Stoler and Orwell

Stoler’s article about colonial categories and people who ambiguously straddled, crossed, and threatened imperial divides (514) can be applied to “Burmese Days” particularly through the characters of Francis, Samuel and Flory. Francis and Samuel being “sons of white fathers and native mothers” are what Stoler calls the progeny of “métissage”, people straddling the boundary between white and native man. Their fate as outsiders to the white society despite their “drop of white blood” (126) is sealed, because, as Stoler says, even with a rhetoric affirming that education and upbringing were transformative processes, Europeanness of métis children could never be assured to colonial officials. What more then for Francis and Samuel who are described as being “brought up in the bazaar”, having “had no education”, and having no proper upbringing (126)—in the white man’s eyes, not only their mixed parentage, but also their lack of any transformative processes would have effectively stained whatever white blood they biologically possessed. This is perhaps why the two men “excited a peculiar dislike in” Elizabeth and why she even terms them “awfully degenerate types” (126)—precisely because these Eurasians were seen as “threat to white prestige, an embodiment of European degeneration” (515).

Flory is another example of a transgressor of boundaries because instead of adhering to Manichean categories in his associations, he has a friendship with Veraswami and even a sexual relation with Ma Hla May. Elizabeth’s disgust towards Flory’s sexual relation once again represents the colonial society’s concern that European men living with native women would be “contaminated” by these native associations (533). This is particularly evident when Flory’s “ugliness” only became apparent to Elizabeth after she witnessed Ma Hla May’s denouncement of Flory and realised that he had “been the lover of that grey-faced maniacal creature” (286), almost as if May had infected Flory with her ugliness through her association with him.