On The Duttons

“I can still see their minute figures [i.e. Miss Beeching and Dutton], standing there in the gigantic, flat, dusty plain of Jaffna peninsula, looking helpless, ridiculous, pathetic against the flaming sunset. And I realized that largely owing to me Dutton would marry Miss Beeching – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Miss Beeching would marry Dutton […] I was depressed that Sunday bicycling back to Jaffna.” (69-70)

Woolf disapproves of the union between Dutton and Miss Beeching. He seems to be demoralized by the thought that the former has been “caught”. He goes on to elaborate this thought with a metaphor:

“[The Duttons] reminded me of those pairs of insects – some are spiders or worms – in which a very small male is attached to a very large female – fitting ignominiously and neatly into her gigantic body – I sometimes think that this must be the ideal life for a male – and, after performing his male functions, is killed and eaten by her or just dies.” (72, emphasis mine)

Woolf’s attitude towards the Dutton’s union seems to based itself on a certain intimation of an unsavoriness in Miss Beeching’s character; he distrusts her, perhaps even imbue her presence in the continent with a deplorable agenda. Woolf writes that, together with Miss Case, Miss Beeching arrives in the tropics for the purpose of missionary work (69). And, as it turns out, “some months later Miss Beeching did marry Dutton.” (70) I am intrigued by why Woolf would feel so strongly against the union between Dutton and Miss Beeching. Is he reacting upon an assumption that the two missionaries entered Jaffna only on the pretext of missionary work, whereas their real agenda is to participate in the “marriage market”? Stoler’s exposition of the restrictions on European women in the colonies may be relevant here: if unions between European man and native women were encouraged institutionally as these were considered “less costly” or economically more viable a method of providing “sexual access” to the European men within the colonial enterprise – native women who entered into concubinage “could be dismissed without reason, notice, or severance pay. They might [even] be exchanged among Europeans and ‘passed on’ when men left for leave or retirement in Europe.” (49) – and if the restrictions on salary increases of male European colonial employees continues to be upheld – as a method of discouraging immigration of European women and marriages between them and the European men in the colonies – would not, then, the pretext of missionary work presents itself as an attractive justification for the entry of European women into the colonies?

Or is Woolf more concerned if Dutton is capable enough a man (an English man?) to enter into so solemn a project as marriage is? In relation to the second possibility, Woolf writes that Dutton is “mentally […] certainly a eunuch,” that “his attitude towards [love and women] was a cross between that of a sentimental and innocent schoolgirl and that of Don Quixote.” Thus, Woolf appears to think of Dutton as naïve and romantic, and perhaps more crucially, unmanly. What then constitutes Woolf idea of (an ideal?) manhood? To answer that, one may refer to the emphasis in the second quote.

More will be touched upon during presentation.