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WORKING OUT EGYPT
EFFENDI MASCULINITY AND SUBJECT FORMATION IN COLONIAL MODERNITY, 1870–1940
By Wilson Chacko Jacob
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4674-6
Chapter One
IMAGINATION Projecting British Masculinity
Rarely has public opinion in Eng land been so deeply moved as when the news arrived of the fall of Khartoum. The daily movements of the relief expeditions had been watched by anxious multitudes of General Gordon's countrymen, yearning for news of one who seemed to embody in his own person the peculiar form of heroism which is perhaps most of all calculated to move the Anglo-Saxon race. When General Gordon's fate was known a wail of sorrow and disappointment was heard throughout the land.—EVELYN BARING, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt
The imperialism of the last third of the nineteenth century, which ignited the scramble for Africa, heightened the Great Game, and incited anticolonial nationalisms, was a highly complex phenomenon involving multiple actors and events, and even today occasions debate among historians. Some are revisiting old arguments—in favor of empire—that it seemed had been put to rest by the culmination of anticolonial movements around the world half a century ago. These arguments will not be rehearsed here. The concern of this chapter is an image central to the justificatory claims of imperialism in the period of high colonialism in the late nineteenth century that has reemerged in the current post–cold war twenty-first century: the masculine Western subject as heroic savior.
The narrative of salvation, which had a somewhat longer genealogy, became an increasingly normal aspect of English and French colonial projects during the Victorian age, even though it had detractors from the very beginning and was critiqued as largely disingenuous by those who were ostensibly to be saved. Nonetheless, it came to serve as a powerful ideological tool in the service of justifying empire at home to metropolitan populations that were beginning to identify as national subjects and were becoming increasingly active in the domain of politics carved out by liberalism. In the multilayered iconography of imperialism being produced from the second half of the nineteenth century within an expanded liberal political framework, the heroic Englishman was a privileged figure. The appearance of this icon was every bit as material as imperial architecture, for example, and just as effective in representing an official image of empire.
The Englishman was densely fashioned, an ornament, "hierarchy made visible, immanent and actual," in David Cannadine's language. He was not being sold to the British public only: the secret of his success was investigated and the results disseminated in France, Egypt, and elsewhere. The constitution of his manly character—physical and moral—was hailed as the model for individual and national progress.
The Sudan campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s popularized as household names, in Britain as well as in Egypt, two exemplars of this ideal: General Charles Gordon (1833–85) and General Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916). As the epigraph vividly suggests, the intersections of Gordon's life in particular with Britain's imperial adventures tell a fascinating story of how masculinity was shaped and might in turn shape policy and play a crucial role in the composition of a national drama.
By the 1880s, Gordon had achieved a certain level of popularity through his participation in the Crimean War and later in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion, which earned him the nickname Chinese Gordon. He was the product of an age in which the "muscular Christian" model of masculinity became popular. The possession of a Christian morality defined by charity, self-sacrifice, and purity combined with physical fortitude was supposed to create a new man who would be successful in all of his domains—family, nation, and empire. The rapid expansion from around midcentury of sports, physical culture activities, and youth groups such as the Boy Brigades evinced the impact of this model.
By the end of the century, an important perspective emerged that regarded the empire as being in a state of decline. The evidence had been building from the Indian rebellions of 1857 to the Afghan Wars, the successes of the Mahdi's army in Sudan, and the Boer War. These signs of imperial weakness, ironically coming to a head at the time of Britain's greatest expansion, served to consolidate a sense of national degeneration and to reaffirm the need for programs of masculine regeneration on an ever larger scale.
Within this context, images of proper masculinity—sometimes represented by an earlier generation of sturdy men like Gordon and other times by a new breed reared on scientific principles, or a mix of the two—were being circulated by the popular press through newspapers, magazines, and novels. Often-cited examples are Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1856), the adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard and G. A. Henty, and boys' magazines like The Boy's Own Paper and Chums. By the end of the century, eyewitness accounts from the scene of imperial battles became a highly popular journalistic genre. The young Winston Churchill contributed reports to British papers from Cuba, India, South Africa, and Sudan. His dispatches on the reconquest of Sudan were collected and published as The River War in 1899. The heroic Englishman was a globetrotter if nothing else.
