Before the war you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be.
GEORGE ORWELL
In order to track the changes in hegemonic masculinity, the change from gentleman to post-gentleman, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it is necessary to go back to the Victorian ideal of the gentleman. As I delineated in the introduction, many of the protagonists in the literature of the interwar and postwar period rework, adopt, and disavow gentlemanly traits—such as restraint, chivalry, disinterestedness, service, and detachment—which are also the virtues of the English/British tout court. To study how gentlemanliness affected subsequent iterations of national masculinity, we must consider, albeit briefly, how and why the gentleman became the national, imperial ideal, and, more important, how those constituent traits became fundamental to national and masculine identity.
The gentleman was mass-produced under the specific system of the Victorian public schools that had acquired unparalleled hegemonic status by the end of the nineteenth century. The public school was instrumental in creating a ruling class where meritocracy and exclusivity worked in tandem; as Perry Anderson describes, they were “designed to socialize the sons of the—new or old—rich into a uniform pattern that henceforth became the fetishized criterion of a ‘gentleman’” (22). The gentleman became the instrument through which the mercantile bourgeoisie and the aristocracy coalesced in the nineteenth century, a union that defined English polity and society well into the mid-twentieth century. From this amalgam emerged the hegemonic traits of Englishness and gentlemanliness that Perry Anderson calls “traditionalism” and “empiricism”—traits that continued to define Englishness in the mid-century moment, as seen in Martin Green’s rendering of the decent man.
Assumed to have begun with Thomas Arnold’s reform of Rugby in 1827, public schools became training grounds for future administrators and national leaders—in short, a new ruling class—in response to the new demands of industrialization and an expanding empire. Public schools defined and articulated the ideals of Englishness and English manhood, ideals that crystallized through a sustained interaction between the industrial/capitalist exigencies (the merging of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy) and the theater of empire (the conquest and administration of colonies). This interaction entwined national and cultural identity with national/imperial institutions. Public school boys were educated into “a vocation of ruling”: the curriculum specifically designed to produce “better-trained and informed administrators” (Viswanathan 56). According to Sarah Cole, they “became the purveyors of an ideological vision that centered on the perpetuation of England’s imperial mission, provided the core training for Britain’s ruling elite, creating a set of norms about how to live and what to believe that touched nearly all sectors of British life, at home and in the expanding empire” (Cole 32). The course of studies in English public schools was designed to foster those leadership qualities required of a governing elite: “independent thinking, a strong sense of personal identity, and an ability to make decisions on one’s own authority” (Viswanathan 56). The ideal gentleman, then, connected the personal code of ethical manliness—how to behave as a gentleman—with the ethno-national code of appropriate leadership—how to behave as an Englishman. The traits of public school gentlemanliness are inextricably linked to the ideals of Englishness and national identity, illustrating the structural presence of empire in the consolidation of English national gender identity. The 1869 Clarendon Commission report on the nation’s public schools makes this link clear:
It is not easy to estimate the degree to which the English people are indebted to these schools for the qualities on which they pique themselves most—for their capacity to govern others and control themselves, their aptitude for combining freedom with order, their vigour and manliness of character, their strong but not slavish respect for public opinion, and their love for healthy sport and exercise. These schools have been the chief nurseries of our statesmen; in them and in schools modelled after them, men of all the various classes that make up English society, destined for every profession and career, have been brought up on a footing of social equality, and have contracted the most enduring friendships, and some of the ruling habits of their lives; and they have had perhaps the largest share in the moulding of the character of the “English Gentleman.” (Simon and Bradley 153)
The commission connected the qualities of the gentleman with Englishness. The “English Gentleman,” with his respect for authority, control, vigor, and aptitude for governance, symbolized the qualities of the English people. It is significant that the English gentleman is defined by his ability to control himself and “govern others.” The public schools create not just a classed, gendered identity, but a classed, gender, and national identity, that makes the English gentleman inherently suitable to imperial and national governance. E. M. Forster, in his “Notes on the English Character,” also observes this particular phenomenon when he opines that “just as the heart of England is the middle classes, so the heart of the middle class is the public-school system … as it perfectly expresses the character” of the Anglo-Saxon (Abinger Harvest 3).
While the public school, as Harold Perkin shows, emphasized the professional ideal, a great deal of their energy was focused on ensuring the training of professionals to head out to colonial spaces. Mangan argues, “Once the Empire was established, the public schools sustained it” (21). In the words of G. Kendall, a former headmaster of University College School, “The public schools claim that it is they who, if they did not make the Empire (for most of them were hardly in existence when the Empire was made), at least maintained and administered it through their members” (qtd. in Bamford 241). The headmasters of public schools announced their commitment to the empire; for them, “the white man’s burden signified moral status as well as moral duty” (Wilkinson 102). The imperial civil and military careers required specific kinds of training, and in the schools, “the classical and modern sides evolved their curricula and conditions in response to this requirement” (Mangan 22).
