Friendship, Belonging, and Space in the Works of JM Barrie, EM Forster

1 “ONLY CONNECT”: FRIENDSHIP, BELONGING, AND SPACE IN THE WORKS OF J. M. BARRIE, E. M. FORSTER, AND J. R. ACKERLEY A dissertation presented by Shun Yin Kiang to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April, 2015 2 “ONLY CONNECT”: FRIENDSHIP, BELONGING, AND SPACE IN THE WORKS OF J. M. BARRIE, E. M. FORSTER, AND J. R. ACKERLEY by Shun Yin Kiang ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATAION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University April, 2015 3 ABSTRACT My dissertation, “Only Connect”: Friendship, Belonging, and Space in the Works of J. M. Barrie, E. M. Forster, and J. R. Ackerley, argues that early- and mid-twentieth-century narratives of friendship bring a sense of openness to spatial regimes and social boundaries of the period. In conversation with recent scholarship on Victorian friendship—especially Richard Dellamora’s Friendship’s Bonds (2004), Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities, and Sharon Marcus’s Between Women (2007)—and queer and affect theory, my readings of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911), E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), and J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip (1956) cover a variety of fictional spaces spanning metropole and empire—such as the Victorian nursery, Neverland, pastoral England, the colonial social club, the Marabar Caves, the animal clinics and public parks of London—in order to locate and better understand friendship as a recurring set of affects and practices between selves and others that are horizontal and emerging, not hierarchical and foreclosed. Mapping different formations and moments of friendship in a range of spaces, my dissertation highlights the extent to which friendship, as a narrative trope and theoretical framework, affords new ways of thinking about being, belonging, and becoming with others. My dissertation also examines the different ways in which Barrie, Forster, and Ackerley’s narratives of friendship confound major themes of the Victorian novel, such as gender-specific separations of private and public life, the marriage plot, bourgeois subject-formation, nation-building, and the racialization of colonial subjects. While mindful of higher-stake concerns over identity-formation, ideological debates over subjectivities and their corresponding communities of belonging, the four chapters in this dissertation are more interested in bearing out the affective energies of friendship, and the unpredictable or non- teleological ways in which they are invoked in certain moments and places but not others. That 4 friendship brings together selves and others in affective and unsystematic ways on the one hand, and seeks to express its livingness and becoming beyond established identity markers such as gender, race, class, and sexuality, and normative communities of belonging such as the family and the state, on the other hand, are ideas whose interconnectedness my dissertation seeks to draw out more overtly. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee— Professor Green, Professor Aljoe, and Professor Dillon—for being generous with their time, advice, and support. Especially, I thank Professor Green, my advisor, for giving timely care and critical intervention to my dissertation where needed, throughout the writing process these past two years. Richard Dellamora, thank you for being an encouraging reader of my dissertation. Victoria Papa, Duyen Nguyen, and Emily Artiano—I owe a debt: in helping me prepare for the dissertation defense, you also reaffirmed my voice, my ideas, and the fact that we are all in this thing called “It’s life, deal with it” together. The steady support that I have received from my family and friends, in Hong Kong and in the U.S., has been an invigorating force throughout my six-year stint at Northeastern University. Without their support, this dissertation would remain the stuff of make-believe. Thank you, Stetson University, too, for giving me wonderful mentorship and literary scholars and creative writers whom I was, and still am, fortunate enough to call friends. John Pearson, Karen Kaivola, Terri Witek—your approaches to literature and your understandings of beauty in human strengths and weaknesses have anchored me to this day. Finally, I thank my partner Gregory J. Collins for his love, for believing in me, and for sustaining the conditions of possibility in which I find happiness and a way to becoming a literary scholar. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 5 Table of Contents 6 Introduction 7 Chapter One: Friendship and the Imagination of Childhood, Care, and Community in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan 20 Chapter Two: “Only Connect”: Friendship, Family, and the Objects of Inheritance in E. M. Forster’s Howards End 52 Chapter Three: Failures That Connect; or Colonial Friendships in E. M. Foster’s A Passage to India 82 Chapter Four: Friendship; or Apprehending More-Than-Human Subjectivities and Spaces in J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip 108 Works Cited 135 7 Introduction The desire of a reparative impulse . wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling “Friendship” . is one name for the co-belonging of nonidentical singularities —Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities In his novel Burmese Days (1934), George Orwell paints a rather grim picture of friendship. Set in British Burma, the story revolves around James Flory, an English merchant and a friend of Dr. Veraswami, an Indian doctor who wants to join the Kyauktada [ki-yoke-ta- da] Club, of which Flory is a member. An unpleasant task faces the protagonist: although the heyday of imperialism has come and gone, Kyauktada Club, like other English clubs in colonial outposts is “the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power,” proud of the fact that it has “never admitted an Oriental to membership” (17). Against the inevitable decline of the Empire, the club performs a social and political function of belonging, and of Englishness, that builds its solidarity on the absence of the Other. The club is foundational to an imagined community that performs itself at the expense and exclusion of others: if one cannot control Burma, so the logic goes according to the British, at least one can take comfort in not having to become friends with the Burmese. What makes Flory’s life even worse, however, is how this race-based belonging is undermining yet another potentially important relationship, namely his burgeoning romance with Elizabeth Lackersteen, who is growing comfortable living in Burma as a burra memsahib—a white woman of high social standing in India. The more Flory wants to expose Elizabeth to the “authentic” side of Burma, taking her to places where the natives gather, the more Elizabeth rejects the idea. Elizabeth’s rejection to interact with the natives, as Flory will soon find out, is a sign of her increased identification with, and loyalty to, the Anglo-Indian community to which 8 she wishes to belong. Caught between competing alliances, and lacking the social space to foster genuine friendship and belonging with others, cross-gender as well as cross-cultural, Flory kills himself at the end of the novel. I am invoking Orwell’s representation of friendship in Burmese Days here not to suggest that friendship was an impossible quest under imperialism, but to highlight the poignancy of how the lack of friendship, or the lack of means to connect with others, can lead to the impoverishment or cessation of a human life. Orwell’s representation of friendship in Burmese Days is singular rather than conclusive, however. Where Orwell hits the hardest in the novel— the fact that friendship is the collateral damage of colonialism—is also where he fails to see the pliancy of friendship. In different ways, J. M. Barrie, E. M. Forster, and J. R. Ackerley, contemporaries of Orwell, underscore the potentiality and hopefulness that, I argue, is inherent in friendship. That friendship fails to respond or chooses not to recognize systems of hierarchy on the one hand, and opens up conditions of possibility for non-normative modes of intimacy and belonging to exist and amass its own meaning, on the other hand, are ideas that I find different resonances in Barrie, Forster, and Ackerley’s fiction. Manifesting itself in different moments and spaces, friendship, as my dissertation consistently argues, reimagines ideas of being, belonging, and becoming with others as something more open and accidental. The idea that friendship can reconfigure prescriptive places of belonging into a sharable space made up of horizontal relations is a paradigm that I return to throughout the dissertation. My dissertation examines the different linkages and relations between friendship, belonging, and space in Peter Pan (1911), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924), and My Dog Tulip (1956). These texts, I argue, collectively suggest an affective impulse in friendship that brings confusion and a sense of openness to a host of normative relations 9 anchored strategically in certain places but not others. Concrete and conceptual spaces such as the Victorian nursery, middle-class homes, pastoral England, the colonial outpost, the animal clinic, and the streets of London, for example, give access, visibility, and protection to certain relations but not others, rendering feelings and formations of belonging a highly differentiated experience. In addition, my readings of these texts also try to bear out an accidental and ongoing nature of friendship, following the extent to which friendship mobilizes bodies and affined groups to unlikely moments when and spaces where the experience of belonging, of being together, does not always have a clear purpose or destination in sight.

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