in the 21 September 1901 issue of The Spectator assumed “M. Hamilton” was a male writer, concluding: “Mr. Hamilton’s work is always interesting and readable, but it is difficult to say whether this book or his last, The Dishonour of Frank Scott, would bear off the palm as an antidote to mirth” (395).

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suffer” (24). Through the narrator, readers get added details into the depth of Kennedy’s prejudice: Kennedy hated and despised natives, but he hated and despised Eurasians still more. A Eurasian combined all the worst faults of both races, untrustworthy, slothful, sensual, with glimpses of the most primitive instincts. He held the theory, that, as with the crossing of animals, the offspring often show a tendency to return to the forms and ways of some primeval ancestor, so it was with the crossing of human races. He confidently applied this theory to Eurasians. (70–71) Much like Caste and Creed, the voyage from England to India serves as a narrative space for commentary on the precarious social existence of the biracial heroine. In both Zelma and Elisabeth’s cases, they are popular and content in England, and each woman has English friends who idolise them for their beauty and kindness. It is not until they encounter, or are observed by, AngloIndians who are hyperaware of the racial hierarchies that exist within British society in India that they become the object of scrutiny.8 In some cases, characters such as Zelma are able to conquer this prejudice by winning over their Anglo-Indian family members (usually fathers) who have not seen their children for years – and are thus very much strangers to one another – and the ­local “memsahib” (usually the wife of the most prominent official in the colonial station) whose judgment on the new arrival serves as the rule of social law for the entire Anglo-Indian community. In Elisabeth’s case, she remains an outsider, both in her father’s house and in the larger community into which she is introduced on her return to India. Elisabeth is, however, popular among the younger male members of the community because of her physical beauty, suggesting that any positive attention and social connections she makes are based solely on superficial qualities. But Elisabeth herself cannot operate on this level and seeks more genuine connections with the people around her. After she receives a marriage proposal, Elisabeth delays making a decision because she does not love the man. Colonel Murray – himself bitterly regretful of the love match he made with Elisabeth’s Indian mother – refuses to condone this rationale in his daughter. She is not allowed to decide her own future because she is both a woman and of mixed ancestry. Murray lashes out at Elisabeth when she ultimately refuses the marriage proposal: 8 An early instance of a narrative detailing a mixed-race (male) protagonist’s return to India is Elizabeth Elton Smith’s “Reminiscences of a Half-Caste,” from her anonymously-published two-volume collection, The East India Sketch-book (Bentley, 1833). - 978-90-04-42656-6

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Don’t you understand it is an honour […] that a white man, an Englishman, should stoop to such as you? Don’t you know what it means to have black blood in your veins? Don’t you understand what it has been to me and to your step-mother to endure your presence as a living memory of disgrace? Do you think you can pick and choose – that many men would face the thought of a Eurasian as a wife? luck 128

Through the narrator, Luck makes it clear to readers that this attitude belies his own responsibility for choosing to marry an Indian woman and thus bringing Elisabeth into the world. What is more ironic is that Murray’s verbal attack on his daughter directly leads to her subsequent decision to escape to Kennedy’s house. After a night spent together, Kennedy hastily agrees to marry Elisabeth, whom he later admits he never loved, and learns that she is pregnant. She mistakenly reads a letter Kennedy wrote about his dislike of Eurasians and begins to be fearful of Kennedy’s view towards her. This is followed by the couple seeing an English couple with a “little brown child” (196). Elisabeth thinks the child has been adopted, but Kennedy tells her that “one of them has some native blood; it often happens” (197). This provokes a growing fear in Elisabeth that her own child will be “dark.” In a narrative that is similar to the sensational infanticide plot of Victoria Cross’s Anna Lombard (1901), Elisabeth discovers that her baby is “dark,” and fearing that Robert – who at this point in the narrative openly despises his wife – will desert her, she smothers her child in order to keep her husband’s love. Though Luck is largely sympathetic of Elisabeth and her actions, this is one instance where she betrays her cultural partiality. Through a judgment of the perceived moral failings of Elisabeth’s Indian side, it is suggested that Elisabeth’s lack of remorse over the murder of her baby comes from her mother’s line: She had no real repentance of what she had done. It would be curious to speculate if the generations on her mother’s side who had held the lives of girl babies cheaply and dealt death to them as to so many kittens, had in some way handed down their point of view to Elisabeth. luck 265

Whereas the title character in Anna Lombard also murders her newborn mixed-race child in order to give herself what she feels is a greater chance of being with her white, English love interest, she is ultimately given a happy ­ending in the form of both Christian forgiveness and a marriage with the man she loves. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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Elisabeth Murray, on the other hand, receives no such happy ending. After Kennedy discovers his wife’s crime, his further rejection of her drives Elisabeth to kill herself in despair. Yet this attempted suicide leads only to more pain and suffering. She shoots herself through the lungs and struggles between life and death for over a week. Kennedy feels no remorse but instead inwardly admits that he is “glad” and has “a wild thrill of joy at the thought of freedom” (307). To add to Elisabeth’s tragedy, Kennedy finds her scrapbook, which is full of clippings about how “some Eurasians are some good” (312). In her last intelligible words, Elisabeth gives Kennedy permission to marry her best friend, an English woman. Fittingly for this narrative of isolation and bigotry, Elisabeth tries unsuccessfully to communicate one last message to her husband: “she tried to speak to him, tried to make him understand something; but he could not find out what she wanted, and her unsatisfied eyes made his heart ache” (314). Yet, this “heart ache” proves as transitory as Kennedy’s love for Elisabeth, and he leaves the room. After Elisabeth dies alone, Kennedy’s first thought is “free” (315). Through Kennedy and his inability to feel any genuine emotion towards Elisabeth, the novel critiques a wider society that judges such biracial members of the Anglo-Indian community. As Lynne Hapgood states, “Poor Elisabeth is not a judgmental moral fable about the dangers of excessive emotion or a patronising assertion of racial superiority.” Instead, her “life critiques the emotional ignorance of the society in which she grows up” (Hapgood 161). I would qualify this astute statement by adding that it is not so much the English society in which Elisabeth grows up that demonstrates this “emotional ignorance,” but, rather, it is specifically the Anglo-Indian society that rejects her based solely on what it sees as racial inferiority. As Hapgood notes, “[t]he significance of India […] is rather in its power to turn the spotlight onto Englishness” (160). This idea is especially true if we look at Poor Elisabeth as an indictment of English society. Despite Elisabeth’s shortcomings, culminating in the murder of her child, readers are left with ultimate sympathy for Elisabeth due mainly to the fact that she is consistently failed by the narrow-minded Anglo-Indian society around her. The social consciousness of the novel was not missed by reviewers. The 10 August 1901 review in the Athenaeum commented: “It is a most miserable book, this; not a ray of joy or pleasure in it from beginning to end, and yet it is true all the same.” Kennedy receives no sympathy, and is described as a man with “the absolutely rigid conception of duty untouched by a spark of love, the correctness of attitude and the professional success of the man, certainly suggest a type – one of the dreariest to be met in this world.” Elisabeth, on the other hand, is described as “the loving creature” who “always does exactly the wrong

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thing, always shocks this awful husband’s correctness, and dies miserably unloved, and joyless even in her great love,” and “is wonderfully described and truly pathetic.” The reviewer concludes, “It is one of those stories which is not only true of the actual people described, but also seems to have an even wider and truer application than to them” (183), suggesting the socio-cultural moral of Indo-British relations and interracial relationships that is at the heart of the story. The Bookseller commended Luck for eschewing the conventional romantic and overly-simplistic idea of beautiful foreign women in favor of a story that deals with realistic racial issues, remarking that “the hard fact remains that for a white man to marry a Eurasian is to court certain unhappiness and disaster” (6 September 1901, 690). Likewise, The Bookman noted Luck’s treatment of a controversial cultural concern, admitting that “the subject is scarcely an attractive one, and the adequate treatment of it leads necessarily at times to touching on matters that are generally considered disagreeable.” The story, though “morbid” and “unpleasant in some of its details,” is nonetheless “very human” (August 1901, 161). The Publishers’ Circular concluded that although the novel was “indescribably sad throughout,” Elisabeth’s character would “evoke the warmest sympathy of the reader” (13 July 1901, 36). The cultural significance of these comments should not go unnoticed. Through her fictional account, Luck does something quite remarkable for the time. In an era when racial boundaries in India were becoming more rigidly defined, and the Eurasian community was increasingly disparaged by both the British and the native Indian populations, she manages to elicit more sympathy for the half-Indian character than for the white English character, a man whose sense of duty and devotion to his work on behalf of empire could, in other narratives, easily represent the best Imperial India has to offer. Early in the narrative, Elisabeth speaks with more meaning than she knows and summarises both her own personal tragedy and the greater tragedy of those like her: “I am not at all clever and I could not [missionise]. I only meant it seems a pity because one race is dark and another fair that they can never be friends. And I thought perhaps someone who had some of the blood of each, even though not a clever person, could understand better” (Luck 14). Though Mary Churchill Luck’s main character gives voice to this cultural tragedy, it is a tragedy that remained largely ignored by British society well into the twentieth century. The novel’s involvement with social critique also allows Luck to challenge the limits of the Imperial romance. For decades, these romances (written by both sexes) depended on strong, respectable, white British men who frequently sacrifice love and safety for the good of the empire. Another type is the British man who for years has been a servant to the empire and only finds a more complete existence through the intervention of a determined, beautiful,

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white British woman who has recently arrived in India and who is ready to do her bit to solidify the continuance of the empire though the creation of the Anglo-Indian family unit. As part of their formulae, these Imperial romances offer readers a series of trials and tribulations that the hero and heroine must undergo in order to reach ultimate happiness. The trouble usually centers on India itself in the form of rogue wildlife, dangerous landscape, famine, disease, and perhaps most typical, the machinations of scheming Indians who rarely represent more than one-dimensional plot devices. By looking at the progression of the Anglo-Indian romance and comparing such works as Caste and Creed and Poor Elisabeth, we can begin to recognise some important reversals and complications of such tropes that sustained the popularity of the Imperial romance for so many years. That Caste and Creed was republished whereas Poor Elisabeth was not, suggests cultural critique was perhaps most effectively introduced and disseminated to the reading public in the form of a more traditional romance. This shows in its likeable heroine and hero, its happy ending, and its very well-­ defined dividing line between “good” and “bad” characters, with native Indians conveniently supplying the roles of the villains of the story (a favourite device of Penny and many of her contemporaries). The more modest success of Poor Elisabeth, with its unflinching critique of the shortcomings of British colonial society was perhaps too “close to home” for a reading public who was raised to believe wholeheartedly in the ideals of the Imperial mission, as well as to idealize the British in India who were responsible for the essential workings of empire. With its tragic ending and deeply flawed characters, Luck’s novel was ahead of its time in imagining the negative effects of the British presence in India on both Indians and the British alike. Unlike Penny, Luck used the romance plot (or more precisely, the failed romance plot) as a way of challenging the very ideals that are upheld and celebrated in Caste and Creed. Ultimately, however, both novels help to complicate previous stereotypical presentations of biracial characters and foreground the experience of female mixed-race protagonists, giving these women more agency in deciding the course of their lives, whether they end happily, as is the case for Zelma Anderson, or tragically, as it does for Elisabeth Murray. The biracial heroines in both novels – no matter how “English” or “Indian” they turn out to be – refuse to neatly fit into any previously established type. Zelma and Elisabeth embody something beyond the typical white British protagonists that represented the domestic and moral center of the British Raj. Both narratives, one happy and the other tragic, also leave the reader with an ending that ultimately questions the Imperial status quo. Though Zelma finds happiness with Percy Bell, Penny makes it clear to her readers that the couple

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must continue to work “for India’s good,” presumably through fostering greater understanding between the races, a unity that is symbolised in both Zelma herself and in her marriage. On the other hand, Elisabeth represents a more tragic portrayal of a heroine who tries to overcome the prejudice around her by following her heart. Luck also makes it clear to her readers that Elisabeth’s potential is most directly thwarted by two white British men: her father and husband. Robert Kennedy, as the anti-hero, represents all that is wrong with Imperial India at the time of the novel’s publication. He is a government official who, unlike Percy Bell, has a very different idea of what working for India’s good means and remains unchanged in his racist views. Alison Sainsbury has noted that women purposefully chose to interrogate the socio-political world of Imperial India through these romances (Sainsbury 171–72). This assertion complicates previous critical explorations of British women’s Anglo-Indian romance novels which tend to present these works as vehicles that pander to their audience’s need for escapist, exotic fiction or simply as formulaic products that show a lack of imagination or intellect. Similarly, Shuchi Kapila asserts: The ideology of romance presents love as an exceptional case which defies official rules governing social and sexual intermixing in any culture. The subversive potential of the exceptional case opens up many possibilities for arguing for the transformative potential of love plots, their questioning of received social norms, and their Utopian projection of possibilities in a world that denies them. (128) Anglo-Indian romance narratives involving biracial protagonists take us a step further in recognising the cultural importance of such works. As specific products of empire, their starting point is beyond the initial instance of contact between Indian and British that results in these main characters’ existence. Where interracial relationships were once considered taboo for British readers, particularly women readers, these novels present their audiences with the next step of this cultural amalgamation: what happens to the children of empire? More specifically, in romance plots that involve female biracial protagonists, these authors ask what place women have within the Imperial system that created them. Considering these authors’ involvement with issues of gender, race, and empire gives readers a new dimension in discussing the cultural value of their writing at the height of the British Empire. Through largely sympathetic portrayals of biracial heroines with distinctly different outcomes – Zelma Anderson, who successfully overcomes prejudice, and Elisabeth Murray, who does not – these

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novels draw attention to the wide array of experiences lived by mixed-raced members of the Anglo-Indian community. These narratives subvert and complicate perceived negative stereotypes of mixed-race people and thus become important early attempts to imagine greater acceptance of ­Eurasians within the Anglo-Indian community, anticipating later-twentieth-century-attempts to bridge the cultural divide between the Indians and the British. Works Cited Arondekar, Anjali. “‘Too Fatally Present’: The Crisis of Anglo-Indian Literature.” Colby Quarterly 37.2 (June 2001): 145–63. Bilston, Sarah. “A New Reading of the Anglo-Indian Women’s Novel, 1880–1894: Passages to India, Passages to Womanhood.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 44.3 (2001): 320–41. Busia, Abena P.A. “Miscegenation as Metonymy: Sexuality and Power in the Colonial Novel.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 9.3 (1986): 360–72. Darby, Phillip. The Fiction of Imperialism: Reading between International Relations and Postcolonialism. London and Washington, DC: Cassell, 1998. D’Cruz, Glenn. Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians. Post/Colonial Litera-ture. Ed. Glenn D’Cruz, Maureen Perkins and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2006. Hamilton, M. [Mary Churchill Luck]. Poor Elisabeth. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1901. Hapgood, Lynne. Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture, 1880–1925. Manchester UP, 2005. Hockley, William Browne. “The Half-Caste Daughter.” The Widow of Calcutta; The HalfCaste Daughter; and Other Sketches. Vol. 2. London: D.N. Carvalho, 1841. Holland, Clive. “Mrs. F.E. Penny.” The Bookman 59 (February 1921): 191–93. Kapila, Shuchi. Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2010. Lahiri, Shompa. Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880– 1930. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1996. Paxton, Nancy L. Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers UP, 1999. Penny, Fanny Emily. Caste and Creed. 2 vols. London: F.V. White, 1890. Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

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“Rev. of Caste and Creed.” The Graphic. 13 September 1890. 295. “Rev. of Poor Elisabeth.” The Athenaeum. 10 August 1901. 183. “Rev. of Poor Elisabeth.” The Bookman. August 1901. 161. “Rev. of Poor Elisabeth.” The Bookseller. 6 September 1901. 690. “Rev. of Poor Elisabeth.” The Publisher’s Circular. 13 July 1901. 36. “Rev. of Poor Elisabeth.” The Spectator. 21 September 1901. 395. Sainsbury, Alison. “Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel.” Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India. Ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert. Manchester UP, 1996. 163–87. Sen, Indrani. Woman and Empire: Representations in the Writings of British India, 1858– 1900. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002. Smith, Elizabeth Elton. “Reminiscences of a Half-Caste.” The East India Sketchbook. 2 Vol. London: Richard Bentley, 1833.

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“A small seasoning of curry-powder” in A.J. Cronin’s Hatter’s Castle Robert Wirth Abstract A.J. Cronin’s voluminous debut novel, Hatter’s Castle (1931), constitutes a reaction to the immensely popular Kailyard school of Scottish fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Just like its anti-Kailyardian hypotext – George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901) – Hatter’s Castle subverts and undermines various conventions of the Kailyard. After delineating the profuse similarities between the two novels, this contribution will hone in on one particular sub-plot of Hatter’s Castle that deviates from its acclaimed precursor in that it features India. It will be argued that what on the surface appears to be a token inclusion and affirmation or promulgation of colonialist attitudes and thought, in fact, represents a subtle and veiled form of criticism of the colonialist ethos when looked at through the prism of the anti-Kailyard. In this way, Hatter’s Castle exemplifies the potential of middlebrow fiction to simultaneously affirm and question dominant imperial ideology.

Keywords A.J. Cronin – G.D. Brown – India – Kailyard/anti-Kailyard – lad o’pairts – remittance man

1 Introduction She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive. nehru 627–28

Whilst conducting research for The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827), the third and final tale to his Chronicles of the Canongate, Sir Walter Scott wrote in a journal entry of the 25th of August 1827 that, in order to add some authentic spice to his novella, he needed the help of a friend who had actually been to India;

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Scott lamented the fact that he could not “go on with the tale without a small seasoning of curry-powder.” Roughly one hundred years later, fellow Scot A.J. Cronin (1886–1981) also felt the need to add a tiffin1 or two to his anti-Kailyardian debut novel Hatter’s ­Castle (1931). For these “exotic” additions to Hatter’s Castle, the physicianturned-novelist Cronin, unlike Walter Scott, did not need the help of a friend; in 1919, he had actually ventured to colonial India himself in his capacity as a temporary ship’s surgeon on the S.S. Ranaganji, albeit only for a rather short stint in Calcutta. He recalls his voyage to India in detail in his autobiography Adventures in Two Worlds (1952), and one episode is particularly telling of Dr Cronin’s critical attitude to imperial mind-sets and prejudices, seen when he narrates his encounter with two first-class passengers from England and their treatment, or rather maltreatment, of the Indian quartermaster (or “serang”) Hasan, who had helped him save countless passengers after an outbreak of the smallpox on the ship: ‘Oh, look, look Ronnie. There’s that absurd creature again.’ […] the object of her mirth – Hasan. The huntress from Cheltenham swung round, bent her wit, her fascinations upon me. ‘Where did you keep him all the voyage, Doctor dear? In a special cage?’ Silence—a vision of the serang’s nobility rising before me. ‘Yes…, in a way … it was a cage… But isn’t it queer, Miss Jope-Smith—the animals were all outside.’ Though I kept my voice even, I thought that I should suffocate. Abruptly I turned away, went below to my cabin and beat my clenched fists hard against the wooden Bulkhead. (38) His encounters with the narrow-minded, ill-informed prejudices and misconceptions that passengers on that trip held about India and its “natives” were later to inform some of the British colonial attitudes that Cronin ascribed to several of the characters he portrayed within the middlebrow novel Hatter’s Castle, where he criticised the whole colonial ethos he saw at work in the small-town society of his native Scotland. In Middlebrow and Gender: 1890–1945, Christoph Ehland and Cornelia Wächter maintain that middlebrow writing often “contains invitations to

1 “Tiffin” is an Anglo-Indian term meaning light meal, snack or luncheon. In Hatter’s Castle, Matthew Brodie’s speech upon his return from Calcutta is recurrently spiced up with such Anglo-Indian words.

