As tomorrow we are going to celebrate the birthday of my wife #reema, I think it's time to discuss the meaning of #friendship in the true sense.
I wish for everyone in this #universe either to get his/her best friend as a life partner or make your life partner your best friend ever to lead a happy life.
I am very naive in the true sense about the treasure of knowledge our ancestors created thousands of years ago. However, because of the internet, research has become easy.
We have kept the name of our only son #ridit - which means #rigveda - the oldest Veda of #bharat. Very soon we will get him introduced to the #sanskrit language so that unlike me, he does not have to depend on others to learn life skills and philosophy firsthand from the treasure trove of ancient #bharat
Rig Veda on Friendship - Mandala 10 Hymn 117
न वा उ देवाः कषुधमिद वधं ददुरुताशितमुपगछन्ति मर्त्यवः |
उतो रयिः पर्णतो नोप दस्यत्युताप्र्णन्मर्डितारं न विन्दते ||
yamayościn na samā vīryāṇi jñātī citsantau na samaṃ pṛṇītaḥ ||
Translation (taken from the Internet. sorry for my lack of knowledge)
1. The Gods have not ordained hunger to be our death; even to the well-fed man comes death in varied shapes.
The riches of the liberal never waste away, while he who will not give finds any to comfort him.
2. The man with food in-store who, when the needy comes in miserable case begging for bread to eat,
Hardens his heart against him – even when of old he did him service – finds not one comfort him.
3. Bounteous is he who gives unto the beggar who comes to him in want of food and feeble.
Success attends him in the shout of battle. He makes a friend of him in future troubles.
4.No friend is he who to his friend and comrade who comes imploring food, will offer nothing.
Let him depart—no home is that to rest in –, and rather seek a stranger to support him.
5. Let the rich satisfy the poor implorer, and bend his eye upon a longer pathway.
Riches come now to one, now to another, and like the wheels of car are ever rolling.
6. The foolish man wins food with fruitless labor; that food – I speak the truth – shall be his ruin.
He feeds no trusty friend, no man to love him. ALL GUILT IS WHO HE EATS WITH NO PARTAKER.
7. The plowshare plowing makes the food that feeds us, and with its feet cuts through the path it follows.
Better the speaking than the silent Brahman; the liberal friend outvalues him who gives not.
8. He with one foot hath far outrun the biped, and the two-footed catches the three-footed.
Four-footed creatures come when bipeds call them, and stand and look where five are met together.
9. The hands are both alike; their labor differs. The yield of the sister milch kine is unequal.
The Gist
A friend indeed is a friend in need.
Wealth is for distribution
Food is for sharing.
Here we go...
My effort to sing a song written by Rabindranath Tagore on the deep meaning of Friendship
Lyrics
শুধু তোমার বাণী নয় গো, হে বন্ধু, হে প্রিয়,
মাঝে মাঝে প্রাণে তোমার পরশখানি দিয়ো ॥
সারা পথের ক্লান্তি আমার সারা দিনের তৃষা
কেমন করে মেটাব যে খুঁজে না পাই দিশা--
এ আধার যে পূর্ণ তোমায় সেই কথা বলিয়ো ॥
হৃদয় আমার চায় যে দিতে, কেবল নিতে নয়,
বয়ে বয়ে বেড়ায় সে তার যা-কিছু সঞ্চয়।
হাতখানি ওই বাড়িয়ে আনো, দাও গো আমার হাতে--
ধরব তারে, ভরব তারে, রাখব তারে সাথে,
একলা পথের চলা আমার করব রমণীয় ॥Shudhu tomar baani noy go, hey bondhu, hey priyo,
Maajhe maajhe praane tomar paroshkhani diyo
Saara pather klanti aamar saara diner trisha
Kemon kore metabo je khnuje na paai disha
E aandhar je purna tomay sei katha bolio
Hriday aamar chaay je dite kebal nite noi,
Boye boye beraay se tar ja kichhu sanchay
Haatkhani oi baariye aano, daao go aamar haate
Dhorbo taare, bhorbo taare, raakhbo taare saathe,
Ekla pather chala aamar korbo ramoniyo.
Maajhe maajhe praane tomar paroshkhani diyo.
English Translation
Extend your delicate touch toward me,
O my friend dear, not your words only.
Weariness of my entire course,
Thirst of the whole day -
I know not how to quench,
How to keep at bay.
Please remind me that -
You fill the darkness and gray.
My heart is willing to dole out,
Acceptance is not what I only care,
Carrying all its reserves
And whatever it could spare.
Extend your nimble hands towards me,
Let me hold them firm,
I'll fill them with my might,
I'll keep them warm.
Your subtle presence I would enjoy,
Lonesome journey be delightful to me.
Yesterday at around 2:00 am, my wife Reema and I had an esoteric discussion which I am posting here because for us if we want to have our young kids develop an uncluttered mind, we will have to do a detailed discussion about all such things.
The basic idea of the discussion was how or if at all emotion affects the decision-making power when it involves the leader’s own very close family members and, if yes, where will he have to draw a line? Is there any way that the leader, while taking such a decision can detach himself from the family tree itself and take it just as an outside observer so that it becomes as objective as it should? Is it at all possible?
The discussion started like this.
Reema said,” Som, you know very well that even the best neurosurgeon will fail to behave properly, if not crippled at all, in the OT when his own son/daughter is on the operation table. It is very natural for a human being. We are not robots.”
She continued, “ With this context, I would like to know your viewpoint about when #lordrama asked #sitamaa for another agnipariksha after she returned from the ashram with Luv and kush which #sitamaa could not digest well and she buried herself inside the Mother Earth -
Was that ordeal from #lordrama somehow affected because of the emotion and love playing high?
Could He take such a decision had the lady were not #sitamaa - His own wife?
Because #lordrama was not impulsive.
He was a great man of character and integrity, He was worshipped everywhere across the globe, and He knew His every decision could make a huge impact. Why He could not just embrace #sitamaa for whatever She was at that time and accept Her as She was at that moment? What would you have done in such a situation?”
After pondering over this issue, I tried to join the dots in which she is trying to find an answer for integrity and morality.
So I reminded her about our earlier discussion that when I speak to someone or meet someone, actually it's the frequency that matters and I hardly care for the physical aspects or any past history or any possession that person has made - neither the wealth nor the degree or anything as such.
I try to straightway look into that person’s #lordshiva - the vibe - the #innerconscience - and try to understand the message that is coming out from this guy's mental presence (mind the term mental, it's not physical).
Hence, you see when a stranger tries to praise something about me, like the way we studied during our college life “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie and all such crap, I just take it as it is and remain unperturbed. But then again the same emotional detachment I fail to exhibit when it comes to my close family members.
Now to answer your question, let me remind you, that #lordrama was an iconic global figure of His time. Hence he had a bigger role to play which is beyond family emotion. This is the reality of a leader’s life. If you study the lives of #netaji, or #vivekananda, or even #buddha, they had to forgo their family to serve humanity. Netaji’s wife had to accept everything about him even if it hurt her badly and hence she did not stop him knowing that probably he would never come back. A leader like # Shakaracharya had to leave the family behind at the tender age of 8.
And with a little light heart, I conveyed to her, now you know why people like #narendramodiji or #yogiji could not taste the #familylife. Because they are born with a bigger purpose. They cannot be tied to day-to-day family matters and emotions.
So when one has to look at certain decisions taken by such a global leader, where his own family members are involved, we will have to take into consideration many aspects beyond emotion and family…
How much can it impact society as a whole
Will it be considered as the real #dharma by the global community
What message would it transpire to the values of morality in family life
Will it redefine the roles and responsibilities of husband and wife in a family
Then I had to stop the discussion there as I had to edit the C++ write-ups of my young son to publish in his technical blog.
Reema’s personal opinion about the effect of that decision by #lordrama
Pros
#buddha #shakaracharya #swamivivekanada #netaji #narendramodi #yogiji and many such saints of #bharat left the family to serve a better purpose
The importance of balance between #family and #leadership - and for a global leader he has to take care of the bigger community he is supposed to serve. For that, if in the future, whoever want to be a leader, think twice before entering family life to save yourself from this great horns of the dilemma -
#family Vs #community
Cons
Probably “Log keye kahenge” or “What people might say and judge you” started
Kunti conceals Karna’s birthright to know His real father
The discussion I am keeping here as an open-ended discussion…
I want people to ponder upon this subject…
However, I will also think and add accordingly…
Enjoy the poem called Swadharm or Self-responsibility written and recited by my wife #Reema
People who are raised by compatible parents are really very fortunate. My dad was like Bhim, brawny, did regular exercises till an unfortunate accident which might cripple him for the life, but then again ignored everything after the accident and sprang back to his normal life within just a span of 6 months, hardly became sick for even a single day, does not mind to take a bath in #ganga of #haridwar in early winter morning knowing about his physical power and strength, ignored the #covid #jab even after my Mom got infected and still never became sick (ultimately he was anyway convinced by Mon to take the jab), and took care of all external pressure protecting us just like a #brawny dad does, but my Mom, used her brain to guide all of us. So even though we did not have a lot of money, all of us are well settled in life, all of my elder sisters are married, well-settled in a city like #kolkata, and all of her grandchildren are doing very well having international careers (and all of them were really influenced by her presence during their childhood) and still having a peaceful life at one of the most backward places of #bharat.
One day, my wife Reema was saying, "Som, how do you feel about this analysis of Mamoni (my Mom) behind the exile of #lordrama?" Reema continued with my Mom's analysis. According to Mamoni, as #lordrama did not have much experience with the people He would rule over as a king, it was kaykayi's #gameplan to force Him out of the shelter of the Mahal and mix up with the aboriginals, with all sorts of people across #bharat and there was no other way as #dasharath loved #lordram blindly and in normal circumstances, it was just impossible.
It was like #swamivivekananda doing #bharatdarshan
Yes, i believe #criticalthinking is an essential part of human #intelligence, and remember, it has nothing to do with the modern-day definition of #feminism
Think about the character of #draupradi. She instigated #bhim to kill Kichak, she instigated #arjun to take revenge, she maintained a very good relationship with #lordkrishna as a #sakhi (#friend) and yet never missed a chance to scoff at the definition of #dharma of #yudhistir because it was impractical, not suitable. Played the real #powergame in contemporary history and created history by herself by being present as a #ringmaster right inside the arena controlling her #lions.
now relate this saga to the many battles of Prihiraj Chauhan Vs Mohammed Ghori and try to realize that had a #lion like #prithirajchauhan been controlled by a ringmaster like #daupradi, what would have happened to the history of #bharat. The latter would have been mercilessly killed after the first defeat.
yes, this is #reality. let us not live behind the veil of impractical #dharma. there is no place for it in real life.
this world is not meant for #good people, this world is for #suitable people.
#hindu ladies of #bharat get a critical mind. play politics outside your family. get the #biggerpicture
It's time for the people of Bharat to accept the color blue as a sign of strength and grace. not everyone's cup of tea. we must understand the grace of the people who carry the blue color as a symbol of their character.
So it's better for us if we get accustomed to the color blue and make our lives normalized by removing the stigma of this great color by opening up our closed, narrow minds. The greatness of society lies there in which we accept everyone, even when they are seen through colored glasses of blue.
Only great and powerful people can carry this color gracefully. let us all celebrate these people.
let us accept #blue to make our lives easy. we will definitely feel better.
enjoy this soulful song written by none other than #tagore to explain how he looks at a lady wearing #blue depicting #urvashi of #heaven
Listen to this soulful music (in Bengali)
Naho mata naho Kanya
"
Naho mata, naho kanya,
naho bodhoo, sundaree roopasee
hey nandanabasinee urbasee
Naho mata, naho kanya...
Gosthe jabe name sandhya
shranta dehe swarnanchal tani
Tumi kono grihaprante
nahi jwalo sandhya deepkhani
Dwidhaay jarito pade
kompro bokkhe namra netrapate
Smitohasye nahi cholo
lojjito basar sajjate ardharate
Ushaar udaya sama
anabagunthita tumi akunthita
"
Translation...
Neither a mother nor a daughter is you, not even a spouse,
Urbashi, O the dweller of the heavenly abode.
When the tired earth draws a golden veil across –
Evening plummets across the grazing field,
You never light a lamp in a corner of a hut.
With perplexed steps, throbbing heart, eyes down,
Smirking, you never stroll to share a nuptial bed at midnight.
Unmasked like the rising sun
You are absolute expressive.
let us all say in chorus... "when we look at anybody, how we feel actually reflects Who we are rather than the person being looked at..."
