'It pained him...that he did not know where the universe ended.'

In the beginning of Joyce's "Portrait", Stephen attempts to place himself within the larger structures that surround him. Beginning with himself, he traces his belonging to his country, nation, and eventually, the universe' (27). While he believes that 'after the universe' comes 'nothing', he is troubled by whether there is 'anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began' (28). This failure to 'know where the universe end[s]' not only 'pain[s]' him, but makes him 'fe[el] small and weak' (28). Here, Stephen's uneasiness is three-fold:

1) The 'nothing place' (28) is something Stephen doesn't understand;

2) It is therefore regarded as something other to him, and is hence excluded from the list of places he belongs to;

3) He thus attempts to keep it at a distance from him by imagining that something exists to demarcate it as a different space altogether. This, however, fails, as he is unable to answer whether there is a 'wall' or a 'thin thin line' separating the universe' and 'the nothing place' (28).

These result in Stephen's anxiety, as his attempts to compartmentalize the world into neat categories of understanding go awry. This seems to parallel the uneasiness that the colonial powers felt when ruling their colonies. Replace Stephen's 'nothing place' with 'the native', and 'the universe' with 'the white world', and you have the colonizer's anxiety. In this new case, safety comes from the neat categories of the colonizer and the colonized- recall Chatterjee's argument that colonialism was based on ruling through difference and exclusionary tactics. Similarly, this safety is threatened with the blurring of boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized- recall Stoler's argument about metissage and metisse children, Ellis' outrage at a servant's improving English and the mere thought of a native as a member of the club, and other instances where transgressions of boundaries spell trouble.

[[Just a thought- in relation to our class' title, the modernist writer's attempt to be unafraid of the unknown is intriguing. Instead of 'feel[ing] very tired to think [of such big things]' (28), modernist writers embrace the unknown and the dissolution of neat boundaries, as these allow for new possibilities to be opened up. In doing so, they (attempt to) transcend the limitations of what the Empire was fearful of.]]

Colonial Fiction...

Something that strikes me incredibly about Growing is the “theatrical unreality” (23) of colonial life that Woolf draws our attention to early on. Notably, he says “I could never make up my mind whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story. (46) We have been in this module studying fictional constructions of colonial portrayal, only to be told that real colonials were very much like fictional constructions. While Woolf’s account then reflects favourably on the Orwellian and Forsterian characters we have debated the realism of; it also more ominously brings to mind the lesson Conrad makes for us of “Lord Jim,” who, consuming adventure fiction, died a deluded romantic hero. Here, we see Woolf’s suspicion that real life colonials have consumed Kipling’s colonial fiction and thus fashion their conduct in a textbook portrayal of what they believe through popular fiction their colonial lives should be like.

Of course, through Stoler’s examination of the myth and realities of colonial living, we are made intensely aware of the fictionality and constructedness of the supremacy of the Empire and European identity, which makes the real colonial’s strict adherence to fictional prescriptions of conduct hardly any more unreasonable than a strict adherence to manuals bearing mythical beliefs of the make-up of Europeans and the colonised. In such a light, anti-imperialist texts, or at least texts such as Growing that highlight the unnaturalness of such conduct become important in opposition to Empire-supporting narratives such as The White Man’s Burden.

Stoler and Concubinage

Pardon me for this late entry! here are my thoughts on Stoler's article...

Stoler argues that the colonizer-colonized categories and labels were layed out by "forms of sexual control" and "defined the domestic arrangements of Europeans and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves"(42). Hence, she says that inperial authority is structured in highly gendered terms, and this sexuality and gender to a large extent gave the colonial system its order and manner.

I find this interesting because it assumes that the women were of a subordinate position, when i would instead propose that women in fact had an upper hand in a system like this, whether they realised it or not. They were being instrumental in shifting the colonial system of meaning from self-interest and moral superiority, making clear the weak links in narratives of colonial legitimization.

When stoler says, "most of these women remained servants... but some combined their service with varied degrees of independence and authorit"(49), the point here is that women had a way out, or rather, a way to manipulate their position and manipulate their men to their benefit, and we do see an example of this in May in Burmese Days.

