Out of Eden: Mapping Psychic Spaces in Rudyard Kipling's Fiction Elizabeth Welby Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Literature and Creative Writing University of East Anglia 30 June 2010 © This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that no quotation from the thesis, nor any information derived therefrom, may be published without the author’s prior, written consent. Part of Chapter 2 has been previously published in The Kipling Journal as ‘The Lords of Misrule and the Pleasant Isle of Aves’, June 2010. A version of part of Chapter 4 has been previously published as ‘Solar Midnight: Traversing the Abject Borderline State in Rudyard Kipling’s “The City of Dreadful Night”’, in The Domination of Fear, ed. by Mikko Canini (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2010), pp. 147-177. Acknowledgements I owe debts of gratitude to many people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor John Thieme, whose dedication to my project coupled with his unfailing energy and tireless perseverance would have, I am certain, surprised even Kipling. John took over the project during the latter stages of my PhD and I am sincerely grateful for his unending enthusiasm and willingness to read, consider and constructively comment on my numerous drafts. I would also like to acknowledge The Kipling Society, both for its electronic research tool, ‘The Reader’s Guide’ and its warm human contact. Many thanks are due to, in particular, John Walker, David Page, John Radcliffe and John Lambert who replied to my frequent questions, large and small, about Kipling’s life and art with grace, good humour and speedy efficiency. Their encyclopaedic knowledge of the man and his fiction is both enviable and astounding. I would like to acknowledge the critical works of Kelly Oliver that helped me find an uncluttered path through the complexities of Julia Kristeva’s arguments on the formation of identity. Most of all, I would like to thank five people whose love and support has been a constant source of strength over the last four years. For my children, Tom, Izzy, Caitlin and Harriet, who have been without the physical presence of their much- loved father during the week and ‘exiled’ from their French homeland during their formative years, I owe a profound debt of gratitude. They have coped with this difficult period with a grace and maturity that belies their years and provided me with many smiles and much unconditional love along the way. For my partner, Bruno whose love and unwavering belief in my work provided a buttress to shore up those many periods of fatigue and worry. It is with the deepest love that I dedicate this thesis to Bruno and our children. Abstract To our private taste, there is always something a little exotic, almost artificial, in songs, which under an English aspect and dress, are so manifestly the product of other skies. They affect us like translations; the very fauna and flora are alien, remote.1 ‘Mapping Psychic Spaces in Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction’ examines Kipling’s artistic journey of separation from his biological mother, the surrogate mother figure of his ayah, and his ‘best beloved’ Indian homeland. Born in Bombay but spending his formative years lodged in a boarding house with strangers on the south coast of England, Kipling experienced a traumatic ‘exile’. Kipling’s exile mirrors the more universal exilic position of the child as it begins the process of socialisation and moves away from the covetous space of the semiotic and into the paternal authority of the symbolic. The ideas on the necessary but problematic rupture of the mother/child dyad in the semiotic in the work of Julia Kristeva and the Kleinian ideas of psychic splitting, together with Hélène Cixous’ work on writing from the margins of phallogocentric discourse will form the methodological scaffolding on which my analysis of Kipling’s fiction is constructed. Zohreh Sullivan’s groundbreaking Lacanian study, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling, will provide the springboard for my analysis of Kristevan and Cixousian maternal spaces in Kipling’s fiction, which no critic has as yet, to my knowledge, dealt with in detail. Kipling’s problematic relationship to the India of his childhood and the ‘loss’ of his mother figures is fictionally realised in his portrayal of India as a ‘feminised’ space. Mother India has two faces in his stories. One is vampiric, endlessly draining the coloniser’s life force and the other is benevolent, providing 1 Rudyard Kipling, Epigraph to ‘The Flowers’, Definitive Verse, p. 190. a safe and familial environment for Kipling’s child characters to explore. India is both the ‘monstrous feminine’ incarnate and the Kristevan ubiquitous pre- symbolic mother. From his real and metaphorical orphaned