Today I would like to tell you the basic differences between the #oriental and #occidental concepts of #masculine and #feminism
we, the people of #bharat, believe in #ardhnarishwara concepts of power - the half-man-half-woman concept. we believe that without the proper combination of these two, nothing is possible.
here is an excerpt from #wikipedia that i am presenting to describe this pure form of the #oriental concepts behind the #creation of this #universe
"Ardhanarishvara represents the synthesis of masculine and feminine energies of the universe (Purusha and Prakriti) and illustrates how Shakti, the female principle of God, is inseparable from (or the same as, according to some interpretations) Shiva, the male principle of God, and vice versa. The union of these principles is exalted as the root and womb of all creation. Another view is that Ardhanarishvara is a symbol of Shiva's all-pervasive nature."
On the other hand, the #occidental concepts of #masculine and #feminism are probably two different parts of society both showing their authority and playing the power game to control the other.
So, maybe for the #women of #bharat, the best use of their #breasts is as a mother...
whereas if it is dictated by the masculine society, as a part of the body for their own pleasure, maybe the idea will be a little scary for the #femininepower
and this kind of #masculine power in the #victorian era of the #britishenglish society was the reason behind the failure of the first mutiny in #bharat against the #british because a #mother of #bharat could not digest the pain that might happen to a #british child whom she does #breastfeeding
please have a look at the attached document which is a research paper on just this utter show of masculine power in the victorian era.
MASCULINITY IN PERIL: MUTINY FICTION AND VICTORIAN MAN-MAKING
by
AMANDA LYNN PHILLIPS
A THESIS
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
in the Department of English in the Graduate School of
The University of Alabama
TUSCALOOSA, AL
2009
Copyright Amanda Lynn Phillips 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ABSTRACT
In Victorian Masculinities, Herbert Sussman identifies the emergence of the “masculine plot” in mid-nineteenth century writing by male authors. The masculine plot, an alternative to the marriage plot’s bourgeois domestic masculinity, provides a hero who eschews the threatening feminine realm and enters a world exclusive to men where he gathers male wisdom leading up to a test of his masculinity. Rewriting masculinity as the sublimation of male desire into productive labor in a solely male world and replacing the marriage bond with male-male relationships demanded that authors of the masculine plot unfold it somewhere outside of contemporary England. British writers displaced the masculine plot either geographically, historically, or both.
By the close of the nineteenth century, the Indian Mutiny offered a location for the masculine plot both physically and temporally removed from home. India during the Mutiny also offered a stage for the masculine plot that was already heavily gender-inflected. When news of the Mutiny first reached London in 1857, the British struggled to build a narrative of the causes and outcomes of the Sepoy Rebellion and to systematize their relationship to a frighteningly unfamiliar imperial holding. Periodicals seized upon a set of stock devices with which to frame their Mutiny narratives, wherein developed a subtext in which a masculine England triumphed over a feminine India. These same gendered dramas appear in children’s adventure novels about the Mutiny published in the late nineteenth century—such as George Manville Fenn’s Gil the Gunner—that operate according to the masculine plot.
My thesis examines ways in which children’s adventure novels about the Mutiny explore tensions inherent in late-Victorian constructions of masculinity. These books exploit both the useful features of the masculine plot and the very failures that make it an insufficient technology for making masculine men, whether real or fictional.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First I want to thank the director of this master’s thesis, Dr. Albert Pionke. This thesis began as a seminar paper in his class on imaginings of India in Victorian writing, and thus Dr. Pionke has guided me through every stage of developing the thesis, from the afternoon I walked into his office with a hazy idea to the morning he shook my hand and told me I had passed my defense. In between, Dr. Pionke spent countless hours talking to me, reading draft after draft, writing amazingly insightful comments, and gently keeping me on task.
I would also like to thank my comittee members—Dr. William Ulmer, Kate Bernheimer, and Dr. John Beeler—for their encouragement, interest, and support. Thanks as well to the faculty of the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library for tracking down hundred-and-thirty-year-old books for me. Finally, I thank the other graduate students in the aforementioned seminar for their contributions in helping me learn to think about India, Britian, and boys.
CONTENTS ABSTRACT.ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.iii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.v
INTRODUCTION.1
G. A. HENTY: DISTORTING AND DISTRUSTING THE MASCULINE PLOT.11
E. M. FIELD’S BRYDA: GIRL HERO, MASCULINE PLOT.28
“HE’LL MAKE A MAN OF YOU”: HOMOEROTICISM AND THE MASCULINE PLOT IN GEORGE MANVILLE FENN’S GIL THE GUNNER44
CONCLUSION.62
BIBLIOGRAPHY.66
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A. Forestier, Bryda enjoyed the morning walk, 1890.39
A. Forestier, Bryda could hardly help laughing at the old man’s utter amazement, 189039
W. H. Overend, We can be friends, and eat salt together, 1892.53
W. H. Overend, I could not refrain from drawing the flashing blade, 1892.56
Introduction
In his 1995 book Victorian Masculinities, Herbert Sussman identifies within Victorian men’s writing a method of constructing masculinity that opposes the dominant English model of manliness based on bourgeois domestic matrimony. In outlining the poetics of, as he terms it, the masculine plot, Sussman provides a useful interpretive model for examining, in addition to the works of Carlyle and other canonical Victorian authors, the children’s adventure novels so popular in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because Sussman’s masculine plot hinges on the removal of the male protagonist from female influence in order to construct a masculinity untainted by the feminized domestic, the plot structure of the adventure novel, with its journey away from home and its quest for identity, constitute a logical space in which to enact this masculine plot. The young British heroes of many adventure novels, such as those of the immensely popular children’s writer G. A. Henty, go forth into the dark hearts of far-flung colonial wildernesses to be built into good, solid British imperialists. The 1880s and 90s produced a number of adventure novels for children that took as their settings India, the Crown Jewel of the British Empire, at the moment of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, when it had looked as though this shining gem among colonies may be lost.1
During and just after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Victorian England’s discourse on Anglo Indian relations figured India as a female successfully mastered by the male-coded British.
Initially this gender-inflected discourse was contained in dispatches, firsthand accounts of the events from the British in India, and a resulting glut of articles in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Bentley’s Miscellany. By the 1860s, when the British had
1 Of course “Mutiny” is the Anglocentric term for the events that took place in India in 1857, and not the most accurate representation of the spirit of those events, especially from an Indian viewpoint. However, as the works with which I am dealing here consistently use the term “Mutiny,” I will follow suit.
subdued their Indian subjects, Mutiny novels began appearing on the market, consisting mostly of melodramas, like Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward, in which India and the Mutiny merely provide an incidental backdrop for a romantic plot. Later in the century, however, Mutiny fiction for children provided its readers with something quite apart from love stories about grown-ups. In these adventure novels, India acts as a masculine testing ground for British children. Thus the Mutiny provided an already gender-inflected stage for the late-century children’s adventure novels to unfold masculine plots.
This conflict on the subcontinent seems perfect for constructing manly heroes using the masculine plot, as it is both far removed from anxious domesticated masculinity in England and already extant in the cultural consciousness of the Victorians as the site of masculine victory for British imperialists. However, despite the apparently ideal Mutiny setting, the masculine plots of these adventure novels demonstrate not only the usefulness of this model for the construction of masculinity but also its inherent flaws—the very problematics Sussman identifies as the basis of the masculine plot’s ultimate failure as a viable alternative to normative masculinity. Authors of Mutiny adventure novels for children thus use the imaginative space of juvenile literature to explore cultural fantasies about, as well as the anxiety-ridden limitations of, alternate methods of masculine self-fashioning.
Indian Mutiny as Gender Drama
Beginning in the summer of 1857, mid-century Victorian periodicals told and retold the story of the Indian Mutiny as they attempted to both provide the public with an explanation of the events unfolding in India and shape its response to the deaths of hundreds of Anglo-Indians in the conflict on the subcontinent. In these widely-read narratives, bewilderment mingled with fear, rage, and finally, as the British reasserted their authority, smug self-congratulation. Because the English public outside the Offices of the East India Company spared little attention for its Indian Empire before 1857, when news of the Mutiny reached London in May, journalists, statesmen, and the reading public struggled to comprehend the causes, events, and possible outcomes of a revolt on a massive continent containing somewhere around 180 million people
claiming a dizzying variety of creeds, races, classes, and languages. By seizing upon a set of stock devices through which to explain the Mutiny, the popular periodicals of the day found a way both to inform the public and to invest it with patriotic zeal. Many of the recurring motifs in the retellings of the Mutiny stories, such as coded messages sent via lotus flowers, fortunetelling boys, and fairytale settings, show India to be a magical, mysterious, seductive place, an alluring feminized landscape that could and should still draw young British men to the subcontinent.
Amid the confusion and fear in England during and following the Mutiny, the English had to be convinced that India remained an important holding for the empire, and titillating their imaginations with such images could accomplish just that. Who could doubt that this beguiling paradise was a colony worth keeping?
Rousing English patriotism in order to ensure a swift and aggressive reestablishment of British control in India required a different set of images. As Patrick Brantlinger notes, the well at Cawnpore became the gruesome image upon which the English fixated obsessively in their clamor for not just reconquest but also revenge against the Indian rebels. When played out on the pages of mid-century periodicals, the episode of the well at Cawnpore, a stronghold where Indian prince Nana Sahib held hundreds of British women and children, brought its own set of stock images, repeated almost verbatim from journal to journal. Narration of the day on which British soldiers, sent to rescue the captives, finally penetrate Nana Sahib’s compound, becomes a sort of refrain of horror for England:
[Nana Sahib] ordered the indiscriminate butchery of the women and children yet left alive, and, on the English troops taking possession of the place on the following morning, the rooms and yard in which the prisoners had been confined were found two inches deep in the blood of the victims. Long tresses of hair, scraps of paper, torn Bibles and Prayer-books, workboxes and unfinished work, the little round hats of children scattered about on the red floor, told too well the harrowing tale. (“Indian Mutiny” 565-6)
Such a litany, demonstrating the shockingly gory fate of Christian women and children of England, incited outraged Englishmen to put on the mantle of manly vengeance and trumpet their masculinity.
In articles written following the quelling of the revolt, the same periodicals repeating the litany of horror at the well wrote about the suppression of the Mutiny as a grand, affirming adventure in which “our manhood has been put to the severest proof,” where English masculinity was tested and found solid (“Indian Heroes” 351). These articles cast England in the role of masterful manly man, with India a place of unmanly men at best. Many journalists attributed the Mutiny in part to the uncontrolled and uncontrollable psychic energy of the Indian Sepoys, innately prone, they claimed, to “outbreaks of passion bordering on frenzy” (“The Company’s Raj” 633). Thus British men must go forth, these writers declared, and master the destructive energies let loose by Indians not manly enough to master themselves. Citing “ungovernable passion” (“The Indian Mutinies” 628) as a cause for the actions of Indian rebels constitutes what Herbert Sussman refers to as a “conventional form of unmanning” in Victorian discourse on gender, where hysteria indicates a lack of the self-regulation that forms the core of masculinity (76). Writers of articles such as one in the London Quarterly Review take care to point out that the “ferocity” of the Indian rebels does not indicate that this subject race is “more imbued with fury” than the English. To the contrary, the Indian man is by nature “milder” than the vigorously energetic Englishman, but more dangerous because his energy goes “unchecked” (“Crisis of the Sepoy Rebellion” 542).
Often, nineteenth-century English writers characterize India as a whole as female. The mildness attributed to the races of India by the London Quarterly Review article above aligns the people with well-known characterizations of femininity. Furthermore, references to the people of India as “dreamy unenergetic being[s]” genders them resolutely female, as in mid-Victorian discourse masculinity requires activeness and pragmatic materialism, whereas femininity is
equated with lethargy and romantic imaginativeness (“The Religions of India” 760).2 Journalists claim that the “feebleness and effeminacy” of the Indians—a “general rule” especially among Hindus—make them a naturally subject race, in need of a master race to guide, protect, and control them (“The Sepoy Rebellion” 214). Though the feminine “feebleness” of the Indian “unite[s]” with “ferociousness” in the Mutiny rebels, it is a weak ferocity and no match for the manly energy of the English (“The Sepoy Rebellion” 254). In this mid-century periodical discourse, the story of the Indian Mutiny takes on a subtext in which masculine England triumphs over the unmanly, even feminine, India.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, British novelists produced a new assortment of Mutiny retellings. The dramas played out on the pages of Bentley’s and Blackwood’s in the late 1850s appear once more in several late-century children’s adventure novels about the Indian Mutiny, including G. A. Henty’s In Times of Peril (1881), E. M. Field’s Bryda (1890), and George Manville Fenn’s Gil the Gunner (1892). Though most mid-century fiction about the Mutiny had been aimed at adults, the majority of late nineteenth-century Mutiny fiction emerged from the children’s literature sector, specifically from the best-selling adventure genre3 . All the familiar motifs of the journalistic accounts, from lotus conspiracies to the bloody well, reoccur between covers depicting children chased by bug-eyed, turbaned, knife-wielding Indians. Not surprisingly, the customary gender drama of the Mutiny features in these novels as well, again asserting the manliness of England as proven by its relationship with India.
