Rudyard Kipling's Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces

256 Pages·2015·2.804 MB·English

by  Lizzy Welby

Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction
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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys
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Literary Genres 1840–1915
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Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing,
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1848–1930
Christine Ferguson Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping
Psychic Spaces
Dickens’s London: Perception,
Lizzy Welby
Subjectivity and Phenomenal Urban
Multiplicity The Decadent Image: The Poetry of
Julian Wolfreys Wilde, Symons, and Dowson
Kostas Boyiopoulos
Re-Imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in
fin de siècle Literature
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Roomscape: Women Readers in the Her Father’s Name: Gender,
British Museum from George Eliot to Theatricality and Spiritualism in
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Women and the Railway, 1850–1915 British India and Victorian Culture
Anna Despotopoulou Máire ni Fhlathúin
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Aesthetic Philosophy Literature: Encrypted Sexualities
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Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction
Mapping Psychic Spaces
Lizzy Welby
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For Bruno and our children
© Lizzy Welby, 2015
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
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and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the
British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 9855 4 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 9856 1 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0444 0 (epub)
The right of Lizzy Welby to be identified as Author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and
the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003
(SI No. 2498).
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Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations ix
Note on the text x
Introduction: Two Separate Sides to His Head – Kipling’s
Ambivalent India 1
1. Paradise Lost: Kipling’s Southsea Years 32
2. Mastering the Law-of-the-Father in The Jungle Book and
Stalky & Co. 63
3. Empire of Contradictions: Desire for the Impossible Mother
India in Kim 100
4. The ‘Sorrowful State of Manhood’: Kipling’s Adults in India 136
5. The Ascent from the Abyss: Dedication to Duty in The Day’s
Work 166
Conclusion: This Other Eden – Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rewards
and Fairies 196
Bibliography 227
Index 240
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Series Editor’s Preface
‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined concept
and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful
content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the
inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the
nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assump-
tion of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour
and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century lit-
erature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned
narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal defini-
tion, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unre-
flective perception of the so-called Victorian has been built; and so they
continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature
and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and
inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-minded and challeng-
ing manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of
its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of
the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put
into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether
the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical,
empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incor-
rect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian
has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the
interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinar-
ity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has
been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much
fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and
differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nine-
teenth century.
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both
the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from conven-
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Series Editor’s Preface vii
tion that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half
century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive
sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue
and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches,
and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of
Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the
series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly
received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi-faceted
and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the
most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek
to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally
through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings
of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to
offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly
familiar, and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from
original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theo-
retical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not
simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century,
but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic
redrawing of those borders.
Julian Wolfreys
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor John Thieme, whose dedication to my
project coupled with his unfailing energy and tireless perseverance would
have, I am certain, surprised even Kipling. I am grateful to Professor Jan
Montefiore for her generosity in sharing her scholarly expertise with me
on Kipling’s art. I wish to thank Julian Wolfreys at Edinburgh University
Press for being an insightful and always-available editor. 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 effi-
ciency. 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 during the course of my writing.
To my children, Tom, Izzy, Caitlin and Harriet, and my partner, Bruno,
I owe profound debts of gratitude.
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. 147–77.
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Abbreviations
A&R Actions and Reactions
BOW A Book of Words
DW The Day’s Work
JB The Jungle Book
LH Life’s Handicap
L&S Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides
PPH Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies
PT Plain Tales from the Hills
S&C Stalky & Co.
SJB The Second Jungle Book
SOM Something of Myself
WWW Wee Willie Winkie
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Note on the Text
Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces 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 posi-
tion 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, as put forward by Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous.
In this study, Kipling’s writing is not presented chronologically but
arranged to follow the trajectory of infancy into adulthood.
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