"She's Turning Into a Monkey" - Gender Constructs in Three Works of Fin de Siècle Colonial British Fiction

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2015

"She's Turning Into a Monkey" -

Gender Constructs in Three Works of Fin de Siècle Colonial

British Fiction

Hanna Moy

MA Literature and Culture Supervisor: Dr Tara MacDonald University of Amsterdam

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Introduction

In this thesis I will examine how the intersection of Western privilege and the perceived ‘freedom’ of the colonial setting – in contrast to mainland Britain - allowed British people to explore gender expression from a position of power, less inhibited by societal mores. I will do this by examining She by H. Rider Haggard, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and Anna

Lombard by Cory. These texts, all published within a few years of each other, offer a window

into the complex gender dynamics of the fin de siècle. The rise of the New Woman took place at a time when the British understanding of human nature, social status, and human morality was undergoing a radical shift due to Darwin's theory of natural selection. When it became

understood that human beings had not been 'specially created' by God as separate from the animal kingdom, it caused anxiety about identity, morality, selfhood, and one's place in society. For centuries, men had been identified with culture, and women with nature. With the advent of evolutionary thought offering new understandings of nature and human identity, the concept of motherhood and nature itself became fraught with anxiety. If women were identified with nature, Darwin’s theory of evolution splintered assurances that women’s constitution was inherently benevolent or that being ‘maternal’ meant being nurturing. Similarly, British male identity as the pinnacle of evolutionary fitness had a savage and animalistic inheritance which the Christian idea of ‘special creation’ had not.

In colonial fiction – here, understood as texts which take place in colonized lands – these anxieties about gender and nature are complicated by understandings of British people as the pinnacle of evolutionary 'fitness', and subaltern people as evolutionarily inferior. This creates a context in which both women and non-Western people are perceived as animalistic, either explicitly or implicitly. The 'animal nature' revealed by Darwin is a disturbing lineage, and as I will argue in the following, British masculinity constructed itself as being able to exercise

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self-control and maintain civilization. British male colonial gender expression is thus centered around showing oneself to be capable of self-control. This ability, then, separates middle-class British men from British women and from colonized people (and, although it is beyond the scope of this thesis, from British working-class men).

In She, by H. Rider Haggard, Ayesha represents a variety of women. She offers herself to the young hero of the text, Leo, as a virgin willing to submissively serve him as an Angel of the House, but her political power, education and intelligence mark her as a New Woman figure. Haggard creates strong homosocial links between men, and reveals anxieties about women's power and influence over men which can be wielded through both traditionally feminine roles, and in the new roles taken on by the New Woman. These anxieties are linked to anxieties about evolutionary fitness and ‘devolution’. Ayesha’s pretensions to power come to nothing and she is revealed as an evolutionarily inferior “monkey” (Haggard 230 & 231).

Earlier concepts of femininity had imagined women in a variety of ways which were different from the Victorian Angel of the House – from sexual temptresses to shrewd and conniving crones. Karen Klein argues that medieval writers could construct women as representing “man’s highest ideals and aspirations” or “a projection of his sexual fears and a threat to his salvation” (Klein 688). These multitudinous images did not entirely disappear at the fin de siècle, but instead, created the possibility of an ambiguous and multivalent perception of women, such as that seen in She. With the rise of the New Woman at the end of the Victorian period, the fear of women seizing rightfully male power became more widespread. New Woman tactics for seizing power sometimes included demanding that women, as the moral 'heart' of society, should be able to extend their responsibility of care from the home to the public sphere. However, other thinkers were even more subversive (or, depending on the perspective, more counterproductive) and second-guessed social institutions and expectations, from marriage to chastity to private property.

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In Heart of Darkness, masculine identity is exposed as fragile and paradoxical. Thrust upon Marlow is the requirement to represent useful, efficient, benevolent patriarchal colonialism, alongside Kurtz. When Marlow is unable to perform this idealized form of masculinity, he is forced to recognize that it is a myth, and that the culture based around it, along with his own identity, is a lie. When he is unable to embody this mythical masculinity, he is left empty inside – inside, there is nothing but the “darkness” of his lost identity. The knowledge that binaries cannot function (that colonial masculinity as the opposite of feminine and black emotionality and savagery - and the evolutionary narrative which constructs white identity as the opposite of blackness - cannot function) then becomes paradoxically part of the very gender identity which has been revealed to be impossible. The illusory nature of British colonial masculinity is then incorporated into that very masculine model, and must be hidden from women due to homosocial loyalties. Heart of Darkness, like She, creates a colonial, homosocial environment in which women are carefully excluded from male spheres of power and knowledge. Women are

portrayed as naïve and unable to understand the moral complexities, ambiguities, and 'darkness' which men must face. In this way, Conrad represents Marlow as realizing that masculinity and British identity are built on myths which cannot bear scrutiny, but naturalizes these as part of British colonial male identity. This creates a situation in which this realization becomes a part of male wisdom, which must be benevolently kept from women at all costs. The irony of Heart of

Darkness is that, even while truth is revealed to be partial and incomplete, the narrative is still a

European, male narrative in which African and female voices are excluded, and into which only male ontologies are allowed.

In all of the texts which I will examine, common themes emerge. In She and in Heart of

Darkness, women are excluded from the imperialist project. Although they are excluded for

different reasons, what is clear is that male bonds and exclusively male spheres are an integral part of the imperialist project. For this reason, Anna Lombard's creation of a space for women to

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work in the imperial project alongside men is a subversive response to the male hegemony of knowledge and power. In Heart of Darkness, women are not able to cross physical boundaries and explore – they are not powerful, and it is their lack of power and knowledge which protects society. In She, women in all roles are a subversive force, because all female roles are powerful and can interfere with masculine realms of power – and this is where Haggard's anxiety about women springs from. Anna in Anna Lombard represents a woman who, like Ayesha in She, steps into male, homosocial realms as an intellectual, a sexually desiring subject, and as a colonizer with political power – but while Ayesha is humiliated and revealed to be a “monkey”, Anna is able to not only retain her dignity, but to emerge as an equal to men and to disrupt exclusively homosocial forms of power and knowledge.

The anxieties which shape these three works emerged in a specific context. Gender expression became one area of life in which social status could be asserted. During the turn of the century, new ideas and shifting social and economic relations had led to fears and anxieties about personal status and class identity while social hierarchy became more fluid than ever before, as James Adams argues in Dandies and Desert Saints (Adams 5). Adams argues that one uniting factor between diverse British masculinities was self-control; men “lay claim to the capacity for self-discipline as a distinctly masculine attribute” (Adams 2). Men were seen as uniquely capable of exercising self-control; in contrast, during the mid- to late nineteenth century womanhood became linked to ‘passionlessness’. As Nancy Cott argues in Passionlessness: An

Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, women were perceived as unable to develop the

virtue of self-control, because they did not have any passion to control (Cott 219). This concept of womanhood was linked to the idea of the innately moral, calm, and idle domestic woman who was the middle class Angel of the House. In this understanding, women were unsuitable for public life or leadership roles due to their nature, and needed to be protected by the guiding hand of male leadership.

