" ... to halve his loneliness ... " (Chap IV)

For Stoler, sex functions not simply as a metaphor for colonial relations (a point of contention in last week's class), but is inherently fundamental to the colonial enterprise, affecting its policies and the practical outworkings of its power relations. Undergirding her entire piece is how intimacy with the colonial other ironically fostered and accentuated racial subjectivities, and this is echoed in Burmese Days. From the start of the novel, in Chap IV, Flory and May are never fully comfortable with in their "relationship". Their physical intimacy belies their disgust not simply for each other, but for themselves as individuals; neither is fully comfortable in his/her own skin. In joint nakedness, both are ashamed of their own physicality - Flory with his birthmark, and May with her breasts. It would then be logical to conjecture that their arrangement is purely economic, given that Flory has bought her from her parents. But I would suggest otherwise, for an alternative answer may be found later in the chapter, where Flory goes for a dip in the pool in the forest. There, surrounded by nature, while watching "a single green pigeon", Flory finds an immanent expression of his inner loneliness. It is in this evocation of the deep malaise of the soul - the desire to know and to fully know another - that Orwell. through the portrayal of sex in the colonies, approaches the modernist apprehension of an individual crisis of subjectivities, of an individual striving against the prevailing discourse.