Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy The Depiction of Men and Women in selected short Stories by Rudyard Kipling Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Supervisor: Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels- Prof. Dr. Kate Macdonald May 2012 Duits” by Sam Claeys Acknowledgements I would like thank to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Kate Macdonald for her constant help and interesting insights on Kipling’s writing, since it was because of her that my interest in Kipling already started during her Ba2 class. This interest has grown over these three years going from a class presentation to a BA paper and eventually to the subject of an MA thesis. Thank you for always making time in your schedule when I had questions, uncertainties or doubts. I would also like to thank my parents, whose kind words and moral support were invaluable during this four year journey. Thank you both for constantly being there for me. 2 Table of Contents 0. Introduction 4 1. Background to research 6 2. Literature Review 8 3. Methodology 13 4. Investigation 13 4.1. The Indian background: the hills, the plains and their interaction 13 4.1.1. The hills: a place of comfort and enjoyment in life and literature 14 4.1.2. The plains: heat, disease and stress 18 4.1.3. The locations of the stories 21 4.2. Kipling’s depiction of women 22 4.2.1. Mrs Hauksbee: femme fatale, caring mother figure or something else? 23 4.2.1.1. A femme fatale? 23 4.2.1.2. A caring mother figure? 28 4.2.1.3. Two dimensions of one character 35 4.2.2. Other women in Kipling’s short stories 36 4.2.3. Kipling’s women: more ambiguous than was thought 44 4.3. Kipling’s depiction of men 45 4.3.1. Strickland: the ideal civil servant? 47 4.3.2. Other men in Kipling’s short stories 53 4.3.3. Kipling’s men: not ideal, but flawed 66 5. Results 67 6. Implications 71 7. Conclusion 73 8. Works cited 74 3 0. Introduction Rudyard Kipling is one of the most influential writers on colonial times in India during the Victorian era. Born in Bombay in 1865, he spent a large amount of his journalistic career in India, writing his first short stories, dealing with the Indian scene and the Anglo-Indians inhabiting it. Because “[t]he literature of the sub-continent of India had been curiously sparse before Kipling’s advent” (Birkenhead 1978: 96), these short stories were popular by the standards of that time and still are for contemporary critics. The recurrent theme throughout these stories is the focus on colonial rule in India and how the British lived in the hill stations and plains stations. He knew which themes were interesting for his fellow Anglo-Indians. Kipling has covered all aspects of this society, as well as all population groups: how soldiers lived in their closed encampments in Soldiers Three (1888), how the British made their own small society within this country in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) or how certain aspects of Indian life can be terrifying to Anglo-Indians in the ghost stories of The Phantom Rickshaw (1888). Kipling describes the British colonials without any glorification in these volumes and others written in that period. The people in these stories are not the idealized prototypes of British imperialism, but ordinary people with their virtues and vices trying to be part of Anglo-Indian society and working hard to solidify the success of the British Empire in India. Most of these early short stories were written between 1886 and 1889 and were published as periodicals in the Indian newspapers he wrote for, such as The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and The Pioneer in Allahabad. Since the reading public of those newspapers were Anglo-Indian colonials, Kipling had to write about subjects close to daily lives whether they lived in larger hill stations such as Simla, Lahore and Allahabad or those in the small plains stations all over lower India. Although Kipling continuously wrote these short stories for the newspapers and these were well received by his reading public, he never planned on publishing his stories as a volume of short stories. He said in a letter to his aunt 4 Edith Macdonald: “I am running a series of Anglo-Indian social stories: - ‘Plain Tales from the Hills.’ I enclose some samples. They ain’t [sic] worth publishing in book form but lots of people have written for them to be so treated. However I don’t” (4 December 1886; Kipling 1991: 141; emphasis in original). However, his first volume of short stories Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) would play a large role in his writing career since after its publication in 1888, it brought him not only critical approval, but also started his career as a published writer, as he noted in a later letter to Margaret Mackail: “the royalty of my Plain Tales is bringing me in £300 a year” (11 February 1889; Kipling 1991: 286). This financial independence and positive approval enabled him to pursue an independent writing career. Although these short stories were important for his early career and show an affinity to native and colonial life that has laid the foundation for his later successes, both as a thematic foundation and in narrative style, still these short stories have not been studied so extensively as his popular poetry and novels. A main theme in Kipling’s early short stories is the way in which he depicts the male and female parts of colonial society, often depicting them with certain flaws that create the action. This adds a dimension of reality. The main focus of this MA thesis will be to describe how Kipling depicts the British colonisers in everyday life, and more importantly, how Kipling positions his male and female characters in this society i.e. how are they portrayed, where is their place in society and more importantly, does Kipling’s India correlate with colonial British India of this time? The main question is if Kipling has helped create the male and female stereotypes such as the hill station flirt or the idealised civil servant, that are now being used to read his stories. These stereotypes have given him the “reputation of being a misogynist” (Sen 2000: 17) for example, because of his depiction of women such as Mrs Hauksbee and Mrs Reiver. In the same way his character Strickland has also given him the 5 reputation of idealising the British civil servant, correlating with the views of the British to what a good civil servant should be. 1. Background to research One of the main reasons for this analysis of the depiction of men and women in Kipling’s short stories is, that not much research has been done on this topic. Kipling’s early short stories, especially the collection Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) were the stories that brought him critical acclaim and showed his skill as a writer. As is said in different reviews by his contemporaries as can be read in the reviews in Kipling: The Critical Heritage where Andrew Lang positively reviews Plain Tales from the Hills: “Mr. Kipling’s tales really are of an extraordinary charm and fascination, not to all readers no doubt, but certainly to many men” (Lang (1889) 1971: 47). Yet little research has been done on this theme in these stories. Some analyses brings some short stories together, but usually this was done in the context of the colonial and post-colonial analysis. It would appear that his early short stories have never been analysed for how Kipling wrote about men and women in these short stories. Within Kipling’s male characters, his soldiers have been studied extensively, however, not much analysis was done on the ordinary civil servant or even the common civilian in his short stories. Therefore, my analysis on Kipling’s male characters will focus on Kipling’s civil servant and will forego his soldiers. Secondly, it seems that when male and female characters in these stories have been discussed, that they have been considered within the stereotypical categories common for that time: the colonial women were either docile wives or femmes fatales while their husbands worked hard in the plains stations. The men were depicted as hard-working servants of the British Empire who taught the British values in India, not only to their government but to the native Indians themselves. Since people analysed Kipling’s work according to these male and female stereotypes and as he was one of the first to write about colonial India, these 6 stereotypes were frequently used in literature on colonial India and therefore could be also easily applied to all literature dealing with this topic. As much as “[the] British authors of [Kipling’s] period were deeply concerned with the position of the Englishwoman in India” (Greenberger 1969: 28), it seems that this theme of the depiction of the Englishwoman in India has not been adequately analysed by contemporary critics of Kipling’s work, since they tend to hold on to these stereotypes of the docile wife or the femme fatale. I disagree with this assumption of stereotypes. To me it seems that Kipling was able to write about colonial India by creating characters of a more ambiguous nature, since the characters of Mrs Hauksbee and Strickland, are more than just a femme fatale and a civil servant showing the British values.