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q­ uestion dominant ideologies, which the reader can but need not accept” (4) and they argue that these narratives: raise disturbing issues concerning the crumbling Empire, collapsing class structures and the deterioration of the Victorian family ideal and contribute largely to the deconstruction and redefinition of gender roles and ideals. In this sense, middlebrow writing can be regarded as a domestication of modernist themes. It is a form of anxiety management that allows unsettling issues to be raised while maintaining at least a superficial impression of narrative stability and security. (3) The “small seasoning” that A.J. Cronin applied to Hatter’s Castle represents one such ambivalent invitation to question dominant ideologies, which takes the form of a subplot revolving around young Matthew Brodie, who is sent to Calcutta by his tyrannical father, James Brodie, the hatter of the title, in order to “make a man of him” (26) – only for the son to eventually return in disgrace: a braggart, a gambler, and a drunkard. In the subplot that comprises Matthew’s departure for India, the epistolary accounts of his time spent there, and his eventual catalytic return to parochial Scotland, the colonial space is merely presented in the abstract – as “a myth, and an idea, a dream and a vision,” to use Nehru’s words, that manifests itself in three distinct forms: firstly, for Matthew’s father, James Brodie, as a vicarious means of potential upward social mobility and prestige; secondly, for both Matthew’s doting mother, Margaret Brodie, and his fiancée, Agnes Moir, as a space of potential moral corruption and physical seduction; and thirdly, for Matthew himself, as a space of independence and licentiousness. India features in the novel not so much as a real place, but rather as a psychological space that exists primarily in the imagination of those characters who know it least. Its inclusion serves to subvert what Richard Cook calls the “ideological project of the ‘cabbage patch’” and, in particular, the “Kailyard’s focus on local, individual moral struggles [which] functions […] exempt from the effects of urbanization, modernity, and the realities of the outside world” (1058). Embedded within the conventions of the anti-Kailyard, the subplot ­contests and challenges the notions and stereotypes of an exotic India prevalent even in small-town Scotland of the late-nineteenth century. In Hatter’s Castle, we are thus by no means presented with the “very real and present and pervasive” India that its first Prime Minister points to in the introductory quote, but rather with various deviating and contradictory colonial gazes and interpretations of what the colonial space represents to the novel’s respective characters; and it is this negotiation of these various “versions” of India and their

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juxtaposition with parochial Scotland within Hatter’s Castle that will constitute the focus of this essay. 2

Immensely Popular, but Now Forgotten

But, before venturing into select depictions of these imagined imperial spaces and their various ramifications within Hatter’s Castle, a few preliminary remarks on A.J. Cronin and his reception seem in order, since he can no longer be considered a household name. It thus appears expedient to briefly comment on his immense popularity at the time, to touch upon the mixed critical response to his work in general and to Hatter’s Castle in particular, and to place the novel within its wider (Scottish) literary context. The Scottish physician-turned-novelist Archibald Joseph Cronin was born into an Irish-Catholic family in Cardross (just west of Glasgow), and was schooled in Dumbarton, which was later to serve as the thinly-disguised blueprint for the fictional borough of Levenford, the main setting of Hatter’s Castle as well as of three others of his novels. He is nowadays best remembered for his novel The Citadel (1937), which is said to have been influential in bringing about the National Health Service in 1948,2 and for his novella Country Doctor (1935) – particularly for its later adaptation as the long-running bbc radio and TV series “Dr Finlay’s Casebook” (1962–1971). In the 1930s, in addition to his first successful novel Hatter’s Castle, which enabled him to give up practising medicine, he wrote two more bestsellers: The Stars Look Down (1935) and the aforementioned The Citadel (1937). Cronin was a prolific writer: as well as various essays and plays, he wrote over 20 novels, many of which were translated, adapted for television, film, the stage or the radio in Britain and America, as well as in Italy, Germany and India. While Cronin never really managed to ­repeat the huge successes he enjoyed with his first three novels – leading Seamus O’Mahony to claim that “Cronin’s work declined creatively after the 1930s” (177) – he, nonetheless, continued to be immensely popular. Alan Riach, for instance, surmises that Cronin is “perhaps the richest author Scotland produced between Scott and J.K. Rowling” (57). His sales figures are indeed ­impressive: “by 1958, [for instance,] the total sales of his books in the United States had passed the seven million” (Mitgang), and by 1961, his sales had 2 For a discussion on how far Cronin’s The Citadel contributed to setting up the nhs, see: Seamus O’Mahony. “AJ Cronin and The Citadel: Did a Work of Fiction Contribute to the Foundation of the nhs?” The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 42 (2012): 172–78.

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e­ xceeded three million in the Soviet Union alone, where he was widely appreciated for his egalitarian stance (cf. Smith). Despite his immense success and popularity both domestically and abroad, however, up until very recently, most of Cronin’s books were not in print,3 and he seemed to be all but forgotten. The reason for his falling into oblivion is not least occasioned by the mixed reception that his work in general received: in 1941, John T. Frederick, for instance, asserted that critics were in two minds about Cronin: For those reviewers to whom sales reports are satisfactory barometers of merit there is no difficulty: Cronin is enthroned among the great, […] But there are not wanting those who deny that he has more than passing popular appeal. In England, especially, critical opinion of Cronin has often been adverse, sometimes contemptuous; […] Cronin has been treated more generously both by bookbuyers and by reviewers in America than in his native country. (121) In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, moreover, considered him a “Markenartikler,” someone who produced a certain “brand” of literature, and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung deemed him an “erstklassiger zweitklassiger Schriftsteller,” a first-rate second-class author (cf. “Gestorben: Archibald J. Cronin”). Academia, even in the rapidly emerging field of Scottish Studies today, has so far largely eschewed most of Cronin’s work,4 and most compendia of Scottish ­literature merely mention him in passing, if at all. Cronin was obviously not high-brow enough for some, or too popular for others. Cronin has, in fact, frequently been labelled middlebrow: his obituary in The Times reads that “his was middle-brow fiction of the most adroit and telling kind” (qtd. in Davies 17), and Sheila Hodges in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1981–85 has described Cronin as “a middlebrow writer par excellence” (103): a verdict that, according to his son Vincent, Cronin himself accepted, albeit only late in life (cf. Davies 257). 3

Hatter’s Castle: Literary Echoes and Appropriations

Already his debut novel Hatter’s Castle, to which we shall now gradually turn, displays aspirations towards high-brow literature, and, failing to meet the high 3 It is only from 2013 onwards that Cronin’s works have been reissued by the publisher Pan MacMillan. 4 The only novel of Cronin’s that attracted wider academic interest is The Citadel.

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expectations of his time, attracted rather varied reactions. Cronin himself writes in Adventures in Two Worlds (1952)5 that: Hatter’s Castle, […] was acclaimed by critics, chosen by the Book Society, translated into twenty-one languages, serialized, dramatized, and filmed. It went into endless editions, [and] has sold, to date [that is 1952], approximately three million copies. (232) And while Sir Hugh Walpole, one of the literary giants at that time, called it the “finest novel since the war” (qtd. in Davies 95), or a reviewer for The New York Times even found Hatter’s Castle the work of a novelist “destined for the seats of the mighty” (Mitgang), many critics lamented and even deplored, as J. Macnair Reid observed, “its literary deficiencies, its derivative story, its grotesque overstatement of character and fact” (18). The novel’s patent similarities to other works of fiction were especially criticised.6 John T. Frederick, for instance, pointed out that Cronin’s first novel was overpraised. Its name, Hatter’s Castle, is suggestive of a literary origin for the author’s inspiration; and there can be no doubt that the central figure of James Brodie, the hatter and master of the strange ‘castle’ and the human beings tenanted therein, owes something to Dickens and a good deal to Hardy. (121) In addition to the obvious echoes of Dickens and Hardy, the main literary origin of Cronin’s inspiration that Frederick is hinting at here is, of course, George Douglas Brown’s anti-Kailyardian masterpiece The House with the Green Shutters (1901),7 of which Cronin himself admiringly stated that it was “undoubtedly a pioneer book,” which “with its almost volcanic eruption, revealed all that had been so carefully glossed over or concealed” (“Realism” 173) within the Kailyard school of literature. Indeed, anyone familiar with Brown’s attack on nostalgic and sentimental nineteenth-century cabbage-patch versions of parochial Scotland will have no difficulty detecting the abundance of similarities to The House with the Green Shutters in the following brief outline of Hatter’s Castle. 5 Which, today, is generally considered to be fictional rather than factual. 6 For a discussion on Cronin and plagiarism with regard to Hatter’s Castle see: Alan Davies. A.J. Cronin: The Man Who Created Dr Finlay. Richmond: Alma, 2011, 102–04. 7 Further works of mention which were inspired by The House with the Green Shutters are John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914) and, of course, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s first book of his The Scots Quair trilogy, Sunset Song (1932).

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The often predictable main plot of the novel, which drags on for an exhausting 637 pages of varying quality, is soon told: set in 1879 in the small fictional Scottish town of Levenford on the Firth of Clyde, the narrative revolves around the hatter James Brodie, whose thrawn stubbornness, overbearing pride and innate viciousness eventually cause his downfall, whilst dragging his business and his whole family down with him. The main protagonist, Brodie, labours under the misapprehension that he is descended from nobility; and all his actions are geared towards selfaggrandisement and elevation of his own standing in the community. He is the textbook patriarchal tyrant and bully who expects everyone to do his bidding and is accustomed to always getting his own way, and who, in the end, loses everything. His destruction is caused by his hubris and obstinate unwillingness to adapt to changing times: when a competitor moves in next door to his hat shop, he gradually loses all his customers since they prefer to take their business to someone who treats them with the respect and courtesy that Brodie never provides. Within his home, a sham castle, he alone is king. His frail old mother, his fragile wife Margaret, his two daughters Mary and Nessie, and his son Matthew are all forced to cower before him and satisfy his every whim and fancy. In the course of the downward spiral, when his wife falls ill and can no longer take care of the “castle” and eventually dies of cancer, Brodie increasingly takes to the bottle, and unsuccessfully attempts to compensate for his own failures by vicariously feeding off the lives of his children, especially that of his youngest and favourite daughter, Nessie. Of the numerous intertwined sub-plots, which all in some way or another contribute to Brodie’s undoing, there are three in particular where each of his children is respectively set up as either a lass o’pairts or a lad o’pairts of sorts8 – as a potential source of elevating Brodie’s standing in the community – only to eventually prove a disappointment to him: his eldest daughter, Mary, falls pregnant and attempts to elope with a young Irish-Catholic, Denis Foyle, and is brutally driven from the “castle” by her father, whose hopes of upward mobility 8 David McCrone rather broadly defines the lad o’pairts as “an individual who escape[s] his working-class or peasant background,” and goes on to assert that: “The lad o’pairts’ path was smoothed by the local Dominie who would bully, cajole and persuade affluent members of the parish […] to give a bursary to support his lad o’pairts” (97). The Kailyardian lad o’pairts theme of “getting on” and succeeding in life generally has a talented, promising and likable youth going to university with the help of the whole community – as in for instance Ian Maclaren’s Beside the Bonny Brier Bush (1894), when the whole village steps up to enable the talented, yet sickly George Howe to pursue his studies. The anti-Kailyardian lad o’pairts does not display quite as much “pairts,” i.e. talent, and goes to university and fails, as is the case, for example, in George Douglas Brown’s novel.

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through a better match have now been dashed. His twenty-four-year-old son, Matthew, who works as a clerk for the shipping magnate Sir John Latta with whom Brodie constantly attempts to rub shoulders, believing himself to be distantly related to him, is secured a five-year position in Calcutta, only to return prematurely, in disgrace – jobless, penniless and prone to overindulging in the various vices he has acquired in India. After his return, Matthew unsuccessfully attempts to shoot his father in a drunken frenzy, and eventually elopes to South America with his father’s mistress, the barmaid Nancy. Brodie’s schoolgirl daughter Nessie, in whom he – towards the denouement of the novel – obsessively places all his remaining hopes, fails to win the prestigious Latta bursary, which would take her on to university. She is beaten to the bursary by the son of Brodie’s arch-enemy, the Lord Provost Grierson. In the end, it is the immense pressure exerted upon her by her father that leads Nessie to commit suicide – the letter of rejection Hardyesquely pinned to her chest. Already from this by no means exhaustive outline of Hatter’s Castle it is clear that the novel is – with the noteworthy exception of the “small seasoning of curry-powder” – conspicuously similar to The House with the Green Shutters. Ian Crichton Smith observed in this regard that “Hatter’s Castle seems, in fact, to be a pastiche of the earlier novel,” and astutely points out that “It would take too long to detail all the resemblances” (9). Suffice it to say that Hatter’s Castle has nearly the same characters and character constellations, roughly the same plot, a similarly patronising and didactic Kailyardian third-person narrative situation,9 a comparable subversive take on small-town Scotland, the same focus on gossip and resistance to change, and a very similar ending – only, it takes far longer to get to said ending: it is more repetitive, indiscriminately detailed, and it has some added cringe-worthy melodrama, painful similes, and unintentional bathos that make it hard for the reader to digest. The Scottish poet William Soutar put the uncanny likeness between the two novels in poetically succinct terms when he observed that: Time, wha maun come tae tak his Castle doun, Sall gie the shutters back again to Broon. qtd. in a. scott 24

Cronin’s attempt at the anti-Kailyard genre does indeed lack the finesse and subtlety of Brown’s towering masterpiece, and certainly wants the readiness for experimentation that Cronin’s Scottish-Literary-Renaissance contemporaries Lewis Grassic Gibbon (in Sunset Song, for example) and Hugh MacDiarmid 9 However, Cronin’s authorial narrator is not as angry and sarcastic as Brown’s.

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(in “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,” for instance) displayed, especially with regard to ambiguous focalisation and the creative use of the Scottish language. Cronin’s anti-Kailyardian efforts are overly dramatic, his subversive treatment of Kailyard themes not pronounced or refined enough, and elements of the Kailyard still linger in his overall positive, almost idyllic, portrayal of Scottish rural society.10 And, it is these shortcomings in particular that set Cronin’s aspirational middlebrow novel apart from what is generally considered to be more canonical literature. While “…MacDiarmid’s cabbage-patch contains thistles with beautiful flowers and sharp thorns” (177), as Scott Lyall once observed, I argue that the thorns in A.J. Cronin’s middlebrow “cabbage-patch” are not quite as prickly as those in either Brown’s, or Gibbon’s, or MacDiarmid’s – and despite the novel’s immense popularity, the “beautiful flowers” are, unfortunately, few and far between. Its anti-Kailyardian features notwithstanding, Hatter’s Castle, written in 1931, is in many ways still very much a nineteenth-century novel. Commenting on its structure, Cronin’s contemporary Scot R. McNair in The English Review, for instance, states that it was “planned on the three-decker principle of the Victorian novelists,” and maintains that Cronin was, in general, “prone to accept the conventions of the Victorian novelists” (134–35) who painted a realistic canvas of lower-class and middle-class British society with all its class rigidities, colonial aspirations, moral certainties and limitations, while at the same time criticising social and political injustices. And, although he started to write at about the same time as proponents of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, to which he is sometimes loosely counted, Cronin was neither a cultural nationalist nor a modernist writer. He was, as his biographer Alan Davies observes, very much a “traditionalist in the mould of writers such as Dickens, Bennett and Hardy, [a novelist who, in fact,] deplored the modernist movement, made up of writers who went out of their way to reject the writing conventions of the great nineteenth-century authors” (18). In spite of its shortcomings and the conspicuous similarities mentioned so far, however, one should not assume that there is nothing enlightening or worthwhile to be found in Hatter’s Castle. Thus, just because it can justifiably be considered an “unimaginative Green Shutters imitation,” we should not, as Alan Bold has done rather dismissively, move “without comment past” (124). Hatter’s Castle. There are glimpses into the psyches and social circumstances of nineteenth-century Scottish lower-middle-class townspeople that deviate from those depicted in The House with the Green Shutters, and are therefore worth considering in depth. In Hatter’s Castle, we not only get insights into the 10

In fact, Cronin in Dr Finlay’s Casebook returns to applying Kailyardian modes of writing.

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narrowness of small-town life in Scotland, and the mindsets it produced, but we are also introduced to its contrast with notions of the wider world of the Empire, opening out from Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde. While British India and the compound in Calcutta where Matthew is stationed are extraneous to the action of the novel, situated offstage, as it were, not described in any detail, and always remaining elusive, India nonetheless plays an important role as a space: it serves as an empty signifier that is filled with different connotations and associations by the novel’s respective male and female characters. Cronin banked on the reader’s familiarity with the “India experience” still widespread during this period – the mere mentioning would already suffice to evoke a plethora of associations and possibly prejudices. What we are offered in Hatter’s Castle is a rather vague image of India that is neither comprehensive, nor homogenous: there is not one, single, real India, but rather several, conflicting, imaginary versions of India within the novel – all presented via the various unreliable narrations, focalisations and imperial gazes by which it is imagined. Admittedly, “seasonings” or “token” inclusions of India as “exotic” backdrops are in themselves nothing new either. India has long been a focus of interest to all British “brows” of literature, be they high, low or somewhere in between: Ralph J. Crane, for instance, holds that “India has captured the British imagination in a way no other part of the Empire ever managed to do. […] The sheer volume of prose and poetry which uses India as its subject is testimony to this” (180). Apart from Scott’s The Surgeon’s Daughter mentioned at the beginning of this essay, we need only think of other texts such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, or later Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, to name but a few.11 The inclusion of India in a text such as Hatter’s Castle, which in many ways can still be considered a nineteenth-century novel, is thus not necessarily unusual. Patrick Brantlinger points out that: In the middle of the most domestic concerns, often in the most unlikely texts, the Empire may intrude as a shadowy realm of escape, renewal, banishment, or return for characters who for one reason or another need to enter or exit from the scene of domestic conflict. As in the Renaissance pastoral, so in the nineteenth-century English novel: a season of imperial adventure in an exotic setting can cure any moral disease. (12) 11

For Scottish literary representations of India and the Empire, in general, see: Douglas S. Mack. Scottish Fiction and the British Empire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006.