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In Heart of Darkness and Anna Lombard, homosociality and male-only colonial spaces both contribute to a context in which heterosexual and heterosocial bonds are paradoxically perceived as obligatory aspects of masculinity and yet damaging to masculinity. This paradox is revealed by the texts as problematizing identity. In Anna Lombard, Anna’s ability to create a space for herself within imperialism is dependent upon the rejection of this paradox. In Heart of

Darkness and in She, women are rejected altogether as companions and political actors. In what

follows, I discuss each text separately, being attentive to the ways in which each author maps colonial gender identity.

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She

H. Rider Haggard's She was one of the most popular adventure or colonial novels of the late Victorian period, and has never been out of print. In his study of empire, Hugh Ridley argues that the populism of colonial novels makes them a litmus test for their times: “It was partly [colonial novelists'] lack of literary distinction and unthinking acceptance of current attitudes which

permitted [them] to reflect so faithfully the currents of their age” (Ridley 12). By tapping into the representations which would be the most evocative to the British reading public, She reveals the anxieties central to the British 'masculinity crisis' at the end of the nineteenth century. This crisis was about the disintegration of middle class British masculine identity in the face of cultural changes, including the New Woman movement, in which fears of degeneracy played a

significant role. In this chapter, I will explore the ways in which empire, gender, and evolution were the subject of the interconnected anxieties revealed in She, and the way in which

imperialism paradoxically depended upon both homosociality and the 'cult of domesticity'.

Mythical Greek Heritage - Passing the Torch

She begins when Leo Vincey, the only surviving member of “one of the most ancient

families in the world” (Haggard 9) is bestowed upon Holly, an aging Oxford don, by Leo's dying father. The family’s origin is in ancient Greece, a significant lineage for a Victorian audience. Rebecka Klette argues that Greece was seen as “mirroring the Victorian era in spirit, as well as in success of commerce, philosophy, art, science and politics” (Klette 1). Indeed, argues Frank Turner in The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, “Writing about Greece was in part a way for the Victorians to write about themselves” (Turner 8). Through giving Leo this heritage, Haggard signifies that he comes from a ‘civilized’ family – indeed, a family that represents civilization.

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While England, as Conrad rightly notes in the opening of Heart of Darkness, was colonized by Romans, not Greeks, “the geographical distance between ancient Greece and England did not stop the Victorians from seeing themselves as embodying the values, ideas, and spirit of the ancient Greek culture” (Klette 4). Leo is early on constructed as an heir to the well-bred, pure lineage and to the “noble spiritual heritage” represented by Greek civilization (Klette 4). Haggard is careful to ensure that this noble heritage is not associated with actual nobility, and emphasizes that on British soil, the Vinceys were middle class. Leo’s father explains: “Not that the Vinceys […] have been particularly distinguished—they never came much to the fore. Sometimes they were soldiers, sometimes merchants, but on the whole they have preserved a dead level of respectability and a still deader level of mediocrity” (Haggard 10) Leo, then, is able to represent a masculinity which is both heir to the heritage of Western civilization, and also solidly middle-class. However, the focus on Greek culture also introduces an element of homoeroticism to the relationship between an older man and a young, attractive Greek boy. As Cecil Wooten points out in “The Elusive ‘Gay’ Teenagers of Classical Antiquity”, “It was

assumed that a man would be sexually attracted by a teenage boy” (Wooten 41). This homoerotic element is a constant presence in the text, emphasizing Holly’s aversion to the idea of engaging with women in the power structures of marriage and intimacy.

Holly adopts and cares for Leo with the help of a male servant. He refuses, on principle, to take a female nurse for the boy, due to his anxiety about feminine power over male children. “I would have no woman to lord it over me about the child, and steal his affections from me,” says Holly. “The boy was old enough to do without female assistance, so I set to work to hunt up a suitable male attendant” (Haggard 16). From early on, Holly is jealous of Leo’s affections, and wants to keep him from associating with women. In the strict separate spheres of Victorian men and women, domestic duties involving the care of small children was a role normally reserved for women. This created a situation in which middle class boys only entered the sphere of men

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when they were sent to a public school.

Leo’s father takes an ancient Greek rather than modern English approach to Leo's education – rather than sending him to school, he secures for him a well-educated, older mentor to train him in the ways of men. Holly’s horror of feminine influence lasts until the final time the reader hears of him. The fictional male editor of She meets Holly and Leo, and while Holly enjoys homosocial company and they all chat together, things change when Leo attempts to converse with women: “when he saw the ladies advancing” towards the men, apparently to flirt with Leo, the editor reports, Holly “cast a reproachful look at his companion [Leo]”, stops talking, and “with an abrupt nod to myself, turned and marched off alone” (Haggard 3).

Although many critics have focused on the negative attitudes to women which are revealed in Haggard's writing, most have overlooked how the “misogyny” (Haggard 124) of its characters, its focus on homosocial relations, and the obsessive fixation on masculine identity reveals a paradox in which heterosexual desire and heterosocial communication is disrupted. When women are not only inferior but dangerous to one's masculinity, they must be avoided. Late Victorian Britain had many spaces reserved exclusively for men, from the army, to public schools, to universities, to much of the administration of the colonial project. This provides a space for a hypermasculine, imperialist celibate or even (hidden) queer identity. Eve Sedgwick's foundational text Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire points out that, although homosociality and homosexuality are often seen as two separate things, there is a continuum between homosexual desire and male camaraderie – a continuum whose “visibility” is “radically disrupted” by homophobia, but which nevertheless exists (Sedgwick 696).

Sedgwick points out that: “There are not separate male-homosocial books," but rather that "the European canon as it exists” is already homosocial - and “most so when it is most heterosexual” (Sedgwick 17). Looking through the lens of homosociality is a useful critical tool for understanding masculinity as a phenomenon. Sedgwick argues that homosociality is

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"structured around the distinctive relation of the male homosocial spectrum to the transmission of unequally distributed power" (Sedgwick 18). Patriarchy depends on strong homosocial bonds as a way to maintain male power. This becomes significant in understanding British colonialism when one takes into account that male homosocial bonds are particularly pronounced in

"institutional, bureaucratic, and military" contexts (Sedgwick 19).

The rigid binaries created to safeguard the purity and privilege of heterosexual British masculinity – binaries which paradoxically both enforce and disrupt heterosexuality - reveal the difficulties necessary in maintaining this identity and the ambivalence at its centre. The British colonial project depended on both the 'cult of domesticity' embodied in reverence for the family unit and heterosexual bonds, and also on 'homosocial' bonding which disrupted

heterosexual/heterosocial bonding. These paradoxes create an innate fragility in masculinity, and it is this fragility that creates the urgency of convincingly performing masculinity, and the fear of failing to perform convincingly enough.