The number of published materials issued during and after the Sudan campaigns is astonishing. A quick search of works in English of varying genres, including travel narratives, official reports, speeches, opinions, histories, ethnologies, biographies, memoirs, novels, poetry, illustrations, and sheet music number well into the hundreds for the 1880s and 1890s. And as Cromer noted, the British public, "the Anglo-Saxon race," was hooked on these narratives (prosaic, poetic, and musical apparently) of spectacular heroism. The proliferation of new images of masculinity in the last third of the nineteenth century was the product of a number of social and technological transformations occurring on a global scale. For those in power in London and Paris, the political and economic changes at home and in the colonies meant contending with new voices in the public sphere and the subsequent challenges to the bourgeois and aristocratic monopoly on power. One of the strategies for containing the emergence of new interests onto the political playing field was through the resignification of empire and nation as a shared family enterprise. The rearticulation of hegemonic masculinity was essential to this process, as Robert Nye suggests in the case of France:
The sense of danger and decline in fin de siècle France so permeated the cultural atmosphere that courage became the obligation of all citizens. Paul Gerbod has written of the extraordinary explosion of a literature of heroism between 1870 and 1914 that was deployed in the form of a "pedagogical strategy" and applied in a variety of public domains. Military heroism was chronicled in statues to the heroes of the 1870 war, in a yearly Almanach du Drapeau listing the heroic exploits of soldiers and policemen, and in the revival of the cult of Joan of Arc, which celebrated the tradition of sacrifice to the fatherland. Civic heroism became an aim of religious teaching, of the numerous patriotic and veterans' organizations of the period, the colonial movement, and even the nascent sporting movement. As though it were the most natural thing in the world, both civic and military heroism were incorporated into the official pedagogy of the Third Republic and served up to the students in lectures and textbooks.
Although Nye refers to the colonial movement here in passing, France's participation in the imperial contests at the close of the nineteenth century is noticeably absent from his discussion of the contexts in which a redefinition of masculinity took place. Nye's focus is perhaps narrowed by the looming importance in the historiography of this period of France's crushing defeat at the hands of the recently formed North German Federation in 1870.
Interestingly, the colonial official was more mindful of the material and psychic implications of empire for his compatriots. Cromer's analysis of the forces driving London's decision to reconquer Sudan, ostensibly for Egypt, illustrates the centrality of imperialism's virile self-image in the formation of policy and identity. He described the public desire to avenge Gordon's killing in Sudan and to (re)dress this injury to national honor as a force that was impossible to stop:
It might have been possible to have postponed decisive action. It would probably have been impossible to have altogether prevented it. The national honour was not to be indefinitely baulked of the salve for which it yearned. An argument of this sort, albeit it is based on sentiment, is of intrinsic importance. In the execution of the Imperialist policy, to which Eng land is pledged almost as a necessity of her existence, it is not at all desirable to eliminate entirely those considerations which appeal to the imaginative, to the exclusion of the material side of the national character. Moreover, whatever may be thought of the undesirability of admitting any emotional lines of thought as guides to practical action in politics, it may be regarded as certain that the politician who endeavours to run absolutely counter to the impulse of the national imagination instead of seeking to guide it will find that he is attempting an impossible task (emphasis added).
He added that one could explain the decision to reconquer Sudan otherwise; for example, controlling the headwaters of the Nile was critical to Egyptian security. But this explanation apparently only mattered much for a "man on the spot" like himself, less so for the British public and politicians in London.
Anticipating Benedict Anderson by nearly a century, Cromer, who was no fan of popular political participation, articulated what was perhaps one of his most astute observations of empire and nation. Although he did not explicitly examine the role of print capitalism in the formation of a British national identity, it was very much implicit in his connection of the "imaginative" and the affective. Unlike many contemporary historians of Britain (and France), Cromer sensed the significance of and connection between the diverse cultural renderings of empire and the material requirements of nation building. Cromer's recollection of a popular affective investment in empire was an interested reading of a situation that had gone awry and an attempt to deflect direct moral and political responsibility for the death of Gordon. As Roger Owen has noted, "The hasty and ill-considered decision to send General Charles Gordon back to Sudan ... was to haunt Gladstone, the members of his Cabinet, and Evelyn Baring for the rest of their lives." Whatever his motivation, Cromer's reflection provides a rare contemporary glimpse of how an empire man through and through envisioned the national as a dependency of the imperial and vice versa. How much the empire actually mattered to the British public at large is perhaps an impossible question to answer, but what is certain is that the cultural conception of that public as a national body became intertwined with the idea of empire during the later Victorian Age. This identification was true even if it occurred in an oppositional mode.