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Hatter’s Castle represents just such an “unlikely text” in which a character’s “moral disease” is supposed to be cured, and representations of India intrude into the narrative in all of the “shadowy realms” that Brantlinger mentions in the quote above, namely, as a refuge for Matthew from his tyrannical father (escape and renewal), as a convenient place to which Brodie can send the son whom he considers a weakling (banishment), and as a space from which Matthew eventually comes back (return). In Victorian popular fiction, in general, as Tamara S. Wagner observes, emigration often offered an easy way out, frequently at the end of a novel. Sending troublesome characters overseas could serve as a temptingly convenient solution, although by mid-century, writers of sensation fiction also tended to use returnees as a plot catalyst. These intruders upset homes instead of helping restore crumbling estates with imported riches, as their relatives ‘back home’ might have expected. (1) Hatter’s Castle combines and appropriates these various emigration tropes that run through Victorian fiction, but employs them somewhat differently. What is unique in the case of Hatter’s Castle is not so much the mere juxtaposition of “the domestic” with “the exotic,” but rather the incorporation of “the exotic” within the subverted lad o’pairts trope of Brodie’s son Matthew. While Matthew Brodie very much resembles John Gourlay’s son in The House with the Green Shutters with regard to his weak disposition, his being pampered and doted upon by his mother, his fear of his father, and his lack of academic prowess, Matt’s particular lad o’pairts theme takes a decidedly different turn: instead of being sent off to university to gain an education (and fail), Matthew is sent away to Calcutta to work for the shipping magnate Sir John Latta (and, as we shall see, also fails). India, the “exotic other,” replaces what the big town or the city in the Kailyard school of literature represents, namely a space of aspiration and getting on (cf. McCrone 78–104) for some, and a location of sin, debauchery and moral corruption for others. In the book, the dichotomy runs along gendered lines: it is mainly the men who perceive India as a place of opportunity and betterment, while the ones who fear the dangers of temptation to an impressionable young mind are the women, i.e. exaggerated and subverted versions of the Kailyardian “figure of the woman in the home,” the enforcer, as Samantha Walton puts it, of “Protestant values of thrift, moderation, piety and conspicuous respectability” (142). And, it is thus to those instances where Cronin’s middlebrow novel diverges from its appraised predecessor that we shall now turn in order to examine the subplot of Matthew

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Brodie and the various notions of India that make up this “small seasoning of curry-powder.” 4

Promulgation and Critique of Colonialist Notions

The reader of Hatter’s Castle first encounters Matthew through the focalisation of his doting mother. In the elaborate fashion so typical of much of Cronin’s prose, he is introduced as a slender youth of twenty-four, pale faced and with a regrettable tendency towards acne, his look slightly hangdog and indirect, his dress as foppish as his purse and his fear of his father would allow, his hands, particularly noticeable, being large and soft, dead white in colour, and with the nails cut short to the quick, leaving smooth round pads of flesh at the finger ends. (24) In a similar vein, through the focalisation of his sister Mary, who idolises her older brother, we learn that Matthew is an “admirable, elegant young man, smoker, mandolinist, lover, the future intrepid voyager to India” (34). Matthew’s father, however, does not think quite so highly of his sole male progeny – which brings us to the first male gaze on India, that of James Brodie. In line with the conservative Kailyard convention which, according to ­Walton, has “women build the characters of male relatives” (143), the hatter largely blames his wife, Margaret, for the character flaws he perceives in his weakling of a son, and wants to remedy these by sending him abroad. Early on in the tale, he muses, for instance: “Yes, there was Matthew, his son! Not a bad lad; a bit sly and soft and sleek perhaps; wanted watching; and spoiled utterly by his mother. But going to India would, he hoped, make a man of him” (Cronin, HC 26). At first glance, it might still appear feasible that Matthew could indeed benefit from being sent to what Billie Melman calls “the locus of male character-building and ‘career’” (5), and that India might serve to improve his character, educate him, and be the place where he could make his fortune. Improving his son’s character, however, is only Brodie’s ostensible reason for sending Matthew away, which soon becomes clear when Brodie goes on to ponder: It was getting near the time now and in only two or three weeks he would be off to that fine job Sir John Latta had got for him. Ah! Folks would talk about that! His features relaxed, as he considered how everyone would

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recognise in this appointment a special mark of Sir John’s favour to him, and a further tribute to his prominence in the town, how, through it, his son’s character would benefit and his own importance increase. cronin, HC 26

For Brodie, having a son go to India is but a potential feather in his cap, and, as such, presents yet another opportunity for his own aggrandisement at home. Sending Matthew away, thus, conveniently entails various side-effects for Brodie: not only is he elevating his own station within the community and improving his standing with Sir John – to whom he kowtows at every turn – but he is also simultaneously getting rid of a problem and reducing the embarrassment of having his son around. On the morning of Matt’s departure for India, Brodie’s sentiments towards his son become even more readily apparent: I hope to God you are going to prove yourself in these [five] years. You’re a sleekit, namby pamby fellow and your mother has a’ but spoiled ye, but there must be good in ye. There must be good,’ he cried, ‘because you’re my son! I want that brought out in ye. Look a man between the eyes and don’t hang your head like a dog. I’m sendin’ you out there to make a man of ye. Don’t forget that you’re the son, ay, and the heir of James Brodie.’ […] ‘I’ve got you everything you want, […] and best of all I’ve given you a name. Be a man, sir, but above all be a Brodie’. (85–86)12 Where one might expect an expression of affection and well-wishing to a son on his departure to foreign parts, Brodie displays all the cruel, egoistic, selfseeking aspects of his own character, and the reader recognises the irony of his demand that the boy should learn to be as he is. Contrary to what his father believes, Matthew’s character is unsatisfactory not despite his being a Brodie, but rather because of it; and in the course of the novel it becomes evident that it was mainly James Brodie, and not necessarily Margaret, who “filled him with the faults he had, and added some extra, just for Matt.” In Brodie’s view, Matthew is the proverbial black sheep of the family, an embarrassment to his proud family name, and India is just the place to remedy this. Matthew’s plight here resembles that of many a nineteenth – and earlytwentieth-century remittance man, who, according to Mark Zuehlke, 12

Brodie’s advice for Matthew to change and “Be a man, sir” here is resonant of and indeed almost seems to be an inversion of the advice given to remain an honourable man despite all dangers and contingencies in Rudyard Kipling’s “If”: “If you […] keep your virtue […] you’ll be a Man, my son!”

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had been sent out to the colonies to spare their families continuing embarrassment and shame. [S]coundrels, dreamers and second sons without future prospects[,] supported by regular allowances sent to them by family back in Britain. (i) Mark Twain, in his travelogue Following the Equator (1897), summed up the remittance man as follows: They said that dissipated ne’er-do-wells belonging to important families […] were not cast off by their people while there was any hope of reforming them, but when that last hope perished at last, the ne’er-do-well was sent abroad to get him out of the way. […] It was the remittance-man’s custom to pay his month’s board and lodging straightway […] then spree away the rest of his money in a single night, then brood and mope and grieve in idleness till the next remittance came. It is a pathetic life. (10) Accordingly, India provides Brodie with the opportunity to mimic the practices of the upper – and upper-middle classes, without even having to pay for Matthew’s upkeep. Whereas Matthew may differ from the typical remittance man in that he does not receive monthly remittances from home while in India, he nonetheless enjoys a similar lifestyle to those hedonistic expatriate sons who morosely whiled away their lives in colonial exile. And, ironically, once he loses his position as a clerk, Matthew is indeed dependent on remittances sent to him by his devoted mother. Brodie’s initial, professed motives for sending Matthew out into the colonies, as well as the calamitous results that eventually ensue, tellingly recall a scene in Bithia Mary Croker’s ghost story “The Khitmatgar” (1906), in which we encounter a similar discrepancy between expectation and outcome: ‘India may steady him,’ thought this sanguine old gentleman; but, alas! it had anything but the desired effect. In India the prodigal became more imprudent than ever. Cards, racing, simpkin, soon swallowed up his moderate allowance, and he fell headlong into the hands of the soucars – a truly fatal fall!. (92) In this earlier imperial middlebrow text dealing with the sending of young men to India, we see a common treatment of male middle-class aspiration and high hopes of the subcontinent as a panacea for ills produced at home. Here too, the perceived failings of the young man are not corrected, but exacerbated by the new-found freedoms he enjoys. Notably, India is treated as being an ­active

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agent, capable of either improving or corrupting. This equating of the colonial enclaves of the British Raj with the whole subcontinent is an often-used literary ploy that, of course, itself displays and promulgates an uncritical colonialist outlook. While generally aware of and even critical of practices of “othering” in colonials’ dealings with the indigenous population, as the introductory quote from his own voyage out shows, Cronin is nevertheless no exception to the middlebrow writers who exploit the imaginary space of India as a kind of shorthand for the experience of young Britishers sent to imperial outposts. That Matthew might suffer the same ignominious fate as so many remittance men before him, that he might be corrupted, led astray, or even die is the main concern of both his mother Margaret and his fiancée Agnes, who do not speak of India as a positive force for improving Matthew’s character, but rather the reverse – which brings us to the colonialist perceptions and reductive stereotypes about India that the women display in Hatter’s Castle. In spite of his various ulterior motives, James Brodie still has hopes that India will change his son for the better. His wife Margaret, conversely, fears that India will change Matthew for the worse. She thus perceives India solely as the place of myriad potential dangers that could befall, yes even consume her favourite child. She anxiously tells her daughter Nessie, for instance, that “‘There’s dreadful fevers out there [in India,] and lions, tigers, elephants and giraffes, and all manner o’ curious beasts and insects’” (Cronin, HC 285). Recurrently, she tries to console herself by reminding herself that Matthew would be getting fresh fruit there, and, of course, that “He ought to get good tea in India, anyway, that’s the place for tea and spices” (91). And, ever concerned and fretting about her fragile son’s safety and health, Margaret claims, moreover, “That there’s agues and fevers and jaundice and all kinds of awful troubles out in these foreign parts” (239). Of course, Margaret, the doting mother confined to home and hearth in a provincial town, would not have access to much detailed knowledge about India.13 This may explain her conflating the fauna of Africa and Asia or her reducing an entire subcontinent to the prevalent stereotypes available to her. However, the maternal fears, here projected onto India, are exaggerated – even for Kailyardian standards – and need to be read in their specific anti-­Kailyardian context. Walton points out that “Among the Kailyard’s catalogue of recognisable plots, morals and characters is the figure of the woman in the home. Indeed, she

13

Susie L. Steinbach points out that while “Imperial images, narratives, and rhetoric were available throughout the Victorian period and saturated Britain from about 1870,” there, nonetheless, is the gap between dissemination of such images and their reception to be considered (cf. 75). - 978-90-04-42656-6

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is the epitome of Kailyard values” (141). These women in the home are mostly “constructed as pious, unworldly and fragile saints [who] also need to be strong, productive and canny economists” (144). Margaret displays only the former of these characteristics, and none of the latter; on the contrary, she is depicted as being frail, negligent of her domestic chores, and thriftless with the small household allowance that Brodie gives her. The conventional Kailyardian relationship between mother and son is similarly subverted from within, undermining the Kailyard formula which, according to Walton, runs as follows: The mother provides early encouragement and moral policing, and lifelong selfless devotion and stability. Her son’s achievements will be meaningless unless she remains in the home until the son returns to make her proud. To Kailyard women, endurance and sacrifice offer spiritual rewards, and the social advancement of the child brings glowing satisfaction. (143) In the end, Margaret is denied the satisfaction of embracing a successful son, and her sacrifice is in vain. The generalisations and over-simplifications about India that Margaret articulates, then, likewise, have to be interpreted in view of her character’s figuration as an exaggerated, over-protective Kailyard mother, and thus, if understood as such, present a subtle critique of the colonial ethos at play in small-town Scotland. Matthew’s fiancée, Agnes Moir, is also constructed along Kailyardian lines. She, too, is depicted as being overly pious, somewhat naïve and impressionable, and unquestioningly devoted to Matthew. Although she is equally apprehensive about what may happen to Matthew in India, her fears derive from a more realistic view of Matthew: she dreads that, instead of being consumed, it will be he who will be doing the “consuming” – partaking, so to say, not of the fruit and the tea and the spices, but of the Indian ladies. With regard to notions of either “consuming” or of being “consumed,” Máire ní Fhlathúin points out that the literature of British India frequently represents British people driven by the need to incorporate the material substance of India and/or Indians into themselves, while a contrapuntal narrative chronicles a fear of bodily disintegration or re-incorporation into the ‘other,’ often depicted in fantasies of being consumed by the Indian landscape or its human or animal inhabitants. (55) On the eve of Matthew’s departure, when he visits Agnes in order to say his good-byes, she admonishes him to steer clear of the various temptations he might encounter in India: - 978-90-04-42656-6

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‘You won’t even speak to any of these foreign ladies, will you, Matt? I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could see them – a pretty face may cover a wicked heart. You’ll remember that, won’t you, dear?’ […] ‘You see, dear, there must be great temptations for a handsome young man out in these hot countries. Women will go to such lengths to get hold of a man once they get their eye on him, especially if he’s a good young man that excites them all the more, and your little Agnes won’t be there to watch over you, Matt. cronin, HC 80

While Agnes is especially worried about him falling prey to “these foreign ladies” and their “temptations,” Matthew is actually secretly looking forward to a bit of depravity. Interestingly, they share the same stereotypes; their respective interpretations, however, differ. Responding to her apprehensions, he ruminates, for instance, that: It was delightful for him to feel that he was so ardently desired, that ­already she was jealous of him to desperation, and, with one eye fixed already upon his future conquests abroad, he murmured solemnly, ‘Yes, Agnes, I see the truth of what you say. The way may be hard for me, but I’ll let no one spoil me for you. It’ll not be my fault if anything comes between us’. (ibid.) Matthew’s insincerity and duplicity here are already palpable, and become even more obvious when he offers the purported reason for why she cannot join him in India: in response to Agnes saying that “‘We’ll be married whenever you come back. Indeed it breaks my heart to think we couldn’t have got married before you left. I would willingly have gone out with you!,’” he protests that “‘it’s not the country for a white woman, at all’” (83–84). Without explicitly referring to it, Matthew self-servingly employs the colonialist stereotype of the “brown-skinned rapist” which took hold of the British imperial imagination especially after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and with which the middlebrow reader in the 1930s was still familiar. Once Matt has more or less reluctantly left for India,14 the anxieties of both Agnes and Margaret are by no means assuaged by the letters they receive from

14

Margaret accompanies Matthew to the boat in Glasgow, where he clings to his mother, saying: “You’re all sending me away and I’ll never come back. It’s my death I’m going out to. Don’t let me go, Mamma.” To which she replies: “‘Ye maun go, Matt,’ she whispered. ‘He [James Brodie] would kill us if we came back together.’” (89).

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him. In his first letter he recounts the voyage to Calcutta15 in great detail, providing descriptions of the weather, the monsoon and the typhoons, and relating his various bouts of mal de mer, much to the concern of his mother. At the end of the letter, which – despite stretching over four pages of the novel – James Brodie merely dismisses as having “Nothing in it! A pack o’ nonsense!” (124), Matthew shares his first impressions: The natives here are, of course, black and seem to work in nothing but loin cloths, although some have turbans. They squat on their haunches as they work on their patches, but some also cast nets in the yellow river water and catch fish which are said to be good. The whites have sun helmets Father, your topee is the very thing. […] I am much impressed with the size of the place and the docks. The sky here seems full of house tops and minarets. (128) This “pack of nonsense” is, in fact, the only unmitigated description of India that is disclosed to the reader while Matthew is there. And, he is writing to please, writing to confirm the stereotypes that his family back in Levenford hold of India. All other eagerly-awaited letters that Matthew reportedly writes are not included in the text; they are merely referred to. And when these letters start appearing less frequently and even begin to significantly change in tone, the anxieties the two women had been harbouring before he left increase even further. Margaret, for example, “had not received a letter from Matthew for six weeks, and, […] now that he was neglecting to write to her, she imagined that ill health or misfortune had surely befallen him” (231). What is more, his later letters to [Agnes] had been indifferent in sentiment to the point of actual coldness, filled with veiled, then direct allusions, to the unsuitability of the Indian climate for a wife, and interpolated by intimations as to his unworthiness or unwillingness to accept her chastely proffered matrimonial relationship. (234) The nature of his correspondence, and the eventual lack thereof, impels Margaret to pay Agnes a visit, during which their misgivings about India reach peak stereotype:

15

This is, in fact, the same voyage that A.J. Cronin himself undertook in 1919.

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‘I’ve been wondering, Mamma, if some of these black persons have not been exerting an evil influence over Matt. There’s people called Rajahs – rich heathen princes – that I’ve read awful things about, and Matt might be led away. He might be easily led,’ she added solemnly recollecting, ­perhaps, her own enticement of the receptive youth. […] I hardly like to let the words cross my lips, but they have wicked, wicked attractions out there like dancing girls that – that charm snakes and dance without.’ […] Mrs. Brodie […] wildly visualised one of these shameless houris abandoning the charming of reptiles to charm away the virtue of her son. … ‘Matt’s no’ a boy like that!’ she gasped. […] ‘I have no definite proof of course, but I can put two and two together,’ replied Miss Moir coldly. If you can read between the lines of these last letters of his he’s always at that club of his, and playing billiard matches, and out at night with other men, and smoking like a furnace’. (240–41) Having read “awful things about” India, Agnes’s knowledge of India is but second hand, bordering on hearsay and gossip. Her growing suspicions of Matthew’s infidelity cause her to typecast an entire subcontinent as the Whore of Babylon, and in so doing, she goads Margaret into imagining India along similar lines. The two women’s depiction of India resembles the gossip featured in both the Kailyard and anti-Kailyard, in which the city or big town, in stark contrast to the Scottish rural idyll, is presented by either the communal voice of the glen (Kailyard) or the gossiping village “bodies” (anti-Kailyard) as the place of corruption and seduction of the purportedly innocent. In this depiction of the two women’s exaggeratedly conventional views Bithia Mary Croker again comes to mind. In Her Own People (1905), the narrator reports a conversation between the seasoned veteran of India, Malcom Haig, and an opinionated lady, in which Haig says: ‘the truth is that India – real India – is to the European a closed book!’ / ‘Oh no, surely not!’ [the lady] protested warmly. ‘Only stupid, lazy people say so!’ / […] ‘You have been in the country of course?’ / ‘No; but I have read about it, which amounts to the same thing’. (26–27) When Matt is forced to return to his family after an undisclosed amount of time, however, it gradually emerges that, contrary to his mother’s fond belief, “Matt was exactly a boy like that,” that he was not as innocent as his mother imagined, and that all the fears and suspicions about Matthew which both Agnes and Margaret projected onto India had indeed been justified. It remains ambiguous, however, whether it was the freedoms he enjoyed in India that had

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corrupted him, or whether his time in India had merely brought out the latent negative traits of Matthew’s character. Initially Matthew does not let on why exactly he returned from India. The telegrams he sends from Marseilles, Paris and London on his protracted ­journey home offer no explanation to that effect, and contain nothing but ­further requests for money.16 Word, however, carries fast in gossipy Levenford, and Nessie claims to have heard that he had, in fact, lost his job: “Jenny Paxton said it was all through the Yard that our Matt had got the sack for not attendin’ to his work” (Cronin, HC 267). One would assume that once Matthew has arrived back in Levenford, the unmitigated truth would be disclosed. Yet, Matthew’s own account of what happened in India is not accurate either, since, when he does eventually let on, his accounts are generally unreliable; the novel thus confronts the readers with characters who have either no first-hand experience of India, yet hold strong opinions about it, or with an unreliable character whose reports leave both characters and readers guessing. This, in turn, undermines the veracity of stereotypes presented in the narrative as a whole: depending on whom he converses with, he either boasts about and exaggerates his experiences, or – ­predominantly towards his mother and father – deviously and self-servingly downplays his exploits. Upon being pressed by his mother to explain the actual reason for his return, Matthew still nonchalantly presents himself as the innocent, hard-done-by victim: “‘That’s soon explained. There’s nothing to tell there. I simply threw up my job because it got on my nerves! To be quite honest, Mamma, I couldn’t stand the damned dock wallah who ran the office […]’” (327). Instead of finding fault in his own actions, or, in this case, in the lack thereof, Matthew – very much his father’s son in this regard – is quick to blame anybody but himself for his own shortcomings: “‘[…] Everything was a fault with him. If a man were a bit late in the morning, after an evening at the club, or if there happened to be a day taken off work just for a little social engagement you know he was simply unbearable’” (ibid.). Matthew’s gullible mother accepts this version of events and, in a way that is particularly telling of her prejudices about India and “the Indians,” instinctively assumes the fault to lie with some “native”: ‘Did ye not speak to Mr. Waldie about it, Matt?’ she queried, sharing his resentment. ‘He’s a Levenford man and a good man. He has a great name for fairness.’ 16

That is, money which his mother eventually manages to procure, albeit only with immense difficulty by having to borrow from Jewish moneylenders in Glasgow.