Queering She

There is an obligatory heterosexuality to colonial masculinity; however, one sees how very heavily this obligation weighs on the shoulders of Holly in She. Holly is able to say “Few sons have been loved as I love Leo, and few fathers know the deep and continuous affection that Leo bears to me” (Haggard 17). When women fall in love with Leo, Holly perceives this as “troublesome” and the “difficulties” which ensue are passed over in Holly’s narrative (Haggard 18). When British identity is constructed as the heir to Classical Greek civilization, this

introduces a queer element into the culture. Although Hellenism was extremely popular among those fin-de-siècle thinkers who Adams would call 'dandies', Haggard's colonial and quite macho Hellenism seems to reveal the difficulty of constructing a 'pure', heterosexual masculinity in the context of patriarchal society and the constant separation of the sexes. The reification of colonial masculinity, which should strengthen the hegemony of heterosexuality by rejecting 'effeminate'

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and 'weak' women and queer identities, paradoxically, through the rejection of women, creates a space for a hypermasculine identity which is unable to eliminate its queer elements. Holly's distaste for women and his obvious jealousy of Leo, combined with his constant admiring description of Leo's beauty and the implication of his Greek mentoring role of the younger man, all open the text up for a queer reading.

To Holly, the valorization of Leo's shockingly beautiful young body has links to the Victorian cult of masculinity which prized the ideal imperial body, valuing the bodybuilder Eugene Sandow. Eugene Sandow was the first celebrity bodybuilder, and became famous at the turn of the century for his ‘perfect’ muscular physique, which was seen as a representation of ideal masculinity. Jesse Matz points out that Sandow's appeal stemmed from the anxiety about shifting codes of masculinity during the coming of modernity, but also that the “worship of vitality” expressed in Victorian ideas of ideal masculinity are part of a “secretly erotic 'craving,' one that is homoerotic for worshipping specifically the nude muscular male body while

pretending at an interest only in health and athleticism” (Matz 35). In fact, Matz argues that “Homosexual desire, repressed or active, was somehow even essentially or inevitably complicit in the imperial project itself” (Matz 32). Fears of a degenerate or weak masculinity allowed a space for hypermasculine, Spartan homoeroticism to exist, as the ideal male body was fantasized about, and as masculinity was made into a desirable ideal; although 'effeminate' or weak

homosexual identity was seen as a degenerate force which weakened the empire, it would be a mistake to see identity in an 'effeminate queer/masculine heterosexual' binary. Masculinity took many forms, but in order to serve the colonial project, masculinities which valued homosocial bonds, attempted to keep separate from women, strove to strengthen patriarchal power through upholding the gender binary, and which idealized strong male bodies, were extremely useful.

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Imperial Masculinity

Wives are also a source of anxiety for Holly, who admits that he is a “bit of a misogynist” (Haggard 69). When Holly contemplates the marriage of Leo to Ayesha, the fearsome She, he jokes: “True, in uniting himself to this dread woman, he would place his life under the influence of a mysterious creature of evil tendencies, but then that would be likely enough to happen to him in any ordinary marriage” (Haggard 191). Such jocular misogyny is clear enough to even the most cursory reader, but the association of women with mystery and evil has deep roots which require more scrutiny. Richard Patteson's analysis in “Manhood and Misogyny in the Imperialist Romance” bears repeating:

The fear and hatred of women evident everywhere in the imperialist romance can be explained partially, at least, by the imperialists' hunger for domination. Victorian imperialism was a

masculine imperative [...] In the imperialist romance, nothing is feared more than the swallowing of identity - whether it be the obliteration of civilization by the barbarian, the overwhelming of the ego by the id, or the envelopment of the male by the female. All involve the breakdown of the order and control that the imperialist romancer sees as the quintessence of the masculine spirit. To create order out of chaos, to impose control, to give shape to reality - these are a man's

prerogatives, this constitutes his identity. Whatever threatens that identity also threatens

civilization. This is the fundamental reason why the "weaknesses" of women are so despised, and why the power of women is so feared. (Patteson 5;7)

Although Holly distrusts and dislikes women, his relationship with Leo is intimate and secret: “Leo was all the world to me […] But, of course, it would not do to let him see how great a hold he had over me” (Haggard 37). Patteson further points out that “one of the many paradoxes in the imperialist romance is that marriage, the cornerstone of a stable society, is so often seen as fatal to the masculine fellowship without which civilization could not be maintained” (Patteson 7-8). This meant that what Sedgwick calls 'homosocial desire' becomes a necessary part of male identity and the imperial project. As Judith Butler points out, “The construction of gender

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operates through exclusionary means […] through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articulation” (Butler 8). Holly, here,

acknowledges aspects of affection which should not be articulated openly – leading one to conclude that if affections go any deeper, then these will not be acknowledged at all. The

homoeroticism between Holly and Leo is an extreme example, but the intense, chaste passion of Marlow for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness also implies that women must always necessarily be outsiders to true intimacy, which, due to women's inferiority and thus inability to truly understand a man, exists only between men.

Holly mentors Leo until he attains respectable, educated, middle-class manhood, all the while preparing him for the day of his twenty-fifth birthday, when he will be able to choose whether to go on the quest which his father has left him. On this day, Holly, Leo, and their servant Job together open a ‘Pandora’s box’ of ancient documents, which allow Leo to trace his lineage through the major male figures of Western civilization. The burden of this heritage is a duty which Leo must accept or reject: to go on a quest from Britain to Africa, and kill the dangerous matriarchal figure who has attacked and killed his forefathers. Ayesha, as a powerful woman, has attacked the paterfamilias of Leo's family – in order to restore patriarchy, he must kill her. The task of killing her has been handed down from man to man during the history of the family, and it is Leo who now takes up the task. In this way, the task of keeping women in their place is constructed as a perennial, necessary task for Western civilization.

In the context of a Victorian British interest in the study of origins, archiving and

archaeology, these documents explicitly categorize this hunt for origins as a male quest. Patricia Murphy convincingly argues that the documents in the opening chapters “establish the written word as a male province” and that the “Vincey history is exclusionary” due to being “accessible only to an educated man” (Murphy 754). The inference to be drawn, concludes Murphy, is that in She, “all links to Western culture are traced through the male” (Murphy 755). Since women do

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not have access to civilization, they are not called to defend it when it is attacked – the burden of opposing dangerous foreign forces is explicitly a white man's burden. Inherent to civilization is the notion that men must rule and defend – a woman with the power to oppose men is a foreign and dangerous notion.