Mutiny Adventure Novels and the Masculine Plot
These historical adventure novels, primarily aimed at English boys, operate according to what Herbert Sussman, in Victorian Masculinities, terms the masculine plot, wherein “manhood is an ongoing process, a plot, a narrative over time that charts achieving and maintaining the
2 Such gender dichotomies are discussed by Sussman in the first chapter of Victorian Masculinities.
3 For the history of Mutiny fiction, see Shailendra Dhari Singh’s Novels on the Indian Mutiny, Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness (199-224), and Hilda Gregg’s Blackwood’s article, “The Indian Mutiny in Fiction.”
tense regulation of male desire” (45-6). During the first half of the Victorian period, normative masculinity required a man to master his psychic energy by establishing a bourgeois domestic identity founded on matrimony. In literature, this concept translates into the marriage plot, wherein male desire finds an appropriate outlet in a wife, thus, under the terms of popular middle-class belief, permanently affirming masculinity. Beginning with Carlyle, however, Sussman identifies a “new masculine poetic for the industrial age,” opposing the “compulsory matrimony” of early Victorian constructions of masculinity: the masculine plot (1, 5). The masculine plot offers an imaginative solution to the Victorians’ “apprehension about bourgeois marriage sapping male energy” by offering a new form of masculinity constructed within a wholly male setting (5).
In this alternative narrative of masculine identity, the hero, seeking an exclusively male universe, leaves the feminine domestic sphere and avoids a course progressing towards marriage. Instead, he endures a series of tests of masculinity, gathering male wisdom from father figures along the way, his journey culminating with a manhood marked by chaste male-male bonds. The final masculine test usually involves “the rejection of the female or mother, often figured by the casting off of female clothing, and bonding with the father or more often surrogate father,” an act “sealed by chaste bodily contact within carefully controlled rituals of male-male physicality” (47). “Closure comes,” writes Sussman, “with the sublimation of dangerous male desire into productive work and initiation into a male community rather than with joining in marriage” (36). New models of masculine identity constructed via the masculine plot, including such figures as the priest and the soldier, emerged in the literature of middle-class male authors, rivaling the more established model of masculinity tied to the domestic.4
The emergence of the masculine plot in literature, and its presence in late-nineteenth century adventure stories, is tied to what John Tosh calls the “flight from domesticity.” In A Man’s Place, Tosh contends that late Victorian men, inheriting the anxieties about domesticated
4 In Dandies and Desert Saints, James Eli Adams identifies the priest and soldier as representing two popular styles of imaginative Victorian masculinity.
masculinity Sussman traces in the writing of such earlier figures as Carlyle, sought an escape from the feminized and feminizing sphere of bourgeois England, either literally, perhaps through emigration to the colonies, or imaginatively, through the shunning of marriage plot novels in favor of books that adopted the poetics of the masculine plot: “for every young man who was prompted by the imperial fervour of the day to seek his fortune in the colonies, there were hundreds of others who were happy to escape for a while from the routines of domesticity into the make-believe of a frontier of the imagination” (Tosh 175). Sussman asserts that “reading literature structured by the masculine plot becomes a replacement for absent public rites of passage, a vicarious experience that satisfies the newly intensified and newly problematized emotional need for masculine identity as differentiation from the female” (47). In adventure novels, young men “set off into the unknown to fulfill their destiny unencumbered by the feminine constraint or by emotional ties with home” (Tosh 174). The “setting off’ is an integral part of this fantasy of a world free from the unmanning taint of the females and the domestic.
Rewriting masculinity as the sublimation of male desire into productive labor in a solely male world and replacing the marriage bond with male-male relationships, demanded that the authors of the masculine plot unfold it somewhere outside of contemporary England.
Accordingly, Sussman points out, “British writers often set the masculine wild zone in remote geographic space, the ships of the British navy, the colonies, or imperial war” (44). At home in England, males attempting to eschew marriage for these types of intense male-male ties would risk suspicion, since such relationships occupy a liminal zone between the homosocial and the homoerotic that grew increasingly troublesome over the course of the century—and downright alarming with the emergence of late-century figures such as Oscar Wilde. The empire provided an acceptable space for the exclusion of women, where male comradeship could flourish, free from the pollution of femininity, and somewhat protected from suspicions of sexual deviance.
Adventure novels of the late nineteenth-century aimed at children adopted the masculine plot to some extent. The Indian Mutiny provided a particularly satisfying stage for the masculine plot, as it was both removed geographically and historically from late-nineteenth century
England. Because Mutiny fiction usually centers on military characters, it positions the masculine plot in an acceptable place, since imperial warfare constituted a territory “where close masculine bonding into adult life is permitted within a warrior model of masculinity that opposes the bourgeois system that compels marriage” (Sussman 49). In addition, the Mutiny setting provided a location for the masculine plot displaced into the past, offering a further level of remove from contemporary England, and therefore a further layer of protection from the difficulties attendant on the intensely charged male-male bonds of the plot. Sussman argues that such “historical distancing” helps prevent the masculine plot’s “fantasy of male-male affective bonds within a wholly male community from crossing the homophobic boundary into homoeroticism” (17).
Importantly, however, no amount of displacement can completely safeguard the masculine plot against the dangerous slippage from homosociality to homoeroticism. Thus according to Sussman, by the 1850s the “realization of such an ideal of manhood” outside of literature, and perhaps within it, becomes untenable (66). Ultimately, Sussman admits, the masculine plot fails to achieve its goal of constructing a solid masculine identity while avoiding dangerously entangling men in relations with women. Sussman’s analysis of the masculine plot, because it focuses exclusively on adult literature and does not include a reading of its role in children’s books, does not examine the ways in which both the productive uses and the inherent limitations of the masculine plot surface in late-Victorian juvenile fiction set during the Indian Mutiny. These children’s novels provide interesting case studies for examining why and how the masculine plot fails to engineer a fully constituted masculine identity.
Three Mutiny Novels, Three Muddled Masculine Plots
In Henty’s In Times of Peril, Field’s Bryda, and Fenn’s Gil the Gunner, vexed masculine plots explore late-century anxieties concerning fantasies of male self-fashioning. Henty’s In Times of Peril enacts the masculine plot’s rejection of the domestic sphere in favor of a male- centric arena for constructing masculinity, but with important departures from the project of creating masculine men away from the feminizing influence of women. The Warrener brothers,
protagonists of this Indian adventure, encounter several females who pollute the homosocial universe required by this poetic. Also problematically, the boys slip in and out of disguises with an ease that the novel attributes off-handedly to their youth, but which also indicates a fluidity of selfhood opposing the crystallization of identity that is demanded by Victorian masculinity. As the novel draws to a close, the masculine plot short-circuits and morphs into a marriage plot—an outcome made possible by the presence of female characters. It seems that this boys’ author, who has charged himself with making English boys into men, cannot in the end fully trust to the masculine plot to do the job. In Times of Peril demonstrates that the masculine plot remained an attractive device for the late-Victorians, but one whose limitations could not be ignored, even when given so ideal a stage as the Indian Mutiny, an acceptably homosocial military setting situated in the cultural consciousness of the Victorians as testing ground for British masculinity.
In E. M. Field’s Bryda, a little girl lives through a masculine plot that, like in Henty’s novel, falls apart at the end with a return to the domestic. The Mutiny gives eleven-year-old Bryda Danvers an opportunity for manly adventure that would have remained impossible for her back at home in England, safely and boringly ensconced within the middle-class domesticity of her grandparents’ house. During the chaotic danger of the Mutiny, separated from her family, Bryda demonstrates bravery and mastery of self, accompanied all along by her faithful and handsome Indian surrogate father. However, Bryda returns to female domesticity at the end of the story, instead of making the masculine plot’s requisite full entrance into masculine brotherhood. The very limitations of the masculine plot, that it is a fantasy of man-making and not a reality, allow for a girl protagonist to be its hero. She can prove her masculine virtues without ever being in danger of becoming too manly, both because she is ever constitutionally female, and because, as Sussman asserts, the masculine plot cannot fully achieve its end. Field’s novel takes advantage of both the successes and failures of the masculine plot as a literary technology for producing masculinity.
George Manville Fenn’s Gil the Gunner constitutes the fullest use of a masculine plot among the three children’s adventure novels, and also the fullest demonstration of its inherent
problematics. In this novel, homosocial bonds tilt precariously towards the homoerotic. Young Gil forms intense bonds with two older men in the course of his story, one a British officer and one an Indian rajah. Chaste male-male bonds are integral to the process of constructing masculinity via the masculine plot, but for Fenn’s boy protagonist, the intensity of these two men’s affections begins to erode the boundaries of chastity. All three books—Henty’s, Field’s and Fenn’s—attest to both the usefulness and the limitations of the masculine plot as a narrative device in literature for children, and as a cultural narrative for the making of men. Of the three, Fenn’s Gil the Gunner comprises the most clear demonstration of the masculine plot’s limitations, in that the book vividly manifests the anxious possibility of homoeroticism that lurks behind the necessarily homosocial universe of the masculine plot.
The fantasy of a masculinity made and maintained in the exclusive company of men was either unavailable or temporary for most Victorian men. Public school, university, and a sojourn in the colonies during military service might remove a man from the feminized domestic of home for a while, but unless an early death prevented it, the return to the domestic loomed in the futures of most men. The masculine plot could not really replace the marriage plot in the lives of most middle-class Englishmen. (After all, without the marriage plot, England could not produce new generations of little imperialists.) But the fantasy remained an attractive one, and found a home within the children’s adventure novel, where readers could imaginatively participate in a form of masculine self-fashioning that exiled the prospect of weak, ennervating feminine influence; that valorized masculine reserve and as a result emphasized the depth and power of male energies; and that allowed intense male-male relationships to tiptoe thrillingly along the line between homosociality and homoeroticism.
Chapter One
G. A. Henty: Distorting and Distrusting the Masculine Plot
He is an admirable author to read and to forget: he gave thrills without number and leaves as often as not a real interest in the history of the period in which the book we happen to read is set. He does not stand re-reading, nor the reading of too many of his books, for his plots are unoriginal and repeat themselves in outline with wearisome regularity. You can be quite sure of the same basic situations, the same over-insistence on manliness, patriotism, and ‘the stiff upper lip.’ (83)
—Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales: Children’s Books and Their Authors
George Alfred Henty wrote prolifically in the genre of children’s fiction in the late nineteenth century, producing over 120 books, most of which fell within the genre of boys’ adventure novels. Regardless of their lack of originality, his books enjoyed enormous popularity among Victorian and Edwardian boys, as well as among those boys’ sisters and fathers. In addition to noting the repetitiveness and simplicity of Henty’s plots, both Henty’s contemporaries and his modern critics often posit his work as presenting a simple, unvexed model of masculinity. George Manville Fenn wrote in his biography of Henty that nothing “namby-pamby” appeared in his books, because “he kept them to boy life, and never made his works sickly by the introduction of what an effeminate reader would term the tender passion” (321). Claudia Nelson, in Boys Will Be Girls, contends that “the arrival of G. A. Henty on the literary scene...enthrone[d] macho manliness as the genre’s dominant ethic” (106). Certainly the stiff-upper-lip mentality governs much of Henty’s fiction; a wounded British boy soldier in one of Henty’s novels pluckily declares to his school-friend, “Well, old fellow, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, and you see it’s my case,” and dies with a smile, enacting perhaps the most perfect scene of manly British patriotism one could imagine (Peril 91).
However, as Roger Lancelyn Green’s throwaway acknowledgment of Henty’s “over- insistence on manliness, patriotism, and ‘the stiff upper lip’” (emphasis mine) suggests, masculinity as it appears in Henty’s boys’ novels is not so simple or unshakable as it is commonly made out to be. The masculine plot as defined by Sussman dominates In Times of Peril: the novel’s dual heroes leave the contaminating confines of domesticity behind to undergo tests of masculinity in the homosocial world of imperial war. Guided by both their own father and multiple surrogate father figures, the boys gain masculine wisdom firsthand through their experiences with battle. But through its occasional, striking violations of this method of constructing masculinity, the novel registers anxieties about nineteenth-century masculine identity. The digressions from the masculine plot involve primarily the recurrent donning of disguises, suggesting a fluidity of selfhood and gender, and the contaminating presence of females, who by all rights should be absent from the homosocial landscape of the masculine plot. Most suggestive of the troubled nature of late-nineteenth-century masculinity is that Henty finally abandons the masculine plot in favor of a marriage plot ending. It looks as though this boys’ author cannot count on the masculine plot to fully construct the masculinities of the boy protagonists of In Times of Peril. Instead, he marries them back into the domestic world of the marriage plot, apparently more comfortable with its limitations than with trusting the homosocial world of the masculine plot to make men of them.
