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.

Sex (and money) in the Colonies

What struck me as I read Stoler was her suggestion that sex in the colonies was closely linked with the economics of colonial control. Stoler posits that it was the practical monetary concerns of keeping the costs of maintenance of expatriate families down that led (amongst other reasons) to the practice of concubinage. However, the practical use of European wives as household managers subsequently promoted marriage with European wives (besides having resulted from heightened fears of resistance and the implications of metissage on white prestige). Relating this to Burmese Days, Elizabeth can be read as the ultimate exemplication of the sexual "laws" that had been set in place to contain capital in the coloniser's hands.

Elizabeth’s gaze upon Flory is coloured by socio-economic terms (significance of her tortoise-shell glasses!) He appeals to her only when he shows mastery over the colonised space, by driving away the bull and by hunting, fitting her notions of a respectable "pukka" or first class sahib. She casts him aside when 'the Honourable' Verrall comes along, as his 700 rupees have become pittance in comparison. Elizabeth moreover is dreaded by Flory's servants, unable to pilfer money for themselves when she becomes mistress. Therefore Elizabeth's conflation with capital control, which exemplifies colonial marriage's conflation with capitalism in colonial discourse.

We the readers therefore clearly see the irony and deluded-ness of Flory in seeking "someone who would love Burma as he loved it and hate it as he hated it...Someone who understood him: a friend"(73) in someone like Elizabeth, a born "Burra memsahib"(300). These attributes Flory seeks in a wife are ultimately unprofitable as it jeopardises White Prestige and subsequently capital dominance. Therefore it is significant that it is women and their links with capital who lead to Flory's downfall. Hla May's screams for money "Pike-san-pay-like!" makes him poor “Porley” and ultimately destroys him socially and Elizabeth rejects him as a result. Flory is punished as he has become an “unprofitable” “cog in the wheels” (69) of colonialism. In light of this, Flory’s earlier opinion that "What shall it profit a man if he save his own soul and lose the whole world?" (80) can be read as a gospel of colonial discourse.

" ... 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.