Tom Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) quite explicitly ties together the elements of the curricula—in this case, cricket, one of the team sports that was part of what J. A. Mangan calls “the games ethic”—to character building aimed at ruling the self, dependents, and, finally, the world. The novel that transformed England’s perception of public schools as well as popularized Thomas Arnold’s conception of manliness and education, has acquired almost canonical status, not just in terms of children’s literature but also within the larger framework of Victorian gender and culture studies. Tom Brown’s maturation toward a disinterested, disciplined self-assertion is revealed in the final section of the book with his captaincy of the Cricket Eleven, clearly the acme of his public school career. In a passage that has acquired canonical status in its own right, the captain of the Eleven, Arthur, and a young master deliberate upon the wonder that is cricket:
“I’m beginning to understand the game scientifically. What a noble game it is, too!”
“Isn’t it? But it’s more than a game. It’s an institution,” said Tom.
“Yes,” said Arthur, “the birthright of British boys old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men.”
“The discipline and reliance on one another which it teaches is so valuable, I think,” went on the master, “it ought to be such an unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may.”
“That’s very true, said Tom, “and that’s why football and cricket, now one comes to think of it, are much better games than fives … or any others where the object is to come in first or to win one’s self, and not that one’s side may win.”
“And then the Captain of the eleven!” said the master, “what a post is his in our School-world! Almost as hard as the Doctor’s, requiring skill and gentleness, and firmness.
“What a sight it is,” broke in the master, “the Doctor as a ruler! Perhaps ours is the only little corner of the British Empire, which is thoroughly, wisely, and strongly ruled just now.” (312)1
While being undoubtedly a paean to cricket, what is interesting here the natural movement from cricket pitch to empire. Cricket is equated with the legal mechanisms of “habeas corpus” and “trial by jury” as quintessentially English contributions to the world. Cricket is an important English institution because it inculcates the values of unselfishness in its players. Boys who play cricket subsume their desire for personal glory and merge into one, so that “the side can win.” The discourse of not letting the side down becomes a crucial marker of gentlemanly behavior: from following codes of appropriate classed behavior, to behaving in a manner appropriate to English imperial rulers. Qualities crucial to victory on the cricket pitch, such as discipline and unselfishness, are exponentially expanded to include the national and imperial arena. In fact, Tom makes this point more explicitly when he praises fellow Rugbean Harry East, a commissioned officer in India: “No fellow could handle boys better, and I suppose soldiers are like boys” (Hughes 318). Gentlemanliness is constituted at the crux of class, nation, and empire and thereby is its most perfect exemplum, a fact of which the text is extremely aware as the narrative vision gradually stretches to include the speakers, the game, the school, and the imperial horizon, paralleling Tom’s growth from the “Little World” of Rugby—an idyllic microcosm of the imperial nation—into the widening world of Oxford, England, and the imperial periphery.
To return to the Public Schools Commission report, it also seemed to indicate that public schools unified men across social classes, which is highly debatable, although the qualities cultivated in these schools certainly acquired cultural cachet across the spectrum of British society. Even schools that were not public schools, but a sort of second cousin to these elite institutions catering to the less wealthy middle classes, followed the patterns set by public schools, and the ideology of gentlemanliness certainly percolated down to the lower classes through sermons and boys’ weeklies.2 The national-cultural ideal of the gentleman cemented in the public school system extended to the institutions of church and university, hence consolidating bourgeois power.3 By the early decades of the twentieth century, through militaristic organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Boys’ Brigades, the hegemonic ideal of manliness had spread to sections of the lower-middle and even working classes (Springhall 53).
Gentlemanliness, as I read it, is a metropolitan gender ideal, that is, one that emerges in the imperial center. The ideal evolved along two tracks: the domestic hierarchical landscape, and in relation to the expanding empire that also structured and sustained it. In my parsing of the gentleman ideal below, I focus on, and meld, both tracks, since it is difficult to separate out the purely domestic and the purely imperial in nineteenth-century metropolitan culture and gender formation. The ideals of the gentleman emerge at the cusp of the national and the imperial, as both Catherine Hall and Mrinalini Sinha have variously shown. Hall argues that “manly independent men,” or the Englishmen of the ruling classes, only emerged “in relation to the dependent and subjected”—women, children, colonized, and working classes (170). Sinha, building on this, contends that British and Indian notions of masculinity/gender in the nineteenth century “cannot be understood simply from the framework of discrete ‘national’ cultures.” Her work illustrates the “prior significance of imperialism in the construction of both ‘national’ British and ‘colonial’ Indian politics of masculinity” in the late nineteenth century. Sinha’s focus is on the “effeminate Bengali”; however, her historicized paradigm of the imperial social formation of masculinities reveals that English national masculinity is imperially structured (Colonial Masculinity 7). I use Hall and Sinha’s theorization of the metropolitan gentleman as a starting point and trace the alterations in the icon through the literature of the interwar and mid-century periods. My book focuses on how historical pressures, the institution of the welfare state, and the disintegration of the empire that sustained and globalized the ideal affect this hegemonic gender configuration. The next few pages lay out the emergence and evolution of some of the key gentlemanly virtues that inform all subsequent versions of late-imperial and postwar literary representations of masculinity examined in this book. Gentlemanliness, as I use the term, constitutes a core set of traits that are associated with the middle-class Englishman/gentleman. Even as the gentlemanly ideal shifts between the various segments of the middle and upper classes (of which there are many, a fact to which this book pays close attention), those who considered themselves gentlemen, or were expected to behave as gentlemen, operated within the coherent, yet dynamic, code of gentlemanliness.