The Author Writes His (Imaginary) Boyhood
George Alfred Henty, who self-consciously fashioned himself as a purveyor of manly fiction for boys, himself fell short of his own construction of ideal masculinity, an ideal he returns to over and over in his juvenile novels. Henty’s friend and rival in the boys’ books market, George Manville Fenn, produced the first biography of Henty in 1907, titled George Alfred Henty: the Story of an Active Life. As the title suggests, Fenn’s treatment of the life of Henty emphasizes the man’s professional life, especially his services to the British Empire and work as a war correspondent for the Morning Advertiser and the Standard as a young man. Of Henty’s life before he left England to serve in the Crimea, Fenn gives only a brief and frequently
oddly apologetic account. With palpable reluctance, Fenn tells his readers that Henty had been an unhealthy child, frail and given to writing love poetry, which predictably made him a target for bullies at Westminster School. Fenn wonders at how “strange” it is “to reflect that the big, robust, heavy, manly looking Englishman...was once a puny, sickly boy who was looked upon by his relatives as one who could never by any possibility attain to man’s estate; but so it was” (1- 2). Much of Henty’s later life and his fiction, as well as much of the remainder of Fenn’s biography, seem to make an attempt at erasing the memory of this feminized childhood.
In response to the bullying he met with at school, Henty devoted himself to learning to box and wrestle, skills that he would display more than once during his jaunts around the world. Fenn approvingly recounts an episode in which Henty, acting as foreman at the building of a military railroad, gave an insolent “scoundrel” a “thoroughly solid and manly thrashing...calmly and in cold blood,” thus demonstrating that Henty had become not only a physically powerful man but also had mastered that cardinal virtue of masculinity, self-control (13-14). Again and again Fenn regales his readers with tales of Henty meting out sound thrashings, in a manner that often seems calculated to distract us from the fact that Henty never actually fought as a soldier during his military service. He indeed traveled with the army to the Crimea, Italy, and elsewhere, but as an official of the Purveying Department, surveying hospitals and organizing supplies—not among the fighting ranks. Fenn admits this is a “plodding life...for a military man with all the making in him of a strong, thoughtful soldier, one who would have become the strongest link in the vertebrae of a regiment.Fate, however, did not guide him in that direction” (35). Henty’s
choice to leave the military is appended to an episode in which he thrashes a man for insulting his wife (this marks, by the way, Fenn’s first mention that Henty even has a wife), in what seems yet another effort to shore up the masculinity of a writer whose military work aligns him more closely with Florence Nightingale than with the boy heroes of his novels.
The bulk of the biography Fenn devotes to narrating the grand adventures of Henty as a war correspondent. Of his domestic life, we find very little. In fact, Fenn’s biography often seems to toy with the narrative of Henty’s life in such a way as to make it into a masculine plot,
to present the author as a man always among men. A handful of brief comments leaves us with a shadowy knowledge that Henty had a wife and children, but Fenn entirely elides the death of Henty’s first wife, his second marriage to his housekeeper, and his family’s horror at this union. For this reason a modern Henty scholar, Guy Arnold, calls Fenn’s biography “curiously flat” (3). Arnold’s Held Fast For England: G. A. Henty Imperialist Boys’ Writer fills in some of the gaps left by Fenn, providing a limited account of Henty’s private life, including information about Henty’s wives, children, and extended family. For example, Arnold points out that the recurring pattern of dual, brother protagonists in Henty’s novels may very well be linked to the death of Henty’s brother Frederick after an outbreak of cholera in the Crimea (7). Nevertheless, Arnold can do little to round out the story of Henty’s seemingly flat life; as an adult, Henty intended to keep his private life private, and he succeeded. The boy whose frail body and tender emotions had been displayed and ridiculed in school became a burly man of remarkable reticence, who replaced his own shamefully emasculating childhood with the plucky, manly childhoods of his hundreds of boy protagonists.
Henty dictated his novels to a secretary with astonishing speed, producing as many as six novels in a year. Early on he developed the formulaic plot that would serve him in the great majority of his stories. Settings across the globe and throughout history, stretching back even to ancient Egypt, provide practically the only variable from one Henty novel to the next. Most of the books, though, find their settings in the nineteenth century, in the vast reaches of the British Empire. Accordingly, the modest amount of critical attention that has been afforded to Henty’s work has focused on whether it constitutes imperialist propaganda. In a brief 1985 article, Gail
S. Clark defends Henty against claims that his work represents aggressive imperialist sentiment, showing him to be not a propagandist, but rather a harmless advocate of morality and strength. Likewise, in a 2002 article Brooke Allen recommends Henty’s novels to home-schoolers as a method for teaching the history of empire, going so far as to make claims for Henty’s historical objectivity that anyone who has read his novels would probably find a tad perplexing. She states, for example, that “far from administering a simpleminded dose of imperialist rhetoric, Henty’s
books do indeed prompt young readers to draw their own conclusions rather than simply parrot received opinion” (22). Modern Henty readers would probably find themselves agreeing, instead, with Arnold’s estimation of the author. “[Henty] was a propagandist,” he states simply, “and a highly successful one” (79).
Arnold devotes a chapter to those of Henty’s novels set in India (five for children and one for adults), calling them Henty’s “justification for empire” (100). Two among these, In Times of Peril for children and Rujub the Juggler for adults, structure the adventure around the events of the Mutiny. In Times of Peril: A Tale of India, published in 1881 and only the fifth of Henty’s single volume boys’ novels, centers on one of Henty’s pairs of brother protagonists who, as Blackwood’s reviewer Hilda Gregg points out, “perform deeds of valour, instruct their elders, outwit the enemy, and gain promotion in a miraculously short time, after the manner which endears Mr. Henty to all his youthful readers” (225). The novel not only demonstrates the inevitability of the British triumph over the rebellion, but employs this gender-inflected moment, displaced historically and geographically from 1881 England, to explore a fantasy of male self- fashioning that enacts, violates, and finally discards the masculine plot.
The Masculine Plot in Action and Under Stress
Previous to the publication of In Times of Peril, one Henty novel had drawn criticism from a clergyman because the author has his twelve-year-old boy hero kiss an eleven-year-old girl, and as a result, Henty claimed to have never again included such an episode in another book (George Alfred Henty 321). Yet the adolescent protagonists of In Times of Peril do indeed kiss their sweethearts, something Fenn must have conveniently forgotten when celebrating the lack of anything “sickly,” “effeminate” or “namby-pamby” in Henty’s work. The tenderly romantic kissing does not comprise the only instance within the novel of anxious departure from the version of fully realized masculine identity constructed by the masculine plot. Slipping in and out of a myriad of disguises (more than once female disguises), the boy protagonists demonstrate a patently un-masculine fluidity of identity. They cross-dress and “pass” for natives all across the Indian landscape, fooling peasants, royalty and military commanders alike. Importantly, not all
of the figures they encounter on their romps are male. The presence of females pollutes the pristinely male universe of the masculine plot, imperiling the fragile, developing masculinities of the boy protagonists. Eventually these female presences allow for the uneasy transformation of the masculine plot into a traditional marriage plot.
The novel begins at the bungalow of the Warrener family in the British cantonment at Sandynugghur. Major Warrener’s two sons, Ned and Dick, a soldier and sailor respectively, are the fifteen and sixteen-year-old protagonists of the story. Mrs. Warrener, the narrator matter-of- factly relates in a single sentence, died years before the action of the novel. Thus when we meet our boy protagonists, they have already been distanced somewhat from the domestic by the removal of the mother and their own geographical distance from England, a removal that signals the first steps towards a masculine plot for the boys. The Warrener brothers exemplify the relentless averageness of Henty heroes, boys devoid of interiority and therefore easily inhabited by the consciousness of the reader, so that, as Claudia Nelson says “[i]deally, some sort of imprinting process will take place, and the manliness of the hero will become the manliness of the reader” (107). Many times, while reading In Times of Peril, one forgets which brother is which. The reader has a difficult task in differentiating between the boys not because of some sort of twin-like symbiosis, or even just plain old family resemblance, but because the Henty hero’s most remarkable trait is his lack of remarkable traits.
The opening scene of the novel finds the brothers lounging on the veranda with their sister Kate and cousin Rose, when a couple of family friends, Captains Dunlop and Manners, inform them of two rumors: tomorrow promises a rousing pig hunt, and the natives have grown restless. The latter they know of because of a mysterious circulation of small cakes, an activity known to “portend something serious” (14). The boys, though initially alarmed, easily forget the troubling news in the excitement of that most manly of sports, the hunt. Dick wonders “do you think my father will let me have a spear?,” and one of the captains laughingly speculates that given Dick’s poor performance during the last hunt, he isn’t likely to be allowed an active role in this one; “you would almost certainly stick somebody with your spear,” he says (12). Clearly
Dick has a long way to go yet on his journey to fully realized masculinity. He cannot be trusted to responsibly wield the powerfully phallic spear without being a danger to those around him. Dick must learn masculine control before he can be endowed with masculine power.
A week later, more bad news of mutiny at Barrackpore and Meerut reaches the Warreners. A structural pattern characteristic of Henty novels emerges quickly: the narrative alternates between episodes highlighting the bravery and cunning of the Warrener boys, and extended, tedious recountings of the movements of the English military as they work to suppress the revolt. Major Warrener supplies his children with “Mohammedan” disguises and a skin- staining solution concocted by their faithful native nurse, a staple character in Mutiny fiction for children. Warrener instructs the youths to use the native costumes to escape in the event that the Indian troops of Sandynugghur revolt, which, of course, they do. Ned, Dick, Rose, and Kate get away thanks to Saba, the nurse, who refuses to tell the mutineers in which direction the children have fled, and is bayoneted for her loyalty. Saba, of course, must be dispatched early in the novel so that the boys can remove themselves from all possible mother figures and pursue their masculine development. As the youngsters flee into the countryside, Rose falls ill and the boys leave their sister and cousin in the care of a kindly Hindu family. Now begins the masculine plot in earnest, as the boys have removed themselves from both the domestic scenes of both England and the Indian cantonment, as well as the feminizing company of the girls. Yet just as the masculine plot gets under way, the first chink in the incipient armor of masculine identity shows. The boys embark on their great masculinizing adventure not dressed as good, hearty English boys on the path to manliness, but instead in the guise of the persistently feminized native.
Boys, Disguise and Masculinity
The disguises provided to the boys by their father are only the first in a long procession of disguises, including many female costumes and one eminently memorable bear-suit, that the Warreners don in the course of the novel to survive life-threatening situations. They obtain their second set of disguises, “Hindoo” in style this time, from the sympathetic peasant who takes the girls into his home. He makes a point of remarking that “Englishmen could not do this [pass as
Hindu]...too much leg, too much arm, too much width of shoulders; but boys are thinner, and no one will notice the difference” (49). The novels thus attributes the ease with which the boys pass in their disguises to the fact that they have not reached physical maturity. Though this explanation, echoed by several other figures in the novel, hinges on a difference in size between boys and men, the boys’ knack for disguise has less to do with bulk and more to do with the undefined, fluid identity of youths who have yet to achieve full masculinity.
According to nineteenth-century formulations, masculinity requires a solidity of identity, an unchanging, well-defined self. Sussman identifies the central Victorian metaphor of masculinity as one in which the naturally unstable internal energies that define maleness are stabilized through self-discipline. This process culminates in a strictly regulated, unified masculine self. The Warrener boys’ ability to successfully assume alternate identities, especially female identities, exhibits an indefiniteness of selfhood that precludes solid masculinity. In his biography, Fenn betrays a defensive anxiety, presumably shared by many of Henty’s other readers, about enjoying, as reader, these games of dress-up amidst macho adventure: “[Henty’s] boys were fighting boys, and very manly, full, as he termed it, of pluck; and though he dressed them up and carried them through peril and adventure galore, it was all good honest excitement, even if here and there too bright in hue” (321). The overly bright hue of Fenn’s excitement (which cannot be so good and honest if he must insist it is good and honest) at reading about dressed-up boys placed in extreme danger suggests that these episodes of impersonation under duress are not merely accidental lapses in the masculine plot, some sort of oversight of Henty’s born of carelessness. For that section of Henty’s readership made up of adult males, the confluence of disguise and danger provides a vicarious thrill. Identifying with the disguised and imperiled boy protagonists enables Victorian men to participate in both a delicious, imaginative dissolution of selfhood impossible for a man who wished to claim masculine status, and a protected departure from the sometimes stifling security and monotony of their lives of commercial productivity and sentimental domesticity in England. For the reader Henty had in
mind when writing, the growing English boy, the transgression of identity modeled in Ned and Dick’s easy use of disguises at least fails to provide a proper representation of becoming manly.
