“Most naturil causes”: Rudyard Kipling and the suicidal soldier

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nineteenth-century discourses on suicide lamented vast systemic causes for self-killing – ranging from supposedly racial predispositions to the ennui of modernity to a culture-wide breakdown of education. Yet in tension with authorities’ overwrought conjectures about the sources of suicidal desire, the British Army in India devised an effective deterrent that bypassed motives altogether: removing ammunition from off-duty soldiers’ kit, statistics showed, decreased incidence of both suicide and murder. Rudyard Kipling’s short stories about suicidal ideation grapple with this paradox. While evoking a whole host of racial, climactic, and societal causes for soldiers’ suicidal impulses, the stories counterbalance such seemingly inescapable forces with canny bystanders who view suicidal actions as avoidable and thus step in to foil the man’s plan. Previous scholars have argued that imperial suicides enacted a fantasy of self-determination in Victorian culture, yet Kipling echoes contemporary military statistics by depicting the suicidal act as a mere accident, a preventable tragedy. Kipling’s stories acknowledge that the everyday work of empire fell to a population of men who were vulnerable to seemingly thoughtless acts of self-destruction. Yet, strangely enough, the apparent vulnerabilities of imperial masculinity in these texts are shorn up by a soldierly community who intervene precisely because they admit they have, at times, felt the same way.