So while Stoler seems to talk aboout "reinforced hierarchies" due to concubinage, i think the more important issue is how these hierarchies are problematised. There is a definite shift from the twice colonized subaltern woman(by patriarchy and by the colonizer) to the subaltern woman with agency and upon whom the colonizing sommunity was deeply dependent on.

The Furry Death

Dear Leonard Woolf, I personally do not find your subject of animals irritating in the least: no, indeed, I rather wish you'd had gone on. And on. And on. Or at least explained what exactly Bambi does when he acquires a nicotine addiction. i find myself horribly intrigued by Charles, "obviously a pukka English dog", as opposed to the pariah "yellow" dogs; I wonder what breed he was to have been so saliently genuine or superior, that he would, possessed by an "imperialist Anglo-Indian spirit" recognize a "native" cat. Caliber in this instance is proved by violence, the "rapidity" of murder that gleans "considerable prestige", which also gets translated into "canine society"- very reminiscent of colonial reaction and the modernist theme of anxiety about new uncertainties.
Growing actually made me think of a line: "For we are surrounded by mirrors, walled in by contradictory images of ourselves" when Woolf ponders on the rightness of sitting on a horse "arrogantly". This contradictory nature is also keenly observed in the anecdote he provided of his encounter of the graves of Adam and Eve. Charles is here the "dog of an infidel". The infidel here is also the savior, being trailed by "smiles and shaking of heads and lifting of hands".
Running an empire is, too, much like taming an elephant, using co-opted natives like "tame elephants" to assuage resistance, it's a "precarious position".

Who watched the newest episode of South Park (Pandemic) and tried grafting Stoler's ideas onto it? So if you obviously are a Peruvian pan flute band and yet... at the same time you're obviously not, you may very well be key in overthrowing Peru or saving the world from giant guinea pigs. Or it could just be why Craig says the kids at school dislike you. Heh heh heh.

Dogone days...

I think it was the way Woolf framed it but I was exasperated that even the dog possessed “the imperialist Anglo-Indian spirit” such that it knew its superiority over native dogs. It seemed rather odd Woolf’s claim that he was curiously unaware of his status as an imperialist. Surely the climate in the colonies was sufficiently different from London and the power the sahibs possess over the natives must have been apparent. The tennis club, in the same way as the European club in Burmese Days, was as a symbol of white superiority and exclusivity. Perhaps he was unconsciously justifying his role by feigning ignorance?

Stoler noted that “what European women had to say had little resonance and little effect until their objections coincided with realignment in both racial and class politics in which they were strategic” (Stoler 57). Here, I am reminded of the sensation stirred by Adela’s alleged sexual assault by Aziz in Passage to India, and the absence and silence of women in Growing. The few women we encounter are that of miserable wives of colonial administrators as they enter into the prison of marriage. Mrs Dutton transits from a relatively independent missionary to the confines of a sterile marriage. Mrs Price bears her suffering in silence “except for the unhappiness terribly stamped on her face”.

Comparing the role of Ma Kin and the European wives, Mrs Price and Mrs Dutton, all three women do not have autonomy and suffer their roles in silence. The men do not take them seriously nor value their opinions let alone care about their happiness in the marriage. How different are they? Perhaps the only endorsement available to European wives is to take on the role of the male imperialist dog (like Elizabeth’s high-handed treatment of domestic staff after marriage in Burmese Days).

colonial identity = masculine identity

the colonial anxieties of emasculation continue in leonard woolf, as we see from his description of dutton and miss beeching: "He seemed to have shrunk and she to have swollen...I sometimes think this must be the ideal life for a male--and, after performing his male functions, is killed by her or just dies. Not that I thought that Mrs. Dutton would kill and eat Dutton; but she seemed somehow or other to have absorbed what little life and virility he possessed." (72) this proves again how the colonial identity is tied inextricably to the masculine identity and its anxieties of challenge from any frontier of the suppressed and disempowered--whether female, native or other. while interpretations of colonialism and imperialism as an outlet for excess male sexual energy or as a sublimation of sexuality (hyam) might seem a little exaggerated, stoler's claim that "imperial authority and racial distinctions were fundamentally structured in gendered terms" (42) is certainly legitimised by the overwhelming literary (and historical--as she has introduced in 'carnal knowledge') evidence brought to bear on the idea that the colonial identity is fundamentally tied to masculine identity and is, as such, gendered.