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‘It’s him I mean, the soor!’ retorted Matthew bitterly. ‘He’s the very one that tried to drive me like a coolie. Not a gentleman!’ (ibid.) However, for his father there is no doubt with whom the fault really lies. When Matthew eventually has to face his father, Brodie disparages him as “Still a weakling and now a failure!” (335) and sarcastically turns his words against him: ‘Dear! Dear! […] He didna like his position. […] Do ye not mean that it didna like you? I’ve been told here in Levenford that you were soundly kicked out o’ it. That they got as sick of the sight o’ ye out there as I am already’. (336) The perceived shame that Matthew has brought upon their family, the fact that he failed to bring “back a fortune” (ibid.), and that he has no other position lined up, infuriate his father immensely. In the harrowingly long-drawn-out scene, Brodie incessantly baits, taunts and mocks his son, sarcastically urging him to tell them ‘About the grand, excitin’ time ye’ve had outbye. About the rajahs and princes you’ve been hobnobbin’ with – about the elephants and the tigers ye’ve shot – tell us quick before ye’ve time to mak’ it up. Yell be a perfect daredevil now, I suppose?’ (338) Brodie is right, the time Matthew spent in India has changed him, but not in the way his father had originally envisioned. His mother, on the other hand, still admiringly observes that he had altered, was profoundly different from the raw youth who had left her only two years ago. […] ‘You’ve got a real smart look about you. There’s an air about you that fair takes my breath away. You’re a man now, my son!’ (324) But what she sees is only the superficial Matthew. She is still unaware of how he has lied to her and inveigled money from her, and she continues to make excuses for her wayward son. Inverting the Kailyard values of moderation, frugality and modesty, he has come back a braggart and is loose with money he constantly has to borrow and even steal from his mother; he lavishly spends that money on his newly acquired habit of getting horribly drunk; and, what is most disruptive to the

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r­igidly fixed social order in a Kailyard community, he has acquired airs and graces above his station: “I’ve been used to a retinue of servants out there – blacks you know – and a man gets so accustomed to ordering them about” (325). On the financial side, he is, of course, dependent on his mother, whom he winds around his little finger with his outward show of sophistication: ‘I wonder though, Mamma, if you would lend me a pound or two for today. It’s such a nuisance, but my bank drafts have not come through from Calcutta yet.’ He frowned at the annoyance of it all. […] Lend me a fiver and you shall have it next week.’ Poor boy, he had been used to mixing with gentlemen who spent money freely, and it was only fair that he should have money in his pocket like the rest. It was, in fact, a necessity after the high society life he had been leading. It was not just to expect a young man as well put on as Matt to go out without the means of backing up his smart appearance. (348) The depths to which Matthew has reportedly sunk are amply illustrated by his two-faced treatment of his mother, alternately bullying her into giving him money that she does not have so that he can go out on the town in Levenford and making her feel sorry for him because she cannot provide the means for him to live the life of a gentleman that he has grown used to. In fact, Matthew shows here a double standard: faute de mieux he wants to indulge in the low life available in Levenford, which he despises as being completely inferior to the places and delights he has enjoyed abroad. Levenford, small-town parochial Scotland and its inhabitants have become anathema to him, and make him long for Calcutta with its many attractions. In a sense, Calcutta and Levenford swap places. For Matthew, it is not India but Levenford that is uncivilised, narrow-minded and joyless. Its limitations that Matthew now experiences contrast with the colonialist classification of the imperial centre as being civilised and advanced, and the colony as being backward, dangerous and wicked, which served as legitimisation and justification for the “civilising mission” that Rudyard Kipling famously encapsulated in “The White Man’s Burden.” Returned from exile, Matthew no longer fits in at home. Levenford has become too small for a “man of the world” (361) like him, as becomes obvious on one of his many binges, when he implicitly compares himself to the Greek hero Ulysses: Memories of lotus-eating nights he had spent in India recurred vivaciously to him and, as they rose before him, whetting his anticipation, he

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muttered, ‘These were the nights. These were the splurges. I’ll go back, all right. Trust me!’ Gaily he plunged into the first public house in the street [… where he] was seized by a vast and contemptuous loathing for Levenford. What good was a town of this kind to a seasoned man like him whose worldly knowledge stretched from the flash houses in Barrackpore to the Odeon bar in Paris? (362–64) He repeatedly talks down the small town, calling it “the deadest, most sanctimonious blot on the map of Europe” (363) and boasts and brags about all the exotic things he has seen: “mosquitoes, monsoons, bars, bazaars, pagodas, sacred and profane cows” (365). Tamara S. Wagner points out that “When failed emigrants returned, when returnees struggled, often in vain, to fit back in at home, in the imperial centre, […] these failures threatened to undermine Victorian ideologies of domesticity as well as of imperialism” (1). Matt has returned from India a gambler, a drunkard and a braggart who disrupts the various domestic illusions of the Empire on the one hand and challenges the complacency of his hometown on the other. Notably, the perceived change for the worse he has undergone abroad substantiates the female conception of India illustrated above as the locus and agent of moral corruption. This is where we recognise the imperial middlebrow’s ambivalent position, which simultaneously challenges or even undermines imperialist ideology in some instances while at the same time reinforcing and naturalising it in others. In contrast to the perceptions the women hold about India, we are shown a more elaborate and positive picture of India in Matthew’s own account, and yet we are not told directly, but in references, allusions and boasts. His job notwithstanding, it is clear that Matthew actually enjoyed India and has an admiration for the place, its inhabitants, and especially the lifestyle he was able to lead there. This admiration becomes particularly apparent when he is out on the town bragging. How deeply he was influenced by his experiences there is shown even in the alteration in his speech. In Kailyard fiction, as in its counterblast, language matters: “Dialect is frequently employed throughout the Kailyard to encode the crucial division between the narrator and the folk, the educated and the ignorant, the workers and the professionals, the backwards and the modern” (Cook 1060). Having gone to India and not to university, the place to “unlearn” the habit and replace it by “education and the linguistic tools (English) of ­wider imagination and intellectual scope” (1059), Matthew continues to speak in his local dialect after his return. He, nonetheless, frequently intersperses – one might say “seasons” – his local idiom with Anglo-Indian words and ­phrases,

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such as chota hazri, bobachee, jilde, even telling his long-suffering mother he is going out for tiffin instead of eating the meal she has provided. While the inclusions of these Hobson-Jobsonisms into his every-day speech serve to indicate his change in social status and experience, they nonetheless also represent a form of cultural appropriation that Cronin does not challenge, but instead promulgates.17 His spell in the colonies has also made Matthew gain the confidence to finally stand up to his tyrannical father. In contrast to the static, one-­dimensional father, Matt’s character does show some development. In the end, he enacts revenge on Brodie by stealing his mistress, Nancy, and by running away with her to South America where he has been offered a fine new job with a “handsome salary” on the strength of his colonial experience: “My experience out East has done me a good turn after all” (Cronin, HC 493). It is in his conversations with Nancy, whom he impresses with his colourful tales of India, that we see how much Matthew was impressed by the country’s flora and fauna, its buildings and temples, the colonial lifestyle and the social round of the British in India. Nancy is fascinated: ‘You’re a great blether,’ […] ‘But I don’t mind these kinds of fairy tales. […] You’ve got a regular advantage over a poor, innocent girl like me that’s never been abroad you that’s visited such grand, interestin’ countries. Now tell me some more!’ […] ‘Tell me about the flowers, and the braw coloured birds and beasts, the parrots, the leopards, the tigers. I want to know about the bazaars, the temples, the gold and ivory images I just can’t get enough about them’. (453–54) And in the end, this is the only instance when Matthew speaks admiringly about India and shows how much his experience there has meant to him. However flawed Matthew’s character is depicted throughout the novel, he is nevertheless presented as dynamic, rounded, and in the end capable of making use of his experience. Despite his posturing and bragging we see that underneath the outward show he recognises how much he owes to India and 17

Charles Dickens already humorously railed against this practice of including Anglo-­ Indian terms when he pointed out in “Indian English” in Household Words (1857) that it was “… a decided nuisance to be pulled up in the middle of the most interesting narrative by some unintelligible word. Am I to sit down to my Times with a Tamil lexicon on one side and a Teloogoo on the other? Am I to waste my substance on Sanscrit and Persian vocabularies before I can sympathise with the sufferings of my countrymen? Or must I go on, as at present, stumbling blindly from one guess to another? Why do the mutineers never rob, or steal, or thieve, or plunder? Why do they always loot?” (321).

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shows a true admiration for the country. Of all the versions of and differing notions about India depicted in the novel, his is the most sympathetic. Yet, Matthew’s sentiments and outlook remain those of a white, middle-class male colonialist. His colonial sojourn is, in the last instance, presented as having been a success, which detracts from the thrust of Cronin’s criticism of colonial ideology, however tenuous and covert it may be, and instead reassures the middlebrow readership that, ultimately, the British colonial project has been and continues to be a “force for good.” 5 Conclusion Although Hatter’s Castle is at its core a novel of nineteenth-century family drama, steeped in Scottish literary traditions and teeming with well-known Scottish types and tropes, “the small seasoning of curry – powder” provided by Matt’s time in India gives it a fillip that other anti-Kailyard novels lack. It shows India as a composite, the object of both desire and fear, and as a space of both vast opportunity and possible failure. The inclusion of India in the novel operates as a potent foil, showing up the contrast between the dull, backwater of Levenford and the supposedly colourful, enticing British colonial lifestyle in the Raj. Even though one has the impression that Cronin used much of his own experience of India as a convenience, “the small seasoning of curry-powder” serves a legitimate purpose in the novel. The interplay between the various conflicting gazes on and associations with this elusive colonial space enhances the subversive element already present in the failed lad o’pairts trope, thus providing an additional layer of social critique to the anti-Kailyardian attack on parochial mindsets. It is obvious that the novel as a whole has its shortcomings. Aside from the blatant similarities to The House with the Green Shutters pointed out above, Cronin’s positioning to the imperial project remains highly ambiguous. Hatter’s Castle simultaneously promulgates the colonial ethos and undermines it. On the one hand, Cronin exploits and appropriates India’s exoticism in order to cater to the tastes and desires of his middlebrow readership. India merely serves as a convenient backdrop, as an expedient addition, and the colonised “other” is nowhere given a voice. On the other hand, he undermines the prevalent contemporary prejudices about India and its population, and castigates those who hold them in small-town Scotland. However, it has been shown that this subtle criticism becomes apparent solely when viewed through the prism of the anti-Kailyard, and would have been detectable only to readers ­well-versed

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in the Kailyard school of literature, i.e. an audience familiar with the tales of Ian Maclaren, J.M. Barrie, S.R. Crockett et al. and their respective ­literary conventions. What Ania Loomba observes with regard to E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown can thus also be argued for Hatter’s Castle, namely that “specific texts are not always simply pro – or anti-­ colonial, but can be both at the same time (72). Hatter’s Castle then, to return to Ehland and Wächter’s argument, succeeds in domesticating modernist themes, making them palatable to its middlebrow readership by “maintaining at least a superficial impression of narrative stability and security.” In spite of Hatter’s Castle’s ambivalence with regard to colonial ideology in general, and the unsettling issues it raises in particular, Cronin’s “small seasoning of curry-powder” was obviously “mild” enough for him to win over the middlebrow market and make his book a bestseller for years to follow. Works Cited Brantlinger, Patrick: Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1940. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1988. Bold, Alan. “Scottish Spirit, the Hard Stuff and Scotlit.” Scots on Scotch: The Book of Whisky. Ed. Philip Hills. Edinburgh and London: Mainstream, 1991, 119–32. Crane, Ralph J. Inventing India: A History of India in English-Language Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1992. Crichton Smith, Ian. “The House with the Green Shutters.” Studies in Scottish Literature 7.1 (1969): 3–10. Croker, B.M. Her Own People. London: Hurst and Blackett Ltd, 1905. Croker, B.M. “The Khitmatgar.” To Let. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1906, 90–113. Cronin, Archibald J. Adventures in Two Worlds. 1952. London: Gollancz, 1961. Cronin, Archibald J. Hatter’s Castle. 1931. London: Gollancz, 1935. Cronin, Archibald J. “Realism in Scottish Fiction.” The Bookman (Dec. 1934): 172–73. Cook, Richard. “The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland.” English Literary History. 66.4 (Winter, 1999): 1053–073. Davies, Alan. A.J. Cronin: The Man Who Created Dr Finlay. Richmond: Alma, 2011. Dickens, Charles. “Indian English.” Household Words. Oct. 3, 1857, 321. Ehland, Christoph and Cornelia Wächter. “Introduction: ‘…All Granite, Fog and Female Fiction.’” Middlebrow and Gender: 1890–1945. Ed. Christoph Ehland and Cornelia Wächter. Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016. Frederick, John T. “A.J. Cronin.” College English 3.2 (Nov. 1941): 121–29.

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Hills, Philip. Scots on Scotch: The Book of Whisky. 1991. Edinburgh and London: Mainstream, 2002. Hodges, Sheila. “A.J. Cronin.” Dictionary of National Biography, 1981–85. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990, 103. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Lyall, Scott. “Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance.” The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature. Eds. Gerald Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2012, 173–87. McCrone, David. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Mack, Douglas S. Scottish Fiction and the British Empire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. Macnair Reid, J. “The London Critics.” Library Review, 6.1 (1937): 16–19. McNair, Scott R. “New Novels.” The English Review, 1908–1937 (June 1931): 133–36. Melman, Billie. Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992. Mitgang, Herbert. “A.J. Cronin, Author of ‘Citadel’ and ‘Keys of the Kingdom,’ Dies.” The New York Times. 10 Jan. 1981. Web. n.a. “Gestorben: Archibald J. Cronin.” Der Spiegel. 12 Jan. 1981. Web. Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. 1946. New Delhi: Penguin Books of India, 2004. Ní Fhlathúin, Máire. British India and Victorian Literary Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. O’Mahony, Seamus. “AJ Cronin and The Citadel: Did a Work of Fiction Contribute to the Foundation of the NHS?” The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 42 (2012): 172–78. Riach, Alan. “Arcades – The 1920s and 1930s.” Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-­ Century Literature. Eds. Ian Brown and Alan Riach. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009, 50–60. Scott, Alexander. “Modern Scots Poets: William Soutar.” Burns Chronicle and Club Directory 3.8 (1959): 18–25. Scott, Walter. “The Journal of Sir Walter Scott.” 25 Aug. 1827. The Literature Network. Web. Smith, J.Y. “A.J. Cronin, Writer of Best-Selling Novels, Is Dead at 84.” The Washington Post. 10 Jan. 1981. Web. Steinbach, Susie L. Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Twain, Mark. Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. 1897. Cabin John, U.S.: Wildside Press, 2002.

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Wagner, Tamara S. Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Failed Emigration. New York: Routledge, 2016. Walton, Samantha. “Scottish Modernism, Kailyard Fiction and the Woman at Home.” Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880–1930. Eds. Kate Macdonald and Christoph Singer. Macmillan: Houndmills, 2015, 141–62. Zuehlke, Mark. Scoundrels, Dreamers & Second Sons: British Remittance Men in the Canadian West. 1994. Madeira Park: Harbour, 2016.

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Sidelining Racism and Discrimination – Recent British Black and Asian Fiction Gesa Stedman Abstract Gesa Stedman analyses a number of recently published contemporary British-Asian and Black-British novels that contain stereotypes and use clichés. She places them within wider trends in the British literary field which favours postcolonial novels that sideline racism and do not challenge their predominantly middle-class readers with the need to analyse their own position and values.

Keywords Contemporary British-Asian/Black-British novels – stereotypes – literary field – ­middle-class values – racism sidelined

1 Introduction Much of contemporary publishing is “white” and calls for more diversity in the literary field in the UK and elsewhere are more than justified.1 However, if one regards the high-seller lists, the prize winners of the most important UK literary prizes, reading group selections and the review sections of quality newspapers, there is a definitive trend towards “accessible” postcolonial fiction. In other words: if a novel gets published which is not written by a white author and wins a prize, gets selected for schools or is adapted for TV, then the likelihood that it is a middlebrow novel is high. Most writers and publishers and other important agents in the field are white, middle-class and more often than not from the South of England. A number of initiatives have been put in 1 The Bookseller has devoted several reports, interviews, and overviews to the lack of diversity in the UK. Nikesh Shukla, a writer and activist, has founded The Good Journal, helped to set up The Jhalak Prize for non-white British writers, and an agency to help promote their work. See e.g. The Bookseller, 29 September 2017, 3 November 2017 http://www.thegoodjournal .co.uk/;https://www.thegoodliteraryagency.org/;https://mediadiversified.org/about-us/jhalakprize/. All accessed 13 May 2018.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426566_012

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place to counter this trend – possibly because the prospect of a new market excites the key players in the literary field, possibly because some activists really have the laudable intention of diversifying the workforce, the readership, and the production side of publishing. Although vibrant literary scenes exist beyond London and the South, these are much less prominent. The following comments therefore apply to the national, rather than to regional literary field(s) in the UK. In spite of the overall lack of diversity, a number of well-known non-white authors exist who have a considerable influence within the literary field. The question poses itself to what purposes they use this influence, and with which results. Writers such as Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, more recently Sunjeev Sahota, and newcomers such as Mahuda Snaith get considerable attention, their novels are reviewed widely in the quality newspapers and literary reviews, they are adapted for TV and sometimes even spark debates which go beyond the rather narrow field of literature. In the following, I will analyse how these authors position themselves within the literary field as middlebrow writers, which kinds of surface and deep plots they develop in their novels, which readership they cater for, and what this tells us about the literary field in the UK as a whole. Surface diversity is founded on repeated and repetitive deep plots which play to the middle-class galleries of the readers and viewers. Middle-class values such as a meritocratic work ethic, a lack of interest in any other social class, an emphasis on selective education, and an unquestioning reproduction of capitalist or even neoliberal, consumerist values, and a generalising view of diversity – in short a reproduction of the current status quo of middle-class British society – reassure the predominantly white and middle-class readers. Chris Bongie has coined the term “postcolonial middlebrow” for this kind of writing, using it as a concept to explain the success of Maryse Condé, a postcolonial writer whose novels in French appeal to both a wider readership and postcolonial literary scholars. My own principles of aesthetic judgement need to be revealed at this point perhaps, so as to be clear from what subject position the chapter is written. A novel I find rewarding needs to challenge me both in terms of content and form. If it uses clichéd metaphors, includes predictable plot moves, unreconstructed genre elements such as happy endings, babies signifying a happy future, a loving gaze at black or brown skin on white, stilted dialogue, exoticism without ironisation, whiteness as the unquestioned norm, to name but a few aspects of imperial literary aesthetics, and if the novel reproduces neoliberal, middle-class political beliefs and concepts without question, then this condition is not fulfilled, even if in aesthetic terms the writer might include the most up-market modernist or postmodernist technical twists. There are novels

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which fulfil these criteria, unfortunately, these are not necessarily the ones which get picked for literary prizes, nation-wide positive reviews, school curricula or reading groups. 2

The Concept of the Middlebrow

The concept of middlebrow fiction is not unproblematic, as Beth Driscoll has shown. Chris Bongie further develops the concept not only by including the contemporary, just like the editors of this collection and other scholars who have moved the middlebrow out of its original historical incarnation of earlytwentieth-century fiction, but also by showing up its troubled relationship with the popular. While I do not want to sound condescending or disrupt other readers’ pleasure, a typical upper-class academic cliché, the problem with the political impact these novels have remains. The difficulty therefore lies not only in a matter of my personal preferences for this or that style of writing, or in my dislike of “popular” plots (romantic interest, coming-of-age, etc.) but rather in the meta-level effect that such novels have. Rather than actually increasing diversity, these particular representations stand pars pro toto for all non-white representations (even if this is factually untrue as other texts exist which are different). This kind of black or brown representation deserves to have less influence and air space since what they subtly argue for politically – and here aesthetic and political representation are bound inextricably up with one another – does not challenge the status quo of middle-class neo-imperial beliefs. These beliefs have little to do with reality – they don’t need to, of course, since we are dealing with fiction – but they have an impact on reality. People are guided by the discourse surrounding them, and part of the discourse for educated people is literature. If the only literature they read sets up whiteness as the unquestioned norm and reaffirms stereotypes, the readers’ prejudices will be confirmed rather than challenged, and neither social reality nor literary representation will change – or only superficially if at all. Recent Black and Asian fiction is often aimed at a global Anglophone readership, rather than a specific regional or national one. Settings and characters are mobile, and move between cultures and continents, rather than being uprooted from one particular culture/country and situated in a second culture/ country. This makes it easier to market these novels as global – often with a US audience in mind – and more difficult to tie them to a particular readership or national literary field. And even if the novels still have a particular cultural and geographical context in which the plot is set, the demands made of readers are not so very high, with middle-class niceties observed and happy endings

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i­ncluded. This makes the label “middlebrow” suitable for a range of recent Black – and British-Asian novels published in English, whose authors are marketed as non-white. This trend set in with success stories such as Zadie Smith’s debut White Teeth (2000), Monica Ali’s London novel Brick Lane (2003), and Andrea Levy’s late on-set bestselling novel Small Island (2004). They all have in common that they teach their middle-class, white, largely female audience something which this audience is not so familiar with, but without making them suffer from guilt or forcing upon them a reading experience which is too painful to sustain the reading.2 White Teeth uses humour to achieve this; Brick Lane has a love-plot, a female protagonist and exoticism with little fundamental social critique to lure its readers into submission, and Small Island produces a mixed-race baby as the final moment of hope for the future. More recent novels continue this trend in spite of social division, institutional racism, the rise of hate crime, Islamophobia – to name but a few trends in British society of the past two decades. In the following section, I will concentrate on a more detailed analysis of three recently published novels to show how the texts are produced in accordance with international audiences and marketing strategies, thus further cementing the trend of “accessible,” easily readable postcolonial fiction by nonwhite writers. 3

Readings in Contemporary Middlebrow

The first example is Zadie Smith’s latest novel, Swing Time (2017). The admittedly stylish book cover, which picks up on the current retro style also used to re-package Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and essays, is misleading. This is no bright and breezy take on North London’s music scene. Rather, it is a stilted and artificial story of two would-be dancers who grew up on the same estate in Willesden and what becomes of them. In contrast to Swing Time’s predecessor, NW (2013), which had its flaws but at least managed to project a sense of place, the latest Smith novel seems to float around the globe with no fixed abode. The sense of place is completely absent, even though the plot is seemingly localised first on a London housing estate, then

2 Cf. Gohrisch, Jana. “Conflicting Models of Agency in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010).” Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires. Ed. Barbara Buchenau, Virginia Richter, with Marijke Denger. Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2015. 413–34.