When Holly and Leo meet Ayesha, they are patriarchal representatives of Western civilization from the Classical to the Victorian period. Ayesha, a well-educated and powerful female ruler, seems to embody a variety of female roles – she is both a virgin and a sexually desiring woman, both a submissive lover and a powerful political and military figure, both humble about her nature as a woman and yet educated and intellectually sharp. Ayesha is

attracted to Leo, and tempts him with the idea of a life lived with her – she would be able to offer him her submissive, virginal femininity as well as the political power which she controls. In Rule

Britannia, Deirdre David argues that:

Compared to Ayesha, who is extremely intelligent and because of her immense age rather well-read, and to Holly, who is a donnish classical scholar, Leo is a dimwit, the sex object for whom Holly and Ayesha compete, although the novel loudly insists that Holly is infatuated with Ayesha and a rival of Leo's. (David 197)

In this text, models of companionship matter – if Leo rejects Holly, he chooses partnership with a woman who is powerful, intelligent, and exhibits sexual, emotional, and political agency. For Leo, who is attractive but intellectually extremely average, partnership with such a powerful and intelligent woman represents giving up patriarchal privilege, and allowing a woman to 'usurp' the role which he has been born into. Holly, throughout the text, is an opponent of female

companionship, whether sexual or not, and values only homosocial bonds. That this text could be written and that this attitude would be unremarkable in such a popular text reveals the strength of homosocial colonial institutions, and the fear of female control and power within all-male realms such as Holly's university, or the colonies.

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She reveals that the 'cult of domesticity', which is an aspect of hegemonic

masculinity/masculinities, was also seen as a dangerous force in patriarchal culture. Even the extremely limited role given to women by patriarchal culture was not so limited that women were unable to exercise agency – for example, over small children, or as objects of desire with the ability to exercise influence by choosing or rejecting suitors, as Holly points out with horror and dismay. A mother or a wife will always exert some form of influence over a man – and for Holly, ultimate masculinity can only happen when this power is rejected in favor of purely male social spheres.

Inside Woman is a Monkey

A virgin, Ayesha conforms to patriarchal codes of ideal female behavior. In Imperial

Leather, McClintock argues that “Within patriarchal narratives, to be virgin is to be empty of

desire and void of sexual agency, passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history, language and reason” (McClintock 30). Ayesha, in contrast, has accumulated wisdom over a period of thousands of years, but her character is portrayed by Haggard as weak and unstable – a woman's character. This reveals that the pretensions of New Women to assert their intellectual capabilities are moot; knowledge is still a masculine provenance. Ayesha is an ambivalent character; powerful enough to kill with a raised hand, but ready to submit to Leo if he will take her: “She took his hand and placed it upon her shapely head, and then bent herself slowly down till one knee for an instant touched the ground—"Behold! In token of submission do I bow me to my lord” (Haggard 222). It is after pledging her submission that Ayesha talks about the immense power that she and Leo could have if they reigned together: she as his submissive wife, and he as the perfect patriarchal conqueror.

Rebecca Stott, who specializes in Victorianism and Darwinism, argues that evolutionary theory provides the basis for the fear that women and 'inferior' races must both be controlled by

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the paternalistic hand of the imperialist white man:

The projection of everything suppressed in civilized western culture onto the figure of the black man as other (as the antithesis of European values and morality) is matched by the projection of these similar fears (barbarism within civilization) onto the figure of the white woman. She is the weak spot in the veneer of civilization by virtue of her position in evolutionary development. (“The Dark Continent” 75 - 76)

In other words, it is not only the 'unruly woman' or nineteenth century New Woman who

threatens to subvert masculine identity, but all female identities. Ayesha the tyrant is a cipher not only for male fears of feminism, but of the power of a traditional woman influencing the boy as a mother and the man as a wife. Whether women are powerful or weak, they are a subversive presence to be feared and are in need of civilizing male control. In “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent”, Patrick Brantlinger argues that:

For middle- and upper-class Victorians, dominant over a vast working-class majority at home and over increasing millions of "uncivilized" peoples of "inferior" races abroad, power was self-validating. There might be many stages of social evolution and many seemingly bizarre customs and "superstitions" in the world, but there was only one "civilization," one path of "progress," one "true” religion. (Brantlinger 166)

To challenge male dominance was to challenge progress and civilization, and to risk sinking backwards into savagery. Even if the New Woman cannot wrest civilization from the hands of the legitimate male successors to patriarchal Classical culture, she can subvert men through her intimacy with them, destroying the boundaries between male and female through a familiarity that subverts the gender binary.

These evolutionary fears are made explicit in the climax of She, in which Ayesha steps into the flame of immortality and dies. As she dies, she goes through a process of 'devolution' in which the veneer of civilization is stripped away and the ape within is revealed. Job says that “She's turning into a monkey” and Holly repeats that she is “no larger than a monkey” (Haggard

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230;231). For Haggard, this is the primordial ape lurking within any woman – although women may give the illusion of knowledge, culture, and power, on the inside, they are only monkeys. It's a humiliating process, during which she begs “Have pity on my shame” (Haggard 231). Holly reflects that:

It requires no great imagination to see the finger of Providence in the matter. Ayesha locked up in her living tomb waiting from age to age for the coming of her lover worked but a small change in the order of the World. But Ayesha strong and happy in her love, clothed in immortal youth and goddess beauty, and the wisdom of the centuries, would have revolutionized society, and even perchance have changed the destiny of Mankind. Thus she opposed herself against the eternal law, and, strong though she was, by it was swept back to nothingness—swept back with shame and hideous mockery! (Haggard 232)

Ayesha loses all of her power, and Leo chooses Holly over her. Holly’s victorious speech above reveals that an unhappy New Woman who is kept isolated from society and alone is no threat – but a New Woman who finds companionship among men who respect her is a deep and

subversive challenge to the entire nature of British colonial society. The subversive nature of

Anna Lombard rests in its ability to fulfill this challenge.

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Heart of Darkness

Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is one of the central works of the Western canon of literature. An ambiguous work which is both complicit in and critical of colonialism, one of its central concerns is European identity. In this chapter, I will examine the way in which male, colonial identity is constructed in Heart of Darkness – which will involve an exploration of the way in which white male colonial gender identity is dependent upon fin de siècle evolutionary

understandings of Africans and women. Ultimately, as Gayatri Spivak points out, both Africans and white women were subaltern and perceived as unable to recognize or communicate 'truth' or 'reality' (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” 306); to attempt to understand or make sense of complex truths is the prerogative of the white colonial male. I will focus on the way in which the colonial milieu creates a paradoxical setting in which the performance of idealized colonial masculinity is revealed as an impossibility and as a mythical construct. Yet the fact that British masculine identity is a destructive myth is a truth which must not be shared with women, and becomes a form of knowledge which is reserved only for men.