In what follows I examine the idealization of English masculinity in one example of the cultural dissemination of "the Sudan" for consumption by and for the production of "the national imagination" in Britain. Since most of the British accounts published by participants in the actual campaigns were of interest to a limited reading public, I will examine a popular fictionalized account that takes the general and mainly young male reader through the events leading to the loss of Sudan in the 1880s and to its reconquest in the 1890s.
Imperial Fiction SUDAN, EGYPT, AND MASCULINITY
In the following reading of Henty's With Kitchener in the Soudan, I focus on the importance of class and race—specifically the configuration of race within a new colonial space—to the rearticulation of British masculinity at a time of perceived internal and external threats. This novel, written in the metropole, makes extensive use of reports from the field filed by newspaper correspondents, a recent phenomenon in itself, to construct an increasingly realistic adventure narrative. With Kitchener in the Soudan is one example of a significant genre of juvenile fiction popular during the Victorian age, a genre that became an important vehicle for sustaining enthusiasm for Britain's imperial project. Henty himself was the author of over ninety such novels aimed mostly at young boys and quite often set in an imperial context in which the conqueror's position was always under threat by a less civilized or savage force.
The hero of Henty's stories was usually a young man who is supposed to embody all the qualities of a properly raised English boy. The standard of masculinity to which he must conform was that of a reformed, revitalized, and robust public school and Oxbridge model. This template of the ideal masculine will be elaborated further in the following discussion of the main character in the novel, the boy-hero Gregory. Suffice to say here that the Victorian ideal of masculinity shaped and was shaped in part through this genre of juvenile fiction, for which the imperial social formation was the raison d'être. Conversely, and pace Cromer, the empire as a moral project was materialized for millions across the colonial divide precisely through such imaginative fictions.
With Kitchener in the Soudan begins with an evocation of Victorian society's strict class boundaries, but as the condition of possibility for a romantic transgression. The father of the novel's young hero, Gregory Hilliard Hartley, a member of a landed aristocratic family, falls in love with and marries a woman who works as a governess. He does so in defiance of his father's wishes and is forced to make a way in the world for himself and his new wife without the assistance of his family. After living together in one room in London on the verge of destitution, he manages to find a job as a minor clerk with a trading firm in Alexandria, Egypt, a year before the British occupation. In order to save enough money to return to Eng land, Hartley looks for a better-paying position with the new colonial administration and finds work as a translator for the Hicks expedition to Sudan. He does not return from this mission—the actual force was annihilated by the Mahdi's army in October 1883—but for the sake of the novel's plot he is not declared dead. It is now up to the mother to raise the child born shortly before Hartley's departure for the Sudan. She cannot leave Egypt because her husband had given her explicit instructions not to turn to his family for assistance and not to let the boy know his father's family name until she felt it was absolutely impossible to continue to leave him in ignorance. The boy also must make his own way in the world.
As any resourceful Victorian woman would when left with instructions from her husband, Annie Hilliard sets about her tasks with vigor and industry. She works as a private tutor and dedicates herself to providing her son, Gregory, with a proper upbringing. The following passage illustrates the spirit of fin-de-siècle notions of education as a form of gendered enculturation; specifically, it articulates a program for raising a boy to become an English gentleman:
While she was occupied in the afternoon with her pupils the boy had liberty to go about as he pleased, and indeed she encouraged him to take long walks, to swim, and to join in all the games and exercises. "English boys at home," she said, "have many games, and it is owing to these that they grow up so strong and active. They have more opportunities than you, but you must make the most of those that you have. We may go back to England some day, and I should not at all like you to be less strong than others." As however, such opportunities were very small, she had an apparatus of poles, horizontal bars, and ropes set up, such as those she had seen in England in use by the boys of the families where she had taught before her marriage, and insisted upon Gregory's exercising himself upon it for an hour every morning, soon after sunrise. As she had heard her husband say that fencing was a splendid exercise, not only for developing the figure, but for giving a good carriage as well as activity and alertness, she arranged with a Frenchman who had served in the army, and had gained a prize as a swordsman in the regiment, to give the boy lessons two mornings in the week. Thus, at fifteen Gregory was well grown and athletic, and had much of the bearing and appearance of an English public school boy. His mother had been very particular in seeing that his manners were those of an Englishman.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WORKING OUT EGYPT by Wilson Chacko Jacob Copyright © 2011 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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