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in New York, and finally in a village in West Africa. This absence and the use of the globalised language of music is one of the reasons the novel did not work for me. Tracey and the first-person narrator, two brown girls, both go to dancing classes, and compete in dancing contests. Black and brown identity is constructed with the help of music and dance – dangerously stereotypical territory. While Tracey’s mother spends most of her time either being beaten up by her abusive husband, who is in and out of prison, or watching TV and shopping, the narrator’s mother is a self-educated leftist intellectual who makes sure her daughter aspires to other things. She never comes alive as a character and sounds like a leftist tract. Tracey becomes a dancer in the chorus for West End shows, before she succumbs to motherhood with multiple and absent fathers. She ends up in the same flat in which she grew up and sends abusive and slightly insane emails to the narrator’s mother, who has become a highly successful Labour local councillor. It is not made clear why Tracey should focus so much on the protagonist’s mother, rather than on other authority figures. The nameless, faceless, and rather inane narrator goes to university and acquires a degree in media studies, begins to work in television, shares a flat with her postman father, long-since separated from his wife, and is discovered by an Australian-born international pop star – Aimée – with global reach. She becomes Aimée’s PA and travels the world with her for nearly a decade. Both the father and Aimée remain flat characters who don’t develop into anything other than the stereotypical figures which they represent. During this time, the protagonist loses touch with her family and former friends, neither sings nor dances any more, and becomes particularly involved with an African village in the Gambia and its inhabitants, where Aimée sponsors a school. In the course of this misguided African charity project, Aimée adopts a Gambian baby, probably buying it off its parents, in addition to her two children by birth. This scandal is publicized by the narrator and she is sacked, ending up in London again. Why she should still be tied to Tracey, her childhood ally and rival, is never made entirely clear. And that is just one of the problems of the novel. The narrator is unlikeable and quite boring. She has got herself out of the estate, in contrast to Tracey, but her thoughts and feelings are rendered in such stereotypical fashion that one soon loses interest. The awfulness of Aimée makes this part of the novel equally uninteresting. One might come to ask oneself, why one should read about a global star and her odd life of nannies, body-guards, smart houses and flats all over the world, and misguided aid attempts in West Africa? This is rightly seen critically in the novel, but the world does not suffer most from the Kylies and Madonnas and their kind of life-style, as unpleasant and politically problematic as it is. Zadie Smith

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uses the interest in celebrities but does not make anything of it. Nor are the other characters more appealing. They never get a chance since they are all stereotypes. The mother speechifies from day one, and is bad at mothering since she is too intellectual and too much wrapped up in becoming something other than a black woman on a housing estate in Willesden. The fathers are either in prison, fathering new children left, right and centre (Tracey’s father and the fathers of her children), or are upright citizens doing their work and looking after their children (the narrator’s father). None of the other minor or major characters fare any better. But what really annoyed and upset me in equal measure is the bandwagon on which Zadie Smith has jumped: she sets part of her novel in the Gambia in West Africa, and the rest in New York, London or other capital cities, thus copying a model which younger Afropolitan authors, often educated in Britain or the US, but living in different places and countries, have recently developed and in some cases also questioned. Taiye Selasi, Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie come to mind. Unfortunately, Zadie Smith’s attempt at reaching out to a globalised readership interested in new perspectives on Africa falls completely flat. I found it patronizing and boring in equal measures. And I wish someone would edit famous writers like they edit less well-known ones. Someone might have told the author that her characters are uninspiring, sound and move like cut-out-cardboard figures and that a concept novel does not necessarily make for good reading. The second example, Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Year of the Runaways (2015), seems to be rooted in a particular northern English setting when one first begins to read it. A large part of the action takes place in Sheffield, with some scenes interspersed which are set in London, and later sections in India. We are invited to observe the severe lives of a number of illegal migrants to the UK. While both the intricacies of Sikh culture and the almost indescribable hardship of young migrant workers in the building and catering trades are perhaps less familiar to middle-class readers, the way the plot is resolved panders to their expectations to such an extent that it can leave the reader infuriated. Sunjeev Sahota’s second novel tells the story of three Indian men, Tochi, Avtar, and Randeep, and one woman, Narinder, and how they manage to go to the UK, and stay there. Set in the Sikh community, we hear how the men get the money together – by donating a kidney in dodgy circumstances, borrowing money from usurers, working three jobs rather than just one – and how they avoid being deported and detected once they have arrived in Britain. The men live in shared “accommodation” which is squalid beyond belief. They work in construction or in the kitchen of Indian restaurants, are short of food, money, women, and only form a bond by way of necessity. It is a

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dog-eat-dog world, in particular since there is no work to go around, and some of the young men end up being homeless, with only a little support from the local Sikh temple. One of the young men has come on a marriage visa – ­married to Narinder who is actually engaged to someone else – but none of them can really make a living. The descriptions of life in Sheffield for male Indian migrants are caught in all its terrible detail, and in accordance with middlebrow readerly expectations affect the reader, although the most exploitative characters are, of course, not white, but fellow Indians who profit from their countrymen’s predicament. One can also find a different example – an Indian-born university professor who helps young Indian students – but the overall impression is one not of fellowship but of exploitation by other non-white men. Sahota’s representation of women is less convincing and often clichéd. It is a good idea of course to make white middle-class readers aware of what it really means to live in the UK as a largely illegal migrant or one with only a limited visa, no job, and no prospects but the hopes of all the family back in India depending on you. Characterisation unfortunately is not the author’s strongest point but that would have been forgivable if he had been brave enough to follow his plot to the end. Instead of having at least one of the young men deported, another killed by the complications following the dangerous removal of one kidney in unhygienic circumstances combined with hard physical labour, and the third disappear into homelessness, the visa-wife sent back to India in disgrace or otherwise physically abused by her violent brother, Sahota presents us with a happy end. All three young men have made it in a way. Only one has returned to India, to find a loving wife with whom he has two children. The visa-wife, although single, survives, and the two others actually make a life for themselves in Britain and are able to bring their families across from India. Even the English migration-abuse detectives from the Home Office are harmless. This is a sop to middle-class readers, and should have been avoided at all cost. In the end, everyone can sit back and say “well, it is possible to survive in crisis Britain, even as an (illegal) migrant. Hard work will do it, and anyway, the odd Indian Sikhs and their codes of honour and their caste system have nothing much to do with us anyway.” A chance to force readers to face reality has been missed here, and a chance to tie individual lives to the bigger picture of global neoliberal economic forces without falling into the usual happy-end-plot-trap. I am not sure I want to agree with Salman Rushdie’s opinion that “[a]ll you can do is surrender, happily, to its power” (Sahota front cover) since that would mean we surrender to that kind of plot.

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The third example is also a realist novel, with chick-lit overtones and a distinct nod to mystery fiction. Since it is a recently published debut novel, its impact, unlike Zadie Smith and Sahota’s novels, cannot be judged yet. Mahsuda Snaith’s first novel The Things We Thought We Knew (2017) is set on a ­Leicester council estate during the millennium years. At first glance, this seems to place the novel in a particular cultural, geographical, and social context. But because of the way in which Snaith treats her characters and develops the plot, what the reader remembers are those aspects of the novel which transcend particulars. Its 18-year-old protagonist Ravine, a second-generation Bangladeshi, narrates her life and friendship with her neighbour, Marianne, who died aged 8 during an accident in a make-shift hideout in the woods, which was blown up one New Year’s Eve by her brother’s fireworks when their mother was completely drunk. Ravine began to suffer from chronic pain shortly after Marianne died, once her burned leg had healed, and only when she turns 18 her condition improves, probably because the writing of her memoir has fulfilled a therapeutic function and she can finally let go of Marianne. It is only revealed at the very end that Marianne has not simply disappeared, like her mother, but that she is dead. An abundance of horrific estate stories, combined with exotic dishes, 1990s political slogans and TV shows, teenage thoughts, feelings, and wishes, make up the majority of the chapters, with Ravine as its homodiegetic narrator at the centre. But the novel’s fictional addressee is perhaps more important: Marianne, a clever, funny, and resilient white girl. Ravine may be the focalizer (we learn about her pain, her sensory impressions, her longings, her thoughts, her memories), but the secret centre of the novel is a white young woman. White expectations – possibly even (lower) middle-class expectations – are raised and fulfilled in this first novel not short on clichés. Although Ravine’s mother taught her Bengali, oddly enough Ravine understands little to nothing. Listening to her one-time Somali neighbours, it is stressed how incomprehensible the language is to her, thus putting her in the same situation as most English people. Ravine repeatedly emphasises that she was the only non-white girl on the estate and at school, thus making it easy for white readers to identify either with Marianne, or with Ravine herself who is portrayed as embarrassed by her mother’s traditional dress, preference for curried food, and Bengali phrases and not-quite-perfect English. Ravine dislikes her Bengali home-schooling teacher and prefers the unnamed physiotherapist who comes and visits her. He is black, like another neighbour and minor character but this fact is alluded to only in passing. Almost all the less important characters with the exception of Ravine’s mother and largely absent father are either white, or at least not

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Asian, making being white or aspiring to whiteness and Englishness the normative centre of the plot. Apart from the predictable use of metaphors,3 clichés such as the nasty ­father whom Ravine identifies as a horror figure (the Soul Snatcher) before she learns that he is in fact her father (who left her mother many years earlier and then later returns for a second courtship), and chick-lit style musings on the eligibility or otherwise of Ravine’s physiotherapist, the novel addresses ­middle-class expectations by flashbacks. In addition, its pretentious overtones (a Kierkegaard quotation as its motto, “constellations” as its chapter headings) clearly indicate that an educated readership is the audience Snaith aims for. Using the well-worn middlebrow genre of mystery fiction ensures the potential commercial success of the novel which The Observer has termed “an original and affecting coming of age novel. A new face of fiction for 2017” (front dust cover, hardback edition). Categorised as “popular fiction” on Amazon, it has recently been published in a German translation (transl. Wibke Kuhn, Piper Verlag, April 2018). One can therefore conclude that it has all the hallmarks of a middlebrow novel. Again, the problem is not necessarily that this is genre fiction or that it is aimed at a popular, white, lower-middle to middle-class audience. The problem lies in the message it transmits, and in the details of the representation. It makes it easy for the white reader to read, because anything that is not English and not white is judged as either exotic (and faintly attractive, such as silk saris and bindis) or as something reasonably familiar (curry dishes).4 The only exception is the figure of the Soul Snatcher, who turns out to be Ravine’s harmless father, and his alleged nastiness a figment of her imagination, spurred by Jonathan’s childhood horror stories. Arranged marriage is unsuccessful, no strong religious zeal is present, life on a housing estate is of course quite dangerous, although there is humanity and friendship to be found, and the majority of characters and/or covert centres of attention are white. Writing a diary is a familiar habit and a very English tradition, the preoccupations of Ravine – apart from having to manage her illness – are described as universal girlish. The scrap book full of memories of their joint childhood – sweet wrappers, photographs – can resonate with any reader. And finally, we

3 For a detailed linguistic analysis of similar clichéd language use, cf. Pardey in this volume. 4 Graham Huggan revealed the link between marketing postcolonial fiction as “exotic” and the success of some of these novels many years ago. Exoticism, or orientalism in disguise, helps to appeal to white readers, just as much as the visual marketing of books by non-white authors, including the marketing of the authors themselves, often uses specific colours, patterns, types, and clichéd images to fulfil readers’ expectations. Cf. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001.

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have a happy ending. Marianne of course is still dead. Marianne’s volatile ­alcoholic mother has disappeared, possibly to Portugal. Her brother Walter, a kind but mentally unstable fat man and uncle to Marianne and Jonathan, is not found again. Jonathan, Marianne’s half-brother and fellow sufferer returns and helps Ravine to get up and leave her bed. By writing a memoir and letting go off her memories, and her sense of guilt, Ravine is cured of her illness. She will be able to lead an independent life after all, possibly with Jonathan as a friend, or maybe even as a lover, to support her. Her mother Amma, portrayed throughout in a thoroughly positive light, turns out to have been plotting to get Ravine to Bangladesh to cure her, not to run off herself, as Ravine thinks. In other words: redemption is possible, the nasty characters on the estate disappear, the nice ones remain, adversity can be overcome, and race and ethnicity are irrelevant since friendship and love can transform even the saddest life and the greatest pain. “The things that happened to us were the things that made us. You helped me become who I am, Marianne. Life is not struggle. Life is not suffering. Life is being” (293) – and that is the trite and clichéd end of Snaith’s novel, a simplistic, take-home message for its readers. 4 Conclusion By sidelining racism and discrimination – literally, as in Snaith’s novel, which only has irrelevant children taunting others, and the non-white narrator Ravine not even knowing that “Paki” is an insult – or by “transcending” it as in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, or in Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways – the postcolonial middlebrow makes the political concerns of postcolonialism fade away. What remains are readable, consumable, largely harmless and unchallenging novels which leave the white middle-class (female) readers with most of their prejudices intact and most of their convictions unquestioned. There is a long tradition of happy endings and fulfilling readers’ expectations which goes back at least to Charles Dickens. However, earlier postcolonial novels by such writers as Sam Selvon, Buchi Emecheta and Caryl Philipps, to name but a few, did not try to make it easy for (white) middle-class readers but turned their unflinching gaze on the lives of migrants in the UK, all the while constructing their representations with the help of the full range of aesthetic means, rather than just using the genre of the realist novel with happy endings. Admittedly, they were probably written for an academic audience, rather than for a broader one, but why readability should entail political affirmation of whiteness, middle-class values, and neo-liberalism, eludes me.

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That the more recent middlebrow postcolonial novels undoubtedly also earn their authors a high reputation in an almost exclusively white literary field, as well as provide them with an income of sorts, is a consequence which is positive for the authors, but less so for the overall diversity of the field and even less so for the readers who like being challenged and taken beyond their usual reading experience. Perhaps we have to wait for the next generations of writers to make us sit up again. That they exist cannot be doubted – some of them can be found in The Good Immigrant (edited by Nikesh Shukla) and Nasty Women (edited by Laura Jones and Heather McDaid), two recent anthologies with not much postcolonial middlebrow content to be found in them.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. London: Doubleday, 2003. Jones, Laura and Heather McDaid. Nasty Women. n.p.: 404 Ink, 2017. Levy, Andrea. Small Island. London: Headline, 2004. Sahota, Sanjeev. The Year of the Runaways. London: Picador, 2015. Shukla, Nikesh, ed. The Good Immigrant. London: unbound, 2016. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. Smith, Zadie. NW. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. London: Penguin, 2017. Snaith, Mahsuda. The Things We Thought We Knew. London: Doubleday, 2017.



Secondary Literature

Bongie, Chris. “Withering Heights: Maryse Condé and the Postcolonial Middlebrow.” Friends and Enemies. The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool UP, 2008, 280–321. Boyne, John. “Swing Time review: Zadie Smith’s new novel can’t overcome faults. John Boyne is frustrated by an uninspiring narrator and condescencion towards Africa.” The Irish Times, 2016. Web. Driscoll, Beth. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the TwentyFirst Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Gohrisch, Jana. “Conflicting Models of Agency in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010).” Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires. Ed. Barbara Buchenau, Virginia Richter, with Marijke Denger. Amsterdam: Brill/­ Rodopi, 2015, 413–34. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001.

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Jilani, Sarah. “Swing Time by Zadie Smith, review: A mature Smith on race, class and a cosmopolitan modernity that doesn’t quite let everyone in. The latest novel from the White Teeth and On Beauty author, moves from north-west London to West Africa.” The Independent, 2016. Web Publishers Association, The. “Inclusivity Action Plan.” Web. Rustin, Susanna. “Sunjeev Sahota, ‘I don’t see why I should benefit from migration when other people don’t.’ The Man Booker-shortlisted author talks about racism, characters caught between worlds and asking how to be a good person.” The Guardian, 2015. Web. Selasi, Taiye. “Swing Time by Zadie Smith review – a classic story of betterment. Two childhood friends from London follow diverging paths in Smith’s finest novel yet.” The Guardian, 2016. Web. Stedman, Gesa. “That Was the Year That Was – The Literary Field in 2017.” The Literary Field Kaleidoscope, 11 February 2018. Web.

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Middlebrow 2.0: The Digital Affect and the New Nigerian Novel Hannah Pardey Abstract The chapter explores the interlaced digital pathways of the contemporary middlebrow to discuss consumption patterns of the new Nigerian novel. It demonstrates how authors, distributors and audiences create the digital affect, an affective online community of metropolitan and ethnically diverse readers whose interest in self-realization through empathetic but distanced suffering with others functions to adjust the middleclass emotional habitus to the conditions of an increasingly globalized market economy. Combining linguistic and literary-sociological categories of analysis to investigate the online community’s emotion talk, the chapter suggests a methodological procedure for studying the middlebrow in the digital age.