It is significant that while marriage and sex are sites wherein the male is able to exert his sexual dominance, they are paradoxically then also the sites of his possible failure and sexual ineptitude. Mrs. Dutton's swelling and appropriation of her husband's virility reflect masculine anxieties about marriage and sex as potential sites of impotence. furthermore, the idea that the masculine identity is tied to performing some kind of sexual function, after which he is rendered useless and ineffectual reduces the masculine identity as tied to a simple physical function--a shallow act lacking actual substance. Likewise, the colonial mask is a "facade" for woolf, and as we have discussed with orwell's elephant, colonialism is very much the assertion and upholding of the image of the potent, virile male with whom must lie all military, racial and sexual power. Stoler's gendered analysis then is very useful for dissecting the colonial identity as fundamentally tied to masculine identity.

Stoler and the sleeping dictionary

When Stoler describes how British Imperialism rationalized concubinage by arguing that “local women could supply as useful guides to the language an other mysteries of local societies”, where they were credited for providing services that kept European men alive in their initial precarious acclimatization to harsh native climates and alien cultures, I was reminded of the Hollywood movie The Sleeping Dictionary, which starred Jessica Alba playing a native woman named Selima from Sarawak who becomes the concubine of a dashing white colonial officer John Truscott (Hugh Dancy) for the purposes of inducting him into the mysteries of the local language and culture. Apart from the gross historical inaccuracies of the film, it is interesting how the movie removes culpability from the British Imperial enterprise by representing concubinage not as a colonial practice sanctioned by the colonialism’s reluctance to export European women to the colonies, but as a native custom initiated by the Sarawak people, and merely tolerated by the British officials. In fact, the representation of the native custom of concubinage seems almost an imposition on the reluctant Truscott, who is represented as the gentlemanly and passive victim who initially struggles to comprehend why he has to abide by the savage native custom of concubinage. The native woman Selima is represented as the sexually aggressive and inexplicably exotic Other who becomes affronted when the gentlemanly and civilized British official rejects her advances because he is bound by his code of honor. Thus, concubinage is sentimentalized and romanticized in the movie because it is for the sake of being a good and responsible governor of the local natives that Truscott yields to concubinage. Stoler’s point that concubinage paradoxically reinforced the hierarchies on which colonial societies were based, while making these distinctions more problematic at the same time is also evident in the film when concubinage, which was supposed to be an “emotionally unfettered convenience” becomes a union that is “sustained and emotionally significant.” This is realized in the film when Truscott and Selima falls into a forbidden love and produces a mixed Eurasian child. This enrages both the communities of the colonizers and the colonized, because the metis child threatened to destabilise the binaristic categories of colonial difference that sustained the division between the white colonizer and the native colonized.

Being Always Subject to "Imperial Power"

In the section where she talks about 'Racist but Moral Women, Innocent but Immoral Men', Stoler notes that even if

'European women were positioned as the bearers of a redefined colonial morality[,] to suggest that they fashioned this racism out of whole cloth is to miss the political chronology in which new intensities of racist practice arose... ...Significantly, what European women had to say had little resonance and little effect until their objections coincided with a realignment in both racial and class politics in which they were strategic' (Stoler 57).

This particularly struck me as it summed up nicely the feeling of futility one may feel in being part of the colonial enterprise. Recall the policeman in "Shooting an Elephant", and his painful awareness of his status as a representative of white prestige and thus the need to 'avoid looking a fool' (Orwell, "Shooting"). Recall also, Flory in "Burmese Days", where it is initially 'unthinkable' (Orwell, "Burmese Days") that he should stick up for Dr. Veeraswami, and ends up signing the document that Ellis writes. Both characters admit to the reality that 'when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys' (Orwell, "Shooting").

