Sadomasochism and the Magical Group: Kipling's Middle-Class Imperialism

Abstract

Recent Kipling criticism always begins by addressing his political multivalence.1 The most redemptive leftist readings have tried to valorize this multivalence as a form of cultural hybridity, casting Kipling as an avatar of Homi Bhabha.2 More commonly, readers inscribe such multivalence within the inevitable contradictions of colonial experience, weighting Kipling's competing loyalties to British imperialism and to resisting colonial subjects in a great variety of ways.3 However the balance is adjusted, though, the debate about Kipling's politics has been almost exclusively conducted in terms of race.4 It has entirely neglected the realm of social class, where another kind of multivalence has been abandoned to diehard rehabilitators of Kipling's reputation. Christopher Hitchens, for example, in a recent Atlantic Monthly essay, lauds Kipling's "fruitful contradictions" (103) as the source of his transcendence of class divisions: "[H]is entire success as a bard derived from the ability to shift between Low and High Church, so to speak. He was a hit with the troops and the gallery...[b]ut he was also...the chosen poet of the royal family and the Times" (96). Andrew Rutherford used the phenomenon of Kipling's supposed cross-class appeal to similar effect in his "General Introduction" to the 1987 Oxford World's Classics editions—the first modern editions to appear after the lapse of copyright. Rutherford warned readers to suspend their biases against Kipling's jingoism, and not to dismiss him "contemptuously" or "hysterically": "Here, after all, we have [End Page 33] the last English author to appeal to readers of all social classes and all cultural groups, from lowbrow to highbrow, and the last poet to command a mass audience" (vii-viii).