Keywords Digital affect – emotion dispositive – middlebrow 2.0 – new Nigerian novel – sociology of literature

1 Introduction Belinda sits down at her little study desk and holds Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl into the self-directed camera to begin one of her regular “book chats.” The domestic setting of the YouTube channel “Belinda’s Book Nook” as well as the presenter’s emphasis on the informal quality of her review construct the act of reading as an intimate and affective experience that she shares with her roughly 600 subscribers and 9,000 viewers. The African-American housewife and mother of two boys may not delight as many consumers as her role model Oprah Winfrey. Yet she promotes a middlebrow pattern of literacy based on an “emotional, personal engagement with books” (Driscoll 65) and thus continues the cultural practices of the television celebrity.1 Belinda’s Book Nook and 1 Oprah’s Book Club started in 1996 as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Syndicated to more than 120 countries, it reached a daily audience of over 7.3 million viewers during its 15-year © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426566_013

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­ umerous other “book tube” or “book haul” channels on YouTube indicate that n the internet has helped to establish the middlebrow as a ubiquitous online venture and therefore invites scholars of the middlebrow to test both the temporal and medial boundaries of the term’s established use. Belinda’s selection of a novel by a Nigerian-British author further suggests to extend the middlebrow’s geographical borders and reconsider it as a product of international readerly desires and needs. Furthermore, her inclination towards “books that talk about different cultures and different countries” as well as her immediate identification with the “biracial child” protagonist of the novel equally raises various questions for scholars of the postcolonial. What kind of cultural work does the middlebrow perform in postcolonial contexts? What are its ideological implications? And how can we study them? 2

The New Nigerian Novel

Transcending the spatio-temporal and medial limitations of the term’s conventional application (cf. Bongie, Driscoll), this chapter shall illustrate the usefulness of the middlebrow as an analytical category for the study of contemporary postcolonial products. While a set of partly institutionalized middlebrow practices of writing, disseminating and reading in the digital age can be traced in a steadily growing body of postcolonial literatures (cf. Gesa Stedman in this volume), I will focus on the new Nigerian novel’s patterns of production, distribution and consumption as middlebrow. The reasons why the recent literary output by Nigerian diasporic authors provides a particularly promising focal point for an investigation of the postcolonial middlebrow are manifold. A large cultural area marked by literary productivity, Nigeria has made significant contributions to Anglophone world literatures and remains among the largest producers of West African Anglophone writing to this day (cf. Berndt). Accordingly, the country’s literary production has engendered extensive and varied scholarly research. In the new millennium, it has become common critical practice to discuss post-2000 Nigerian fictions under the catchphrases “Third Generation Nigerian Literature” or the “New Nigerian Novel.” First outlined by Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton in two special issues of English in Africa (2005) and Research run (cf. Driscoll 47). Studies of the first televised book club, the reading practices of its host and the setup of its audiences abound (cf. e.g. Aubry, Konchar Farr and Harker, Long, Wolff). For a detailed discussion of Oprah’s Book Club as a mass-mediated enterprise and paradigmatic instance of the “new” literary middlebrow see in particular Driscoll’s chapter “Book Clubs, Oprah, Women and the Middlebrow” (45–82). - 978-90-04-42656-6

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in African Literatures (2008), the concepts reference an ever-increasing corpus of novels by Nigerian-born writers residing and publishing in the UK or the US. Highlighting the diasporic condition of authors, texts and readers, the terms demarcate a remarkable break with the openly political commitment of earlier writers to the (postcolonial) nation. The fancy self-fashioning of ­Ghanaian-Nigerian author Taiye Selasi as “Afropolitan” is a case in point. Downplaying political attachment to or responsibility for the situation in Nigeria, the term encapsulates third-generation writers’ much-emphasized cosmopolitan awareness which embraces the supposedly liberating “global” landscapes that began to flourish after decolonization (cf. Adesanmi and Dunton, Selasi). A quick glance at its authors, publishers and audiences implies the new Nigerian novel’s close entanglement in a world market of literature pointing towards London and New York. Depending on their place of residence and/or their novels’ spatial constructions, the authors are variously categorized as “Black British,” “Nigerian British” or “Nigerian American” (cf. e.g. Cuder-Domínguez, Pérez-Fernández). Conceptualizing the new Nigerian novel as a sales label, this chapter will employ the term in order to dissolve the frequent distinction between British and American versions of contemporary Nigerian novels and instead stress their shared status as commodities principally produced for and consumed by audiences located in Euro-America such as Belinda. 3

Investigating the Postcolonial Middlebrow in the Digital Age

Starting from the assumption that its conceptualization as a market commodity reveals the new Nigerian novel’s participation in an online cultural phenomenon that I refer to as “middlebrow 2.0,” the following pages shall demonstrate how producers, distributors and consumers of the new Nigerian novel create the “digital affect”: an affective online community of metropolitan and overwhelmingly female readers of various races and ethnicities with an interest in self-affirmation through compassionate yet distanced suffering with others.2 Exemplifying the digital affect with four new Nigerian novels by female authors – Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), Diana Evans’s 26a (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004) and Sefi Atta’s Everything 2 I am indebted to Jana Gohrisch who suggested the concepts of the digital affect and the emotion dispositif (see below) in our middlebrow research forum. My subsequent examinations of Barker-Benfield’s and Moretti’s studies as well as Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century theory of moral sentiments primarily developed from inspiring discussions with my colleagues Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier at the University of Hanover.

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Good Will Come (2005) – this chapter shall link the novels’ reception strategies to the eighteenth – and nineteenth-century middle-class culture of sensibility. More precisely, it will draw on two studies that elaborate how the shared female consumption of sentimental fiction served to adapt the middle-class habitus to the conditions of an emerging capitalist market economy in Britain in the 1750s and in the United States in the 1830s, respectively. Against this backdrop, the shared online consumption of the four new Nigerian novels fosters a feeling of belonging that serves both to counteract and to reinforce consumers’ enmeshment in late capitalist social and economic structures.3 Following the construction of my interpretive framework and the digital affect, I shall investigate a large set of data including author websites and interviews, publishers’ advertising efforts, newspaper reviews and reader responses on Amazon, Goodreads and YouTube. Employing computerized methods derived from corpus linguistics,4 I will further demonstrate how the cultural work of the digital affect can be interpreted with the help of the “emotion dispositif”: combining Michel Foucault’s notion of the “dispositif” and Pierre Bourdieu’s critical concepts of “habitus” and “capital” shall elucidate how the dominantly emotional approach to reading practised by Belinda and other members of the digital affect constructs the new Nigerian novel as both a counterforce to and guide in what Fredric Jameson calls “late capitalism” (cf. Jameson). The results shall demonstrate that the various agents of the digital affect avail themselves of the conventions of “emotion talk”5 in order to simultaneously relieve their sense of isolation and fragmentation characteristic of late capitalist society and enhance their cultural capital to ensure their participation in and eventual belonging to an increasingly globalized market economy. Assuming that the cultural work of the digital affect rests on its members’ constructions of the cultural and social “Other,” this chapterbuilds on the 3 In his 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson draws on Ernest Mandel’s three-stage model of capitalism to characterize postmodernism as the dominant cultural style of late or multinational capitalism (cf. 78). Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1978) divides capitalism into “three general revolutions in technology engendered by the capitalist mode of production” (qtd. in Jameson 78): market capitalism, monopoly capitalism and late or multinational capitalism. My subsequent discussion of the digital affect’s historical echoes will build on this tripartite schema of capitalism. Furthermore, I will examine how far Jameson’s notion of postmodernism as the “cultural dominant” (56) of late capitalism informs the cultural work of the digital affect. 4 I am grateful to Rainer Schulze who kindly shared his linguistic expertise and pinpointed some extremely valuable resources. 5 The term “emotion talk” references Monika Bednarek’s linguistic study of Emotion Talk Across Corpora (2008). Accordingly, I employ the term to signify the digital affect’s use of emotion terms as well as their syntactic and semantic realizations (cf. Bednarek 2).

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i­ nsights of the collection’s preceding contributions. While middlebrow writing on the Empire served to legitimize and naturalize colonial rule, the middlebrow online encounters between authors, distributors and readers function to disseminate neocolonial ideologies and perpetuate colonial power structures that bear on the continued Western control over the international book market and its consumers’ approach to reading (cf. Ashcroft et al. 146–48). 4

Middlebrow 2.0

The introductory example of Belinda’s Book Nook not only illustrates that middlebrow literary culture has moved to the World Wide Web. It further indicates that the middlebrow flourishes in particular when new media and hence new means of dissemination emerge. This is at least one of the central claims that Beth Driscoll develops in her study The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (2014). Focusing on the continuities between historical and present manifestations of the middlebrow, the author refers to “[t]he globalized twenty-first-century mass media” (56) as one of the most outstanding innovations of the contemporary middlebrow. Moreover, her historicizing perspective allows her to conceptualize the middlebrow as a heavily mediated cultural formation: while “new media formats and distribution mechanisms” (25) such as radio programmes and magazines spurred middlebrow culture in the early-twentieth century, the technological innovations of the new millennium turn the middlebrow into a digital venture with an e­ ver-increasing scope and ever more diverse possibilities of consumer participation. How does Driscoll bring to bear her observation that the middlebrow “operat[es] in a digital environment with new global reach” (4) upon her analysis? Her study focuses on four middlebrow institutions which act as powerful mediators of middlebrow culture by defining what and how to read: televised and digitized book clubs, newspaper reviews, literary prizes and literary festivals. Dedicating one chapter to each institution, Driscoll carves out their middlebrow distribution practices along “eight key features” (3) such as commercial, mediated and emotional.6 Given the significance and ubiquity of the internet in contemporary middlebrow culture, her argument cannot do without the collection and evaluation of online data which is particularly foregrounded when she focuses on the consumer of the new literary middlebrow. 6 The other five key features that Driscoll discerns are middle class, reverential, feminized, recreational and earnest (cf. 3).

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Her chapter on literary festivals, for instance, “uses primary research on festival audiences” (153) and considers more than 3,200 digital audience surveys of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Zooming in on audiences’ live tweeting during author events, her discussion of literary festivals further highlights “readers’ digital interactions” (154) on Twitter. Accordingly, Driscoll’s emphasis on consumers’ embrace of digital technology frames the new literary middlebrow as an essentially participatory culture that rests on their co-production of the cultural material they engage with. Despite her study’s suggestion to look for the new literary middlebrow on the internet, however, Driscoll’s investigation of online data does not follow a particular method and therefore remains cursory. This limitation results from the fact that she does not focus on a clearly defined corpus of primary material but rather accumulates various disconnected examples to demonstrate the scope of studying the middlebrow in the twenty-first century. As a consequence, she locates the present middlebrow in contexts as multifarious as the James Frey controversy of Oprah’s Book Club (cf. 72–74),7 pedagogical debates about the Harry Potter novels (cf. 83–118), media reports on the Man Booker Prize (cf. 134–50) and Twitter conversations of the Emerging Writers Festival audience (cf. 180–86). Furthermore, the overview quality of her study explains the author’s defensive tone which keys in with middlebrow studies’ concerted endeavour to rewrite the term’s discursive history of denigration and the concomitant tendency to highlight the middlebrow’s alternative yet equally valid literary practices (cf. e.g. Aubry, Radway, Rubin). Indeed, Driscoll’s continual emphasis on the middlebrow as “a multifaceted, rich cultural space” (44) or as “a source of value and satisfaction for an increasing number of readers” (201) culminates in her concluding remark that “[t]his study has not just described the new literary middlebrow, but defended it” (ibid.). Arguably, Driscoll’s writing position results from the neglect of contexts in which the middlebrow model of literacy and associated practices of consumption have highly problematic consequences. To be more precise, the celebratory attitude of Driscoll as well as other scholars of the historical and contemporary middlebrow rests on the absence of the postcolonial. Driscoll occasionally notes that the new literary middlebrow crosses national borders, “works internationally” or “increasingly promotes a global cosmopolitanism” 7 The book club’s selection of James Frey’s bestselling memoir of drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces (2003), engendered considerable media debate when the account turned out to be invented. Stressing the ethical agenda of her literacy model, Oprah Winfrey publicly criticized Frey for betraying the trust of herself and her audience. Driscoll reads the controversy as an example of the middlebrow’s “committed earnestness” (74) towards consumers’ project of self-improvement (cf. 72–74).

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(198). If anything, these and other comments on international writers merely prove that her missing postcolonial perspective leads her to disregard the neocolonial power politics of the international book market and therefore ultimately rehearses a middlebrow pattern of interpretation that she originally sets out to critically investigate. Pointing to the urgent need to establish a lively dialogue between the two fields of research, Driscoll’s study provides a key inspiration for my literarysociological analysis of the new Nigerian novel. It effectively influences the conceptualization of the contemporary middlebrow in digitized terms and largely defines the selection criteria for the construction of my corpus of online material (cf. Table 1). This chapter shall go beyond Driscoll’s approach, though, by proceeding from a clearly demarcated body of primary sources and employing computerized linguistic methods in order to demonstrate that the digital affect consists of a tightly-knit pattern of production, distribution and consumption that Driscoll’s wide range of examples conceals. It would be misleading to suggest that Driscoll sidelines the middlebrow’s connection to the market. Indeed, she employs the term “commercial” as one of the key characteristics of the new literary middlebrow. However, adopting an interventionist cultural studies perspective, she readily grants consumers the capacity of “appropriating and interpreting cultural commodities in diverse, creative, and at times subversive ways” (Aubry 11) and therefore neglects the profit-oriented underpinnings of the middlebrow’s democratic impetus. The heading of this section, middlebrow 2.0, is clearly modelled on Jonathan Franzen’s concept of “technoconsumerism” (72) that Driscoll uses to engage with the writer’s argument against the mass-mediation of literature and highlight the democratizing impact of digital technologies on consumerism.8 While the heading acknowledges that twenty-first-century middlebrow culture has migrated to the internet and thus forms the conceptual basis for the notion of the digital affect, this chapter equally stresses that digital technologies such as social media constitute an immense market and therefore function as tools of multinational corporations. Foregrounding a political economy 8 In his Guardian article “What’s Wrong With the Modern World?” (2013), Franzen defines “technoconsumerism” as “a humanist rhetoric” of “empowerment” and “creativity” and “freedom” and “connection” and as a “humanist rhetoric” including such benefits as empowerment and freedom that are, however, only available to a limited number of mediasavy “­techno-titants.” Driscoll rightly remarks that Franzen adopts a “moralistic tone” when conceptualizing technological advancement as “bad and literature as good” (72). Occupying the middle ground between degrading and celebratory attitudes, my chapter demonstrates that the middlebrow 2.0 can be used as an analytical and not a moral category which does, however, not preclude a capitalist critique.

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perspective, I conceptualize the middlebrow 2.0 not primarily as “a multifaceted […] cultural space” (Driscoll 44) marked by increasing consumer agency but as a mass-mediated culture characterized by homogeneity and repetition rather than heterogeneity and diversity concerning consumer positions. Indeed, my linguistic analysis of the affective online community will substantiate that the network of authors, publishers, reviewers and readers of the new Nigerian novel has a very limited set of interpretive strategies that overwhelmingly filter consumption through emotion. This act of emotional recalibration results from the “corporate interests, mass-media mechanisms, and the demands of capitalism” which “exert an enormous influence over the ways in which the products generated within this system get interpreted and used” (Aubry 12). As the construction of the digital affect and its evaluation with the emotion dispositif will show, the affective online community exhausts itself in the continual reinforcement of an emotional reading pattern which serves both to counteract and to confirm mechanisms of trading the novels and the commodities engendered through their reception for profit. 5

The Digital Affect

Before demonstrating how to collect and evaluate the practices of the digital affect created by four new Nigerian novels, I will briefly trace the historical echoes of the affective online community which span different stages of capitalism and suggest slightly varied means of resistance to and containment in its mechanisms. Accordingly, this section adopts a historicizing vantage point to develop two key ideas. For one, it illustrates that capitalism and emotion have a tendency to go hand in hand or, more precisely, that emotions fulfil a function in capitalist societies. Secondly, it inquires in how far the middlebrow 2.0 and one of its manifestations, the digital affect, can be conceptualized as an expression of postmodern culture. Drawing on Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as the “cultural dominant” (56) of late capitalism, the section considers whether the middlebrow 2.0 equals the twentieth-century middlebrow in generating streams of cultural production that contradict dominant cultural styles. Does the middlebrow 2.0 constitute postmodernism’s Other? The notion of the digital affect builds on two influential studies which focus on how the shared consumption of sentimental fiction by middle-class women encouraged the creation of a public sphere in the UK and the US in the 1750s and 1830s, respectively: G.J. Barker-Benfield’s The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1992) and Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

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(2008). Despite the widely different contexts their studies are located in, BarkerBenfield and Berlant similarly claim that the emergence of the UK and US public spheres coincided with the rise of the capitalist market economy and the subsequent development of consumer culture.9 Against this backdrop, both scholars discuss sensibility or sentimentality as the dominant mode serving to adjust the emerging middle classes to the new social and economic system. Crucially, then, both studies frame the public sphere as an affective rather than political space and therefore indicate that the formation of the digital affect can be read as a reaction to social and economic change. Accordingly, the emotion talk of consumers of the new Nigerian novel provides a consolidating means of coping with late capitalist challenges.10 Barker-Benfield and Berlant’s insights form the starting point of the conceptualization of the digital affect and hence deserve detailed consideration. Essentially a rewriting of the separate spheres concept, Barker-Benfield’s account of eighteenth-century middle-class culture demonstrates how the reform of manners blurred the boundaries between public and private spheres and thereby framed the negotiation of new gender roles. Focusing on the establishment of a public male sphere, the first chapters illustrate how discourses of sensibility functioned to expand commercial endeavours. As he argues, “[i]t was in the interest of commerce that men cultivated politeness and sensibility, this tendency coinciding with the goal of ‘the reformation of manners’” (Barker-Benfield xxv) primarily led by middle-class women. While male agents of the public sphere readily benefited from the opportunities to turn sensibility into capital, they also feared that the mobilization of sensibility discourses put them in the dangerous position of being rendered effeminate. Correspondingly, the remaining chapters emphasize that Britain’s transformation of the economy and the male public sphere rested on the transformed role of middleclass women as consumers of household goods and the emerging novel. Along these lines, Barker-Benfield shows how the private sphere, constructed as the 9

10

According to Mandel’s characterization of capitalism as a three-stage cultural development‚ the “rise” of a capitalist market economy precedes the “fundamental breaks […] in the evolution of machinery under capital” (Jameson 77) and refers to “the ‘original’ industrial revolution of the later 18th century” (qtd. in Jameson 78). More precisely, the first phase of market capitalism starts with “[m]achine production of steam-driven motors since 1848” (ibid.). Drawing on Mandel’s schema, Jameson claims that “late or multinational or consumer capitalism […] constitutes […] the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas” (78). The term “pure” signifies that, according to Jameson, late capitalism holds no position of critical distance because “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (56) and therefore engenders the kind of alienation addressed above.

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primary site for consumption and “dominated by female consumer choice” (ibid.), became a central scene of expressing female power and authority over the development of the public sphere.11 Berlant’s study of 1830s “women’s culture” as “the first mass cultural intimate public in the United States” (viii–ix) presents close readings of a broad range of early to mid-twentieth-century middlebrow texts by women writers and their forms of consumption to characterize the US public sphere as an “affective scene of identification among strangers” (viii). Her analysis of American melodrama classics such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) or Imitation of Life (1933) as well as their stage and film adaptations frames sentimentality as both a resource for and constraint on female agency. Emphasizing different historical enactments of “intimate publics,” i.e. patterns of shared publicity rendered possible by the development of mass media, Berlant’s study goes beyond other surveys of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sentimental fiction. Marked by its members’ assumption of a common femininity, an intimate public creates a space of attachment and satisfaction in that it “promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion” (ibid.). In an intimate public, Berlant argues, femininity functions less as an identity and more like a genre, an inclination towards conventions which is enacted through the two dominant modes that constitute the study’s title: sentimentality and complaint. The double-edged promise that an intimate public offers plays a crucial role in the conceptualization of the digital affect: pledging a sense of belonging to conventional forms as a relief from capitalist alienation, it equally reinforces capitalism because it feeds commodity culture in the first place. Concentrating on the “experience of social belonging” (viii) that unites various generations of intimate publics, Berlant does not correlate their different realizations with different stages of capitalism which can be conceived, however, when looking at her study through the lens of Jameson’s theory of postmodernism. Unsurprisingly, her analysis of the stage and film adaptations of American melodramas draws on the Marxist critic’s vocabulary of a postmodern aesthetics marked by pastiche, quotations and nostalgia (cf. e.g. 78–79). The middlebrow 2.0 and one of its expressions, the digital affect, unfold against the same backdrop of postmodern play. However, I will demonstrate that they 11

Barker-Benfield’s well-conceived study of the gendered conditions of eighteenth-century sensibility is marked by a blatant omission: race. For instance, his discussion of Aphra Behn’s proto-novel Oroonoko (1688) does not consider that the protagonist is African (cf. 226, 307). The study thus ignores how far Britain’s reform of manners and the resulting construction of an affective consumer culture rested on the exploitation of the black colonized subject.