Drawing upon Said’s theory of identity as dependent upon a contrast with the ‘Other’, I will examine the way in which British colonial masculinity is represented in the text as existing in contrast to women and Africans. When this contrast with Africans is eroded, the 'horror' of Western similarity to Africans creates the destabilizing of Marlow's understanding of himself – rather than Western civilization being the benevolent height of human evolution, and rather than seeing Europe as a destructive force attacking Africa, 'savagery' is revealed to be an innate part of both Africa and Europe, and the primordial and evolutionary savagery of human beings is revealed.

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childhood – parts of the world which are “unnamed” until named by a European. When these spaces are “named”, they “[cease] to be a blank space of delightful mystery” (Conrad 43). Marlow has a “boyhood idealistic compulsion to visit an uncharted realm” (Meyer 331). Steeped in the excitement of the narrative of imperial adventure and discovery as a child, Marlow finds that as an adult, there are very few places left to explore in order to fulfill his ‘glorious dreams’ of childhood (Conrad 43). These dreams place Europeans in a new Eden, in which European men are able to continue Adam’s patriarchal work as the one who discovers and gives names to the world. In the Old Testament, this is a right bestowed upon Adam – not Eve – by God. For Marlow, the unnamed place that attracts him resembles an “immense snake” which “fascinate[s] him” (Conrad 43). Like the snake in the Garden of Eden, the Congo promises secret, mysterious knowledge, but is treacherous and leads to the horrible discovery of human fallenness. Like in the Garden of Eden, entrance to this secret knowledge is obtained not through men, but through a naïve woman.

Performing Masculinity In ‘The Darkness’

Guerard argues that Heart of Darkness is a “journey within the self” (Guerard 36), in which British identity is explored. When the reader is introduced to Africans, they are portrayed as appallingly animalistic and as distant relatives from white human beings:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there

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being a meaning in it which you — and you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend. (Conrad)

Chinua Achebe's criticizes Heart of Darkness for portraying Africa and Africans as "the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality" (Achebe). Chinua Achebe argues that Africa, in Conrad's hands, is a foil to European supremacism - that Africa and Africans exist as a negation, and that European identity makes up the norm against which other cultures are measured. It is true that European male identity in Heart of Darkness is dependent on its superiority to and comparison with African men (and white women). When Marlow sees Kurtz's barbarity, he realizes that nothing separates Europeans from the barbarity of Africans. This fundamentally racist realization is both dependent upon and critical of the fin de siècle evolutionary approach to race. When British colonial identity, which is dependent upon white supremacy, is revealed as an illusion, Marlow cannot draw distinct boundaries between white British identity and the 'other', and he is unable to define himself as superior in comparison to Africans. This causes his sense of himself to collapse.

Since, according to Judith Butler, gender is a social construct, it can only be performed if it is intelligible to an audience. As Adams points out, “Regimens of masculinity regulate more than erotic desire; they are many-faceted constructions of identity and social authority that inevitably situate the private self in relation to an imagined audience” (2). When Marlow is in a new setting, he is unable to perform British masculinity. Once in Africa, Marlow is confronted with the inefficiency, waste and cruelty of the imperial project. This is why, when Marlow finds a book left behind by another settler in the middle of the Congo, he is amazed and touched. The book that he finds is a prop of masculinity par excellence – as a symbol, it involves ordering, logic, diligence, self-mastery, and self-control. If the world is a theater on which he must perform the role of British colonial masculinity, this prop, emerging from the “darkness”, is an

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artifact of male performativity. This is why he is overjoyed to find it:

I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness [...] there was a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages […] luminous with another than a professional light […] I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship. (Conrad 78) The book represents everything British masculinity stands for – which is why Marlow, now speaking to old friends who share the same values as him, identifies it as an 'old friend', too.

Since for white supremacist, Darwin-minded Europeans, the 'very worst', most dangerous thing lurking in European humanity is its African origins, the cruelty which Europeans commit in Africa was associated with the Africans themselves. Europeans who committed acts of cruelty fancied that they were "going native" and becoming influenced by African savagery. The idea of noble European values and identity was so strong that imperialists could not conceive of the fact that the cruelty was European in origin. In this, Conrad's text illustrates the gulf between

European identity and self-perception, and the disturbing, elided facts of the imperial project: Marlow decides to remain loyal to what he regards as the manliest of options. The idealistic vision of imperialism as a civilizing mission is revealed as no more than a comforting illusion, embodied throughout the text by women, while the greed, violence, and hypocrisy of modern empire are of an essentially unmanly variety. (Barnett 278)

Marlow has internalized the values of ideal colonial masculinity, with its codes of honor and virtue. However, in the light of the colonial project, he is unable to embody these virtues. It causes him distress to be unable to perform colonial masculinity in the light of the true nature of colonialism; the gulf between his identity and his inability to perform it leave him lost. As Sussman points out, "The variants and possibilities of manliness are manifold […] in real life, masculine identities within a single person almost always take a hybrid form in combining multiple scripts into innumerable forms of a life of manliness" (Sussman 9). Marlow casts about for a way in which to live out authentic colonial masculine identity, which "binds him tightly

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into a network of exclusively masculine communality which excludes women and those forms of masculinity considered to be 'flabby'" (Barnett 278).

Marlow perceives that colonialism is not the grand mission which his aunt has made it out to be. He acknowledges that "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much" (Conrad 41) In other words, rather than proving the fact that Europeans, and especially the British, are the pinnacle of humanity and human

enlightenment, British and European power and wealth is revealed to have been based on jingoistic ideas that one's own country and people are superior to others, and thus naturally deserve to rule, and that this justifies large-scale theft from other peoples. Meisel points out that Conrad leaves the reader to analyze for themselves what Kurtz did, and does not explicitly reveal the full 'horror' of the situation (Meisel 21). The Belgian empire controlled the area of the Congo which Conrad visited and the area which is referenced in Heart of Darkness. As Hochschild points out in King Leopold's Ghost, an entire nation was enslaved and 10 million Africans were murdered in the genocide which the Belgians committed. Small children and their parents were tortured and mutilated if they did not harvest rubber fast enough; contemporary documents show baskets of hands gathered by imperial administrators as punishment for bringing in a light load (Lindqvist 27). Kurtz decorating with severed African heads was based upon another white colonist, Captain Rom, who used severed African heads to decorate his flower garden, as reported in the Saturday Review immediately before Conrad started writing Heart of Darkness (Lindqvist 28).

Marlow, however, is lost in the gulf between the noble, benevolent rhetoric of imperialism and the reality of genocide. While he sneers at the recollection of his aunt being swayed by the imperialist rhetoric she heard on the radio, he attempts to make sense of

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the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to..." (Conrad 41). In order to preserve this “idea”, Marlow lies to Kurtz's fiancée, allowing her to continue to believe in benevolent colonialism. According to Stewart, this lie to Kurtz's 'Intended' was used by Conrad to show that “the lies of Western imperialism mislead us to death” - that to lie is to abandon one's integrity (Stewart 319) and thus, arguably, one's masculinity. However, Gibson argues that the tenuousness of truth revealed by Conrad's narrative make straightforward moral conclusions more difficult to draw (Gibson 114).