Ned and Dick cannot achieve their full masculinity by the end of the novel if they go on traipsing about in costume. Their father registers anxiety about this issue halfway through the novel when he nervously asks the boys, currently dressed as Hindu women courtesy of a friendly ranee, “Can’t you cast off these women’s clothes?” (131). The brothers are not allowed to rejoin the army ranks until they scrounge up some manly outfits. Major Warrener’s rejection of his sons as they stand before him in female dress—a rejection spoken in a rather ritualistic manner— followed by his acceptance of them back into the all-male community of the military ranks after they have shed their female costumes, enacts an important part of the masculine plot as outlined by Sussman. He states that the “achievement of manhood involves the rejection of the female or mother, often figured by the casting off of female clothing, and bonding with the father.This
process of bonding involves, first, ritualized rejection by the father, then acceptance” (47). Yet this ritual of rejection and acceptance between Major Warrener and his sons occurs only halfway through the novel, and importantly does not mark the last time that the boys assume alternate identities through disguise. Ned and Dick cannot be said to have crystallized their manhood until they settle permanently into the prescribed uniforms of soldier and sailor, abandoning their considerable talents for disguise, however useful it may have been to retain mutable identities during their perilous adventure.
The nature of the last of the boys’ disguises seems calculated to make the assuming of alternative identities seem a less-than-desirable activity both to the Warreners and to the reader. In the midst of a battle in enemy territory, Dick kills a filthy wanderer—a fakir who has assaulted Ned—and the fakir’s pet bear. While Ned lies unconscious, Dick quickly concocts a plan for escape. They must have disguises, as they are surrounded by enemy soldiers who will surely discover them at any minute, so Dick skins the bear, scalps the fakir, waits for his brother to come to, and imparts to Ned his plan. Though it takes “a great effort to overcome his first sensation of disgust,” Ned wears the “wig” (and some artfully applied mud) and Dick wears the
bear (189). After a few days of traveling quite literally in someone else’s skin, the boys are relieved enough to return to their good English uniforms that they never don another disguise, and the reader is quite likely glad of it.
Men, Disguise and Masculinity
The inverse relationship of skill in disguise to degree of achieved masculinity appears again in Henty’s adult Mutiny novel, Rujub the Juggler, published twelve years after Peril. In this novel, however, success at disguising oneself figures not as a happy consequence of the inherent lack of masculinity in boyhood—which looks forward to a never-doubted, fully constructed masculine identity in adulthood—but as a useful byproduct of a tragically flawed and seemingly never-to-be-achieved masculinity in an adult male protagonist.
The hero of Rujub, Ralph Bathurst, harbors a terrible secret, and his struggle with the shame it engenders shapes a Mutiny novel much less adventure-driven than Peril, in which the Mutiny only gets going on page 152. As the Publishers’ Introduction to the edition published by
M. A. Donohue of Chicago (most likely a “pirated” edition) explains:
Strange as it may seem, the hero of the tale is a natural-born coward, who cannot stand the noise of gunfire. He realizes his shortcomings, and they are frequently brought home to him through the taunts of his fellow soldiers. A doctor proves that the dread of noise is hereditary, but this only adds to the young soldier’s misery. To make himself brave he rushes to the front in a most desperate fight, and engages in scout work which means almost certain death. In the end he masters his fear, and gives a practical lesson of what stern and unbending will- power can accomplish. (iv)
After reading this summary, one needn’t bother with the book, except for the sake of the romantic (marriage) plot, which actually dominates the text though the above note elides it entirely. Gregg, the Blackwood’s reviewer who praised the dashing boy protagonists of Peril, in the same article pans Henty for “thrust[ing] upon us” Rujub’s decidedly un-dashing, unmanned hero, “the unfortunate Ralph Bathurst” (225). Her bafflement clear, she declares, “It is difficult even for the reader to remain in sympathy with this luckless young man when his peculiar malady has overpowered him several times at the most critical moments” (225). Bathurst does
indeed stand alone among Henty heroes, separated by a seemingly congenital femininity. Fenn must have forgotten about him in order to report that Henty “had a horror of a lad who displayed any weak emotion, shrank from shedding blood, or winced at any encounter” (334). Bathurst does more than wince at dangerous encounters; he is reduced to a sort of male hysteria, paralyzed, shaking, and utterly without control of himself.
Importantly, though, Bathurst’s sub-masculine status enables him, like the Warrener boys, to assume disguises that would be impossible for the fully masculine characters in the novel. While a large group of British men and women defend their besieged fortress against hordes of surrounding mutineers, Bathurst twice disguises himself in native costume and slips out to gather intelligence and negotiate for assistance. Though he cannot do what a man can do and fight, he can do what a man cannot so easily do—assume an alternate identity. However, as he steadily overcomes his unmanning fear over the course of the novel, and his masculinity begins to solidify, it becomes more difficult for Bathurst to don disguises. Bathurst’s friend Rujub describes the third and last disguise, used to penetrate an enemy prison and rescue Bathurst’s future bride Isobel—a much more manly activity than spying—as that of a rough warrior class of native, necessary because Bathurst is (suddenly, despite the fact that when the novel began he was full-grown) too “big and strong” to pass in any other costume (308).
Though Bathurst’s skill at disguise echoes that of the Warrener brothers, one suspects that the adult male readers who experienced a vicarious thrill while reading about Ned and Dick dressed as Hindu women took less pleasure from reading about Bathurst’s moments of impersonation. For one thing, as indicated by Gregg’s disgust with Bathurst’s “malady” and Fenn’s insistence that readers come to Henty for “bold, straightforward” young men, not “milksops,” Henty’s Victorian and Edwardian readers most likely did not identify closely with Bathurst, as they did with the Warreners (226, 333). To identify with Ned and Dick is to be a boy again. To identify with Ralph is something else altogether, something deeply threatening. Ralph Bathurst is the hero of a marriage plot, one so invested in the romantic narrative that the story often comes to us via the point-of-view of Isobel, and his lack of masculinity comes from inside
himself. Heroes of a (mostly) masculine plot, Ned and Dick Warrener face threats to their masculinity that are either temporary (they will grow out of the fluidity of self that makes them so successful at disguise) or external, such as the intrusion of women into the homosocial world of the masculine plot.
Women Where There Should Be None
Not weighed down by any such shameful defect as burdens Ralph Bathurst, the freewheeling Warrener boys of In Times of Peril ramble over the Indian landscape and manage to participate in every major battle following the revolt at Meerut, thinking little of danger and enjoying themselves with the “happy recklessness of boys” (54). Finding opportunities to prove their manliness at every turn, the boys grow increasingly “excited by the thought” of having the “power to fight in defence of their sovereign’s dominions and of the helpless women and children” (64). Periodically throughout the adventure they reunite with their father, who consistently offers praise, manly wisdom, and the chaste male-male physicality that Sussman identifies as crucial to the masculine plot. For example, early on in the adventure, the boys discover the camp in which mutinous Sepoys hold Major Warrener captive. As Dick frees his father inside a pitch-dark tent surrounded by the enemy, the boy cannot resist falling upon his father’s neck and “kissing him with passionate delight” (56). Many surrogate father figures appear as well, including such celebrated British military heroes as General Nicholson and General Havelock, who honors the boys with a dangerous secret assignment only they can accomplish because only they can pass in any disguise. Fighting at the side of British soldiers, the boys immerse themselves in the homosocial world of the military.
Yet between epic battles, the boys’ jaunts across the Indian countryside bring them into contact with women that shatter the strictly male universe of the masculine plot. These dangerous feminine influences include a ranee who clothes them in women’s dress. The threateningly flirtatious ranee praises British manliness—”They are men, the English sahibs,” she declares, and “How brave you English boys are”—but teases Ned and Dick in an unmanning register (116, 118). “You are only a boy,” she taunts Ned, and later scolds Dick, calling him an
“impudent boy” (117, 119). Even worse, after they assume the womanly dress, she exclaims, “You make very pretty girls” (146). Dick instantly develops a boyish but dangerous attraction to this sensual, alluring Indian woman, whom he calls (boyishly) a “brick” and (dangerously) a “darling” (117, 119). When she “coquettishly” offers her hand, a “little hand whose size and shape an Englishwoman might have envied,” and both boys kiss it—though Dick with more “heartiness”—she is clearly presented as a fascinating alternative to a good English sweetheart (119). When Dick reports the episode in which “an Indian lady had succored them” to Major Warrener later, he hints that “at the end of the war it was probable that Ned would present his father with a daughter-in-law” (131). The ranee’s polluting female presence disrupts the masculine plot and jeopardizes the formation of both of the boys’ manhoods.
Henty does provide Ned and Dick with ample tests of their masculinity which they pass with flying colors. Under a variety of circumstances they slaughter a respectable number of hostile Indians, beginning with a native trooper Ned shoots to protect his sister and cousin. They carry important messages across the Indian plains for generals, cunningly eluding capture.
Present for a portion of the siege of Lucknow, the boys spike the guns of a battery from which the opposition has terrorized the holed-up British, among whom Ned and Dick each find a sweetheart, sisters Nelly and Edith Hargreaves. Thus the Lucknow episode provides not only an opportunity for an important test of masculinity but also presents a further deviation from the masculine plot—more vexing female presences. Weaving into a narrative of dashing adventure providing further proof of the boys’ masculine courage, we find a distracting romantic subplot with the boys uncertain and sulking over girl troubles, or, even worse, enjoying feminine affection.
Dick’s sweetheart, Nelly, proves most detrimental to his masculine growth, relentlessly teasing him in an infantilizing register. Upon first meeting the Warreners, she exclaims “why, you look to me to be quite boys” (163). Worse, she clearly wants Dick to remain a boy: “If you could always remain as you are now..., just an impudent midshipman, I should not mind it. Do you know, Dick, they give terriers gin to prevent their growing; don’t you think you might stop
yourself? It is quite sad...to think that you may grow up into a great lumbering man” (234). Understandably “indignant” at Nelly’s unmanning treatment, Dick recuperates the masculinity he has lost in this exchange by returning to the chaste male-male contact sacred to the masculine plot (234). That is to say, he marches right off to the next page and into a rough-and-tumble, “light-hearted” game of chase with a fellow midshipman, their dodging, rushing, tackling, grappling play warming the hearts of the old “tars” who hear their shouts of laughter (235).
Even the brothers’ most heroic act in the book suffers from the de-masculinizing taint of these female pollutants. Though none of the military men of the British fortress dared think it possible, Ned and Dick successfully organize and execute the audacious gun-spiking operation, which involves crossing the no-man’s-land between the besieged and the besiegers, entering enemy territory, sabotaging heavily guarded weaponry, and then (perhaps most impressive) getting away. General Inglis, the British commander of Lucknow, praises the “young gentlemen” for their “gallant action,” which exemplifies the courage and daring that define English pluck (226). Immediately following the sending up of three cheers for the gallant lads, however, the boys receive the infamous (namby-pamby?) kisses, and Dick’s sweetheart calls him a “darling boy,” mitigating the gain in masculinity he has just accomplished (228).
These romantic entanglements impede the progress of a masculine plot that requires an all-male universe for complete effectiveness. After telling the tale of their brave attack on the battery to a regiment of cavalry under General Havelock, Ned and Dick are declared “heroes of the day” (200). Yet still they regard their adventures as the “immense lark” of “two schoolboys,” not as the manly deeds of men; they remain the “darling boys” their sweethearts call them, as though the girls’ act of labeling them less than manly is enough to make them so (200). To make any real progress towards developing their masculine identities, the boys must leave these problematic ties to females and reenter the wholly male world of the proper masculine plot.
