Writing the white self by censoring sex

I found Stoler’s observation that the later stages of colonialism were accompanied by the increasing need to build a “cordon sanitaire” (77) around whiteness and white prestige very interesting. This seems to be paralleled in the tension I find in Orwell and Woolf, which arises, I feel, between the growing awareness of empire’s complexity on one hand and the anxiety of self – the need to inscribe one’s identity within protective whiteness – on the other.

This tension is reflected in the Orwell and Woolf texts, which claim to be autobiographical but which are carefully – whether consciously or not – crafted to project a certain image of the self. What struck me in particular about Woolf was how he constantly drew on symbols of whiteness to shape his discourse. The people and events he writes about are compared to (and therefore understood through) fictional discourses from Austen, Kipling, Forster, Don Quixote; his autobiographical account is based not just on personal recollections but on letters exchanged with Lytton Strachey in England. One has to be in dialogue and contact with Englishness/whiteness in order to express the self. And in order to project a self that is acceptable to standards of whiteness (as Woolf himself performs to the Club and to the natives), Woolf and Orwell’s accounts of the self also undergo some form of self-censorship. As noted in other posts, women are curiously absent in texts by both authors; attempts at portraying (white) women are sanitized and desexualized – a symptom of the prescribed moral and sexual roles that Stoler identifies.

Arguably, sexuality in colonialism is essential but veiled (by symbolism or other forms of discourse and power relations) because sex is disarming in its physicality and visceral nature. This is somewhat similar to Woolf’s epiphany that when faced with simple, sensory contact with his beloved animals, “they make nonsense of all philosophies and religions” (101) [though Woolf seems to have a disturbing tendency to place more importance on his pets than on the natives!]. Hence, the power of sexuality and sex to challenge imposed boundaries (physically manifested in the metis children of mixed blood) explains why they were gradually censored from the discourse of whiteness.

the act of colonialism

Woolf seems to paint colonialism as something akin to a farcical act and I got a first hint of this when he says that it was the act of pretending to be grand “in a strange Asiatic country’ that “gave the touch of unreality and theatricality” to the lives of the White ruling caste. In London, they were what they were, they were not acting. But in Ceylon, they “were all always…playing a part, acting upon a stage”; the backcloth of which was imperialism” (24).

This notion of theatricality and acting is continued when Woolf describes how he attained a good impression in Jaffna. He says, “My reputation as …a Sahib…was therefore established within three hours of my arrival, for a civil servant, wearing bright green flannel collars and accompanied by a dog who within the space of ten minutes killed a cat and a large snake, commanded respect”. Here, the comical and almost ludicrous manner by which Woolf gained this immediate respect as a White master undermines his own prestige because it is almost as if White respectability depended not on true substance, but on whether one possessed the right costumes and props to pull off the White master’s act of prestige.

This idea of acting is also evident in how the civil servants met every evening for a game of tennis, which had become something like “a ritual, almost a sacrament”, before adjourning for social conversation—“the ritual of British conversation which inevitably followed British exercise”. All these social rituals seem to me like outward shows of sophistication and civility, mere acts of the white man’s supposed prestige and superiority over the natives. All these definitely reduce colonialism to a very empty and substance-less shell for me—a very staged-up act that is ultimately hollow at the core.

Sexuality in Exigency

We see in Woolf’s Jaffna account the figures that obviously reflect the Stoler’s description of European women in the colonies. A “Jane Austen character”, Woolf describes Mrs. Lewis as a archetypal female of the Victorian Social Realist novel (42). Likewise, it is due to such characters that Stoler describes to have “contructed the major cleavages on which colonial stratification would rest” (56), “as bearers of a redefined colonial morality” (57). Her attempted matchmaking of Woolf with Mary can also be seen as the microcosmic replication of the colonial state’s directive that European men in the colonies would need to be married to a European woman to keep them in check.

