Violence & the Crowd: Familiar?

In Burmese Days, we see the episode in which Flory and Elizabeth go shooting, and end up hunting down a tiger which they kill. This act of violence/killing, is just as graphic as the one we saw in Shooting an Elephant, but what was entirely different was how they set out to shoot( perform that act of violence in the first place). Elizabeth in particular seems to have quite an unsettling attitude toward violence; namely that she doesn’t quite care. When Flory was telling her about the “imperial pigeon”, how “the Burmese” believe it vomits when it dies and that it is “murder to shoot them”, all she asks is “Are they good to eat?” (All Ch 13)This (apart from being horrifically funny), suggests not just an absent “humanitarianism”(Stoler 514), but also a certain consumption of the colonial land in terms of its exotic material(which we could read as the imperial west needing the raw materials to fuel their industrialized west)Elizabeth loves violence, it is only after this shooting event she seemed to be drawn to Flory( but we all know how THAT turned out). In the end, its violence, violence, violence: Flory shoots Flo( who is part of Flory in well name and companionship), then shoots himself, and of course that whole violence of the riot, which reverberates a clear “rejection of the terms of the civilizing mission”(Stoler 551) with its ideas of civility, order and humanity in the western imperialist lifestyle.

The riot outside the Club shows another Orwellian scene of the crowd, previously seen in Shooting an Elephant with those “yellow faces”, in Burmese days they were “pouring in by the hundreds” and “rushing around aimlessly” without much purpose except to keep “flinging stones, yelling and hammering at the walls”. The crowd is always painted as a mass (MESS) of “whatever-ness” with their noise and physical mass being the focus rather than their intellect or social purpose .This depiction may reflect Stoler’s idea that there is a “conflation of racial category… cultural competence and national identity” (Stoler 514). The mass of the Burmese are lumped together in their race and ‘therefore’ their lack of culture which perhaps to the west mean their(Burmese) ‘national identity’ equate to general incompetence.