Growing Skewed

I find myself having a perplexed attitude towards 'Growing'. On one hand, I think it is subjective to the point of being unrealistic, and on the other, it seems jarringly honest.

Let’s take the honest bits first: he includes extracts of letters, many of which appear uncensored. There is crudeness in his letters (““f*** your wife” I added and enraged him”), as well as a kind of sadism regarding the incident of his owl and rat (“All night long he chases a rat round the dog kennel…he never catches him and as I never feed the rat, they are both slowly dying of starvation”). Also, he admits to sleeping with a “young Burgher girl”, an act that I am sure would not have reflected well of him then.

But I begin to challenge Woolf’s candidness when I see things like “No one, the man included, seemed to be much concerned by this” as a response to Woolf's mismanaged dog peeing on a Sinhalese man, or even that (according to him), “the Arabs were vastly amused” to be “hit…[by]a walking stick” to clear a path for himself. I see it as just another form of White validation of ‘native’ abuse—simply through a ‘but they don’t mind’ attitude. Woolf’s descriptions of events also seem exaggerated/almost ideological (the way the native crows began “eating the vomit as it came out” of Charles’s mouth, or the fact that tiny Charles defeated 3 “large” native dogs, each double his size mind you). I also find his depictions of women in the text fairly extreme, almost like caricatures—we see the phrases “true to type”, “true to the type”, “the kind of wife”, “the…freckled type”—who are flatly/spectrally depicted—“she was a Jane Austen character”, “an inveterate matchmaker”, “went out of her way to say the most outrageous things at the most awkward moments”, “two angels performing a miracle”. Perhaps, the politics of mis/ representation are in play here.