Marlow’s disturbing realization in the Congo is that the British colonial masculine belief - that it is possible to discover truth and impose order anywhere one goes - is hubris. This

complicates the performance of colonial masculinity, which is dependent upon the imposition of order. As Said argues:

By accentuating the discrepancy between the official ‘idea’ of empire and the remarkably disorienting actuality of Africa, Marlow unsettles the readers’ sense not only of the very idea of empire, but of something more basic, reality itself. For if Conrad can show that all human activity depends on controlling a radically unstable reality to which words approximate only by will or convention, the same is true of empire, of venerating the idea, and so forth. With Conrad, then, we are in a world being made and unmade more or less all the time. What appears stable and secure – the policeman at the corner, for instance – is only slightly more secure than the white men in the jungle, and requires the same continuous (but precarious) triumph over an all-pervading darkness, which by the end of the tale is shown to be the same in London and in Africa. (Said 29)

The narrative form of Heart of Darkness has the effect of creating a splintered, incomplete tale which has passed through many male interpreters before finally arriving with the reader. Conrad’s spare, poetic style anticipates modernist styles and themes; Kurtz never speaks – his words are only reported by Marlow to the unnamed narrator, who them repeats these words to us,

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the readers. In this way, ‘truth’, whatever it may be, is revealed as extremely partial and incomplete; Conrad’s method allows us to share Marlow’s uncertainty and confusion. As Stott points out, in Heart of Darkness, “Once again a group of men travel into the ‘dark continent’, hopeful, with a mission. But, unlike Haggard, Conrad avoids the aerial view, the monarch-of-all-I-survey trope, right from the start” (“’Scaping the Body” 155). If European masculinity is constructed as a responsibility to use logic and reason to conquer and make sense of the world, then Marlow’s tale reveals that knowledge can only be incomplete. As Guetti points out, “the reality of experience lies beyond language” (Guetti 501). For Marlow, it continues to be the role of the white British male, and only the white British male, to attempt to make sense of the nature of truth, and this truth is the domain of men only. However, when his ‘noble’ act of lying leads to the loss of integrity, and when it is required to preserve a beautiful idea which promotes great horror, Conrad reveals the paradoxical nature of masculine identity as a core aspect of

imperialism.

Knowledge and Gender

When Marlow’s aunt uses her connections to get a job for him on a Congo steamboat, she speaks highly of him and of the work he is going to do, believing it to be a benevolent and

selfless task appropriate only for those men who represent the highest ideals of Western culture. Marlow, in Conrad’s narrative-within-a-narrative form, tells us how she puts it: "She talked about 'weaning those ignorant million from their horrid ways'" (Conrad 48) - in other words, she referenced the popular narrative used in support of colonialism. Her idealistic view is blamed, by Marlow, on the media - "There had been such a lot of rot let loose in print and talk" that "the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet" (Conrad 48). Marlow’s skepticism about the purpose of empire, juxtaposed with an excitement to ‘discover’ the Congo so fierce that he enlists all of his relatives to find him a job, is complex.

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Was Marlow critical of imperialism before he went to the Congo, or is he skeptical of his aunt only in retrospect? Marlow is an unreliable narrator; his perspective on his own ideas and motives have been developed after his journey is already over, and it is impossible to discover what his own, perhaps naïve ideas about empire were – especially since he reacted to the reality of the Congo with shock and frustration.

Nonetheless, what is represented as his aunt’s naïve perception – that imperialism is philanthropic – disturbs Marlow. He listens politely, but is made "quite uncomfortable", and finally tries to point out that "the company was run for profit" (48). Marlow's implication - that the entire project is a for-profit way to siphon wealth from Africa to Europe, rather than a noble project, flies over her head. She "brightly" argues that the profit being made is a happy byproduct of Western, Christian selflessness: "You forget, dear Charlie, that the laborer is worthy of his hire" (48). This Bible verse, from the Gospel of Luke, was used when Christ’s disciples were leaving to engage in missionary work. In response to her comment, Marlow reflects on the naiveté of women in general:

It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over. (Conrad 48)

Marlow’s aunt is represented as an ignorant believer in the myth of benevolent European empire, and this naiveté is seen as representative of all women’s moral idealism since “the day of

creation”. In this way, Conrad represents women as idealists who are unable to grasp the moral ambiguities which all men experience and live with. Thus, women are again represented as conventional Victorian Angels of the House – as people who must be kept away from the destructive nature of the public sphere, which would disturb them and make it impossible for

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depended. Women’s role was to inculcate morality in children and to provide a counterweight to the unpleasant realities of the masculine world, as part of the cult of domesticity. McClintock argues that:

The cult of domesticity was not simply a trivial and fleeting irrelevance, belonging properly in the private, 'natural' realm of the family. Rather […] the cult of domesticity was a crucial, if

concealed, dimension of male as well as female identities -- shifting and unstable as those were -- and an indispensable element both of the industrial market and the imperial enterprise.

(McClintock 5)

Women’s role at home was not only a necessary corollary of men’s roles outside of the home in service to empire and capital, but an ideological necessity as well. For Conrad, women are not the dangerous creatures that they are for Haggard, nor is their naiveté immoral or ill-intentioned. White women are naturally blandly moral, passionless, and incapable of understanding or taking part in colonialism beyond their role in the domestic sphere. For Marlow, women represent domesticity, and while men are able to move from country to country in order to grasp the complexities of colonialism, and are able to explore their identities, women's identities are not dependent upon tests of their self-control, nor the battleworn homosocial sharing of terrible, complex realities. Instead, their identities are utterly dependent upon and shaped by their context. As Gabrielle McIntire argues in “The Women Do Not Travel”:

Mostly the women are sedentary, stationary, and confined to their own territories, metonymically embodying the separate cultural, racial, and geographic identities at play in the novel.

(McIntire 258)

Imperialism must be a male enterprise, because only men have the power to transgress

boundaries. Africans and women are both essentialized as belonging to and representing their nations and their cultures; only men are able to perceive the ambivalence and complexity of identity, politics, and the narratives of civilization. Women are 'out of touch with truth', but this should not be remedied. It is an innate aspect of femininity, and an integral part of British

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civilization.

Victorian mothers were seen as the ‘moral heart’ of the home, and the home as a microcosm of the empire. In order for boys to become men, they needed to move beyond the feminine world of clear morals and simple, Victorian values. In Heart of Darkness, male values are nuanced, difficult, and painful, and feminine values would make the work of colonialism impossible. Paradoxically, the ‘cult of domesticity’ is necessary for the work of empire;

women’s idealistic support for empire is necessary if men’s work is to be supported, but women must not know what this work entails. They must provide young British boys with the moral values they need to be British colonial men; however, these values cannot truly exist, and are revealed to be illusions in the context of the reality of the Congo.