Yet, the absence of the wife figure in Woolf’s account in Jaffna provokes suspicion. It might be presumptious to say it, but perhaps like most European men in the colonies, he indulges in prostitutes to relieve sexual tensions/pressures of living in the colonies (68), and the marriages of his generation in Jaffna are described to be bleak and sad (70), for Dutton and Miss Beeching’s marriage is described to be falling apart (74). Where then, is the European wife, or the native concubine that Stoler prescribes for men in the colonies?

Woolf’s platonic lying together on the sand with Gwen, juxtaposed with the lax (immoral?) upbringing of the two girls by their widowed mother (102), shows him to be deviating from Stoler’s chapter description of European men in the colonies as “innocent but immoral men”, needing “racist but moral women” (56). But what Woolf’s silence on his sexuality in the Jaffna account means the abovementioned or is simply glossing over the norms of colonial sexual politics, his encounters of colonial representations of sexualty largely subscribe to the economical and political exigencies.

"... the silence, the emptiness, the melancholia ..."

No one (at this point in the class, at least) can miss the significance of the opening of Chapter 2: "There was something extraordinarily real and at the same time unreal in the sights and sounds and smells ... and this curious mixture of intense reality and unreality applied to all my seven years in Ceylon" (21). Once again, like Conrad, Woolf probes the nature of reality, and by extension the nature of consciousness and of experience itself and the very faculties with which we apprehend/comprehend the world. The fact that the Woolf prefaces his own arrival in Sri Lanka in such uncertain terms underscores his own anxiety at being displaced from not only his home, but from the familiar structures of knowledge production and meaning making. In being pushed to the very fringes of the Empire Woolf finds it almost necessary to undertake the ontological questioning that is at the heart of his memoirs. This line of questioning undercuts the solipsism that is so intrinsic to the "I" of the autobiography, and the centre cannot hold. Much of the chapter is a reorientation, in every sense of the word, in a foreign country, but just as Woolf is getting comfortable in Jaffna, his brief posting to Mannar unsettles him once again, besieging him with sleepless nights.

Thus, modernism was not just a fictional strategy; it also allowed for the interrogation of autobiographical self, and for the crystallization of the anxieties of the colonizer, as Woolf came to see colonial superfluity and futility in Sri Lanka. One is left to consider (as does Leonard himself, undoubtedly) what might have happened if he did marry Gwen, and it in is this subtle yet palpable ponderation of the autonomy of the individual against the social script that Woolf does not simply address a growing disaffection towards the colonial enterprise, but mounts a redress of the self and society, and how the latter impinges on the former.

Performativity; Power and a little Gender

The idea of theatricality or performativity is seen again in Woolf’s Growing. His open admittance that “in Ceylon [they] were always, subconsciously or consciously, playing a part, acting upon a stage.(Woolf24-25)” suggests that the role of the colonized is one that is not so much assumed as it is acted out. The underlying notion of having expectations to meet in the eyes of colonial standards by the establishment suggest that the relationship between colonizer and colonized was not only set up by expectation (and recognition) of a master-slave(power-powerless) dynamic, but also perpetuated by it. Stoler’s idea of “who counted as “European” and by what measure”(43) then becomes something that is vague in terms of actual personality traits, but becomes a much more vague label recognized by virtue of the way the colonizers and colonized act. This can be seen in Woolf’s autobiography where his dog defecates someone’s clean white clothes and no one takes notice and also when the Charles, his dog is sick all over the native owned place in Jaffna and no one took notice. The fact that the white man (and the whiteman’s dog) can behave in such a manner without consequence signals the obvious power positions.

While Stoler’s article of Gender suggest that sexual images illustrate the iconography of rule(45), what remained curious to me is Woolf’s illustration of women(white or non) in the excerpts, from the nonchalant way he says he “spent the night”(I forget the page) with a local woman to his merciless, descriptions of Miss Beeching with the “face rather like that of a good looking male Red Indian”( Woolf 26)and Mrs Lewis as “large, plump and flordly good-looking”(I forget which page), he seems to embody that colonial ideal of European “hypermasculinity”(cant find the page in Stoler) in his power of gender over the figures of Others; women and perhaps the most “othered’ the native women (who supposedly are “useful guides”(Stoler 49)