Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space in Kipling's "Jungle Book" Author(S): John Mcbratney Source: Victorian Studies, Vol

Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space in Kipling's "Jungle Book" Author(s): John McBratney Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring, 1992), pp. 277-293 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3828034 Accessed: 20-01-2020 02:00 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Victorian Studies This content downloaded from 106.215.63.189 on Mon, 20 Jan 2020 02:00:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms John McBratney IMPERIAL SUBJECTS, IMPERIAL SPACE IN KIPLING'S JUNGLE BOOK THE ROMANTIC IMAGE OF THE CHILD HELD A SPECIAL VALUE FOR VICTORIAN readers. In an age in which individual energies were increasingly disciplined, routinized, and regulated within an industrialized society, that Wordsworthian "Seer blest," whose joyful amplitude of being was set against the encroaching "Shades of the prison-house," represented both the vestige and hope of individual powers unfettered by school, factory, church, or state. This figure of the child was equally valued by a nation that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, was not simply industrial but self-consciously imperial-whose conception of itself was defined less by Little Englanders than by Charles Dilke's notion of a "Greater Britain." This shift in national identity put citizens of the Empire in a state of contradiction. On the one hand, Dilke's phrase inspired a larger vision of the self, and on the veldt of South Africa and in the rugged hills of the Indian Northwest Frontier young Britons found vast spaces within which to realize a grander vision of themselves. On the other hand, in the scramble for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s Greater Britain found its expansion checked by rival European powers in many parts of the world. In a society that featured strong pressures and enticements to sup- port an embattled Empire, Britons both home and abroad felt constrained to define their identity in narrow, nationally self-serving rather than large, inter- national terms. This was especially true in the Empire itself, for in military cantonments, civil stations, and colonial settlements, Britons encountered social, professional, and political arrangements whose codes were often more severe and unbending than those they had left at home. These codes were especially inflexible in British India. As Francis G. Hutchins has pointed out, the English middle class in India often outdid their counterparts at home in their fidelity to English middle-class custom (108). The young heroes of juvenile adventure literature seemed to promise readers an escape from this contradiction. In the adventure fiction of Charles and Henry Kingsley, R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, W. H. G. Kingston, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, male readers young and old embraced the myth that one could grow up to be robustly free and yet remain resolutely manly, Christian, and British. This myth flourished even more strongly in the juvenile magazines and papers, like Boy's SPRING 1992 This content downloaded from 106.215.63.189 on Mon, 20 Jan 2020 02:00:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 278 John McBratney Own Paper and the later Boys of Our Empire, popular in the jingoistic Britain of the turn of the century (for discussion of this popular literature, see Dunae; James). But relief from paradox was, in most of these fictions, only apparent. While the youthful protagonists of this genre sought self-aggrandizement in imperial theaters far from home, they also protected sedulously the image of themselves as young English gentlemen, guarding themselves against the possibility of "going native" or otherwise being "contaminated" by the Africans, Asians, Native Americans, or Pacific Islanders with whom they came in contact. In effect, they went abroad to assert an essentially home-grown identity. The ideology embodied in this literature, urging at once expansion and retrac- tion of the self, made for odd effects of characterization, especially in the novels of Henty, whose heroes stand curiously wooden and impervious amid their exotic surroundings. Among the authors of this nineteenth-century genre, only Kipling tried, with any real sense of the possibilities at stake, to create a scope and variety of individual self-definition commensurate with the adventure story's largeness of geographical imagination. The narrative of The Jungle Book, part fantasy, part fable, and part adventure story, provides a powerful analogy for the British imperial subject caught between individual desire and social restraint. As we will see, Kipling's attempted broadening of the terms of imperial identity depends largely on a subtle handling of imperial space. Juvenile fiction typically enacts a struggle between child and adult that begins in youthful unsettledness (anxiety, anger, or confusion) and ends in grown-up stability. But as Sarah Gilead has pointed out, children's fiction, and particularly children's fantasy literature, often violates this Bildungs pattern. The progressive movement from child to adult, configured formally in the movement from fantastic episode to realist frame is often undone in unexpected ways (277-78). In The Jungle Book, the education of Mowgli seems, at first, to offer a sure, though painful transformation of child into adult. But a closer look shows this change to be hedged. In the final framing story of the Mowgli series, "In the Rukh," the hero seems to retain the ability, despite his choice of an adult identity as a servant of the British Raj, to regress to his earlier, jungle self. Although, as I will show, this ability rests on specious grounds, The Jungle Book as a whole clings to the possibility of having it both ways, of a wolf-child's growing to manhood without quite outgrowing his lupine identity. What allows Mowgli this double pleasure is the persistence of a "felicitous space" that emerges in the fantasy of childhood and-survives the modulation from fantasy narrative to realist frame. I have taken this phrase from Gaston Bachelard, who uses it to describe those childhood images of enclosed space-houses, drawers, chests, wardrobes, nests, shells, comers, etc.-that arouse a sense of recollected delight, intimacy, and comfort in the adult writer and reader (xxxi-xxxii). Within this vestigial realm, Mowgli seems able to return to a selfhood of dual aspect the resists the narrowing definitions of a single, unitary adult identity.2 VICTORIAN STUDIES This content downloaded from 106.215.63.189 on Mon, 20 Jan 2020 02:00:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms IMPERIAL SUBJECTS, IMPERIAL SPACE IN KIPLING'S JUNGLE BOOK 279 What is the nature of felicitous space in Kipling? How is identity shaped inside its boundaries? How does it permit the apparent persistence of the childish alongside the grown-up self? To the extent that the Raj contrib- utes to the formation of this adult identity, what relationship obtains between felicitous space and British imperium?3 Given the tension between juvenile freedom and imperial duty, what finally is the nature of Mowgli's identity? I The answers to these questions require a close look at Kipling's conception of cultural identity in an imperial world, a conception that colored all his writings about India and, arguably, many of his later writings about England. Kipling's wrestlings with this issue were, in one sense, intensely personal. Born in Bombay to Anglo-Indian parents; sent to England at age six to endure the Evangelical hells of Southsea; hired at sixteen to work at the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette; after India resettled unhappily in London to launch a literary career; married to an American woman with whom he tried, with disastrous results, to put down roots in Vermont; resettled again in England only to move restlessly from house to house until he finally found a home at Bateman's in Sussex-Kipling spent much of his early and middle life trying to solve a co- nundrum of cultural affiliation unique in British life. Yet in another sense, his private quest for a secure sense of citizenship reflected a larger, public concern in turn-of-the-century Britain with the formation of an imperial culture, one that integrated a sense of Dilke's Greater Britain with a nationalist idea of Britain proper. Kipling assumed a leading role in articulating the terms of this cultural project. In "Recessional" (1897), he adjured an arrogant, jingoistic England to recall the need for humility and contrition in maintaining her "Dominion over palm and pine." Although the poem construes the European contest for empire as a fight among nations ("Judge of the Nations, spare us yet"), it offers, a few lines later, a parallel interpretation of the struggle as racial-between the Eng- lish and the "lesser breeds without the Law" (Complete 327). Although Kipling was referring to the Germans with this phrase, in doing so he was invoking a kind of distinction that had a wide relevance among a people still clinging to evolutionist assumptions of racial supremacy. To Kipling, the Germans were only one of many lesser breeds grading down by discrete steps from the Anglo- Saxon at the top to the Australian aborigine at the bottom.

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