While Stoler's quote makes reference to women, it is clear that all entities under the colonial regime (women, men, animals; you name it) must follow their prescribed place in society, even if this place is irrational, immoral, or redundant. This is not to say that the status quo is static-on the contrary, it is ever-changing (Stoler gives the example of how concubinage is viewed differently over time). However, most noteworthy is the fact that this change only occurs when it is in keeping with the larger, current goals of the empire. Until then, one may agitate for change to little or no effect- such is 'imperial power' (Stoler's title).

(286 words excluding block quote)

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.

Sexuality in Exigency

We see in Woolf’s Jaffna account the figures that obviously reflect the Stoler’s description of European women in the colonies. A “Jane Austen character”, Woolf describes Mrs. Lewis as a archetypal female of the Victorian Social Realist novel (42). Likewise, it is due to such characters that Stoler describes to have “contructed the major cleavages on which colonial stratification would rest” (56), “as bearers of a redefined colonial morality” (57). Her attempted matchmaking of Woolf with Mary can also be seen as the microcosmic replication of the colonial state’s directive that European men in the colonies would need to be married to a European woman to keep them in check.

Yet, the absence of the wife figure in Woolf’s account in Jaffna provokes suspicion. It might be presumptious to say it, but perhaps like most European men in the colonies, he indulges in prostitutes to relieve sexual tensions/pressures of living in the colonies (68), and the marriages of his generation in Jaffna are described to be bleak and sad (70), for Dutton and Miss Beeching’s marriage is described to be falling apart (74). Where then, is the European wife, or the native concubine that Stoler prescribes for men in the colonies?

Woolf’s platonic lying together on the sand with Gwen, juxtaposed with the lax (immoral?) upbringing of the two girls by their widowed mother (102), shows him to be deviating from Stoler’s chapter description of European men in the colonies as “innocent but immoral men”, needing “racist but moral women” (56). But what Woolf’s silence on his sexuality in the Jaffna account means the abovementioned or is simply glossing over the norms of colonial sexual politics, his encounters of colonial representations of sexualty largely subscribe to the economical and political exigencies.

show me the women

There is hardly any mention of women, much less notable and interesting woman personalities in Leonard Woolf’s Growing. I think this is very much explained by Stoler’s article on how colonial policies discourage the immigration of European women into the colonies, limiting marriages only to high ranking officials and keeping salaries of European recruits “artificially low” to prevent them from starting a family (48). I think that it is the scarcity of European women, rather than Leonard Woolf’s deliberate omission that explains the lack of female personalities in his autobiography.

Leonard Woolf did pay special attention to the Lewis and Price couple. Mrs Lewis was “[l]arge, plump, floridly good-looking”, “a Jane Austen character complete in face, form, speech, mind – a Mrs Jennings” (42). She is “an inveterate matchmaker” equipped with “artless and embarrassing manoeuvres” (43). Mr John Penry Lewis was a “[l]arge, slow, fat, shy man” who was “extremely lazy and not fond of responsibility”, “took little interest in administration” (41). Mrs Price “was the exact opposite of Mrs Lewis. She was a real Victorian lady” (114). She is “rather silent and extremely nervous”, with an “impenetrable reserve” (114). Ferdinando Hamlyn Price was “[t]all, thin, athletic looking, baldish, with a long hatchet-face” and was “congenitally and incorrigibly lazy” (105).

There are a few observations to be made. Both Mrs Lewis and Mrs Price have “delicate sensibilities” and need for “elevated standards of living” (55). Mrs Price whose “life with Price and Ceylon ... terrified her” (114), Mrs Lewis and her gramaphone (88). Marriages are confined to high ranking colonial officials (i.e. G.A). Married men are lazy and seldom dealt with colonial administration, preferring to delegate the jobs to young and single subordinates (i.e. Leonard Woolf).

Contrary to Stoler’s article, I do not see European women and marriage as having that much of an impact on colonial rule. Then again, perhaps that is what Stoler is concerned with, the overlooking and omission in assessing the influence of European women with regards to colonial policies.

European women in native lands

Stoler’s essay talks about the role of women in colonialism, and how sexual politics can be seen in relation to racial policies. Although the presence of European women in native lands enforced the boundaries and social spaces drawn between the white community and the natives, this reinforcement of racial differences was a continuation from previous tensions in the interactions between colonizers and colonized. European women are however chided for several things: racism, jealousy of Euro-Asian unions, and if they are assaulted by natives, they are often blamed for provoking their desires.

