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Rudyard Kipling's Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces PDF

256 Pages·2015·2.804 MB·English
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Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 1 09/03/2015 10:36 Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Volumes available in the series: In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary London’s Underground Spaces: Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Representing the Victorian City, Literary Genres 1840–1915 Saverio Tomaiuolo Haewon Hwang Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Shock of Modernism Reading and Screen Practices Deaglán Ó Donghaile Helen Groth William Morris and the Idea of Jane Morris: The Burden of History Community: Romance, History and Wendy Parkins Propaganda, 1880–1914 Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions Anna Vaninskaya Trish Ferguson 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Late Victorian Britain Disease, Race and Climate Nicholas Freeman Jessica Howell Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontës, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in George Eliot, Nietzsche Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, Henry Staten 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 Forthcoming volumes: Robbie McLaughlan Roomscape: Women Readers in the Her Father’s Name: Gender, British Museum from George Eliot to Theatricality and Spiritualism in Virginia Woolf Florence Marryat’s Fiction Susan David Bernstein Tatiana Kontou Women and the Railway, 1850–1915 British India and Victorian Culture Anna Despotopoulou Máire ni Fhlathúin Walter Pater: Individualism and The Sculptural Body in Victorian Aesthetic Philosophy Literature: Encrypted Sexualities Kate Hext Patricia Pulham Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www.euppublishing.com/series/ecve Also available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Julian Wolfreys ISSN: 2044-2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 2 09/03/2015 10:36 Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction Mapping Psychic Spaces Lizzy Welby WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 3 09/03/2015 10:36 For Bruno and our children © Lizzy Welby, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, 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). WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 4 09/03/2015 10:36 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 WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 5 09/03/2015 10:36 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- WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 6 09/03/2015 10:36 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 WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 7 09/03/2015 10:36 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. WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 8 09/03/2015 10:36 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 WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 9 09/03/2015 10:36 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. WELBY 9780748698554 PRINT.indd 10 09/03/2015 10:36

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