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.