such unsexiness

What stood out the most for in Burmese Days was the very different treatment of sexuality and desire in the novel. Someone mentioned earlier that all characters in the novel were cast in a negative light, and I’ll add that all but one are decidedly physically unattractive. We’re already familiar enough with the subversion of white male superiority, hence Flory’s giant birthmark, the yellowing Mrs Lankersteen and a whole host of lazy, drunk colonials. However, unlike previous novels read on the course, the native Other is never exoticised or aestheticized into an object of desire. Even at her best Ma Hla May is “an outlandish doll and yet a grotesquely beautiful one” (52); the clearest visual picture we get of the Burmese man is U Po – “fat, symmetrically, like fruit swelling”. Unlike Kurtz’s African mistress or the hunky punka-wallah of Passage to India, the native is no longer represented as possessing the virility, health and other attributes that the Empire is shown to have lost.

If the native is read as representative of the ‘East’ that is colonised, the novel suggest an attenuation of the colonial daydream of the East as Exotic Other. Colonies are no longer ideal sites constructed in opposition to the West, upon which the desires of the West can be projected. Neither does the East exist as an Other: when seen through the eyes of Orwell it takes on the same mundane, greyish hue as do the withering colonials. Even Elizabeth, the central object of desire, becomes by the end of the novel “the position for which Nature had designed her for from the first, that of a burra memsahib” (287). Desire is recycled endlessly into banality; the loss of desire suggests a dissipation of virility that heralds Empire’s impeding decline.