Men, Masons and Melancholy: The Singularly Masculine Ghost Stories of Rudyard Kipling

Abstract

Kipling's Indian ghost stories concern men – and men in company – just as much as they concern the occult or indeed the Empire and its British cultural origins. They arguably differ, though, from the conventional ghost story through their marked insistence upon the communal response to occult visitation – the need or drive to make haunting something which, if faced alone, is necessarily shared, and so dissipated in the act of communication. Masculinity, too, is characteristically interrogated here. In place of comfortable, familial – and familiar – surroundings, the protagonist is disorientated by the mutability of his environment, its shifts between imposed British paradigms and realities and enduring indigenous difference. In Kipling's supernatural fiction, the cliché of male bonding that promotes single-sex collegiate, fraternal or professional relationships perceptibly sustains the sometimes-temporary connection between disparate individuals immersed in the unprecedented stresses of colonial hauntings, ocean-borne monstrosity or wartime trauma.