Gentlemanliness was always structured in relation to an Other. The working classes formed the perfect dialectical antithesis to the synthesis of the gentleman construct. The working-class man represented an undiluted, almost primitive form of masculinity against which gentlemanliness was the acme of discipline, self-restraint, and Englishness. What distinguished the physicality of gentlemanliness from the working-class male body was its moral dimension: the vigor and virility of manliness was tempered and disciplined (Kingsley 19). In an earlier iteration of the argument he develops in his recent The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922, Joseph Valente explicates this point further: “The normative (gentle)man was … seen to be invested with great and effective moral energy for the restraint, discipline, and redirection of his urgent and brutish desires. A muscular ideal of manhood consisted precisely in the simultaneous necessity for and exercise of this capacity for rational self-control—in strong passions strongly checked—from which the virtues of conventional ‘masculinity’ (fortitude, tenacity, industry, candor) were assumed to derive.”4 He goes on to argue that the productive tension between this almost animalistic male energy and the moral imperatives of self-discipline set manliness apart, ensuring the superiority of the middle-class gentleman. Valente refers to this “closed-circuit self-referencing tension between [manhood’s] component energies” as a sort of “discordia concors” where gentlemanly self-government and self-restraint became the markers of autonomy and right to self-determination and, as a consequence, the right to govern others. In the same quarter, the disciplined manliness of the English gentleman was set against, and defined by, the effeminate or inadequate masculinity of the imperial Other. Thomas Carlyle’s Englishness, as he defined it in his “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” depended on the decisive and forceful manliness of the Englishman as opposed to the idle chaotic primitivism of the “Quashee.” Carlyle argues for the superiority of the English by legitimizing a specific stylization of English middle-class manliness, and he feminizes and “unmans” the “Quashee”: “Do I, then, hate the Negro? No; except when the soul is killed out of him, I decidedly like poor Quashee; and find him a pretty kind of man. … A swift, supple fellow; a merry hearted, grinning, dancing, singing, affectionate kind of creature, with a great deal of melody and amenability in his composition” (311; italics mine). The Jamaican Negro stands in antithesis to the vigorous manliness of the Englishman. The Englishman’s manliness depends on the coding of Quashee as feminine, soft, and frivolous, which in turn defines and concretizes the superiority of Englishness. However, at the very moment of the articulation of that difference, the difference is also consolidated and made over into myth.
One of the defining traits of hegemonic English manhood was the expansive service ideal, which was predicated on the Englishman’s inherent moral superiority and detachment. The notion of detachment was most clearly and influentially articulated by Matthew Arnold in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). Arnold’s conceptualization of this inherently English ideal was itself underwritten by the domestic empire within Britain. Arnold, while ostensibly making a case for the preservation of Celtic literature, details the inherently hybrid identity of Englishness. He contends that the “English genius” is a “composite of the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius, the Norman genius” (Arnold 87). Englishness in itself, it seems, does not exist; it is, according to Arnold, the commingling of the best of different racial traits. While the Normans, the Saxons, and the Celts (in particular) possess an essence, a myth, and an eternal spirit, the English possess no such thing, and therein lies their greatest strength.
For Arnold, the absence of an inherent essence allowed the English the privilege of detached observation. As opposed to the Normans, Saxons, and Celts, who were limited by their holistic essence, the English, in the absence of a predetermined cultural and racial memory, could disinterestedly absorb and control the totality of others. Other Europeans, Arnold points out, have noted the Englishman’s inherent self-consciousness, which he asserts is a direct consequence of the “English nature being mixed … while the Latin nature is all of a piece, and so is the German nature, and the Celtic nature” (102). When Arnold talks about the Englishman, he refers to the middle-class or upper-middle-class Englishman; he certainly does not mean the lumpen working-class man. He attributes this self-consciousness to Englishness as an admixture of racial traits produced by a long history of conquest and dominance, where England itself was both conquered and conquering. The Englishman strives to maintain a balance within his contradictory racial heritage, an effort that makes him acutely self-conscious. Here the almost deprecatory self-consciousness is actually a form of self-awareness. Englishmen, as an effect of their history of conquest, possess an inherent balance and detachment that others lack. This detachment and balance, coupled with Saxon pragmatism, ensured that the English were particularly suited for cultural and racial dominance.
