scholarly journals Haunted Oppressors: The Deconstruction of Manliness in the Imperial Gothic Stories of Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Anna Berger
Keyword(s):  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
Adventure Fiction ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Adventure Stories

Building on Patrick Brantlinger’s description of imperial Gothic fiction as “that blend of adventure story with Gothic elements”, this article compares the narrative formula of adventure fiction to two tales of haunting produced in a colonial context: Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” (1890) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Brown Hand” (1899). My central argument is that these stories form an antithesis to adventure fiction: while adventure stories reaffirm the belief in the imperial mission and the racial superiority of the British through the display of hypermasculine heroes, Kipling’s and Conan Doyle’s Gothic tales establish connections between imperial decline and masculine failure. In doing so, they destabilise the binary construction between civilised Western self and savage Eastern Other and thus anticipate one of the major concerns of postcolonial criticism. This article proposes, therefore, that it is useful to examine “The Mark of the Beast” and “The Brown Hand” through a postcolonial lens.

Voyaging Out

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Sarah LeFanu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
Mary Kingsley ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
Imperial Institute ◽  
The Military ◽  
Board Ship ◽  
African Nationalism

This chapter takes the reader through the months immediately preceding the departure to South Africa of the three protagonists of the book, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley, in, respectively, January, February and March 1900. We see Rudyard and Carrie Kipling enduring their first Christmas without their daughter Josephine, and Kipling’s belief in the necessity and the good of war in South Africa, despite the military reversals of its early months; we see Conan Doyle throwing himself into war preparations and being inoculated against typhoid during the voyage; we see Mary Kingsley giving her last lecture in London at the Imperial Institute, and, on board ship, writing a critique of Christianity and a plea in favor of African nationalism, stressing the link between African land ownership and freedom from Western interference.

Something of Themselves

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah LeFanu
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Mary Kingsley ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
South African War ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
Cultural Legacies

In early 1900, the paths of three British writers--Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle--crossed in South Africa, during what has become known as Britain's last imperial war. Each of the three had pressing personal reasons to leave England behind, but they were also motivated by notions of duty, service, patriotism and, in Kipling's case, jingoism. Sarah LeFanu compellingly opens an unexplored chapter of these writers' lives, at a turning point for Britain and its imperial ambitions. Was the South African War, as Kipling claimed, a dress rehearsal for the Armageddon of World War One? Or did it instead foreshadow the anti-colonial guerrilla wars of the later twentieth century? Weaving a rich and varied narrative, LeFanu charts the writers' paths in the theatre of war, and explores how this crucial period shaped their cultural legacies, their shifting reputations, and their influence on colonial policy.

Kipling’s Art of War

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-519
Author(s):  
Nasser Mufti
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Art Of War ◽  
National Imagination ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle

Nasser Mufti, “Kipling’s Art of War” (pp. 496–519) This essay looks at the British empire’s most ambitious years, when it saw Britain and its settler colonies as belonging to a global nation-state, most commonly referred to as “Greater Britain.” The apex of this imperial-national imagination came with the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War, which jingoists like Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling celebrated as a civil war because it was seen to be a conflict between the “blood brotherhood” of empire: Britons and Boers. Hence the characterization of the Boer War as “the last of the gentleman’s wars” or “a sahibs’ war,” because it was said to be fought between the civilized fellow-citizens of the British empire. But Kipling also had to confront the fact that British and Boer tactics were decidedly “ungentlemanly” at the war front. I turn to his short story “A Sahibs’ War” (1901), which is especially concerned about the “gentleman’s war” in South Africa looking identical to anticolonial wars in Afghanistan and Burma, which in Kipling’s mind were barbaric frontier conflicts. Kipling registers this ambivalence between civil and colonial war in the language of his story, which strategically puns across English, Afrikaans and Urdu/Hindi. These translingual puns make legible and sensible the tensions between the intra-national and extra-national, domestic and foreign, civil and imperial that characterized Greater British discourse at the turn of the century.

Organic Imperialism

2014 ◽  
pp. 250-267
Author(s):  
John Kucich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Adventure Fiction ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
Empire Studies

Empire studies has largely overcome tendencies to view metropole and periphery as oppositional. Nevertheless, critics’ focus on sexual and racial forms of reciprocal cultural constitution has eclipsed analysis of how competing conceptions of social order interrogated each another at sites of cross-cultural exchange. What has chiefly escaped revision is the notion that the empire was based on an organic social model that remained fundamentally conservative despite cross-cultural contacts. In nineteenth-century Britain, organicism acquired elasticity as new forms of social mobility and inclusiveness pervaded domestic life. In the colonial context, these progressive conceptions of organicism were sometimes transformed by encounters with indigenous societies. The central argument of this essay is that nineteenth-century organic imperialism was increasingly liberalized, and was further modified by fictional representations of non-Western social order. It focuses on sea adventure fiction and two colonial novels: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899) and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901).

Spaces of Adventure and Cultural Politics of Masculinity: R M Ballantyne and The Young Fur Traders

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 591-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard S Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
Fur Traders ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Robert Michael Ballantyne ◽  
Adventure Stories

Masculinities reflect the characteristics of the spaces—real and imaginary, material and metaphorical—in which they are constructed. Mapmakers, ranging from academic geographers to popular storytellers, chart masculinist geographies: Spaces in which masculinities are mapped. One important genre of masculinist geographical narrative is adventure. I explore the masculinism of adventure through a detailed, contextual reading of one particular adventure story. The Young Fur Traders—a British Victorian boys' adventure story set in Canada, written by the Scottish writer Robert Michael Ballantyne. In the setting of The Young Fur Traders, Ballantyne mapped a form of masculinity known generally as Christian manliness. Literal journeys through the spaces of adventure constituted metaphorical journeys through adolescence, from white, middle-class boyhood to white, middle-class manhood. Settings—liminal, largely unknown but broadly realistic, male-dominated, primitive, simplified, and idealised spaces—were imprinted upon this masculinity. The settings of adventure stories arc cultural spaces in which hegemonic masculinity is mapped and, in some cases, unmapped.

Can the Postcolonial Animal Speak?

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 619-637 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fayaz Chagani
Keyword(s):  
Physical Violence ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Moral Universe ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Human Animal

This essay addresses the repression of considerations of human-animal relations in postcolonial studies. It suggests that because the field has not fully examined its own anthropocentrism, it continues to reproduce a rather conventional humanism in spite of many claims to the contrary. A central argument of the essay is that in failing to recognize the subjectivity of nonhuman animals, and accepting their exclusion from a moral universe reserved for humans, postcolonial criticism participates in the symbolic and physical violence committed against them. In terms of approach, the essay begins by tracing three humanist “moments” in the career of postcolonialism. This is followed by an assessment of the recent ecocritical turn in postcolonial literary studies. The essay concludes by considering whether humanism does in fact need to be overcome and what remains to be done for postcolonial thinking to more adequately confront “the question of the animal.”

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