Similarly, the women in the novels read in this course have been portrayed as naïve, racist and unable to adapt to native cultures. Have we been reading them wrongly? That we fault these women for perhaps not being more open-minded and less racist, when in fact, they had a gendered-specific role to play in the colonial lands. As Stoler argues, “what European women had to say had little resonance and little effect until their objections coincided with a realignment in both racial and class politics in which they were strategic” (57). Do we perhaps take on the position of a White male colonizer with certain expectations of how European women were to behave, in ways which are also “strategic” to our own understandings of colonialism?

If colonialism is predicated on colonial difference, then European women could either be perceived as the bearers of these differences or they could transgress their roles. Either way, they must be read in ways aligned with particular ideologies and value systems. As much as European women, like the natives, are policed by the white male colonizers, they are policed by readers too.

Performativity; Power and a little Gender

The idea of theatricality or performativity is seen again in Woolf’s Growing. His open admittance that “in Ceylon [they] were always, subconsciously or consciously, playing a part, acting upon a stage.(Woolf24-25)” suggests that the role of the colonized is one that is not so much assumed as it is acted out. The underlying notion of having expectations to meet in the eyes of colonial standards by the establishment suggest that the relationship between colonizer and colonized was not only set up by expectation (and recognition) of a master-slave(power-powerless) dynamic, but also perpetuated by it. Stoler’s idea of “who counted as “European” and by what measure”(43) then becomes something that is vague in terms of actual personality traits, but becomes a much more vague label recognized by virtue of the way the colonizers and colonized act. This can be seen in Woolf’s autobiography where his dog defecates someone’s clean white clothes and no one takes notice and also when the Charles, his dog is sick all over the native owned place in Jaffna and no one took notice. The fact that the white man (and the whiteman’s dog) can behave in such a manner without consequence signals the obvious power positions.

While Stoler’s article of Gender suggest that sexual images illustrate the iconography of rule(45), what remained curious to me is Woolf’s illustration of women(white or non) in the excerpts, from the nonchalant way he says he “spent the night”(I forget the page) with a local woman to his merciless, descriptions of Miss Beeching with the “face rather like that of a good looking male Red Indian”( Woolf 26)and Mrs Lewis as “large, plump and flordly good-looking”(I forget which page), he seems to embody that colonial ideal of European “hypermasculinity”(cant find the page in Stoler) in his power of gender over the figures of Others; women and perhaps the most “othered’ the native women (who supposedly are “useful guides”(Stoler 49)

a friend by any other name is a foe

My post will be about the "fraudulent recognition" of Flory as a friend. First off, other than the good doctor it's pretty much safe to say that Flory doesn't have any other friends (the "louts" at the Club he's so fond of denigrating won't be hard-pressed to call him one either, him and his "Bolshie" ideas). Strangely enough though the term "friend" is peppered liberally throughout the narrative, there are very few instances of Flory calling Veraswami that very name; he calls him "doctor" instead. This effectively puts distance between an Englishman and a Burmese and lends ballast to the disquieting sentiment that it is "a disagreeable thing when one's close friend is not one's social equal". This close friendship is one-sided; Flory is an exploiter in the same vein as the bigoted Ellis is but worse since he professes to be the doctor's friend and claims that that friendship "was not worth" the ugly rows that would break out were he to support the doctor's election to the club in the next breath. He only throws in his cloth together with Veraswami when he himself is in a position of power later on and therefore, untouchable. Veraswami's fanatic loyalty to the English is translated into his friendship with Flory, one that isn't reciprocated. Flory's suicide damns Veraswami to "pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes" and yet still Veraswami makes the necessary arrangements in the wake of his messy death, in both his official capacity as doctor and personal as friend, lying to preserve Flory's legacy, a legacy nobody else cares for anyway. He's as much removed from shok de as you can get.
The asymmetric essences embodied by the colonizer and colonized here are that of Flory's renunciation of his only ally and Veraswami's dogged decency.

Flory and the Angel in the House...

