Undisciplining Englishness: Narratives of Colonial Encounter in Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four

Abstract

This article explores how Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four undisciplines Englishness—English national character constructed through the nation’s racial politics from the Reform Act and beyond the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century—by drawing upon the trendy Victorian studies’ call for “undisciplining.” I define “undisciplining” as an act of undermining the disciplinary racism sustained by novelistic form and examine how the novel undisciplines Englishness—i.e. places the nation’s assumed isolated superiority in relation to unregulated colonial encounters negating racial hierarchies and criminality in narrative and urban space. Doyle portrays Englishness as a racial construct created for the purpose of clearing out a space for an artificially imagined sphere of the comfortable home secured from outside forces of colonial encounters. Episodes and characters imported from colonial India disturb the seemingly seamless narrative that incorporates them into England. I argue that the colonial elements in the novel—the British Indian Army, Jonathan Small, Indian jewelry, and Tonga—do not build toward the establishment of the superiority of Englishness, but instead reveal an unstableness and artificiality of that ideological construct. While Watson’s first-person narration endorses a form of disciplinary power, other narrative flows dissemble the narrative components working within that frame so that they cannot fit into the logic of the definite omniscient closure, and thereby reveal an undisciplined vista of Englishness, interfused by colonial encounters.