Haunted Oppressors: The Deconstruction of Manliness in the Imperial Gothic Stories of Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle

Anna Berger

doi:10.3390/h9040122

Abstract

Building on Patrick Brantlinger’s description of imperial Gothic fiction as “that blend of adventure story with Gothic elements”, this article compares the narrative formula of adventure fiction to two tales of haunting produced in a colonial context: Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” (1890) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Brown Hand” (1899). My central argument is that these stories form an antithesis to adventure fiction: while adventure stories reaffirm the belief in the imperial mission and the racial superiority of the British through the display of hypermasculine heroes, Kipling’s and Conan Doyle’s Gothic tales establish connections between imperial decline and masculine failure. In doing so, they destabilise the binary construction between civilised Western self and savage Eastern Other and thus anticipate one of the major concerns of postcolonial criticism. This article proposes, therefore, that it is useful to examine “The Mark of the Beast” and “The Brown Hand” through a postcolonial lens.

Highlights

Introduction[W]hen I tell you that for four years I have never passed one single night, either in Bombay, aboard ship, or here in England, without my sleep being broken by this fellow, you will understand why it is that I am a wreck of my former self. (Conan Doyle 2000, p. 78)
Building on Patrick Brantlinger’s description of imperial Gothic fiction as “that blend of adventure story with Gothic elements”, this article compares the narrative formula of adventure fiction to two tales of haunting produced in a colonial context: Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the
Both stories are marked by an ambivalent treatment of the colonial encounter. It is the body of the white middle-class man that is othered and abnormalized: while Fleete regresses to a liminal being between human and animal, Holden is reduced to a ghost-like version of himself. Both stories blur the binary divisions between civilised Western self and savage Eastern Other—dualisms which are clear-cut in imperial adventure fiction

Summary

Introduction

[W]hen I tell you that for four years I have never passed one single night, either in Bombay, aboard ship, or here in England, without my sleep being broken by this fellow, you will understand why it is that I am a wreck of my former self. (Conan Doyle 2000, p. 78). Both stories are marked by an ambivalent treatment of the colonial encounter It is the body of the white middle-class man that is othered and abnormalized: while Fleete regresses to a liminal being between human and animal, Holden is reduced to a ghost-like version of himself. In this way, both stories blur the binary divisions between civilised Western self and savage Eastern Other—dualisms which are clear-cut in imperial adventure fiction. I will turn to Kipling’s and Conan Doyle’s stories and interrogate the ways in which these tales use the Gothic to counter adventure fiction and, in the process, reveal concerns about the rightfulness of Britain’s imperial project

The Construction of a Myth

Reverting to the Barbaric

Conclusions