From Masculine Plot to Marriage Plot
As In Times of Peril draws towards its climax, the Warrener boys escape both Lucknow and the feminine influence of the Hargreaves sisters. The boys become increasingly
differentiated from one another, Ned remaining with the army and Dick attaching himself to a naval brigade. Though they still fight more or less side-by-side, Dick clearly emerges as the leader, not only of his brother, but of the men around him. He leaves behind the unconscious, joyful larking about of boyhood and begins to think seriously and strategically about the war. In fact, he saves his father, brother, and Major Warrener’s regiment from death at the hands of a roving band of Sepoys because he has the foresight to plan a possible escape route from a temple in which they camp for the night. However, only at the very end of the novel do the boys receive the appellation “manly,” and oddly this honor occurs in conjunction with their father’s reflection that the boys would do well to marry their sweethearts, Nelly and Edith Hargreaves, as the Hargreaves’ father was a “very wealthy man” (247). Dick’s arrival at “manhood” gets a single mention, and then in the course of an unmanly display of emotion; the narrator claims “it is doing no injustice to Dick’s manhood to say that he shed many tears” upon parting with his father (278).
The boys’ masculine identities, though apparently gained, are not sealed in the characteristic manner of the masculine plot. Instead, in a final violation of the masculine plot, the novel ends in a flurry of marriages, including a double wedding for Ned and Dick and the Hargreaves girls, and a return to domestic life in England. The novel closes with the prettiest little domestic scene imaginable:
General Warrener [formerly Major] and his wife [formerly Mrs. Hargreaves] are still alive. Major Warrener [Ned] has a seat in Parliament; and Captain Warrener [Dick], who never went to sea after his marriage, lives in a pretty house down at Ryde, where his yacht is known as one of the best and fastest cruisers on the coast. At Christmas the whole party—the Dunlops [Rose and family], Manners [Kate and family] and Warreners—meet; and an almost innumerable troop of children of all ages assemble at the spacious mansion of General Warrener in Berkeley Square, and never fail to have a long talk of adventures that they went through in the times of peril. (280)
If we could agree with Kimberly Reynolds, who states that “masculinity is a given—an irrefutable quality—in Henty’s heroes,” perhaps the appending of the marriage plot to the
masculine plot could be forgiven, as the boys would have been always already going to succeed in attaining their masculinity (76). Yet given the kissing, the dressing up as women, and the slippery identity implied in the assuming of disguises, their masculinity does not seem to have been an irrefutable quality. The shell game that Henty plays with the idioms of masculinity here—now you have the masculine plot, now I give you the marriage plot—seems a dangerous one, if we appreciate the deep anxiety of the Victorians when confronted with cracks in masculine identity.
Perhaps for Henty, a man whose own childhood feminization heightened his investment in claiming a fully recognized masculinity, the all-male world of the masculine plot, and the tendency for its homosocial bonds to shade into the homoerotic, seemed too precarious in the end. One needn’t look hard to discover that Henty obsessively revisits and revises his own journey to full masculine status through his books’ heroes. Ralph Bathurst, stricken with a shameful constitutional weakness that he cannot help, resembles a certain Westminster boy prone to illness and long periods of bed rest. Dick Warrener, the young sailor who becomes the focus of a book that began with two indistinguishable brothers and, as the last paragraph of the novel tells us, in his later years owns a fast yacht, seems strangely reminiscent of a certain sea- loving yachter who lost a brother but found a solid masculine role for himself as an adventurer, war reporter, and author of boys’ books (280). If we agree with Fenn, who posits that Henty “painted his own boyhood in all—the boy—the young man as he wished him to be, and the man,” then perhaps Henty has too much at stake personally in these novels to make the masculine plot solely responsible in forming his boys into men (333-4).
Of course Henty’s dilemma in dealing with the masculine plot is not just Henty’s dilemma. Unlike the marriage plot, which draws its construction of masculinity from the real world into the fictional world, the masculine plot is only ever a fantasy—a fiction. In scripting the masculine plot, writers like Carlyle and the later adventure novelists indulged in a fantasy of complete removal from the taint of female sexuality and its tendency to, as they saw it, make men less manly. But the fantasy could not translate to the realities of Victorian England, where
women and male-female sexuality could scarcely be avoided for long. The public school, the university, time spent in military service—these may provide temporarily the homosocial world of the masculine plot, but a return to the domestic was virtually inevitable. Because Henty had laid for himself the task of making boys into men with his novels, he must face up to the fact that the masculine plot could not be depended on to construct real-world masculinity. The much more traditional style of masculinization available in the marriage plot provides a safer, more established route to manliness, one which Henty could fall back on after a long foray into the world of the masculine plot in In Times of Peril.
Chapter Two
E. M. Field’s Bryda: Girl Hero, Masculine Plot
In the same Blackwood’s article in which she praises Henty’s In Times of Peril, Gregg notes that E. M. Field’s 1890 children’s adventure novel Bryda: A Story of the Indian Mutiny gives a “wonderfully complete picture of [the Mutiny] from the limited standpoint of a child” (225). Shailendra Dhari Singh, in a 1973 book-length survey of Mutiny fiction, echoes Gregg in commenting that this “simple story of a girl” gives a “sympathetic and touching account of Indian life” (71). Thus both critics fix their attention not on Field’s plot or characters, but rather on her faithful and compassionate portrait of the events and context of the Indian uprising. One cannot help but wonder whether these two writers dismiss the novel as “simple” and “limited” primarily because its plot centers on a girl protagonist. Though both critics discuss the heroism of the Warrener brothers with relish, neither Singh nor Gregg provides any comment on Bryda Danvers, Field’s child heroine, aside from Singh’s (as we shall see) confounding assertion that “Bryda's experiences are not harrowing either for herself or her friend Lottie” (71). Neither critic notes the similarity of the plot of Bryda to the plot of In Times of Peril, a similarity that points to the remarkable paradox of Field’s book: in Bryda, a female protagonist stars in a masculine plot.
In Boys Will Be Girls, Claudia Nelson argues that in late Victorian children’s fiction, “the excessively feminine girl became a figure to distrust” because she seems to discard “natural childhood in order to conform to the unrealistic ideals of the grown-up world.” (26). This little girl, who impresses adults with her precocious maturity, who primps and preens and fantasizes about her future courtship, marriage, and adult domestic life, seems hardly a child at all.
Concomitantly, Nelson asserts, “the boyish heroine became a fixture in girls' fiction” (26). The
fictional model of girlhood became the tomboy. In this view of things, “natural childhood” means boyhood, even when the child in question happens to be female.5
In Bryda, Field exploits the masculine plot’s insufficiency as a literary technique for constructing masculine identity, in party by giving us both the “excessively feminine” Lottie and the “boyish heroine” Bryda. Thus the novel acts as a comparison of the “bad” female child and the “good” female child. Bryda’s tomboyish disposition doesn’t limit itself, however, to emulating the raucous play and spiritedness of boydom. In this book, the little girl lives through a story structured by the conventions of a masculine plot—the departure from the domestic, the identification with the father figure, the tests of masculine character. However, as with In Times of Peril, the masculine plot again short circuits at the end of Bryda with a return to the domestic scene. In the case of Bryda, the return to the domestic acts as a final affirmation of the girl heroine’s inescapable femaleness, proof that the masculine plot of her story cannot and does not make a man of her. Because the masculine plot fails to attain its goal of masculinization, it can be employed in a book with a girl protagonist in order that she might have an opportunity for manly adventure and thus prove her masculine virtues without ever being in danger of losing her innate feminine identity.
The Indian Adventure
As the novel opens, ten-year-old Bryda Danvers, who has lived until now with her grandparents in England, travels to the Indian village of Dakpur to join her parents, Colonel and Mrs. Danvers. After only a short time in Dakpur, Bryda declares that “there could be no country so lovely as India, or so pleasant to live in” (15). Only two pages later, however, the narrator foreshadows the coming Mutiny: “a deep hatred of the English, and of their rule in India, had been for a long time burning in the hearts of the natives” (17). The Sepoys of Dakpur revolt, and, after a brief siege, Bryda and the other villagers leave for Rungpur, where a garrison of English
5 Catherine Robson, in Men in Wonderland, supports this notion when she contends that the death of girl-worship in the late-nineteenth century cleared the way for the boy to become “childhood’s supreme representative” (193).
soldiers will protect them. Fleeing Dakpur by boat, the villagers come under attack, and a faithful servant, Wazir, saves Bryda and her friend, Lottie Sykes, by swimming them ashore and hiding them in the jungle. Separated soon after, Lottie and Bryda embark on very different adventures. Lottie becomes the plaything of a ranee, and Bryda, after a life-threatening illness, helps rescue a child widow from the awful fate of suttee. When the girls reunite, more adventures ensue, including an encounter with murderous Thugs and the indispensable tiger hunt. The novel closes with Bryda back home in England, comfortably surrounded by her family and friends, who miraculously all survived the Mutiny. Mrs. Brooke, the housekeeper “who has never been further than some five miles from her native village in all her life,” observes sagely that Bryda has come home “sadder and wiser,” much like the English people after the Mutiny (235).
Bryda’s Masculine Plot
The masculine plot in Bryda begins as Sussman reasons all masculine plots must—with the removal of the hero(ine) from the emasculating taint of English domesticity. This novel characterizes the threatening domestic scene not only as a danger to masculine virility but also even more dramatically as a scene dominated by death, and therefore the destruction of all virility. Bryda’s grandparents have died, and their death releases her from entrapment in the morbid stillness of the Summerton house where she has grown up. The opening paragraph solidly aligns the domestic with a static lifelessness:
It was very quiet in the old house at Summerton. It always had been quiet there since Bryda Danvers had known anything about it, for the house was old, and almost every person and everything in it was old. The oak furniture was quite black with age, the drawing-room chairs were covered with chintz, of which the very last bit was sold fifty or sixty years ago. The servants were old; an elderly cat, who had had so many families of kittens that one never could count them, lay on the costly old rug by the old-fashioned fireplace. Bryda had more than once wondered whether the flies on the windows and walls were the same flies year after year, they seemed to crawl so slowly. (1)
Clearly Bryda must escape this stifling bourgeois interior; its heavy furniture and frozen time will suck the life out of her otherwise. When the second paragraph begins with almost exactly
the same phrase as the first, “It was quiet in the old house,” the repetition provokes something akin to horror (1). One almost expects to find the entire first paragraph repeated, as though as reader one has become trapped in the eternal moment just portrayed.
Bryda escapes the “heavy stillness” that hangs over Summerton, and thankfully for the reader, in sailing to India she also leaves behind the saccharine sentimentality of her grandparents’ deaths: “one after the other they had lain down and closed their eyes quietly, to open them in that far Land of which they had read and talked to each other, and sometimes to little Bryda, with cheerful hope for so long” (2). The move to India, though certainly progress in the direction towards the masculine plot, does not fully remove Bryda from the enervation of domestic life. The English residents of Dakpur maintain a domesticity that echoes the initial scene at the Summerton house. As the narrator describes a typical afternoon in the cantonment, during which everyone sleeps through the hottest hours of the Indian day, the connection forged with the deathlike domesticity of Summerton induces horror once again:
Everyone was asleep, or, at least, lying down.A fly was creeping up the wall
opposite Bryda’s sofa; he crept so very, very slowly. Was he asleep, too? and was he walking in a dream? Or was it all a dream? and would Bryda wake to find herself at Summerton, with flies crawling, crawling—like—this—oh——? (14)
Bryda must escape this domestic scene too. Just as for the Warrener boys of In Times of Peril, the revolt of the cantonment’s Indian troops provides Bryda with an exodus from this Anglo- Indian domestic scene, and launches her into the world of the masculine plot. Also like the Warrener brothers, Bryda must further separate herself from contaminating female presences, and thus her eventual separation from Lottie in the jungle.
The masculine plot, Sussman claims, must provide its hero with father figures who impart crucial masculine wisdom and guidance. Bryda has first her own father to fill this important role. After Colonel Danvers entrusts his daughter with the task of protecting her mother from upsetting information, he draws Bryda into an embrace, “and she lay[s] with her head on his broad shoulder, feeling so safe there” (39). This act of chaste physicality following
Bryda’s acceptance of the responsibility of shielding her mother enacts a ritual Sussman identifies as critical to the masculine plot. Importantly, in agreeing to protect Mrs. Danvers, Bryda and her father have also excluded her from their bond, and of course exclusion of the mother is a key condition of the masculine plot as well. Bryda’s father entreats her to be a “little soldier” and soothes her anxiety at being unable, as a ten-year-old girl, to fight if “real enemies” threaten: “A soldier’s duty is not always to fight,” he assures her (40).
Later, when the attack on the boats separates Bryda and her father, Wazir, a native servant of the Sykes family, becomes the girl’s surrogate father. Though much English discourse on Indian males relentlessly feminizes them, Field portrays Wazir as a paragon of masculinity.