Arnold’s ideas of disinterestedness were further consolidated as constitutive of Englishness and manliness throughout the nineteenth century, as the parliamentary and public debates that raged around the criteria for the Indian civil service in the nineteenth century demonstrate. In fact, disinterested governance and the quintessentially English “gentlemanly administrator” who embodied that myth emerged from an imperial issue, a protracted struggle to ensure that Indians did not gain mass entry into the Indian civil service in 1866.5 The far-reaching effects of this debate resulted in the three-tier integration of the public school, university, and civil service and the creation of a “new mythology, translating the upper-classes’ monopolisation of administrative power into an ideal of disinterested governance. … That ideal still resonated more than a century later in a … description of the British civil service as a classless class of well-bred men” (Goodlad 134). The connection between public school and Oxbridge domination of the imperial civil services exposes that the national representation of “English” masculinity was tied to “a strictly provincial representation of ‘native’ masculinity of Indians” (Sinha, Colonial Masculinity 9). It also validated what Graham Dawson has called “English-British masculinity,” one that underscored the “Englishness” in the identity of the “British” centralized in the civil service as a result of the Public Service Commission. Significantly, the imperial matrix that formed Indian masculinity and English manliness explains the public school emphasis on making “men of vigour, tact, courage, and integrity, men who are brave and chivalrous and true, men who in the words of the academical prayer are ‘duly qualified to serve God both in Church and state’” (Weldon 823). The requirement of appropriate gentlemanly behavior not only restricted the entry of Indians into the service, but within England it hegemonized certain types of manly behavior over others. Englishmen were required to be noble, disinterested, disciplined, physically strong, and morally righteous. Within the national frame of bourgeois capitalism, these traits combined the romantic ideals of chivalry with a strong bourgeois morality.
Disinterestedness, that prime virtue of the English gentleman, was the Englishman’s rigorously maintained ability to subsume self-interest for the greater good and engage with all situations and peoples impartially and objectively. The burden of the elite Englishman was to rule and civilize; hence, the service ideal and disinterestedness were conjoined. This culture of altruism, or disinterested service, which, according to Stefan Collini, was a pervasive, almost obsessive aspect of Victorian culture, is an integral constituent of gentlemanly vigor and conduct. For Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, a gentleman is one who pursues “the higher motives” and must learn “to think of himself as part of a greater whole, whose conduct has been habitually directed to noble ends” (Stephen 279). Hence, altruism, in the Victorian and Edwardian sense of duty toward others, meant rigorous self-discipline for the good of others, and, indeed, superiority of the masculine self is consolidated through an awareness of, and working for, the social good. This gentlemanly obsession with altruism and duty developed in the larger context of the nation and the empire and continued to inform the ideal of the gentlemen well into the mid-twentieth century, as seen in the good clergymen who populated Barbara Pym’s novels. Duty toward dependents—whether they were women, the working classes, or the less civilized and primitive inhabitants of the imperial periphery—provided a sense of purpose, and this sense of purpose motivated, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, a rigorous technology of the self, which in turn delineated the morally superior English gentleman from the decadent aristocrat or the lumpen working-class man.6
The melding of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy in the nation’s public schools produced an elevated and glamorized service ethic, embedded as it was within an altered and ostensibly more democratized tradition of chivalry and aristocracy appropriated from the tales of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Prince Albert became the iconic representation of this marriage of aristocratic glamour with the more practical, mundane values of the bourgeoisie. Prince Albert helped to yoke “essentially bourgeois values with the traditions of chivalry.”7 This notion of service and dedicating one’s life for the benefit of others was underpinned by the notion of knight errantry.8 This code of the gentleman in a devolved mode inflected the masculine stylizations of the decent, postwar man, even as they attempted to repudiate it.
The code of chivalry was reformulated in order to provide the nineteenth-century gentleman with an appropriately significant code of ethics—the gentleman was seen as the epitome of purity and honor and “endowed with a sense of noblesse oblige towards women, children and social inferiors” (Richards 113). While it would never be called noblesse oblige, a concerted public school move was to raise the tone of middle-class manliness and skew it toward the upper echelons of society, prioritizing duty and virtue.