I was especially interested in Stoler's depiction of the colonies as "laboratories of modernity," with those within it "subjects" that "reworked" the coloniser's "experiments" and the "possibility that their choices expressed a domestic subversion, a rejection of the terms of the civilising mission." (551) In conjunction with this, I was thinking about the development of modernism in postwar Britain, and the trend of sexual experimentation, with unorthodox relationships such as homosexuality and extramarital affairs being encouraged (or at least, so we seem encouraged to think through biographies of various modernist writers), and such experimentation being a part of the reaction modernism had against the Victorian values of family life.

As far as reaction towards Victorian values goes, Flory could be in ways construed as a modernist (or modern) hero, turning against the traditional English ranks to socialise with the natives, and abandoning the façade of Victorian morality to admit to its lie - "the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them." (33) When Passage's Collector sadly notes "after all, it's our women who make everything more difficult out here," it might well apply to poor old Flory, for it is Elizabeth's arrival that erects in him the Victorian vision of "the angel in the house" and its family trappings - a vision that, as discussed above, was fading even in England, as Elizabeth attests to: "'You should have a piano,' he said despairingly. 'I don't play the piano.'" With a Victorian idealisation of women as his downfall, Flory goes from modernist hero to Victorian loser, a failed subject in that "laboratory of modernity." In contrast, Stoler's "cultura[l] hybrids" would instead be true modernist heroes, their "lifestyles" (551) perhaps closer to the "domestic subversion" that the very modernists in Britain were grasping towards.

Milieu, infection and colonial health

Stoler quotes Paul Rainbow’s argument that “the concern about milieu permeating French colonial thinking on education, health, labor, and sex in the late nineteenth century can only be understood in terms of the scientific episteme on which it relied” (535). This stood out for me for two reasons: the notion of milieu that Stoler discusses several times in the reading, and the “episteme”/metaphor of infection that permeates colonial discourse.

On one level, the colony is presented as a source of infection for the metropolitan centre in terms of physical health. Contemporary medical accounts warned of health dangers to Europeans who “stayed in the tropics too long” (Stoler 536); this is reflected in Burmese Days with Flory’s illness that “finished” his youth (68) and the creepy doctor who measured Marlow’s cranium in Heart of Darkness. Infection also carries to another level of heritage and blood, hence the anxiety over metis (literally mixed blood) that Stoler examines.

Besides carrying uncomfortable overtones of feudalism (where the right to rule is carried in the blood/endowed by superior divine force), this literal, quasi-empirical way of looking at the effect of the colony on the colonizer is problematic for me because of how it subsequently becomes a metaphor and epistemological mode that shapes the discourse and perception of colonizer and colonized alike. Imperialism becomes, in every sense of the word, a malaise that plagues colonial relations and thought: notice how for Flory “what poisoned everything…was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived” (Orwell 68). The framework of infection shapes the milieu in which colonialism functions and the colonizer’s response: preventing infection by purifying the milieu/environment, as Flory does by replacing the source of infection (May) with the totem of the pure white woman. This is partly why the portrayal of both women in Orwell’s text (barring the complications of authorial irony) disturbs me on an instinctive level.

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.