In Conrad's tale, the "noble cause" of imperialism made the "gentlest, quietest creature that ever walked on two legs" into a man who felt he needed to "assert […] his self-respect" by "whack[ing] an old nigger mercilessly" with "a stick" (Conrad 44). This kind of unchecked violence – the fight was over two hens, and led to death - creates a "mad terror" in the village, which is deserted, and becomes so barren that even the hens have disappeared - "the cause of progress got them" (Conrad 44). This ironic aside demonstrates that the 'noble cause' of ‘progress’ is destructive, violent, and petty, and draws out the worst even from good, gentle people, illustrating the “banal complicity and conformity” of imperialists which Conrad was eager to demonstrate (Maier-Katkin 585). For Marlow, however, this is a reality that must be kept from women.

As examined earlier in She, Western culture created a situation in which the struggle for self-mastery was understood as an inherent part of colonial masculinity; self-control was not a feminine trait, since women were ‘naturally’ passive and passionless (Adams 5-12). In Heart of

Darkness, the construction of masculinity becomes problematized by a setting in which it is

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project, or be efficient while working within the parameters available to him.

In the African setting, colonial masculine identity is revealed to be an impossible myth which cannot be performed, and Marlow is unable to be loyal to this construction, since every choice he can make is a “nightmare”. Lewis points out that “Conrad shows the impasse that English liberal nationalism has reached as it confronts the results of imperialism and social Darwinism” (Lewis 214). Marlow's gender identity as a British colonial man is dependent upon the hegemonic narrative of empire as a philanthropic project and its ideological underpinnings. These include scientific racism and social Darwinism - his struggle between the idealistic 'decent' British values which he has been taught to embody in order to perform British masculinity, and the reality of the British colonial project and his own self, create the crisis of identity which is at the heart of the text. It is when these binaries blur, I argue, that disconcerting realizations about the nature of colonial male identity become obvious; yet, by absorbing the ‘darkness’ into colonial masculinity, awareness of the constructedness of masculine identity becomes a moral and rational feat which ultimately separates white colonial men from those who must be protected and ruled: Africans and women.

The exclusion of women is an innate part of the structure of Conrad’s text. Marlow makes clear that the tale he is telling is for men, and Heart of Darkness is shaped by its form as a narrative within a narrative. The transmission of knowledge must be kept within male,

homosocial society. While in She, knowledgeable women are dangerous, in Heart of Darkness, they just do not and cannot exist. Women are completely separate from the business of empire – men go on adventures; women stay at home. As Said points out, in colonial novels such as Kipling’s Kim:

All of [the men] speak the language that men speak among themselves. The women in the novel are remarkably few by comparison [...] to be ‘eternally pestered by women’ is to be hindered in playing the Great Game, which is best played by men alone. We are in a masculine world

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dominated by travel, trade, adventure, and intrigue, and it is a celibate world, in which the common romance of fiction and the enduring institution of marriage are all but ignored. At best, women help things along: they buy you a ticket, they cook. (Said 137)

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow is telling his tale to three other men, all secluded on a yacht together. In Youth, Conrad describes these same men sharing a camaraderie created by the “strong bond of the sea, and also the fellowship of the craft” (Conrad 7). Conrad refers to this text when explaining in Heart of Darkness that this bond has been “mentioned somewhere” (Conrad 37), and now stating that these same four men, now later on in their lives, share a bond which “hold[s] our hearts together through long periods of separation” (Conrad 37). Narratives are acts of sharing between a speaker and a hearer; Marlow communicates to the other men on the ship, but not to women. Through hearing the words of the anonymous narrator, shared in a context of male intimacy, we enter into a community of storytellers – a male community, or a homosocial community, in which knowledge is male and must not be shared with women. As Barnett points out:

The causes of the collapse of personal identity are persistently embodied in Heart of Darkness in feminine form, and against this both Marlow himself and the text’s own construction present the telling of stories as one of those activities which can secure the integrity of masculine identity. (Barnett 282)

When speaking of his decision to lie to Kurtz’s fiancé about his last words, his rationale is that “She is out of it – completely. They – the women I mean – are out of it – should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse” (Conrad 90). In other words, the simple morality of women, which Marlow treats with such disdain in his aunt, is necessary for both the project of colonialism and in order to maintain any illusions about truth and morality at all – which, for Marlow, are fragile bastions against total “darkness” and

“horror”. When Marlow decides not to tell Kurtz's fiancée the truth about his death, he does so in order to preserve her illusions:

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She was saying 'He drew men towards him by what was best in them.' […] 'Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before the great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her – from which I could not even defend myself. (Conrad 122)

For Marlow, women’s moral values and idealistic notions about their nation, the imperial project, and masculinity have to be preserved because even though they are illusions, these values are the only thing keeping Western civilization from “the darkness”. This realization reveals that the difference between Western civilization and African barbarity (according to white supremacist Western narratives) is an illusion. For Conrad, men cannot help their ‘fallen’ state – it is their role to name, discover, and take part in the world, and taking part in the world reveals the 'darkness' at the core of Western civilization – namely, that the illusion of Western superiority and benevolence is used as an excuse to loot wealth from other cultures and to commit mass murder. Throughout the text, the way in which language can be used to distort as well as reveal is a constant theme (Wasserman 327) and the ideal of Western civilization is revealed as a manipulative narrative used in order to gain power, rather than as a tool which can be used to construct identity. This means that the ideal of benevolent masculine colonial identity can never be performed.

Conrad constructs a new identity for Marlow from the ashes of colonial identity, which continues to uphold patriarchal notions of gender roles and the need to protect women, but with the awareness that this is all based upon a lie. Part of British masculinity, in this construction, is recognising the duplicity and impossibility of these ideals, and sharing knowledge of it with other men, but never revealing it to women. In this way, knowledge is maintained as the provenance of men, and male superiority is upheld even as this superiority is found to be an illusion – men may not be “better”, but they know the secrets of the 'darkness' which women can

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is right to lie and preserve the 'idea only' and protect Kurtz's fiancée. This act of benevolent patriarchy – deciding what knowledge is appropriate for a woman to have – can also be seen as a triumph of the darkness. If the 'idea only' of imperialism is something to be bowed down to, resembling African “idolatry” (Dilworth 516), then preserving this idea places African

'heathenism' in the center of what Marlow sees as the last bastion of civilization, preserved in its naivete by the benevolent and protective colonial man – domestic women. For Marlow, in the text, knowledge is part of colonial masculinity even if this knowledge brings suffering and confusion. Women however, must remain in their Eden.