At this juncture, it is necessary to point out that gentlemanliness was not static: the ideal took several forms through the course of the century. The early form of manliness, or “moral manliness,” molded along Christian principles became more secularized as an effect of the increasing political importance of empire as well as internal changes in the gender order (Viswanathan 100–110). By the end of the century, Christianity had almost disappeared as one of the explicit and essential ingredients of public school gentlemanliness. The “games ethic” had taken its place. As Mangan points out, “The chosen medium for the fostering of [the] virtues [of the English gentleman] were team games. … And by means of this ethic the public schoolboy supposedly learned inter alia the basic tools of imperial command: courage, endurance, assertion, control and self-control. … There was a further dimension to the later concept of ‘manliness’: its relevance to both dominance and deference” (Mangan 18). The fin de siècle—marked by what Tim Middleton calls “the increasing turbulence surrounding gender roles (occasioned in part by the phenomenon of the New Woman) and the anxieties about the impact of this perceived cause of national decline in the (real and feared) imperialist clashes of the 1880s and ’90s”—produced a refashioning of hegemonic manliness as a more muscular, more virile version of its earlier morality-laden stylization (Middleton 137). This perceived discourse of decline in the fin de siècle is responsible for the rise of the New Imperialism and a muscular manliness.9
Despite these shifts through the Victorian and pre–World War I eras, the qualities of gentlemanliness retained a certain sense of continuity.10 The key gentlemanly virtues consolidated during the nineteenth century—chivalry, self-restraint, disinterestedness, detachment, vigor—devolve, decline, mutate, and shape subsequent versions of English masculinity in the literature of the twentieth century. The trauma and massive loss of young male lives during World War I destabilized the strength of the manly ethic that had underwritten the empire and the imperial nation. On the one hand, Paul Fussell, Elaine Showalter, Michael Roper, and Sandra Gilbert argue that World War I saw the end of the ideals of manliness that defined the late Victorian and Edwardian imperial nation, where Victorian “fantasies of historical heroism gave way to modernist visions of irony and unreality.”11 On the other hand, Joanna Bourke and Allen Frantzen have shown that ideals of hegemonic manliness were reconfigured to incorporate, and focus on, themes of pain, fear, and sacrifice. While I agree with Bourke and Frantzen, I believe the code of gentlemanliness involves disintegration and alteration. This uncertainty regarding hegemonic English imperial masculine authority was concomitant with what Barbara Bush has called the “feminization” of empire (80). After 1918, as a consequence of “the skills and character” women had acquired during the war, they were increasingly represented as “Empire Builders” (Bush 81). The relationship between women, nation, and empire altered substantially, particularly following the Sex Disqualification Removal Act of 1919, which allowed them to enter male professions. The increased presence of women—whether elite professionals, lower-ranked working women, or bourgeois wives—transformed imperial masculinities. Ideas of chivalry, male (homoerotic or otherwise) bonding, fair play, masculine public spaces, and colonial clubs all became sites of contention and, as a consequence, objects of mockery in Waugh’s novels. In the subcontinent, for instance, the Government of India Act of 1919, which was a sop to agitating Indians following their participation in World War I, allowed Indians access to “every branch of administration,” enabling educated Indians to enter the imperial bureaucracy in unprecedented numbers.12 Anglicized native men in the administration challenged Englishmen and their inherent manly superiority by their very existence. The native gentlemen embodied gentlemanly values that defined English raced, classed superiority, and threatened the very idea of English gentlemanly superiority. The British, then, had to deal with mass uprisings and demonstrations that undercut ideas of imperial control (the Indian Civil Disobedience movements under Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) while being challenged on their gentlemanly virtues of fair play, legality, restraint, and civility. The hegemonic ideal of English gentlemanliness, as a consequence of these intersecting changes, became increasingly fraught and destabilized. In the face of such inevitable political and cultural change, the certainties of racial, classed, manly superiority that both defined and determined the ideal of the gentleman slowly shifted.
In the section that follows, through a brief reading of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), I examine how the text represents not only the qualities of hegemonic imperial English manliness delineated above, but also its decline and alteration in imperial spaces. While the novel has been the object of a great deal of critical (feminist, queer, postcolonial, formalist) study, critics have never considered the narrative’s representation of English manliness and its relationship to imperial authority, an oversight that illustrates the naturalization of that imbrication. The reading functions as a pivot point that connects the Victorian and Edwardian formulation of gentlemanliness to the slow disintegration and change through the 1930s into the postwar period.
Though the British empire was at its largest and most expansive in the 1920s and ’30s, that same period also witnessed 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. A Passage to India shows the fragility of the discourses of manliness and imperial power even as it demonstrates its progressive devolution. This is especially the case as colonial nationalist resistance that signaled the end of empire challenges the authority of imperial Englishmen.
The unraveling of manliness in tandem with authority becomes particularly evident in late imperial spaces where the pukka sahib is increasingly split from gentlemanliness. The pukka sahib is an imperial mediation of the domestic ideal of the gentleman, where the ethno-national or the racial-tribal code takes precedence over the personal-ethical code: race becomes the defining factor of the Englishman. Ann Laura Stoler in her unpacking of the making of the classed bourgeois body points out that “bourgeois identities in metropole and colony emerge as tacitly and emphatically coded by race” (Stoler 144). The difference, and it is a difference of degree and not kind, is that metropolitan gentlemanliness was implicitly racially encoded while the Englishman was explicitly so. The English gentleman at home and the imperial Englishman in the periphery, the pukka sahib, are interlocked, forming a codependent relationship, where separating one from the other spells the end of both. A Passage to India is an extended meditation on this inevitable and overdetermined fissure in the long, slow decline of empire, even as it simultaneously illustrates the continued mythic power of the disintegrating ideal.
