Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T15:55:19.207Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

IMPERIAL BARBARIANS: PRIMITIVE MASCULINITY IN LOST WORLD FICTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2008

Bradley Deane
Bradley Deane*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Morris
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Cecil Rhodes, the “Colossus” of late Victorian empire, proudly proclaimed himself a barbarian. He spoke of his taste for things “big and simple, barbaric, if you like,” and boasted that he conducted himself “on the basis of a barbarian” (Millin 165, 242). His famous scholarships designed to turn out men fit for imperial mastery required success in “manly outdoor sports,” a criterion Rhodes privately called the proof of “brutality” (Stead 39). Yet while Rhodes celebrated qualities he called barbaric or brutal, his adversaries seized upon the same rhetoric to revile him. During the Boer War, for instance, the tactics by which Rhodes and his friends tightened their grip on South Africa were boldly condemned by Henry Campbell-Bannerman as “methods of barbarism.” Similarly, G. K. Chesterton denounced Rhodes as nothing more than a “Sultan” who conquered the “East” only to reinforce the backward “Oriental” values of fatalism and despotism (242–44). This strange consensus, in which Rhodes and his critics could agree about his barbarity, reflects a significant uncertainty about late Victorian imperial ambitions and their relationship to “barbarism.” Clearly, the term was available both to the empire's critics as a metaphor for unprincipled or indiscriminate violence and to imperialists as a justification for their efforts to bring civilization to the Earth's dark places, to spread the gospel, and to enforce the progress of history that the anthropologist E. B. Tylor called “the onward movement from barbarism” (29). But Rhodes's cheerful assertion of his own barbarity represents something altogether different: the apparent paradox of an imperialism that openly embraces the primitive. Nor was Rhodes alone in sounding this particularly troubling version of the barbaric yawp. During the period of the New Imperialism (1871–1914), Victorian popular culture became engrossed as never before in charting vectors of convergence between the British and those they regarded as primitive, and in imagining the ways in which barbarians might make the best imperialists of all. This transvaluation of savagery found its most striking expression in the emergence of a wildly popular genre of fiction: stories of lost worlds.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 205 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atkins, Francis Henry [pseud. Frank Aubrey]. The Devil-Tree of El Dorado. 1896. New Jersey: Wildside, 2001.Google Scholar
Atkins, Francis Henry [pseud. Frank Aubrey]. A Queen of Atlantis: A Romance of the Caribbean Sea. 1899. New York: Arno, 1975.Google Scholar
Ballantyne, R. M.The Giant of the North; or, Pokings Round the Pole. 1881. New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, n.d.Google Scholar
Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Campbell-Bannerman, Henry. Speech to the National Reform Union, July 14, 1901.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Chesterton, G. K. “The Sultan.” A Miscellany of Men. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1912. 238–44.Google Scholar
Chrisman, Laura. Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Churchward, James. The Lost Continent of Mu. 1926. London: Neville Spearman, 1959.Google Scholar
Cobban, James MacLaren. The Tyrants of Kool-Sim. London: Henry, 1896.Google Scholar
Davidoff, Leonore, and Hall, Catherine. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.Google Scholar
Dawson, Graham. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Bass, Alan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. 278–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickens, Charles. “The Noble Savage.” 1853. The Uncommercial Traveler and Reprinted Pieces. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1958. 467–73.Google Scholar
Donnelly, Ignatius. Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. 1882. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Lost World. New York: A. L. Burt, 1912.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Maracot Deep. 1928. New York: Doubleday, 1933.Google Scholar
Ellingson, Ter. The Myth of the Noble Savage. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.Google Scholar
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.Google Scholar
“A Forgotten Race.” Cornhill 17 (1891): 38–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fussell, Paul. “Irony, Freemasonry, and Humane Ethics in Kipling's ‘The Man Who Would Be King.’” ELH 25.3 (1958): 216–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, W. S. and Sullivan, Arthur. “The Pirates of Penzance.” 1879. The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan. Ed. Bradley, Ian. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 187–263.Google Scholar
Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. New York: Basic Books, 1979.Google Scholar
Haggard, H. Rider. Alan Quatermain. 1887. Ed. Butts, Dennis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon's Mines. 1885. Ed. Monsman, Gerald. Petersborough: Broadview, 2002.Google Scholar
Haggard, H. Rider. When the World Shook. London: Cassel, 1919.Google Scholar
Haley, Bruce. The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Donald E., ed. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanson, Carter F. “Lost Among White Others: Late-Victorian Lost Race Novels for Boys.” Nineteenth Century Contexts 23.4 (2001): 497–527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herbert, Christopher. Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.Google Scholar
Herbert, Christopher. “Epilogue: Ethnography and Evolution.” Victorian Studies 41.3 (Spring 1998): 485–93.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. “Barbarism: A User's Guide.” On History. New York: New Press, 1997. 253–65.Google Scholar
Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown's School Days. 1857. Ed. Sanders, Andrew. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Hyne, C. J. Cutliffe. The Lost Continent. 1899. New York: Ballantine, 1972.Google Scholar
Katz, Wendy R. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire: A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Kingsley, Charles. Hypatia; or New Foes with an Old Face. 1853. New York: Macmillin, 1888.Google Scholar
Kingsley, Charles. Westward Ho! or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the County of Devon, in the Reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. Cambridge: Macmillin, 1855.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. Collected Stories. Ed. Gottlieb, Robert. New York: Knopf, 1994.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. “The Finest Story in the World.” 1893. Collected Stories 257–89.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. “The Man Who Would Be King.” 1888. Collected Stories 215–55.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. “The White Man's Burden.” 1899. Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Doubleday, 1907. 215–17.Google Scholar
Lane, Christopher. The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Lang, Andrew. “The End of Phaeacia.” The Wrong Paradise and Other Stories. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886. 3–107.Google Scholar
Low, Gail Ching-Liang. White Skins, Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 1996.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “Minute on Indian Education (2 February 1835).” Macaulay: Prose and Poetry. Ed. Young, G. M.. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. 719–30.Google Scholar
Mangan, J. A.“‘Muscular, Militaristic and Manly’: The British Middle-Class Hero as Moral Messenger.” The International Journey of the History of Sport 13.1 (March 1996): 28–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marx, Edward. “How We Lost Kafiristan.” Representations 67 (Summer 1999): 44–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Millin, Sarah Gertrude Liebson. Cecil Rhodes. New York: Harper, 1933.Google Scholar
Meyers, Jeffrey. “The Idea of Moral Authority in ‘The Man Who Would Be King.’” SEL 8.4 (Fall 1968): 711–23.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Ludovici, Anthony M.. Vol. 1. New York: Russel and Russel, 1964.Google Scholar
Rosen, David. “The Volcano and the Cathedral: Muscular Christianity and the Origins of Primal Manliness.” Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Ed. Hall, Donald E.. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 17–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.Google Scholar
Seeley, John. The Expansion of England. 1883. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.Google Scholar
Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Smeaton, Oliphant. “The Mystery of the Pacific: Easter Island and the Evidences of a Lost Continent.” Westminster Review 144 (1895): 29–47.Google Scholar
Smeaton, Oliphant. A Mystery of the Pacific. 1899. London: Blackie & Son, n.d.Google Scholar
Stead, W. T.The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes. London: Review of Reviews Office, 1902.Google Scholar
Stephen, James Fitzjames. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. 1873. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.Google Scholar
Stocking, George W. Jr.Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Tosh, John. A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture. 1871. Vol. 1. New York: Harper, 1958.Google Scholar
Wee, C. J. W.-L. “Christian Manliness and National Identity: The Problematic Construction of a Racially ‘Pure’ Nation.” Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Ed. Hall, Donald E.. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 66–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolseley, Garnett. “The Negro as a Soldier.” Fortnightly Review 44 (1888): 689–703.Google Scholar