Writing the white self by censoring sex

I found Stoler’s observation that the later stages of colonialism were accompanied by the increasing need to build a “cordon sanitaire” (77) around whiteness and white prestige very interesting. This seems to be paralleled in the tension I find in Orwell and Woolf, which arises, I feel, between the growing awareness of empire’s complexity on one hand and the anxiety of self – the need to inscribe one’s identity within protective whiteness – on the other.

This tension is reflected in the Orwell and Woolf texts, which claim to be autobiographical but which are carefully – whether consciously or not – crafted to project a certain image of the self. What struck me in particular about Woolf was how he constantly drew on symbols of whiteness to shape his discourse. The people and events he writes about are compared to (and therefore understood through) fictional discourses from Austen, Kipling, Forster, Don Quixote; his autobiographical account is based not just on personal recollections but on letters exchanged with Lytton Strachey in England. One has to be in dialogue and contact with Englishness/whiteness in order to express the self. And in order to project a self that is acceptable to standards of whiteness (as Woolf himself performs to the Club and to the natives), Woolf and Orwell’s accounts of the self also undergo some form of self-censorship. As noted in other posts, women are curiously absent in texts by both authors; attempts at portraying (white) women are sanitized and desexualized – a symptom of the prescribed moral and sexual roles that Stoler identifies.

Arguably, sexuality in colonialism is essential but veiled (by symbolism or other forms of discourse and power relations) because sex is disarming in its physicality and visceral nature. This is somewhat similar to Woolf’s epiphany that when faced with simple, sensory contact with his beloved animals, “they make nonsense of all philosophies and religions” (101) [though Woolf seems to have a disturbing tendency to place more importance on his pets than on the natives!]. Hence, the power of sexuality and sex to challenge imposed boundaries (physically manifested in the metis children of mixed blood) explains why they were gradually censored from the discourse of whiteness.