Flory and the Angel in the House...

I was especially interested in Stoler's depiction of the colonies as "laboratories of modernity," with those within it "subjects" that "reworked" the coloniser's "experiments" and the "possibility that their choices expressed a domestic subversion, a rejection of the terms of the civilising mission." (551) In conjunction with this, I was thinking about the development of modernism in postwar Britain, and the trend of sexual experimentation, with unorthodox relationships such as homosexuality and extramarital affairs being encouraged (or at least, so we seem encouraged to think through biographies of various modernist writers), and such experimentation being a part of the reaction modernism had against the Victorian values of family life.

As far as reaction towards Victorian values goes, Flory could be in ways construed as a modernist (or modern) hero, turning against the traditional English ranks to socialise with the natives, and abandoning the façade of Victorian morality to admit to its lie - "the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them." (33) When Passage's Collector sadly notes "after all, it's our women who make everything more difficult out here," it might well apply to poor old Flory, for it is Elizabeth's arrival that erects in him the Victorian vision of "the angel in the house" and its family trappings - a vision that, as discussed above, was fading even in England, as Elizabeth attests to: "'You should have a piano,' he said despairingly. 'I don't play the piano.'" With a Victorian idealisation of women as his downfall, Flory goes from modernist hero to Victorian loser, a failed subject in that "laboratory of modernity." In contrast, Stoler's "cultura[l] hybrids" would instead be true modernist heroes, their "lifestyles" (551) perhaps closer to the "domestic subversion" that the very modernists in Britain were grasping towards.