We first meet Wazir when Lottie’s father beats him for forgetting to bring his music to a dinner party at the Danvers house:
Captain Sykes lost his temper, seized a stick that chanced to lie near, and began to beat and kick the poor servant, calling him all manner of bad names, and seeming to be in a furious passion. The servant bore it all meekly, and was at last sent off to run as fast as possible for the music, while Captain Sykes went into the house again, as cheerful and as pleasant as if he had never been disturbed. (18)
Captain Sykes’s inability to control his temper marks him as an unmanly man, but Wazir emerges from this humiliating situation to prove himself more masculine than his master, for he masters his own indignation at this cruel treatment and expresses it only later when among friends. During the exchange between discontented Indian servants that Bryda overhears outside her window, Wazir speaks of his wish that his fellow Indians would act as “men, and not beasts of the field” and throw off the oppressive yoke of English rule (22). He possesses a masculine beauty and a powerful physicality; though the other natives squat, “tall, splendid-looking” Wazir stands upright, looking “picturesque” with his “blazing” eyes (21). More than once the narrator describes his face as handsome.
In addition to his self-restraint and masculine physique, Wazir displays the bravery and integrity of a manly man, all of which make him a suitable surrogate father to Bryda. They first form an attachment to one another when Bryda comes upon a feverish Wazir at Lottie’s birthday
picnic. She personally covers the sick man with cloths to shield him from the hot sun before seeking help from some of the other servants. The physical act of kindness cements a bond between them that Wazir honors by vowing to help Bryda when the Mutiny reaches Dakpur. When the English inhabitants of Dakpur attempt to flee by boat, Indian soldiers stage a slaughter from which Bryda and Lottie escape only through the courage of Wazir, who swims to the opposite shore hauling both the girls through the water while under fire. After hiding in the jungle, Bryda and Wazir embrace in another instance of the ritualistic physical affection the masculine plot enacts between the hero and the father figure. Even when captured by the Rajah of Bundi, Wazir manages to slip away and return to Bryda, watching over her during her recovery from fever, and keeping her safe until her Uncle Jack can come for her. Though originally a proponent for Indian rebellion against English rule, Wazir faithfully honors his vow to Bryda.
The hero of the masculine plot must pass tests of masculinity. For the Warrener brothers of Henty’s novel, the disabling of the enemy’s guns comprised the most important masculinity test, since that single act saved the lives of so many women and children trapped within the walls of Lucknow. Likewise, Bryda helps save a child bride from a horrific death on her boy husband’s funeral pyre. After her ordeal in the jungle and the excitement of being told by an itinerant
snake-charmer that her parents survived the massacre on the river, Bryda falls ill for many weeks. A kind household in an unnamed Hindu village takes her in and helps care for her as she lies at the brink of death, fighting off a fever. When the fever breaks and Bryda regains consciousness, she still needs bed rest to recover her strength. In the meantime she acquaints herself with the two children in the household, a boy of seven and a girl of ten named Kaminee. Astounded, Bryda observes the preparation for and execution of the much-abused Kaminee’s wedding to a haughty Brahmin boy of the village, a match for which Kaminee has little feeling except the delight at getting to be dressed up for the wedding, but which will raise the status of her father in the village greatly.
But alas, just days after the marriage ceremony Kaminee’s new boy husband dies of cholera. Wazir hurriedly escorts Bryda out of the village on mysterious pretenses, and then confesses to his young friend that Kaminee will that day be made to throw herself on the funeral pyre of her husband, in an ancient (and by this time mostly defunct) Hindu tradition called suttee. Horrified, Bryda gives her fullest show of emotion in the novel, weeping “long and bitterly, imploring Wazir to take her away from this dreadful heathen place” (197). Uncle Jack, however, appears suddenly (and with all the magically perfect timing of a knight in shining armor) to sweep up both Bryda and Kaminee and whisk them away from the harrowing scene. So though Bryda doesn’t physically save the damsel in distress, her presence in Kaminee’s village is the only reason the poor girl survives, and Bryda’s affection for the child convinces Uncle Jack to negotiate with Kaminee’s parents to let her join Bryda’s family at once. Certainly this routing through Uncle Jack’s adult masculine power mitigates the triumph of Bryda’s masculine test, but the episode seems to function structurally in the same manner as the Warreners’ spiking of the guns outside Lucknow.
Uncle Jack does not actually function as one of the surrogate fathers of the masculine plot. In fact, his role seems to be one uniquely tailored to the central alteration this book makes to the masculine plot—its placement of a girl hero as protagonist. In many ways, Uncle Jack acts as Bryda’s other self. On the voyage from England to India, he alternately acts as her conscience—as when he reminds her of her duty to act as comfort to her mother—and her playfully childlike companion. He teases her in a generally avuncular manner, but he does not condescend to her or moralize at her. They seem to act as a pair, complementing one another.
Bryda’s company allows Uncle Jack to lay aside his serious adult worries and military demeanor and enjoy himself, and Uncle Jack’s company provides Bryda with someone to engage in manly activity on her behalf, whether bartering in the bazaar or rescuing a child-bride. The things she simply cannot do, even as protagonist of her own masculine plot, Uncle Jack steps in to do for her. His masculine agency can take over where the little girl’s runs out. Thus he can swoop in and perform the task of rescue that Bryda’s presence in Kaminee’s village makes possible,
joining his physical power to Bryda’s moral power so that the masculine test can be passed successfully.
Though Bryda herself passes masculine tests that have to do primarily with just being at the right place at the right time (as in Kaminee’s rescue) or endurance (continuing on bravely in her search for her parents after having been abandoned in the jungle and suffering a severe illness) instead of physical acts of valor, Bryda’s story does contain a handful of models of physically powerful women and women who take on the roles of men. The first of these appears in the book courtesy of a tale told by an elephant-driver (or mahout) to Bryda. The mahout recounts the story of an elephant belonging to the King of Oude who, in his rage at being eluded by another elephant with whom he fights, turns on his mahout, and “put[s] his heavy foot on the man, crushing him to death in a moment” (79). When the man’s grieving widow comes forth, child in arms, to reproach the elephant, he hangs his head in shame and allows the woman, “by the king’s command, to mount to her poor husband’s place” (79). Thereafter the widow acts as the elephant’s driver, a vocation unheard of for a woman. The second example of a woman whose vocation normally belongs to males of considerable masculine power, a guard in the Rajah of Bundi’s camp, appears in Lottie’s tale of captivity. When the Lottie attempts to escape the tent of the Rajah’s women at night, she encounters a “strange figure,” “that of a woman, and yet [wearing] a sort of military uniform” (164). This strange figure identifies herself as a woman- soldier set to guard the tent of the ranee and see that no one comes or goes without the Rajah’s permission. Of course, importantly in both these cases, the powerful women wield their power courtesy of a ruling male’s authority, executing the commands of a true masculine power. But they still demonstrate a palpable yearning for female-wielded masculine power that Bryda shares with the text as a whole.
In the end, however, the book does not grant Bryda the masculine status towards which the masculine plot moves. The impossibility of Bryda’s reaching full masculine status seems to have nothing to do with her spirit or inner self, and everything to do with her body. However brave a little soldier Bryda strives to be, she will always remain constitutionally female. Her
body betrays her weakness even when her spirit remains indefatigable. Despite the repugnance Bryda expresses towards hysterical behavior early in the book, she involuntarily falls into swooning states more than once in the novel, implying that mere willpower cannot master her body’s innate female hysteria. When Bryda comes to after her first fainting episode, Lottie questions her immediately about the experience:
“How did you like fainting?” asked Lottie...
“Did I faint?” said Bryda. “Then I didn’t like it a bit, and I shall never do it again if I can help it.”
“But if you can’t help it?” said Lottie. “I shall try to help it,” said Bryda. (86)
Trying counts for something, but Bryda does indeed faint or “half-faint” a number of times in moments of great excitement. The most striking proof of her constitutional weakness arrives, of course, in the form of her long illness in the middle of the book, and in her final acceptance that she cannot ever wield her father’s sword against her enemies. “[We] cannot all lay down our lives,” Bryda says sadly, after hearing the tales of physical bravery enacted by men during the Mutiny (229). Bryda could not physically save Kaminee alone; she could only, by her presence in her friend’s village, and her affection for the girl, provide the opportunity for Uncle Jack to rescue Kaminee from death by fire. The masculine plot, it seems, cannot overcome the fact that Bryda’s body stands between her and the masculine status she longs for.
The “Bad” Girl and the “Good” Girl
Though constitutionally incapable of achieving full manliness, Bryda can at least be more manly than other little girls. Bryda’s boyishness defines itself against Lottie’s excessively feminine behavior. In the beginning, these two very different girls do not care much for each other. Bryda, the narrator explains, thinks Lottie “horrid,” but it is the “wish of Bryda’s mother that the little girls should be friends” (38). As Bryda and her Uncle Jack shop in the bazaar of Dakpur for the silver filigree jewelry Bryda wants to give Lottie as a birthday present, Uncle Jack remarks, “Then you are very fond of Lottie Sykes?” (32). “Oh, no,” replies Bryda, “I don’t like her at all, though I have tried very hard” (32). Uncle Jack prompts Bryda to elaborate on her
disdain for Lottie: “She is so silly! She cries over everything: if she tears her frock, or does some such thing that doesn’t matter at all. And all she cares for is to grow up quickly, so that she may marry a Rajah, who will give her a necklace of pearls as big as a turkey’s eggs” (32). The lack of self-control Lottie exhibits by crying publicly and openly, and her romantic dreams of fairy- tale love and luxurious domesticity provide the chief contrasts to Bryda, who cries in private (or not at all if she can help it) and dreams of being a brave warrior.
Although “a week and two days younger” than Bryda, Lottie displays all the traits of precocious womanliness that Nelson suggests would disqualify her for the status of celebrated childhood in the last decades of the nineteenth century (32). Lottie patterns herself after the model of womanhood provided by her mother, a nervous woman given to hysterics. “My nerves are weak, like Mamma’s,” Lottie declares (45). In fact, when Bryda arrives at Lottie’s home for the birthday party, she finds Lottie lying limply in an armchair. Her father has just come home with alarming news about the newest rumors of uprisings among the natives throughout the country, at which Mrs. Sykes “went into hysterics” and Lottie “fainted away” (43). When Lottie asks Bryda if she has ever fainted, Bryda replies, “never,” and then declares, “a little impatiently,” “I don’t at all want to try” (43). Bryda disdains the hysterical behavior of which Lottie seems rather proud because she herself values the masculine virtue of self-control.
Lottie doesn’t just faint at the drop of a hat; she cries easily and at inopportune moments as well, further illustrating her lack of self-control. As the girls and Wazir hide in the jungle just after escaping the massacre at the river, Lottie weeps and moans so loudly that Wazir fears she will be heard and they will be found out by the murderous rebels. Bryda admonishes her for endangering them further with her noisy emotional outburst, and Lottie in turn accuses her of being heartless: “But my mother and father are killed! and I don’t believe you care, Bryda, though your people are killed too—you don’t even cry” (105). Bryda has “crushed back her tears”; though “she would have been quite glad to be able to cry like Lottie,” her awareness of the serious trouble they face leads her to postpone indulging in her emotions until a more appropriate occasion (105). Only when she finds herself alone in the jungle with an injured
ankle, seemingly abandoned by Lottie and Wazir (who went for help and never came back), does Bryda finally “[begin] to cry very bitterly, sobbing aloud in the lonely wood, where no human ear” may hear her weeping (123). Even so, she still covers her face to hide her tears, and recovers her self-control momentarily. Only once more does Bryda cry out of self-pity, after coming out of a dangerous and protracted fever, and again she covers her face and stifles her tears quickly (175). In both these instances, her tears last only moments. The only time Bryda cries for longer than a few moments, she does so because she believes her friend Kaminee has been made the victim of suttee. One suspects the most manly of men would do the same. The fact that Bryda can restrain her emotions and seeks to conceal them when she cannot marks her as masculine in contrast to the flagrantly and foolishly emotional Lottie.
The eminently girly Lottie has her own misgivings about Bryda. She thinks her boyish friend “a little loud, and rough, and ill-mannered, you know” (38). Lottie doesn’t stand alone in having qualms about Bryda’s lack of feminine behavior. Some people think, the narrator notes, that Bryda climbs trees “rather too well...for a girl” (125). And when Uncle Jack first tells Bryda that she will join her mother and father in India, he must gently admonish her for failing to have the response appropriate to a dutiful daughter:
“Oh, oh!” cried Bryda; “ and I shall ride elephants, and catch baby tigers to play with, and”—
“And be a comfort to Mother, eh?” said Uncle Jack slyly. “Yes,” said Bryda, looking down. (4)
Fig. 1Fig. 2
Though some may find Bryda a bit too boyish, the novel certainly celebrates her masculine qualities. In A. Forestier’s illustration of Bryda in Dakpur, she wears the standard frilly frock of Victorian girlhood, and though the caption reads “Bryda enjoyed the morning walk,” the little girl looks stiff and uncomfortable clutching her parasol, her face set in an expression not of delight but of rigid formality (see fig. 1). Yet in a later illustration of Bryda perched on a tree branch wearing a turban and simple dress almost identical to the Indian man standing below, the child’s face expresses palpable delight and her posture looks comfortable and natural (see fig. 2).