A Passage to India, set between 1912 and the early 1920s in colonial India and now canonized as a text of empire, is the story of the alleged rape of an Englishwoman intertwined with the attempted friendship between an Indian man and an Englishman. Feminist and postcolonial critics have claimed that its central trope of rape represents (hetero)sexual violence and imperialism, respectively. Recently, critics have argued that the novel attempts to breach colonial differences through the transformation of the homosocial terrain of empire by a racially transgressive homoerotic desire.13
Whereas the early historicized discussions of A Passage to India focus on how it disrupts the sedimented paranoia of the Mutiny of 1857—that is, the perennial fear of the Indian man’s desire for the white woman—I consider the novel’s overlooked description of empire as a theater of manliness. In this homosocial space where Indian and English women become the counters through which imperial power is consolidated (and hence also bear the burden for the impossibility of colonial camaraderie between Englishmen and Indian men), I consider the imperial trajectories of Ronny Heaslop and Cyril Fielding as two concurrent types of public school manliness.14 Through the character of Heaslop, Forster parodies the gender ideal by transporting it back to the imperial terrain that helped constitute it. Fielding, on the other hand, embodies the Englishman whose gentlemanliness stretches the boundaries of the ideal—much like Forster himself—as it is altered by changes in the imperial situation, and more crucially the erotics of empire. To fully understand the reach of the narrative’s meditation on imperial manliness, it is necessary to consider its historical span even as it seems to shy away from specific historical events. The novel’s period of gestation stretches between Forster’s first visit to India in 1912 and his second in 1921, spanning World War I, the repressive measures of the Rowlatt Acts, the upsurge of nationalist feeling, the civil disobedience movement, the rise of Gandhi, the first Government of India Act, and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Broad in scale, it telescopes its critique of manliness and the mutations in the ideal.
Heaslop’s zealous desire to fulfill his imperial duty is a part of the public school manliness that echoes Tom Brown’s desire in Tom Brown’s Schooldays to be at “work in the world.” He fervently believes that the English are not in India to be “pleasant” but to “do justice and keep the peace” (51).15 Heaslop’s identity as an Englishman in India lies in his ability to dispense justice and do his duty to his “caste.” Subsuming himself to his imperial destiny, he becomes a type, a much-desired transformation according to the district collector, Turton. There is no Heaslop outside his identity as pukka sahib and the homosocial Anglo-Indian community. In binding himself so emphatically to the code of the sahibs, he perpetuates the code he has acquired in his public school: that of the dutiful English gentleman who never lets his side down.
To emphasize the continuity of the gentlemanly/public-school/imperial code, one must return to the central trope of rape. Critics, most notably Jenny Sharpe, have already uncovered the ideological ramifications inherent in the victimization of the English woman and the Indian man within the framework of colonial power dynamics.16 I want to point out that Heaslop’s martyrdom attributed to him by the Anglo-Indian community, emphasizing the homosocial dynamic of the English in India—a dynamic whose origins lie in the Mutiny of 1857 and its aftermath—also reveals the fracture of established ideas of English manliness. An act of violence upon the Englishwoman’s body in colonial India is read as an attack on imperial authority. It is also more crucially, I argue, interpreted by the Anglo-Indian community as an attack on Englishmen, metonymic of the imperial nation. Earlier, colonial insubordination would have been answered by the righteous wrath of the chivalric Englishman and a reestablishment of his power. However, with the upsurge of colonial nationalism and its appropriation of the discourse of law, imperial authority is necessarily predicated on continued restraint and an adherence to the legal system, especially following General Dyer’s Amritsar massacre of 1919.17 General Dyer’s reign of terror was also centered on and justified by the chivalric honor of the Englishman. He instituted the infamous crawling order in the wake of an attack on a missionary woman. Dyer’s “suitable punishment” for this flagrant assault on white womanhood by a single Indian man was for all Indians to crawl on their bellies, if they wished to pass through the street on which the attack took place. Indeed, his rationale for the order unequivocally reinscribes the sanctity of the English Lady and the priestly chivalric duty of Englishmen devoted to preserve it: “The order meant that the street should be regarded as holy ground, and that, to mark this fact, no one was to traverse it except in a manner in which a place of special sanctity might naturally in the East be traversed” (qtd. in Sayer 142). Forster’s narrative, which alludes to both the 1857 Mutiny and Dyer’s order, exposes the flaws of colonial ideology by unambiguously connecting the consolidation of English manliness and colonial power.