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do not revel in the “hopelessly commercial culture” (Storey 205) where the integration of aesthetic and commodity production is complete (cf. Jameson 56). As we shall see in the following sections, the urgent desire for meaning of the digital affect’s members is a far cry from postmodernism’s depthlessness and superficiality and therefore suggests a significant parallel to the early-­ twentieth-century middlebrow. Commenting on the literary developments at the time, Nicola Humble argues that [i]t is not […] that novelists, and particularly female novelists, suddenly started writing meretricious, class-obsessed fripperies in the years after the First World War, but rather that the status of the realist novel was dramatically altered by the coming to public consciousness of the modernist and associated avant-garde movements. (11) Against this backdrop, we can establish a connection to the beginning of the twentieth century and conceptualize the middlebrow 2.0 as postmodernism’s Other. Opposing the blatant entanglement of capital and culture, the digital affect seeks to counter the market with emotions – only to be continually reintegrated into its mechanisms. 6

Data Collection: Constructing the Corpus

Contrary to Barker-Benfield and Berlant’s historical investigations of affective public spheres whose agents are largely constructed in the literary texts that the scholars discuss, the notion of the digital affect promises more immediate access to actual agents and thus promts a shift in emphasis from literary to ­literary-sociological levels of analysis. However, the internet does not necessarily render the construction of the affective community any easier. Unlike corpora that conventionally form the research objects of linguistic inquiries, my corpus of online material had to be actively constructed from a broad range of different text types. Since the selection criteria as to which digital platforms to include determine the outcome of the analysis, it is essential to define them carefully and consider their implications. What is more, any construction of a corpus consisting of online data also has to acknowledge that the corpus material is virtually indefinite and constantly changing.12

12

I sampled my corpus in April 2018. The bibliography merely lists online sources explicitly mentioned in the running text. - 978-90-04-42656-6

The Digital Affect and the New Nigerian Novel Table 1 

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Analytical levels of the digital affect

Production

Distribution

Consumption

official author websites author interviews other online publications creative writing programmes 51 publishers websites reading guides paratexts newspaper reviews literary prizes literary festivals 38 reader reviews Amazon UK/US Goodreads YouTube online reading groups/blogs 1,852

I propose that we investigate the digital affect on three different yet interrelated analytical levels. Table 1 offers an overview of the various levels and text types that constitute the affective online community of four new Nigerian novels. The criteria for the construction of my online corpus are, of course, mutually dependent on my definition of the new Nigerian novel as an agent in contemporary middlebrow culture and the resulting expansion of Adesanmi and Dunton’s definition of the concept. The influence of Driscoll’s study reveals itself most clearly in my focus on middlebrow institutions that capitalize on the new Nigerian novel. To provide an example on the level of distribution, all of the four novels were published by a handful of “leading media conglomerate publishers” (Steiner 319) that control the global book market and – as their ­simultaneous online publications of reading guides suggest – readers’ approaches to literature. Similarly, the level of consumption indicates that the act of reading is not necessarily controlled by consumers but rather mediated by powerful US corporations with global reach.13 A cursory glance behind the 13

A quick search on Google indicates that the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads (which is a subsidiary of Amazon) as well as YouTube (which belongs to Google) are not controlled by its composers. According to information supplied by the US electronic company, Amazon gains a yearly revenue of $177 billion. The yearly revenue YouTube makes from its advertising programmes was estimated between $4.7 and $5.6 billion in 2013. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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institutional gates indeed shows that “capitalism is the driving force of a ­renewed globalization where one-half of the world’s largest economic units are c­ onstituted by 200 transnational corporations who produce between onethird and one-half of world output” (Barker 20) of which the new Nigerian novel forms an appropriate literary example. Against this backdrop, the neatly demarcated categories that structure the table hardly represent the actual online traces of the new Nigerian novel. Functioning as a tightly-knit network, the digital affect offers several roles to be filled at once and thereby contradicts the frequent claim that digital media create diverse consumer positions. For example, the author Diana Evans is not just the producer of new Nigerian novels but, as her regular reviews of other new Nigerian novels such as Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013) or Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s Stay With Me (2017) in The Guardian attest, also acts as a distributor within the affective online community.14 Similarly, Bernardine Evaristo, who interviews Evans for the literary magazine Wasafiri, functions as a distributor but is better known as a critically acclaimed Nigerian-British novelist herself. Publishers, to name a third example, do not merely distribute the new Nigerian novel but also use online platforms to fashion themselves as consumers within the community: Oyeyemi’s US publisher, for instance, created the online “Picador Book Club” to construct itself as a like-minded mediator between author and reader and thus advertise her fifth novel Boy, Snow, Bird (2014). Finally, readers on Amazon, Goodreads and YouTube as well as online reading groups and creators of literary blogs are not merely consumers but – as the number of viewers or the comments sections on these platforms prove – contribute considerably to the distribution of the new Nigerian novel. Given the interrelatedness of its agents and the various cross-references and repetitions they produce, the digital affect represents less a “complex and contradictory” (Storey 221) but more a homogenous cultural space that is marked by a capitalist basis. As the numbers in Table 1 indicate, the extensive online research yields a corpus of roughly 2,000 online documents for four novels. Following the preparation of the corpus,15 we can first approach it by focusing on its eponymous characteristic, i.e. affect, and search the documents for syntactic and semantic

14

15

Evans’s example indicates in particular that the notion of the digital affect exceeds the four novels under scrutiny and applies to numerous other new Nigerian novels I study at length in my dissertation project on the “Postcolonial Middlebrow: The New Nigerian Novel.” The preparation of the corpus included, among other things, the conversion of websites into pdf files, the transcription of YouTube videos and the deletion of reader reviews written in a language other than English. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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structures with the noun feeling or emotion, the verb feel or felt, the adjective emotional and the adverb emotionally. The results substantiate the claim that the online community is established by its members’ sharing of emotions: the above words occur in more than 55% of the documents.16 In order not to repeat the emotion talk of the digital affect, we require a metalanguage and methodology to “step out” of the affective online community. The following section suggests how we can combine linguistic and literary-sociological categories to effectively analyse and interpret the community’s reliance on emotion and avoid the danger of mere repetition. 7

Data Evaluation: Emotion Talk and the Emotion Dispositif

In The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013), Franco Moretti suggests the method of “reverse-engineering” (14) to investigate the relation between literary and social histories. Starting from the assumption that aesthetic forms constitute “structured responses to social contradictions” (ibid.), his study convincingly demonstrates how “formal analysis may unlock […] a dimension of the past that would otherwise remain hidden” (ibid.). In order to trace the characteristics of a bourgeois mentality in a vast array of modern European literature, Moretti draws on methods of corpus linguistics and surveys data from the Google Books corpus, the Chadwyck-Healey database and the Library Lab corpus. Apart from focusing on various “unconscious grammatical patterns” (19) such as the use of fillers or free indirect style, he structures his analysis around a number of keywords such as “useful” or “earnest” – adjectives that are “perfectly traceable” (18) in the literary texts – to “unlock” the bourgeois mindset of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since adjectives qualify the mentality he seeks to reconstruct from the literary texts, it does not come as a surprise that Moretti refers to his subchapter on Victorian adjectives as “the conceptual core” (19) of his study. Analysing a large corpus of literature by conducting a corpus analysis, he observes a significant semantic shift: In Victorian times, a large group of adjectives that used to indicate ­physical traits begin to be widely applied to emotional, ethical, intellectual, or even metaphysical states. In the process, the adjectives become 16

The distribution across the different analytical levels attests that all agents of the digital affect equally activate emotion talk. On the level of consumption, the words occur 0,45 times per review. By way of comparison, they are even used 3,78 times per document on the level of production. - 978-90-04-42656-6

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­ etaphorical, and hence acquire the emotional ring that is typical of this m trope. (127) Shifting from a descriptive to an evaluative function, he claims, adjectives become the “inconspicuous vehicles of Victorian values” (130). Moretti’s study informs the evaluation of the digital affect on different levels. For one, the analysis of the corpus of online documents sampled in the previous section follows a similar methodological procedure. More precisely, it determines how the affective online community employs emotion talk by focusing on recurring collocational patterns. The study of collocations derives from the central assumptions of structuralist semantics which, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, claims that language can be systematically described and analysed (cf. Geeraerts 49). Accordingly, collocations refer to “lexical relation[s] between two or more words which have a tendency to co-occur within a few words of each other in running text” (Geeraerts 170). Assuming that agents of the digital affect use particular words in proximity to the cultural keyword EMOTION, I explore the concept’s syntactic and semantic realizations to unearth the cultural norms and experiences of the affective online community. Against this backdrop, I follow Moretti’s combination of linguistic and sociological analyses and interpret my linguistic observations along the category of the emotion dispositif which I develop by merging Foucault’s notion of the dispositif and Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital. The following analysis and interpretation resolves around two research questions: How does the digital affect express emotions? And what textual properties trigger the expressed emotions? Table 2 provides an overview of the overall ten recurring syntactic realizations of the EMOTION concept which suggest that the digital affect relies on a limited grammar of emotion talk. Consisting of verb, noun, adjective and adverb constructions, the grammar of the affective online community shows a clear preference for constructions with the verb feel or felt. Valency grammar substantiates that the digital affect’s emotion talk mobilizes basic English sentence structures to put emphasis on the emoter, i.e. the person expressing an emotion, and the particular emotion involved (cf. Bednarek 80). Various subject-verb-object-realizations of the EMOTION concept such as I feel sad or I felt anxiety stress subjective emotions resting on the emoter’s physical experience. More complex realizations i­ ncorporate subordinate clauses, such as I felt that it opened a window or I felt like I was part of the story, to compare the emotion to an imagined scenario. The third large group of verb realizations underpins the affective online

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The Digital Affect and the New Nigerian Novel Table 2 

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Realizations of the EMOTION concept

I feel/felt She/it feels/felt I feel/felt (her) I/you feel/felt that I/you feel/felt like/as though

She/it feels/felt like/as though Feeling/emotion Feeling/emotion (of) Emotional Emotionally

sad, happy, unsettled, uneasy, uncertain, frustrated, anxious, tense, optimistic, affected normal, human, alien/ated, lonely, unwanted, fragmented, brave, strong, strengthened, alive pain, empathy, sympathy, connection, emotions, anxiety, pity, Nigeria, the heat and dust, the characters I was there, I knew, I understood, it opened a window, I can almost smell the food etc. I was part of the story, I have travelled there myself, you were living in the story, I know each character, you know them personally, the characters were my friends, I’ve been their houseguest, I was able to get inside [her] head, I was [her], the characters and their problems were real real life, real person, real people, she does not belong, she does not fit in human, complex, complicated, ­conflicting, raw, universal, natural, warm, soft, deep compassion, authenticity, oppression, curiosity, separateness story, pain, abuse, problems, journey, turmoil, struggle, insight, richness, growth engaging, difficult, gripping, devastating, estranged, satisfied, involving, charged, rich, intense

c­ ommunity’s desire to relate and connect. Constructions like It feels human or I felt her pain illustrate that the emoter requires a stimulus or trigger, i.e. “the cause, reason or target of an emotion” (Bednarek 70), to express her feelings. Accordingly, these constructions can be referred to as “distorted echoes,” as

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consumers’ rewritings of the novels that are filtered through their emotions, which turn the novels and their characters into projection surfaces of readerly desires.17 That the act of identification forms a crucial strategy of the digital affect is further substantiated on the semantic level which – once again – leads us back into the eighteenth century and into the pages of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Rejecting the notion of an inborn conscience that will guide humanity towards benevolence, Smith refers to feelings of sympathy as the most important characteristics of man. Even if his “impartial spectator” capable of distinguishing between mere identification and imagination cannot be found among the members of the digital affect, the vocabulary of the community clearly gestures towards the need to counterbalance the same capitalist structures that it continually confirms.18 Against this backdrop, the recurring syntactic and semantic structures that constitute the digital affect’s prefabricated language exceed the linguistic dimension and attain a sociological level that can be investigated with the help of the emotion dispositif.19 Generally associated with the influential notion of “discourse,” Foucault first mentions the dispositif in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976). However, he only offers a proper definition during an interview later published in the collection Power/Knowledge (1977): What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous assemblage consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic positions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus.

17

18

19

I am indebted to Rainer Schulze for suggesting the term “distorted echo.” It rests on the distinction between authorial affect, i.e. agents expressing their own emotions, and nonauthorial affect, i.e. agents expressing the emotions of others, discussed at length in Bednarek (cf. 146). Given the insights of Barker-Benfield and Berlant’s studies I discussed above, it is hardly a coincidence that Smith published The Wealth of Nations (1776) only seven years after his analysis of moral sentiments. The eighteenth-century entanglement of capital and emotions as well as its continuation into the twenty-first century first occurred to me when I worked together with Jana Gohrisch on her lecture series “Survey of British Literatures and Cultures.” The term “prefabricated language” was originally coined by the linguist Michael Lewis who claims that native speakers do not only draw on prefabricated grammatical structures but also use prefabricated lexical phrases or chunks of language to produce fluency. I thank Rainer Schulze for drawing my attention to the term.

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The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (194) Foucault’s use of the synonymous term “apparatus” clearly resonates with the Althusserian notion of the “isa.” Consequently, his example of the “apparatus of sexuality” stresses the more subtle mechanisms of state control that Louis Althusser describes in his work: consisting of close entanglements of various discursive and institutional practices such as rendering the female body ­hysterical or framing children’s sexuality in pedagogical terms, Foucault illustrates how the dispositif produces and regulates sexuality at the same time (cf. 209–22). His historicizing take on discursive processes furthermore enables him to define the dispositif as a reaction to a state of social crisis. Highlighting the connection between the various elements of a dispositif and thus stressing its network character, Foucault describes its function in terms of cultural intervention. Accordingly, a dispositif constitutes “a sort of […] formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need” (195). Along these lines, the tight network of discursive and institutional online practices constituting the digital affect can be conceptualized in terms of an emotion dispositif that answers to the “urgent needs” produced by late capitalism. Using the internet to generate its institutions and discourses, the emotion dispositif fosters a set of dispositions that drive its agents towards particular positions, acts and utterances. I shall close this section by illustrating how the contradictory habitus of the digital affect both counteracts and confirms the capitalist mechanisms that produce the online community in the first place. I will do so by proceeding from an analysis of the adjectives that its members use most frequently with the nouns story and character. Table 3 establishes a paradox which suggests the digital affect’s constant oscillation between notions of the universal and the individual. Table 3 

Story Character

Adjective collocations

human, unique, universal, authentic, haunting, gripping, moving, absorbing, compelling, beautiful, empowering, rich, true, honest, courageous human, unique, universal, authentic, complex, deep, rich, sensitive, troubled, unstable, fragile, nervous, disconnected, warm, real

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The adjectives human and universal, which co-occur with story or character 84 and 35 times, respectively, hint at the digital affect’s capacity to either ignore or appropriate racial, national and age differences.20 The underlying claim to universality does not only bespeak the community’s “democratic fantasy of its own universal appeal” (Aubry 4). Crucially, the words that occur most frequently in the immediate environment of human and universal are psychological (problems), mental (illness) or mentally (unstable, disturbed) and therefore express the community’s deep-seated “belief that everyone suffers the same kind of psychological hardships, and that they too are participating in painful struggles constitutive of the human condition” (Aubry 24, original emphasis). Investigating the reception patterns of six bestselling novels in middlebrow institutions, Timothy Aubry’s Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (2011) discloses a “prevailing therapeutic paradigm” (11) according to which readers in the US “choose books that will offer strategies for confronting, understanding, and managing their personal problems” (1). Accordingly, we can read the digital affect’s repeated use of the words universal and human as a means of negotiating contemporary middle-class “problems” in the affluent West. Transposing these “problems” onto black girl protagonists, the digital affect uses the four novels “to dwell obsessively upon their psychological health” (Aubry 20) and thereby counteract a sense of isolation with a sense of belonging to like-minded community members. The frequent use of the words unique (46 times) and authentic (22 times), on the other hand, specifies the kind of belonging the community accomplishes. Emphasizing individuality, the therapeutic paradigm functions as a currency in the middlebrow quest for cultural sophistication. Consequently, the “articulation of psychological difficulty” (Aubry 26) enables agents of the digital affect to “perform their interior affective experience so as to establish their position in society and distinguish themselves from their peers” (15). Resting on the economic and imaginative exploitation of others, the digital affect’s accumulation of cultural capital, which grants belonging to the market, thus reinforces the neocolonial capitalist structures that it otherwise seeks to counteract. To conclude, starting from the assumption that twenty-first century middlebrow culture has moved to the internet, this chapter has exemplified the

20

Reader profiles on Goodreads or YouTube allow us to further specify the setup of the community. Accordingly, its members are predominantly white, female, aged 20–40 and located in the UK or US.

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cultural work of the digital affect with four new Nigerian novels. ­Developing a ­theoretical framework and suggesting a methodological procedure for ­studying the postcolonial middlebrow in the digital age, this chapter has demonstrated how to collect and evaluate the literary practices of the digital affect by combining linguistic and literary-sociological categories of analysis. The investigation of the online community’s emotion talk has yielded that its members use the novels to satisfy their paradoxical impulse of both resisting and endorsing their entanglement in late capitalist social and economic structures and thereby perpetuate colonial and racist power structures resting on the Western control over the global book market. It goes without saying that, framed as market commodities, the novels participate in the middlebrow 2.0 and can thus be read as “extremely sensitive measuring devices capable of registering their readers’ pre-existing needs” (Aubry 10–11). Accordingly, an exhaustive study of the middlebrow 2.0 has to incorporate levels of textual analysis. How do the novels imagine the affective online community? Which aesthetic means do they use to answer the desires of its members? Providing a fruitful starting point for future investigations of the twenty-first-century postcolonial middlebrow, a detailed answer to these questions would exceed the boundaries of this chapter. The above contribution by Gesa Stedman dives into the aesthetic characteristics of recent British Black and Asian novels to suggest how contemporary postcolonial productions actively contribute to the emotional response patterns of the digital affect and thereby highlight that the middlebrow 2.0 can be understood as both a reception and production phenomenon. References Primary Sources

“The Picador Book Club reads Boy, Snow, Bird.” Pan Macmillan, 3 March 2014. Web. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Atta, Sefi. Everything Good Will Come. Northhampton: Interlink, 2005. Belinda’s Book Nook. YouTube Review Channel. YouTube, 17 November 2016. Web. Evans, Diana. 26a. New York: Vintage, 2005. Evans, Diana. “Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi – review.” The Guardian, 3 April 2013. Web. Evans, Diana. “Stay With Me by Ayòbámi Adébáyò review – a big-hearted Nigerian debut.” The Guardian, 9 March 2017. Web. Evaristo, Bernardine. “Diana Evans in conversation.” Wasafiri 20.45 (2005): 31–35. Oyeyemi, Helen. The Icarus Girl. New York: Anchor, 2005.