Liminal Eurasians in Burmese Days

Stoler’s essay about the metissage phenomenon of interracial unions and how Indo-Chinese in various Dutch colonies occupied a liminal position in colonial society due to their hybrid identity manifests itself in Burmese Days, specifically in the condition of the two Eurasian men Francis and Samuel. Their liminality is evident in how they are despised by not only the European community, but also alienated from the native Burmese community because their “political, economic and social bids” were in contradistinction to the demands of the native population, not in alliance with them. On the one hand, Europeans such as Elizabeth perpetuate pseudo-scientific racist myths about the allegedly inherently degenerate natures of Eurasians, asserting that “half-castes always inherit what’s worst in both races”, and thus exclude them socially by not wanting to associate or “touch them with a stick”, while using such myths to rationalize and justify the political exclusionary, discriminatory practices implemented against them, such as “cutting them off from entering third-grade Government services.” On the other hand, Francis and Samuel’s relationship with the natives, although much friendlier because the natives allow the Eurasians to cadge and work for them, is also a tension-fraught one because the Eurasian men basically capitalize or exploit the colonial notions of racial difference as a means of survival. They perform “European-ness” by complaining of “prickly heat” and wearing “huge topis” that remind the natives that they’ve got European skulls susceptible to sunstroke even though they may not suffer from these conditions that plague white men, because it is precisely the “drop of white blood” that assures their survival, recommending them as superior beings worthy in the eyes of the natives who grudgingly allow them to living amongst them. Their liminality which is caused by the exclusion from a proper European education and abandonment by their English clergymen fathers is also expressed in how their attempts to showcase their mastery of the English language falls short because of the excessively overt use of highly conventionalized/ritualised forms of civilised English expressions such as “Good evening to you” and “most honored to make your acquaintance” which are interspersed with grammatically, structurally or syntactically unsound or awkward phrases such as “Myself I suffer torments each night” that are associated with the perceived stereotype of how a native Burmese who is unable to master the English language speaks.

Crossing boundaries

The “purity of the community… the essence of the community [as] an intangible “moral attitude”, a multiplicity of invisible lines” (Stoler 516) that cannot be crossed is seen in Flory, May and Dr Veraswami. Flory crosses the racial lines of imperialism by befriending and aligning his sympathies with the colonized. However, with Elizabeth’s arrival, the invisible lines that divide colonizers and colonized are unveiled as he realizes that he “longed all these years for somebody to talk to!” His acute loneliness stems from straddling between his colonist lineage and disapproved friendships with the locals. In May and Dr. Veraswami, there is a reversal of racism as they believe the colonists as superior to their own race and actively seeks to cross into the domains of the colonists’ community. May thought that becoming the wife of a white man would give her prestige and earn respect while Dr Veraswami believed his own race as inferior to the colonists.

Both Colonizers and colonized are trapped within the nets of imperialism. Dr. Veraswami and May can never cross into the other community while Flory can never assimilate into the Burmese because of the burden of his colonist status:

But we can't help it… a demon inside us driving us to talk. We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and somehow never can. It's the price we pay for coming to this country.

The disgrace and fear of contamination of the white race by metissage cost Flory his life. Most of all, all who transgressed from and into the boundaries of ‘pure communities’ suffer humiliation, poverty and death while those who remained within their side of the picket fences (Elizabeth, Macgregor, Ellis etc) continue to perpetuate racial demarcation. In the end, both colonizers and colonized cannot escape their ‘birthmarks’.

It was not what he had done that horrified her…It was, finally, the birthmark that had damned him.

Victimization of Women

Stoler asserts that European women were controlled and 'policied' "by reaffirming the vulnerability of white women and the sexual threat posed by native men" (60). This positioning of women as weak, vulnerable and fragile has been and still is repeated across various instances of war.

In A Passage to India, we have the incredulous belief that "the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer" (222), thus placing the European woman as vulnerable to the sexual appetite of native men.

Part of Hilary Clinton's speech at the First Ladies' Conference on Domestic Violence, 17 Nov 1998: "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat".
http://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/html/generalspeeches/1998/19981117.html

In an article titled, "The Independent Experts’ Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peace-building", Rafeeuddin Ahmed, Chef de Cabinet to UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim says: "In retrospect, I realize how much of my perception about women in war was influenced by the media. The incessant images of desperation and victimization tell only part of the story. The other part, the strength, courage and resilience, is rarely captured".
http://www.es.amnesty.org/uploads/tx_useraitypdb/women_war_peace.pdf

Women are constantly positioned and depicted as victims. However, I feel that Elizabeth of Burmese Days is somewhat a robust character. She appears to be a rather 'strong' character in the sense that she does not burst into tears (chapter 23 when Verall leaves at the train station, rather than bawling "she would betray nothing"), instead she is rather aggressive and assertive.

Therefore, what I mean to say is that Orwell doesn't really depict the vulnerability of European women (as per the character Elizabeth). But what is interesting is the vulnerability of European men to the sexual threat posed by native women is instead presented to us readers.

P.S. The darn page has an error and so I wasn't able to italize or underline anything properly. Dang it.