The Anglo-Indian response to the alleged assault on Adela should be read within the discursive frame not only of the 1857 Mutiny but also of the debate between John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle over the actions of Governor Eyre in Jamaica in 1865—an event echoed by General Dyer’s conduct. In October 1865, responding to a riot in Morant Bay, the British governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, proclaimed martial law and sent in the troops, resulting in the deaths of 439 natives and the flogging of 600. Governor Eyre’s actions became the focal point around which prominent members of English society debated the mode of English imperialism, the superiority of English civilization, and the perceptions of English nationhood.18 Interestingly, this debate came to be focalized through the manliness of Governor Eyre and the English, and the degenerate masculinity of the natives so brutally repressed. The Governor Eyre controversy emphasized that hegemonic manliness is the medium through which ideals of Englishness are routed, delineating middle-class manliness through a sense of difference from black/brown men, from black/brown and white women, and from the English working classes (Hall 191). It also demonstrates a moment where, as Catherine Hall argues, two competing forms of middle-class manliness vie for hegemony.
Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Charles Kingsley, members of the Eyre Defence Committee, argued that Eyre’s military actions were appropriately decisive and necessary. It was, they said, in keeping with the chivalric duty of safeguarding English interests: Eyre took the altruistic yet necessarily cruel action to maintain order and continue the civilizing process of Jamaica. On the opposing side, John Stuart Mill condemned Eyre for his inappropriate manliness and claimed it revealed a lack of reason and compassion. For Mill, Eyre’s extralegal arrogance had to be punished by the sane impartiality of English law, if England’s claim to a civilizing imperialism was to be justified. The Anglo-Indian community in Forster’s Chandrapore wishes to reenact the chivalric violent anger of 1857 and 1865. Their communal desire stands in contradistinction to the logic of due legal process on the basis of which the English justify their rule and requires that they exercise restraint and detachment à la Mill.
Forster’s narrative deliberately splits the tenuously balanced contradictions that are constitutive of English manliness in empire: righteous anger and restraint. Righteous aggression must be contained with the specter of the Indian nationalists challenging the English on the grounds of their own legal system. The imperial Englishman is stripped of the justificatory chivalric violence that established his superiority over the “cunning,” “effeminate” Indian man. Restraint, illustrative of the Englishman’s moral superiority in face of the brutal cunning of the Indian rapist, no longer connotes strength, as the community perceives it not as a willed act but rather as the evitable helplessness of legality. Ronny Heaslop’s impotence becomes particularly evident in his characterization by the Anglo-Indian community as “poor suffering Heaslop” (Forster 211). His only possible act of vengeance against his impugned honor is to deny Aziz bail.
On the other hand, in the character of Cyril Fielding, the liberal Englishman, there is the splicing of the gentleman from the pukka sahib that tests the bounds of the imperial ideal. Fielding is unusual in that he “has been caught by India late” (Forster 63). In his forties by the time he arrives in India as principal of the local college in Chandrapore, he is not fully integrated into the discourse of the pukka sahib. His ideas of manly fair play and close male friendships, derivative of the public-school gentlemanly ethic, disrupt English manliness in empire, precisely because they cross taboo racial lines. Fielding disarticulates the gender code and denotes a crisis of imperial homosociality: from the beginning Fielding refuses to engage in the misogynistic chivalry that is expected of the pukka sahib, as he does not condescend to the ladies at the club, annoying them in the process. The question here is not (primarily) about the effect of desire on masculinity, but rather about Fielding’s belief that the values of gentlemanliness are universally applicable; that is, they are not racially delimited. It is only when Fielding’s gentlemanliness, unhitched from ethno-tribal affiliations, simultaneously intersects with intimacy and desire that a reconfigured style of manliness emerges.19 As long as it does not shade into homosexuality, homoerotic desire—an open secret—between English gentlemen is conducive and necessary to the consolidation of both Englishness and manliness, as indicated by Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and any number of public school narratives, beginning with Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Sarah Cole and Tim Middleton (among others) point to the rigorous policing of the border between the homosocial and the homosexual (137), and how gentlemanly bonds shifted constantly along the continuum of homoeroticism and homosociality. The “romance” (not necessarily always sexual) between young men at various all-male institutions was a well-known and openly acknowledged fact.20 In contrast, intimate egalitarian friendships across racial boundaries defy conventional imperial standards and “leave a gap in the line” (Forster 190).21
Fielding’s gentlemanliness—which privileges intimacy over nation, justice and fair play over race—is seeded by the code of the gentleman. But the further he stretches those abstract ideals, the further he is from being a pukka sahib in the empire. In other words, he deracializes the gentlemanly ideal. In siding with Aziz after Adela’s claim of rape, Fielding prioritizes his intimacy with Aziz over his duty to his countrymen. Paradoxically, it is his gentlemanly ethic of disinterested justice that impels his refusal to proclaim Aziz’s guilt. His gentlemanly fair play is not circumscribed by whiteness or Englishness, but rather extends to the native, brown, though Anglicized, man. The police chief McBride points out the necessity of subsuming the self for the community, of privileging race/nation over justice: “But at a time like this there’s no room for—well—personal views. The man who doesn’t toe the line is lost. … He not only loses himself, he weakens his friends. If you leave the line, you leave a gap in the line” (190). Intimate friendships between Englishmen serve to strengthen the national/racial “line”—a telling sports and military metaphor—while sexual intimacy (both heterosexual and homoerotic) with an equal across the line leaves it open for attack from the opposing side (a metaphor that recurs in the texts that I consider in this book). In not channeling his affect appropriately, in not rallying around the victimized white body of the Englishwoman, Fielding disrupts the affective heterosexually charged homosocial terrain of post-Mutiny imperial India. He stretches English manliness in the empire as far as it can go before it ceases to be either Englishness or manliness; he abandons both national/racial pride and chivalry for affection and universal justice.