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Anna Lombard

Anna Lombard was published in 1901 by Victoria Cross, the penname of Annie Sophy

Cory. A New Woman text, it was written as an imaginative engagement with gender at the fin-de-siecle, outlining new ways in which women and men might behave and interact with one another. In contrast to She and Heart of Darkness, which I have written about above, Cory's

Anna Lombard is written from a perspective which seeks to undermine and subvert traditional

understandings of gender. Anna Lombard attempts to imagine what forms of expression colonial gender may take if white British women were to take their place in the colonial project as the equals of white British men. Like Haggard, Cory is careful not to undermine the colonial project, and uses the 'Orient' as a playground for her imagination in order to conceive of alternative, fulfilling ways of living as a white British person. While colonial works written by men often use the East or 'Orient' as a setting in order to fulfill or engage with masculine fantasies of

conquering within an arena free from the perceived de-masculinizing influence of women, Cory uses the East as a setting in which to subvert male colonial arenas of homosocial bonding and to assert female sexual and social fulfillment. In order to do this, she shows that women can exercise colonial prerogative over colonized bodies – a traditionally male prerogative - and can do so within a context of equality with British men, as equal partners in the British imperial project.

When examining Anna Lombard, I will argue that Cory challenges the ‘cult of domesticity’, the concept of separate ‘spheres’ for women, and the idea that colonialism is a men's game, and that she, in turn, creates a space for colonizing white women to take their place

alongside colonizing men. In order to do this, she offers crossgender or gender-swapped

characters and shows that white women can use the white sexual prerogative over colonized bodies - just like men. This narrative bypasses the specter of rape by 'native' men, which had

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been utilized as a method of maintaining the public/private sphere in the colonial project by arguing that white women would be perpetually at risk in, and thus unsuitable for, rough-and-ready colonial life. In Anna Lombard, Cory emphasizes the risks of homosocial environments, and creates a setting in which British women are an integral part of colonial life and of the colonial project.

In order to understand Cory's work, I must first place Anna Lombard in its historical and literary context. The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English calls Cory a "British author of racy novels", (159) an identity which is certainly earned. Despite stereotypes of the New Woman as wanton and immoral, Cory’s sexually desiring heroines are the exception rather than the rule in New Woman fiction. While New Woman thinkers such as Sarah Grand,

Margaret Oliphant, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett saw attacks on marriage and domestic life as dangerous to the cause of political and economic liberation (Richardson and Willis 25), Cory’s bestselling novel spoke to women who were not as tempted by demands that they become the chaste heroes of the nation. Victorian sensation fiction of the 1860s has been argued to expose the 'deviance' which could not be contained and anxieties about gender which would not be repressed. (Nemesvari 516) Later-century New Woman novels were identified by their concern with the role of women in society, and their creative labor to attempt to portray alternative roles for women, but the ‘New Woman’ was a diverse phenomenon. Willis and Richardson argue that “New Women themselves did not always define their goals clearly: their fiction and prose-writing reveal contradictions and complexities which resist reductive, monolithic readings”; the New Woman is defined by her “autonomous self-definition” and her “determination to set her own agenda in developing an alternative vision of the future” (Richardson and Willis 12). When the role of women had been pushed more into a domestic, ‘hidden’ sphere than ever before, and women taught to be submissive and to take male views as their own, the New Woman was a threat to traditional feminine gender roles. In other words, the turn of the century was a time of

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intense splintering of gender expression. As Ledger argues:

The rise of the New Woman at the fin de siècle was symptomatic of an ongoing challenge to the monotheistic ideological certainties of mid-Victorian Britain. […] The collision between the old and the new that characterized the fin de siècle marks it as an excitingly volatile transitional period; a time when British cultural politics were caught between two ages, the Victorian and modern; a time fraught with both anxiety and with an exhilarating sense of possibility. The recurrent theme of the cultural politics of the fin de siècle was instability, and gender was arguably the most destabilizing category. […] The New Woman was perceived as a direct threat to classic Victorian definitions of femininity. (Ledger 22)

Victorian identity was dependent upon colonialism, and since Victorian definitions of femininity and clear notions of social 'place' were integral to the colonial project, changing identities were a threat to the entire empire (and its vested interests). Since each individual's identity was

dependent upon context, disruptions of identity among, say, middle-class women, were also threats to the identity of the class system, social structure, patriarchy, white supremacy, and all the other bones that made up the skeleton of British society. One man, speaking at the 1893 World's Fair, said that "The woman’s movement of this age is the most momentous event that has ever disturbed the sleep of the conservative," adding that, “Without warning, woman

suddenly appears on the scene of man’s activities, as a sort of new creation, and demands a share in the struggles, the responsibilities, and the honours of the world” (Anon, The Women's Herald). Anna in Anna Lombard does exactly this - demands a share in the colonial project, with all of its benefits, wealth, and entitlements.

Gender Swapping in Anna Lombard

Anna Lombard takes place among the British Colonial community in India. The male

first person narrator, Gerald Etheridge, works in the Indian Civil Service, whose members are made up of a "tiny administrative elite" appointed through the Government of India Act of 1858,

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which was enacted by the Parliament of the United Kingdom (Ewing, no page number). Etheridge, as a privileged and educated member of this elite, serves a dual purpose as the

narrative voice in Cory's text. On the one hand, he offers insight into the conventional outlook of privileged British colonial society. His reflections on the racial and gendered expectations of his society, as well as his descriptions of British colonial social expectations and behaviour in general, establish a conventional standard of social norms as a background against which the story of Anna Lombard plays out. On the other hand, he offers what Thomas calls "ironic detachment", approaching social norms with an often subversive and critical perspective (Thomas). This allows a narrative space in which the life and behavior of Anna Lombard is set against the context of her temporal and spatial location, but is also treated apologetically. Through his commentary on social norms, Cory's Etheridge sets up a benchmark of social expectations even while these are subverted through his and Anna's behavior and relationship. It is in this context that Cory gender-swaps her two main characters. Cory creates an alternative way of life for Anna - one in which she is free to act as a British colonial man - while Etheridge represents another alternative. He is an 'ideal man' who exists as a complement to the New Woman, and as a challenge to British colonial concepts of masculinity. While the obsession with masculine strength and power revealed an anxiety about whether British men were ‘man enough’ to rule, Cory undercuts this anxiety with the implication that this very obsession with strength and power was a threat to the integrity of the colonial project.

When Etheridge is introduced to the reader, Cory wastes no time in making clear that he is uncomfortable in the company of other men, and finds their attitudes towards life and women distasteful. While at a ball, a fellow British man remarks that a girl is "beastly thin", and

Etheridge thinks to himself that it is the "quality of the heart" that matters most when making judgements about women. (Cory10) When the other man continues to objectify the women around him, treating them as valuable only for their appearance and use to himself and other

"She's Turning Into a Monkey" - Gender Constructs in Three Works of Fin de Siècle Colonial British Fiction

2015