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Adesanmi, Pius and Chris Dunton. “Everything Good Is Raining: Provisional Notes on the Nigerian Novel of the Third Generation.” Research in African Literatures 39.2 (2008): vii–xii. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Studies. The Key Concepts. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2007. Aubry, Timothy. Reading as Therapy. What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. Barker, Chris. The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2004. Barker-Benfield, G.J. The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Bednarek, Monika. Emotion Talk Across Corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint. The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Berndt, Katrin. “West Africa.” English Literatures Across the Globe. Ed. Lars Eckstein. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2007, 61–85. Bongie, Chris. “Withering Heights: Maryse Condé and the Postcolonial Middlebrow.” Friends and Enemies. The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008, 280–321. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Ed. John G. Richardson. Westport: Greenwood, 1986, 241–58. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. “Double Consciousness in the Work of Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans.” Women: A Cultural Review 20.3 (2009): 277–86. Driscoll, Beth. The New Literary Middlebrow. Tastemakers and Reading in the TwentyFirst Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Foucault, Michel. “The Confession of the Flesh.” Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980, 194–228. Franzen, Jonathan. “What’s Wrong With the Modern World?” The Guardian, 13 September 2013. Web. Geeraerts, Dirk. Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s. Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92. Konchar Farr, Cecilia and Jaime Harker, eds. The Oprah Affect. Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2008. Lewis, Michael. The Lexical Approach. The State of ELT and a Way Forward. Hove: LTP, 1993.

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Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs. Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Moretti, Franco. The Bourgeois. Between History and Literature. Brooklyn: Verso, 2013. Neumeyer, Harald. “Dispositiv.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ansätze – Personen – Grundbegriffe. Ed. Ansgar Nünning, 4th edition. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008, 135–36. Ogunyemi, Chikwenye. Africa Wo/Man Palava. The Nigerian Novel by Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pérez-Fernández, Irene. “Embodying ‘twoness in oneness’ in Diana Evans’s 26a.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 49.3 (2013): 291–302. Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books. The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Selasi, Taiye. “Bye-Bye Babar.” The Lip Magazine, 3 March 2005. Web. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. Ed. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Steiner, Ann. “World Literature and the Book Market.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Eds. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. London: Routledge, 2011, 316–24. Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction. 7th edition. London: Routledge, 2015. Winkler, Rolfe. “YouTube Growing Faster Than Thought, Report Says.” Wall Street Journal, 11 December 2013. Web. Wolff, Janice M. “Reading Oprah: Gender and Literacy in Book Club Culture.” WILLA 12 (2003): 27–37.

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Index Adaptation 47, 141–42, 148–49, 153, 227 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 209, 211, 220 Purple Hibiscus 220 aestheticism 92 imperial literary see also art Afropolitan 211, 220 agency 13–14, 51, 61, 174, 227 Ali, Monica 207 Brick Lane 209 altruism 9, 14, 36, 109, 112, 114 Amazon 214, 221, 230 Angel in the House 76 Anglo-India 8–9, 17, 76, 78–79, 89, 91, 98, 100, 124, 159–60, 200 Simla 13, 90–91 romance 79, 162, 174–75 conventions 9, 13, 17, 73, 128–29, 161–62, 164 ghost story 12, 72–73 art/artistic 14, 56, 90, 94–95, 96, 100, 124, 136 see also aestheticism dance 210 see also fiction film 141, 146, 148–50, 156, 227 see also graphics, illustrations, paintings Atta, Sefi 220 Everything Good Will Come Australia 28, 31, 32 Bangladeshi 213 Belinda’s Book Nook 218, 222 body 12, 96, 116, 130, 135–36, 141, 145, 146, 155, 235 female 12, 116, 141, 155, 235 Boer War 12, 35, 36 bohemianism 98, 99 Bongie, Chris 9–10, 18, 106, 207, 208, 219 Bourdieu, Pierre 89, 94, 98 Boy’s Own Paper 24, 26, 36 Brexit 1–4 British Empire 3, 5, 9, 25, 30, 31–32, 35, 36, 39–40, 47, 104, 175 British Raj 9, 174, 192

Canada 27, 29, 31, 33–34 capital cultural 94, 95–96, 99, 137, 150, 236 economic 111, 119, 237 capitalism 19, 96, 207, 221, 225–227, 230, 234–235 exploitation 120 Caribbean 10, 14, 105–07, 120 caste 82, 86, 144, 163, 212 chick-lit 213, 214 civilizing mission 17, 104, 110, 151, 162, 199 class 10, 29, 79, 85, 93–95, 97–98, 107, 121, 124, 162, 186 middle class 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 23, 29, 40, 49, 65, 105, 109–11, 114, 119, 130, 132, 137, 206–07, 212–13, 221, 226 brown 108–09, 112, 113 lower class 119, 128, 130, 186 upper class 12, 111, 128, 152, 191 working class 10, 22, 40, 104, 106, 107 cliché 18, 118, 207, 212, 213 collocation 232, 235 colonialism 34, 126, 150, 155 power structures 62, 66–67, 73, 79, 84, 107, 113, 119, 126, 130, 153, 161, 222, 224, 237 cross-colonial 142 anti-colonial 203 commodity 120, 220, 227 Commonwealth 1–3 complicity 15, 121, 125–27, 137, 147 Conrad, Joseph 6, 60, 105 Heart of Darkness 60 consumer 12, 49, 155, 207, 218, 220–28, 230 Cosmopolitan 111, 113, 220 Craik, Dinah Mulock 163 The Half-Caste 163 Croker, Bithia Mary 73–75, 77, 164, 196 “The Khitmatgar” 80, 83 “The Red Bungalow” 80, 87 “To Let” 83 In Old Madras 72, 77, 86 Cronin, A. J. 17–18, 179, 181–82 Hatter’s Castle 180, 181, 182–203

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242 Cross, Victoria 15, 124–27, 136 Anna Lombard 128–32, 134, 136–37 Life of My Heart 128, 132, 134–35, 136 Theodora. A Fragment Cunard, Nancy, Negro. An Anthology 120–21 dance see art degeneracy 14, 17, 55, 109, 112, 161 digital 219, 222–24, 228, 237 affect 220–21, 224–29, 231–37 discrimination 121, 215 Diver, Maud 13, 89, 96 The Englishwoman in India 85, 91, 93 The Great Amulet 89 diversity 18, 107, 116, 206–08, 216, 225 domestic 25–26, 31, 39, 119, 188, 218 fiction 14, 18, 75, 90, 91, 92, 104–05, 109, 115–16, 162 realism 114 Driscoll, Beth 8, 18, 208, 219, 222–24 Duncan, Sara Jeanette 13, 91–92 « An Impossible Ideal » 90, 91, 94–98 The Imperialist 92 The Pool in the Desert 90, 92, 94–95 Economy/economic 1, 2, 5, 9, 30, 76, 89–90, 98, 100, 110, 118, 212, 221, 226, 230, 236–37 Edmondson, Belinda 10, 106, 107 education 11, 15, 23, 39, 110, 111, 131–32, 137, 207 Eliot, George, Middlemarch 112 emigration 25–32, 35, 39–40, 188 emotion 11, 117, 120, 134, 164–65, 172, 221, 225, 228, 231–32 dispositif 221, 225, 232, 234–35 talk 221, 226, 231, 232, 237 see also feeling Empire nostalgia 2 Englishness 13, 90, 116, 172, 214 see also British, see also Great Britain eroticism 146 ethnicity/ethnographic/ethnological 55–58, 60–61, 147 Europe/European 1–4, 12, 32, 33, 38, 50, 55, 60, 62, 66, 75, 90, 92, 96, 105, 108, 111, 132147, 154–55, 231 Eurasian 136, 159–60, 162–64, 173 Euro-America 220 see also American Evans, Diana 220, 230 26a 220

Index exotic, exoticizing 5, 12, 16, 18, 26, 35, 40, 49, 54, 67, 73, 78, 97, 142, 146, 150, 156, 175, 180, 187–88, 200, 207, 209, 213, 214 feeling 54, 161, 165, 210, 213, 231, 233–34 femininity 14, 34, 114, 121, 128, 152, 227 heterosexual 106 middle class 65, 112–13 fiction adventure 17, 25, 40, 46–48, 49, 57, 67–68, 162 Bildungsroman 76, 104–05, 113–14, 116, 119–21 crime 114–17, 120 domestic 104–05, 116, 162 graphic novel 46 imperial 6, 8, 12, 13, 15, 17, 48, 73, 84, 90–93, 96, 99–100, 116, 129, 137, 160–62 juvenile mystery 213, 214 New Nigerian Novel 219 popular 23, 161, 188, 214 realist 109 film see art Foucault, Michel 135, 144, 221, 232, 234–35 Fraser, Augusta Zelia 14, 103–04, 121 Lucilla. An Experiment 14, 106, 108–113, 119 gender 13–15, 32, 34, 36, 40, 52, 67, 73, 75, 78, 92, 105, 107–110, 121, 125, 127, 132–34, 137, 150, 160–61, 163, 175, 188, 226 see domesticity, femininity masculinity 12, 64, 117, 128, 137 ghost stories see also Anglo-India Girl’s Own Paper 24–40 global 1, 7, 18, 208, 210–11, 212, 220, 229, 237 globalization 2, 3, 11, 151, 221–22, 230 Goodreads 221, 230 Gothic 78, 84, 86–87, 90, 106, 114, 116, 119, 121 grammar 155, 232 graphics 48, 57, 67–68, 124 see also art, illustration, paintings Great Britain 31, 159 Haggard, Ryder H. 5, 44–68, 105 Allan Quatermain 46, 49, 55–57, 59–61 King Solomon’s Mines 46–55, 61–62 Maiwa’s Revenge 46, 47, 49, 63–67 - 978-90-04-42656-6

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Index Hall, Catherine 104 Hammill, Faye 16, 142, 151, 154 happy ending 18, 163, 171, 174, 207, 208, 212, 215 highbrow 6, 10, 97, 137, 151, 154 hill station 13, 74, 81 see also Simla horror 87, 106, 214 Humble, Nicola 7, 107, 114, 116, 137, 228 humour 18, 93, 209 see also satire, see also irony hybriditity generic 106–07, 116, 120 identity 75, 79, 95, 100, 160, 227 black 210 brown 10, 210 middle-class 113 racial 160, 164 ideology 1, 25, 75, 125 imperial 8, 12, 105, 107, 200, 202–03 middle-class 109, 115 neo-colonial 11, 146 neoliberal 207 self-help 109 illustration 12, 26, 44–68, 124 see also graphics, see also paintings imperialism 3–5, 8, 11–12, 15–17, 25, 32–35, 40, 46–47, 49, 54, 68, 75, 92–93, 104–07, 125–127, 131, 137, 154, 161–62, 175, 179, 200 neo-imperial 208 indigenous 144, 146, 192 irony 109, 119, 121, 149, 157 see also humour, see also satire Jamaica 106, 110, 116–20 Jameson, Fredric 221, 225, 227 JanMohamed, Abdul 154 Kipling, Rudyard 6, 13, 36, 72, 74, 76, 91, 92, 105, 187, 199 Plain Tales from the Hills 90, 93, 99 Levy, Andrea 209 Small Island 215 literary field 13, 117, 206–07, 216 market 5 prize 206, 208, 222, 229 linguistics 221, 231 Livingstone, David 103–05

Long, Margaret 14–15, 105–06, 113–15, 121 The Golden Violet. The Story of a Lady Novelist 14, 105–06, 113–119 love story 127 Luck, Mary Churchill 160, 169, 173 Poor Elisabeth 169–75 Macdonald, Kate 7, 106, 116, 128 magazine 22, 24–25, 35, 36, 39, 47, 49, 55, 118, 141, 153, 222 see also periodical manual 13, 76 market book see also economy literary Masai 12, 55–57, 59–61 Maugham, Somerset 141–42, 150–53 “Rain” 142–49, 151–56 McClintock, Anne 161 media 16, 19, 36, 47, 141, 219, 222–25, 227, 230 melodrama 128, 153, 185, 227 memsahib 73–81, 83–84, 128, 170 middlebrow 4–6, 7–11, 24, 47–49, 67, 84–87, 89–90, 96, 99, 105–07, 113, 114, 116–17, 137, 142, 151–52, 179–80, 182, 200, 202–03, 208–09, 214–16, 218–19, 236 2.0 220, 222–27, 237 anxiety management 6, 17, 180 Battle of the Brows 5 Caribbean 10 fin de siècle 67 postcolonial 9, 18, 207, 215–16, 219, 220, 237 migration 1, 3, 25–35, 39–40, 126, 188 see also emigration modernism/modernist/modernity 7, 9, 16, 106, 114, 120, 125–26, 142–43, 147, 152, 154, 180, 186, 203, 207 Modern Girl 16, 141, 152–56 monogamy 15, 126, 131, 134 Morant Bay Rebellion 117, 118 Moretti, Franco 113, 220, 231–32 Music 94, 110, 209–10 see art mutiny 73, 96, 129, 194 New Hellenism 15, 127, 133 New Woman 14, 66, 106, 109, 113, 119, 133–34, 136 see also women New Zealand 30–31 - 978-90-04-42656-6

244 Nigerian 19, 219–21, 224–26, 229–30 Noble Savage 12, 49–50, 53–55 non-white 49, 66, 161, 207–09, 212–13, 215 O’Callaghan, Evelyn 108, 115 online 19, 219–25, 228–30, 232 communities 19, 220, 225, 230–31, 235, 237 Orientalist 96, 127–28, 130–31, 135, 146 Other/Otherness 11, 12, 17–18, 54, 55, 73, 78, 104, 126, 128, 134–35, 154, 159, 192, 202, 221, 225, 228 Oyeyemi, Helen 218, 220, 231 The Icarus Girl 218, 220 painting 52, 65, 92, 94–96, 134 see art see also graphics, see also illustrations patriarchy 9, 15, 66, 74–75, 117, 119, 126, 132 Penny, Fanny Emily 17, 163–64 Caste and Creed 160, 164–68, 174 penny dreadfuls 11, 23–24 performance 13, 73, 79, 84, 90–91, 93, 95, 98–100, 142, 154 periodical 15, 22–23, 47, 124 see also magazine photography 36, 68 see art play 141, 146, 147–49, 151, 153 see also theatre postcolonial 3–4, 8–11, 18–19, 106–07, 120, 154, 206–07, 209, 215–16, 219–20, 223–24, 237 post-emancipation 9, 105, 109–111, 117 postmodernism 225, 227 Pratt, Mary Louise 57, 60 publishers 7, 74, 206, 220–21, 225, 229–230 race 9, 14–17, 49–50, 53, 55, 59, 62, 67, 106–13, 116, 119–20, 125, 127, 129, 137, 141, 144, 152, 159–164, 166–67, 169–171, 173–76, 209 biracial 17, 159–60, 162–67, 169–70, 172, 174–75, 219 interracial love 15, 17, 62, 128–30, 134, 136, 161–62, 169, 173, 175 mixed/mixing 14, 17, 108, 111, 119, 145, 152, 159–60, 162–64, 170–71, 174, 176, 209 multiracial 109 racism 128, 130–32, 137, 147, 209, 215 Radway, Janice 152, 223

Index reader 4–5, 7–8, 10, 12, 15, 17–19, 25–27, 48, 56–57, 67, 76, 104, 109–10, 115–17, 120–21, 124, 128, 131, 166, 175, 194, 202–03, 207–08, 211–15, 219–23, 225, 234, 237 reception 4, 19, 109, 114, 117, 221, 236–37 Religious Tract Society (rtc) 11, 23, 38 representation 6, 11–13, 74, 100, 109, 113, 116, 149, 150–55, 187–88, 208, 214 review 74, 104, 108–09, 115, 141, 165, 169, 172–73, 183, 186, 206–08, 218, 221–22, 225, 229–31 Robina Crusoe 34–35, 40 Robinson Crusoe 25, 34–35 romance 9, 13, 17, 46–49, 57, 67–68, 72, 75, 77, 86, 104, 114–17, 119–20, 128, 137, 159–63, 174–75 domestic 8, 14 historical 105–06, 118, 121 imperial 12, 47–48, 60, 105–06, 110, 159–60, 173–75 station 15, 128–29 Sahota, Sanjeev 18, 207, 211, 212 The Year of the Runaways 211–12, 215 Said, Edward 54, 104–05 Culture and Imperialism 104–05 Orientalism 54 Sam Sharpe Rebellion 105, 117 Samoa 16, 140–48, 155–56 satire 90, 115 see also humour, see also irony Scottish 17–18, 78, 104, 160, 164–65, 168, 181–82, 185–86, 202 Kailyard 179–80, 183, 185–86, 188, 192, 196, 200, 202–03 Selasi, Taiye 211, 220, 230 Sensibility 160, 221, 226–27 sentimentality 226–27 sexuality 12, 15, 62, 114, 125, 127, 129, 135, 162, 166, 234–35 homosexuality 136, 152 Shearing, Joseph see Long, Margaret Sikh 211–12 Simla 89–101 slavery 52, 108, 118–19 enslavement 15, 117, 119, 121 post-slavery 106, 116 Smith, Zadie 18, 207, 209–11, 213, 215

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Index Swing Time 209, 211, 215 White Teeth 209 Snaith, Mahsuda 18, 207, 213 The Things We Thought We Knew 213–15 South Africa 36–39, 44, 46, 48, 62, 68 South African War 25–26, 35–36, 38 South Pacific 16, 143, 148, 150 Spinner, Alice see Fraser, Augusta Zelia stage 16, 141, 147–49, 153–54, 157, 227 see also theatre Steel, Flora and Grace Gardiner 74, 76, 85 The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook 76 stereotype 12, 49, 63, 76–77, 84, 135, 137, 146, 160, 163, 166, 176, 180, 192, 194–95, 197, 208, 211 superiority 9, 14, 60, 68, 94, 98, 109, 125, 128–29, 132, 147, 162, 172 terror 59–61, 73, 87 Thacker’s Indian Directory 80 theatre 150, 153–54, 67 see also play, see also stage transnational 150, 230 trope 15, 93, 100, 104, 108–09, 111, 116, 120–21, 127, 141, 148, 178, 188, 202 type 13, 52, 61–62, 75, 113–14, 132, 141, 163, 173–74, 196, 202, 214, 228–29 UK 1, 3, 206–07, 211–12, 215, 220, 225–26 see also Great Britain Umbopa 50–55, 61 Umslopogaas 12, 49 U.S.A./ United States 46, 108, 153, 181, 221, 227 see also America

values 113, 141, 154–56, 188, 193, 198, 207, 215, 232 Victorian 7, 11, 14–15, 22–23, 25, 34, 40, 47–48, 50, 66, 68, 105, 109, 113–14, 118, 121, 125, 127–28, 133, 137, 162, 186, 188, 200, 231–32 violence 12, 25, 32, 44, 61, 65, 128–29 visual culture 12, 46–47, 49, 68 war/warrior 4, 12, 25–26, 33, 35–40, 49, 52, 54–57, 59–61, 63–66, 143 Weber, Hans von 5–6 West Africa 210–11, 219 West Indies 31–33, 104–116, 121 Western 12, 47–48, 56–57, 60, 65, 68, 111, 131, 135, 146, 155–56, 162, 222, 237 Whiteness 166, 207–08, 214–15 Winfrey, Oprah 218, 223 Women 13–14, 28–29, 34–35, 37, 40, 75, 78–79, 105–06, 108–11, 114, 129–30, 135–36, 144, 149, 152–53, 159–62, 169, 173–75, 188, 192–93, 195–96, 200, 212, 225–27 African 12, 49, 52, 62–63, 65–67 Anglo-Indian 73, 80, 85 English/British 36, 73–74, 93, 113, 159, 161–64 Indian 163 see also New Woman white 62, 91, 132 Women’s Emigration Society (wes) 27–28 Woolf, Virginia 6, 127, 137, 151, 187 World Wide Web see online Yellow Book, The 15, 124–25 Young, Robert 126, 134 YouTube 218–19, 221, 229–30, 236

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