child characters and adolescents to his imperial heroes, Kipling’s Anglo-Indians and Indians struggle to assimilate a paternal law, but their desire for the life-affirming maternal realm constantly threatens the autocratic word of the (colonising) father. It is not until Puck of Pook’s Hill that the author finally creates a welcoming space for all his fragmented and wretched children and adults. There is room in his re-imagined socio-cultural Sussex landscape for their dual identities, out-caste subject positions and bicultural experiences. Sussex thus becomes a psychic translation for India. In England, Kipling finally finds an unproblematic pastoral, which can articulate his ambivalence by incorporating a maternal space in the paternal order, and thus completes the process of psychic mapping. Abbreviations A&R Actions and Reactions (London: Macmillan, 1951) BOW A Book of Words (London: Macmillan, 1928) DW The Day’s Work (London: Macmillan, 1898) JB The Jungle Book (London: Macmillan, 1922) LH Life’s Handicap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) L&S Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (London: Macmillan, 1923) PPH Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) PT Plain Tales from the Hills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) S&C Stalky and Co. (London: Macmillan, 1957) SJB The Second Jungle Book (London: Macmillan, 1962) SOM Something of Myself (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) WWW Wee Willie Winkie (London: Penguin, 1988) Contents Acknowledgements Abstract Abbreviations Introduction Two Separate Sides to his Head: Kipling’s Ambivalent India 1 Chapter 1 Paradise Lost: Kipling’s Southsea Years 40 Chapter 2 Mastering the Law-of-the-Father in The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co. 85 Chapter 3 Empire of Contradictions: Desire for the Impossible Mother India in Kim 141 Chapter 4 The ‘Sorrowful State of Manhood’: Kipling’s Adults in India 198 Chapter 5 The Ascent from the Abyss: Dedication to Duty in The Day’s Work 244 Conclusion This Other Eden: Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rewards and Fairies 291 Bibliography 337 1 Introduction Two Separate Sides to his Head: Kipling’s Ambivalent India 2 The two of them, laying [Kim] east and west, that the mysterious earth- currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long afternoon – bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and lastly, nerve by nerve. […] Kim slid ten thousand miles into slumber […] sleep that soaked like rain after drought. […] And Mother Earth was as faithful as the Sahiba. She breathed through him to restore the poise he had lost lying so long on a cot cut off from her good currents. His head lay powerless upon her breast, and his opened hands surrendered to her strength. The many- rooted tree above him, and even the dead-manhandled wood beside, knew what he sought, as he himself did not know. Hour upon hour he lay deeper than sleep.1 Water was trickling from a score of places in the cut face of the hill, oozing between the edges of the steps and welling up between the stone slabs of the terrace. Trees sprouted in the sides of the tank and hid its surroundings. It seemed as though the descent had led the Englishman, firstly, two thousand years away from his own century, and secondly, into a trap, and that he would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or that the Gau-Mukh [cow’s mouth] would continue to pour water placidly until the tank rose up and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would fall and crush him flat.2 Rudyard Kipling’s descriptions of India, particularly in his verse and fiction, frequently contain images of a ‘feminine’ landscape, and his urban and rural environments are painted with brushstrokes that can be both hazily impressionistic and finely detailed. As the above epigraph from Kim shows, Kipling can seamlessly move from the healing Sahiba to the tender and protective Mother Earth who repairs Kim’s fragmented soul at her breast. Yet Mother India can also be a terrifying entity for England’s colonial sons as these lines from his ‘A Vision of India’ demonstrate: Mother India, wan and thin, Here is forage come your way; Take the young civilian in, Kill him swiftly as you may.3 1 Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. by Máire ní Fhlathúin (Ontario: Broadview, 2005), pp. 308, 315. Further references are given after quotations in the text. 2 Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2001), p. 126. 3 Rudyard Kipling, ‘A Vision of India’, in The Works of Rudyard Kipling, XVII: Early Verse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), p. 63. 3 His ‘feminised’ settings cast India in the conflicting roles of a nurturing, life- affirming mother figure and an uncontrollable, fecund she-devil.