An Orphaned Manliness: The Pukka Sahib and the End of Empire in A Passage to India and Burmese Days
An Orphaned Manliness: The Pukka Sahib and the End of Empire in A Passage to India and Burmese Days
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孤儿般的男子气概：普卡老爷和印度与缅甸时代的帝国终结
DOI：
10.1353/sdn.0.0036
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发表时间：
2010
影响因子：
0.2
通讯作者：
P. Gopinath
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
P. Gopinath
为什么你总是虐待那些你称之为混蛋的人？他们是世上的盐。想想他们所做的伟大的事情--想想那些使英属印度变成现在这个样子的伟大的管理者......想想看，英国绅士是多么高贵的一种类型！他们对彼此的忠诚！公立学校精神！即使他们中那些举止不幸的人--我承认有些英国人傲慢--也有我们东方人所缺乏的伟大的、纯正的品质。在他们粗糙的外表下，他们的心是金子。--乔治奥威尔（《缅甸岁月》38）在《缅甸岁月》中，印度医生维拉斯瓦米（Veraswami）对自由主义者约翰·弗洛里（John Flory）的谴责做出了回应，他热情洋溢地颂扬了高贵的英国帝国主义者的美德。Veraswami用理想主义的语言称赞他，好像在重复公立学校的座右铭。他赞扬了英国绅士的高贵，“他们光荣的忠诚”，他们的“公立学校精神”和他们的“黄金心”（38）。在这里，天真而忠诚的维拉斯瓦米是一个西化的本土人的漫画，他内化了帝国话语中他的自卑感。他是一个沉重的叙事讽刺的工具，因为这些理想的明显体现--以实际生活在Kyauktada的Sahibs的形式，行动发生的殖民地车站--毫无例外地是放荡的，放荡的，完全可以理解的。事实上，Veraswami也许是所有殖民地官员中最虔诚和最受尊敬的。然而，英国绅士的高贵类型的神话是如此强大，以至于统治者和被统治者都相信它的存在，即使帝国的现实与之相矛盾。他们渴望它，哀悼它的损失，尽管他们相信自己仍然体现了这一点。马洛式的对比，曾经存在的男子气概的修辞--显然仍然激励着这一奋进--英国人在一个摇摇欲坠的王国中的残酷现实是一首在帝国晚期的文本中随处可见的挽歌。然而，与康拉德的刚果不同的是，堕落并不仅仅是由于白色灵魂与黑暗之心的相遇。相反，仰卧的本地人的崛起加速了pukka Sahib或完美/坚实的英国人的分裂。虽然大英帝国在20世纪20年代和30年代是最大和最扩张的，但同一时期也是帝国权威结束的开始。在第一次世界大战的破坏之后，这几十年见证了印度独立运动的势头，爱尔兰自由邦的成立，以及非洲各地的大规模罢工。乔治奥威尔、弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫和伊夫林·沃等人的作品描绘了帝国自信在国内和帝国内部的稳步恶化。最近的批评焦点是英国性的对位生产，以及20年代和30年代的文学如何预测即将到来的帝国解体，试图将英国性和民族文化从其帝国网络中分离出来。(1)至关重要的是，这些优秀的作品并没有说明性别在两次世界大战之间的文学和文化中对民族文化和身份的中心地位。扩展和完善安贾利Arondekar，蒂姆米德尔顿，和莎拉科尔在世纪末的帝国男性气质的检查，我带来承担的重点是男性气质，特别是其明确的组成特征，与英国民族文化和身份在两次世界大战期间的对位生产的调查。我分析了两次世界大战之间的两个反帝国主义的文本，很少一起研究：E.M.福斯特的《印度之行》（1924）和乔治奥韦利的《缅甸岁月》（1934）。将这两个文本联系在一起，可以看到在帝国漫长的黄昏中，帝国男子气概的逐渐退化。事实上，它揭示了他们的反帝国主义观点塑造了帝国性别政治的代表性。把它们放在一起读，它们揭示了关于男子气概和帝国权力的交叉对话的长期脆弱性，即使它们展示了它的渐进式分裂，特别是当它在标志着帝国终结的殖民民族主义抵抗中折叠起来时。…
Why iss it that always you are abusing the pukka sahibs, ass you call them? They are the salt of the earth. Consider the great things they have done-consider the great administrators who have made British India what it iss... And consider how noble a type iss the English gentleman! Their glorious loyalty to one another! The public school spirit! Even those of them whose manner is unfortunate--some Englishmen are arrogant, I concede-have the great, sterling qualities that we Orientals lack. Beneath their rough exterior, their hearts are of gold. --George Orwell (Burmese Days 38) In Burmese Days, responding to liberal John Flory's condemnation, the Indian doctor, Dr. Veraswami, enthusiastically extols the virtues of the noble imperial Englishman. Veraswami praises him in idealistic terms, as if regurgitating public school mottos. He eulogizes the nobility of English gentlemen, "their glorious loyalty," their "public school spirit," and their "hearts of gold" (38). Here, the naive and loyal Veraswami is a caricature of the Westernized native who has internalized the imperial discourse of his inferiority. He is an instrument of heavy narrative irony, because the apparent embodiments of these ideals-in the shape of the Sahibs who actually live in Kyauktada, the colonial station where the action takes place-are without exception dissolute, debauched, and wholly ignoble. Indeed, Veraswami is perhaps the most gentlemanly and honorable of all colonial officials. And yet, the myth of the noble type of English gentleman is so powerful that both the ruler and ruled believe in its existence even if imperial reality contradicts it. They long for it, and mourn its loss, even as they believe they still embody it. The Marlowian contrast between the rhetoric of manliness that once existed--that apparently still animates the endeavor--and the harsh reality of Englishmen in a crumbling realm is a dirge heard everywhere in the texts of late empire. However, unlike Conrad's Congo, the degeneration is not solely caused by the white soul's encounter with the heart of darkness. Rather, the rise of the supine native precipitates the breaking apart of the pukka Sahib or the perfect/solid Englishman. Though the British empire was at its largest and most expansive in the 1920s and '30s, that same period was also the beginning of the end of imperial authority. Following the devastation of the Great War, these decades saw the gaining momentum of the Indian independence movement, the founding of the Irish Free State, and mass labor strikes across Africa. The works of George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and Evelyn Waugh, among others, chart the steady deterioration of imperial confidence both at home and in the empire. Recent critical focus has been on the contrapuntal production of Englishness, and on how literature of the '20s and '30s, anticipating impending imperial disintegration, sought to disengage Englishness and national culture from its imperial web. (1) Crucially, these otherwise excellent works do not account for the centrality of gender to both national culture and identity in the literature and culture of the interval between the World Wars. Extending and refining the examination of imperial masculinities during the fin-de-siecle by Anjali Arondekar, Tim Middleton, and Sarah Cole, I bring to bear a focus on gentlemanliness, specifically its articulated constituent traits, with an investigation of the contrapuntal production of English national culture and identity in the interwar years. I analyze two anti-imperial texts of the interwar years, rarely examined together: E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) and George Orweli's Burmese Days (1934). Linking these two texts together renders visible the gradual progression of the devolution of imperial manliness in the long twilight of empire. Indeed, it reveals that their anti-imperialist perspective shapes the representation of imperial gender politics. Read together, they reveal the perennial fragility of the cross-hatched discourses of manliness and imperial power even as they demonstrate its progressive disarticulation, especially as it folds up against the colonial nationalist resistance that signaled the end of empire. …