The difference between Heaslop and Fielding is evident not only in their approach to imperial duty and their relationship to their “side”; it is also made particularly obvious in their interactions with Dr. Aziz, the primary Indian character in this imperial drama. Ironically enough, Heaslop cannot see Aziz as anything other than a generic native, whereas the narrative individuates Aziz far more than it does Heaslop. Heaslop’s entrenched identity as sahib is so entirely dependent on the native man as inferior and emasculated that he can only see Aziz as an incomplete mimic Englishman.22 On finding Aziz with Adela and his mother at Fielding’s house at a tea party, Heaslop demeans Aziz by reducing him to a type in order to reestablish masculine hierarchy: “Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie-pin to spats, but he had forgotten his back collar-stud, and there you have the Indian all over: inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race” (87). In an Englishman, sartorial splendor is a mark of status, but in an Indian man it is mere dandified mimicry. The deliberate use of the term “exquisite” feminizes Aziz, as it is usually used to describe a beautifully dressed woman. Heaslop reserves his most devastating blow for what he considers Aziz’s racial, manly failing—his slackness. Aziz might dress like an Englishman, but he will never be one, as he lacks the fundamental quality of an Englishman: discipline. Aziz’s self-conscious, imperfect mimicry only serves to highlight the difference between him and the unself-conscious disciplined Englishman. It is worth mentioning here that Aziz did start out the evening with a collar stud, but he gave it to Fielding in a gesture of friendship and intimacy, which only heightens the irony of Heaslop’s declamation.
In contrast, Fielding, though he does not typify Aziz, indulges Aziz’s childlike emotional spontaneity—an Orientalist perspective shared by the narrative. Fielding’s affection is based on a deliberate narrative infantilization of Aziz, which maintains Fielding’s English gentlemanliness against Aziz’s Indian undisciplined emotionalism. Nevertheless, Fielding’s treatment of Aziz as an individual and a focus of obscured desire and obvious affection foregrounds his different approach to English manliness. This recognition of the native as individual and man complements Fielding’s refusal to rally around Adela Quested as victimized body. He refuses to participate in the dance of chivalric homosociality when he engages with Adela as a person to be reasoned with, rather than a female body around which an emotional/hysterical Anglo-India must close ranks. After Adela’s ordeal, in which she definitely repudiates the narrative of the Englishwoman as victim of dark male desire by retracting her allegation of rape, Fielding is the only one to offer her refuge. He is the only one who considers her an individual agent rather than a vulnerable symbol of imperial English manliness. Adela’s refusal to be the victimized English lady in need of protection aligns with Fielding’s abandonment of the discourse of chivalry to undo the gender dynamic that structures imperial power.
Fielding’s gentlemanliness, then, exemplifies the dissolution of imperial manliness that is a direct consequence of the upsurge in nationalist sentiment, and an acknowledgment of (Westernized) Indians and women as equals. The narrative critique of the intersection of racist, sexist, and heteronormative ideologies that produce and consolidate Ronny Heaslop establishes Cyril Fielding as the gentlemanly antithesis to Heaslop’s sahib. However, Fielding’s dismissal of the imperial codes transmutes the idea of the Englishman in empire only at the price of its own unraveling.
This reading of A Passage to India demonstrates how the ideals of gentlemanliness—duty, disinterestedness, discipline, chivalry, and racialized homosocial/homoerotic bonding—altered during imperial decline, but it also examines how they existed in a push-and-pull in imperial spaces. It further emphasizes the intricate knot between gentlemanliness/middle-class English manhood, nation, and empire. The focus on the gentlemanly traits as they emerge, alter, and circulate through the 1920s–1930s and beyond into the literature of the mid-century not only makes explicit the intertwined relationship between traits of hegemonic masculinity and the nation, but also reveals how deep-rooted these ideals of gentlemanliness are as ideals of Englishness. As we shall see in the next chapter, Evelyn Waugh’s work, in form and content, explores the travails of the gentleman and gentlemanliness in the interwar years. While the gentleman before the Great War knew that he was a gentleman, as George Orwell stated, things would become increasingly hazy and difficult for him after the war.