Few scholars of late-Victorian imperial culture will be unacquainted with the work of Norman Etherington, whose latest book returns to ground he broke nearly forty years ago. In his 1978 essay on Rider Haggard and the layered personality, Etherington became one of the first to argue a position since ratified by scores of essays and a thousand syllabi: Haggard's popular novels, and the other imperial romances he inspired, deserve our careful consideration. The gist of this influential article was that rather than mindless imperialist agitprop, Haggard's novels were early expressions of emerging mental models of depth psychology. In his new volume, Etherington returns to the intersection of those same themes—aesthetic creativity, conservative imperialism, and Freudian psychology—but adds to Haggard's example an impressive range of important artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the writers Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan; the composer Edward Elgar; the architect Herbert Baker; and, finally, T. E. Lawrence, that conservative fantasy made flesh. Each is given his own chapter, and Etherington's object in each is “to point out that at the turn of the twentieth century the ideas of imperialism resonated with the new concept of the divided psyche that Freud did much to popularize” (2).
The first of Etherington's seven chapters is a verbatim reprint of his 1978 essay, which gives us a sense of the ways his interests have both endured and evolved. His original impulse had been to legitimize Haggard's novels by emphasizing their psychological interest at the expense of their political content, which Etherington treated almost dismissively, arguing “that it is remarkable how little imperialism creeps into the books” (23). Of course, given the growth of postcolonial studies in the decades since, scholars now regard the imperialism of Haggard's fantasies as their chief attraction, and in the six subsequently written chapters Etherington gives the political and the psychological more equal weight. The general argument of the later chapters is that these artists perceived a compelling symmetry between the unstable strata of the individual psyche and the fragile structure of imperial rule. Consequently, their work was driven by a prohibited fascination with energies that were figured as both deeply internal and threateningly alien: “the fount of their creative imagination was precisely their inability to hold a lid on the inner ‘savage’ self that stood opposed to all their fervently expressed support for order and discipline—which so closely mimicked the appealing but hopeless mission of imperialism in world affairs” (17).
Though this pairing of the layered mind and imperial power is central to the book, Etherington remains noncommittal about the precise nature of their relationship. We are told that they are parallel and analogous, that one “recapitulated” the other (38), that they “run in tandem” and “reverberated sympathetically” (165, 197), but it is ultimately unclear whether we are to think there is some causal relationship between them, whether they were merely convenient metaphors for one another, or whether some third factor produced both ways of thinking. Etherington's disinclination to confront problems of causality and influence more directly, while understandable, blunts the historical precision of his observations. Absent some narrative of change, for instance, it becomes harder to appreciate the differences between late-Victorian conservative notions of discipline (which Etherington claims his subjects regarded as peremptory) and earlier evangelical or liberal ideas of self-mastery (which he says they despised). Indeed, it is not entirely clear in this account why the earlier liberal model of imperialism—with its characterization of subject peoples as unruly children who needed to be taught to control themselves—is any less aptly described by a Freudian model; certainly the suppression of savagery and the civilizing mission, which Etherington links to repression, were more unequivocally embraced by the liberal imperialists than by the conservatives, and Gladstone seems far better cast in the role of superego than does Disraeli.
Etherington's analysis is less concerned with such broader historical questions than with the complexities of his subjects’ individual careers, and in this light it is worth noting that he uses Freudian psychology not only as a point of reference for Edwardian theories of mind but also as a tool for discovering the latent struggles of these artists’ creative lives. The kind of readers who are usually convinced by the revelation of Oedipal dramas (whereby, for instance, Kurtz in Heart of Darkness becomes a figure for Conrad's father, or Kipling's forbidden Indian women for his mother) are likely to be persuaded here. But they may also notice the silence about other scholarly investigations of empire in psychoanalytic terms; notable absentees include Graham Dawson, John Kucich, Gail Ching-Liang Low, and Anne McClintock, not to mention Homi Bhabha. These absences are examples of a regrettably general lack of engagement with recent scholarship; with the exception of the chapter on Elgar, there is little evidence that Etherington's analysis has been influenced by anything published in the last two decades. Given his long experience, it is a shame not to have his opinions on the work of other scholars who have followed him into exactly the same terrain he describes here.
The virtues of his volume are not especially apparent when we step back and survey the project as whole; its wider historical prospect is too hazy and its methodological approach too well trodden. Rather, the book's strengths lie in the insights it offers in passing, insights that are the fruit of Etherington's deep familiarity with his primary sources and forty years of rumination on his subject. His analysis of Baker's grasp of landscape as a vital part of imperial architecture is fascinating and convincing, and his treatment of Kipling's racism brilliantly accounts for its nuances as well as its brutish force. The chapters on Conrad and Elgar offer powerful challenges to those who would excuse them, on the grounds of aesthetic admiration, from the general ugliness of fin-de-siècle imperialism. The chapter on Buchan's conspiratorial adventure stories may well do for that relatively neglected novelist what Etherington did for Haggard almost forty years ago. As usual, Etherington's work is clear and engaging, and this latest volume will be welcome to readers interested in any of the seven men it portrays.