In contrast to its celebration of Bryda’s tomboy version of girlhood, the novel consistently reforms Lottie’s overly feminine nature. The little girl entertains elaborate romantic fantasies of fairy-tale marriages, a swift rise to royalty, and a life of pleasure and indolence.
When a captive Lottie learns she will be taken to the Rajah of Bundi, her daydream about the
coming scene comprises a narrative right out of orientalist romance: “So the English maiden was brought before the Rajah...and, when he saw her coming, the Rajah wondered at her hair, which was golden, and very long and waving” (152). The fantasy continues, and Lottie imagines the “richly dressed,” “tall and very handsome” Rajah falling in love with her, dressing her in “richest robes” with “gold and jewels” and seating her on “a throne of gold” where she will be attended by “a hundred beautiful native girls” (155). The narrator scolds her roundly: “Foolish child! She had a habit of making up romances for herself, in which she was always the heroine, doing all sorts of wonderful and very grown-up things” (152). Alas for Lottie, she learns her lesson, for the Rajah turns out to be “a short fat man” in “European dress” (155). “For his face,” the narrator continues, “well, handsome was the very last word one would choose to apply to it” (155). Far from becoming the ranee she dreams of being, Lottie first gets doted upon by the women of the Rajah’s harem, then ignored when a “performing dog” catches their fancy (217). Lottie learns that the life of a real ranee consists mostly of boredom (159). In the meantime, she lives in captivity, tormented by worry about Bryda, whom she has left in the jungle. The narrator, however, pointedly reminds us that Bryda, though lost in the jungle, is “happier after all in her lonely tree-nest than Lottie among her silken cushions” (162). Masculine adventure clearly wins out over feminine romance.
While Lottie’s treatment by the Rajah and his harem seems to act as punishment for indulging in sentimental fantasies she has learned, presumably, from girly romance stories, Bryda’s very different fantasy life is celebrated in the novel. Bryda has no use for romance. As Lottie debates whether she should marry immediately after her coming out or refuse a few offers first, Bryda yawns, “for she had never thought about that question, and it did not interest her” (46). In Dakpur, when the girls speculate about what will happen if the troops revolt, Bryda wonders if they couldn’t pour boiling water from the roofs onto the rebels, “as ladies used to do in the Middle Ages” (45). Lottie, as a result of her lax education, knows nothing of the tales of medieval adventure. As Bryda explains about chivalry, she notes that “the ladies used to give the knights their glove or their sleeve. I shouldn’t care to cut my sleeves out, though, to give to
anybody” (45). Of course the joke hinges on her childish misunderstanding of the custom, but the sentiment—a personal distaste for romantic gestures—remains.
Instead of romance, Bryda’s fantasies involve her in acts of bravery as a warrior. In one exciting daydream, “Bryda herself, dressed in a mantle of tiger skin, [drives] back a whole army of Indian soldiers from the walls of a fort, brandishing her father’s sword” (42). Like Dick Warrener hoping his father will let him wield the spear when they go hunting, Bryda longs to be endowed with this almost embarrassingly phallic weapon belonging to her father. Though Bryda never accomplishes the full masculine power that Dick earns through his masculine plot, and therefore never gets to fight as a true warrior, Bryda does get to play the protector in a limited capacity. As a sort of psychic guardian, Bryda protects her mother from the rumors of impending mutiny for as long as possible. She overhears the native servants plotting outside her window one night, and though in her fright she wants to “go for comfort to her mother,” Bryda instead goes back to bed, thinking “Why should I frighten mother?” (25). When she tells her father about the overheard conversation, he confirms that she must shield her mother from her frightening knowledge and be brave herself. She might not be able to fight, but Bryda is still her father’s “little soldier” (40).
Despite their poor opinions of one another as the book begins, Lottie and Bryda become true friends in the course of their adventures. Reunited after their separation of some weeks, the two girls hug and kiss one another like sisters. In a manner of speaking, Lottie becomes Bryda’s sister; Lottie’s mother dies of an illness contracted due to the hardships of the Mutiny, and Mrs. Danvers “adopts” Lottie and her baby sister, promising to care for them as her own. Bryda says of her somewhat selfish friend “I know she will soon get nice if she lives with mother,” but Lottie’s trials have already done their work, and she has gone a long way towards discarding her frivolous, petulant behavior (208). She even decides she would rather not live out her earlier fantasies after her captivity in the harem: “I would not be a Ranee; no, not for anything you could give me” (220). As proof that luxury and wealth no longer excite her imagination, Lottie casts off the jewels she has been dressed in, carelessly scattering emeralds across the jungle
floor. When informed of her mother’s death, Lottie does not collapse into hysterical self-pity as she would have at the novel’s beginning, but instead quite unselfishly wonders aloud “Do you think she suffered much?” and then spends the day quietly keeping to herself (223). Lottie has learned to restrain her emotions and to think of others before herself.
Lottie’s femininity may no longer be gratingly excessive, but it still stands in contrast to Bryda’s masculine character. Relieved to be free of her captivity, Lottie exclaims, “How glad I shall be to do some needlework and read some books again” (220). Bryda adds, “And to go for a walk, I should think” (220). After her foray into luxuriant Indian indolence, Lottie longs for the productive but quiet activity of English domesticity. Ever the tomboy, Bryda thinks rather that her friend should be looking forward to vigorous physical exercise. It is because of this innate masculinity that Bryda can be the hero(ine) of her own masculine plot—something Lottie, even in her reformed state, could never do.
The Return to the Domestic
In the end Bryda’s masculine plot leads her not to a fully embodied masculinity, but instead right back to the English domesticity from which she escaped on page three. In the final pages of the novel, Bryda joins her family in the mountains of northern India. Mrs. Danvers watches over all as Colonel Danvers and Uncle Jack lie on comfortable couches, Lottie works quietly on her needlework with her little sister Marion nestled close, Kaminee struggles patiently to learn her ABCs, and Bryda sits by her father’s side, “ready to bring anything he might want” (232). Like the flurry of weddings that close Henty’s In Times of Peril, the sentimental domestic tableau presented at the close of Bryda replaces the appropriate ending to a masculine plot—the hero’s acceptance as a full member of an all-male community—with an ending appropriate to domestic fiction. The family’s return to England finalizes the return to normative domesticity for Bryda, and with that normative domesticity comes silence. Bryda’s voice disappears in the last pages of the novel. Instead, Uncle Jack’s male voice gets the last words, a finger-wagging comment at the expense of the British in India, who have, he says, rightfully learned an important lesson from the Mutiny. Back in England, Bryda’s masculine adventure becomes a
thing of the past, a fantasy almost, though infinitely precious to the now silenced girl who has been demoted from father’s little soldier to father’s little servant: “Bryda can sometimes hardly believe that she only spent a little more than a year in India, she seems to have lived through so much in that time” (235).
But what does it mean for a little girl to endure a ritual of masculinization? Perhaps a nasty comment by a little boy at Lottie’s birthday picnic will help us begin to decipher this riddle. As the children discuss what would happen if the Sepoys of their camp revolted, Bryda admits, “I think we should all be frightened....I know I should” (56). A nameless older boy declares “with dignity,” that “Girls are always cowards, of course” (56). That ironical “with dignity” pointedly undercuts the “of course” of the boy’s statement, and in fact the entire novel seems calculated to disprove the stereotype of female cowardice. And what better way to show female bravery than to place a brave female child within the pages of a boys’ adventure story, a masculine plot? Because Bryda remains constitutionally female no matter how brave she may prove in her adventure, and because the adventure is removed from the “real” world of domestic England into the fantastical realm of Indian warfare, the ritual of masculinization that the masculine plot provides never endangers Bryda’s feminine maturity. In addition, the inefficacy of the masculine plot, which led Henty to finish In Times of Peril in the manner of the marriage plot, in Bryda’s story serves as a final safeguard against over-masculinization of the little girl.
Precisely because the masculine plot is a fantasy, a fiction, it can safely place a female child at its center without making some sort of monster of her. During her Indian adventure, Bryda’s masculine plot allows her to demonstrate that females (at least in a limited capacity) can enact masculine virtues such as bravery, pluck, and self-control when removed from their feminized domestic roles and placed in the dangerous realm of manly adventure. However, when Bryda returns home, the fantasy ends, and she reenters normative domesticity with her femininity unscathed, her masculine plot merely a cherished memory.
Chapter Three
“He’ll make a man of you”: Homoeroticism and the Masculine Plot in George Manville Fenn’s
Gil the Gunner
George Manville Fenn suffers the unfortunate fate of being remembered primarily as G.
A. Henty’s less successful competitor in the boys’ adventure novel market of the late nineteenth century. Like Henty, Fenn wrote prolifically in the genre, sending his boy protagonists out to range across the vast holdings of the British Empire, where the lads struggle to make the awkward transition into manhood. That Fenn’s books enjoyed less popularity than Henty’s may strike modern readers as a bit strange, given that Fenn’s stories avoid many of the shortcomings with which the more widely-read and often-remembered Henty is justly charged. Modern critics point out Henty’s sloppy jumbling of bare bones narrative, wooden dialogue, and long, dry passages detailing troop movements and battle strategy—often blatantly plagiarized from source material Henty found at his local library. Fenn’s storytelling, in contrast, tends toward lush description, thoroughly readable dialogue (at least in comparison to Henty), and fairly smooth transitions from scenes of the protagonist’s private actions, thoughts and conversations to vibrant scenes of large-scale battle. But whereas Gregg affords Henty’s In Times of Peril and Rujub the Juggler a lengthy paragraph’s worth of attention in her Blackwood’s review of Mutiny fiction, she sums up her disappointment with Fenn’s Gil the Gunner; or, The Youngest Officer in the East—published in 1892—in a single sentence: it is “a story with no lack of exciting incidents, but suffering from the drawback of a hero of a type peculiar, we believe, to Mr Fenn’s tales for boys, who can only be fitly described by the epithet cantankerous” (225).
Henty’s Warrener boys, so devoid of interiority as to be effectively indistinguishable from one another, could never be cantankerous, because they could never manage the degree of selfhood required to warrant any sort of character descriptor besides the standard adjectives of
stereotypical, upright British boyhood. Fenn’s Gil, however, spills over with wayward emotions, displays all the uncertainty and anguish of the storm-and-stress-ridden adolescent, and generally makes for a more fully fleshed, believable protagonist than Henty’s plucky, cardboard cutout youths. The Warrener boys sail towards manhood with unwavering self-assurance; Gil struggles awkwardly in his quest for a fully constituted masculine identity. His story thus makes for a much more interesting read, at least looking at these two books from here where we stand in the early twenty-first century. Given the depth of the late Victorians’ anxieties about masculinity, though, it should not be surprising that readers in the 1890s preferred Henty’s smooth sailing to Fenn’s rough seas.
Fenn, unlike Henty in In Times of Peril and Field in Bryda, lets his protagonist tell the story, and the use of first-person narration partially accounts for the much higher degree of interiority displayed by Gil than the heroes previously discussed. It is that interiority, and the reader’s view of the hero’s inner turmoil that interiority makes possible, that makes Gil the Gunner useful for examining the (homo)erotics of the masculine plot. Desire—barely discernible in In Times of Peril and absent in Bryda—courses giddily through the pages of Fenn’s Mutiny story. In this novel, the delicate balance between the homosocial and homoerotic inherent in the male-male ties of the masculine plot tilts precariously toward the homoerotic. The result, though rather delicious to a modern audience, must have made uncomfortable reading for a late- nineteenth-century readership—a post-Wilde-trials readership, that is. In fact, in light of the frequent hand-pressings, hot whispers, and anguished declarations of love passed between males in Gil the Gunner, it is easy to see why Victorian readers preferred Henty’s less palpitating fiction for boys.
A Boy in Need of a Masculine Plot
As we learn in the novel’s opening pages, Gilbert Vincent cannot control his temper. Gil’s emotional profligacy denotes a lack of masculinity, as observed by General Crucie, the head of Gil’s military school, who breaks up a fight between Gil and another schoolboy on page one. Crucie demands of the young officer-in-training, “How can you expect to command men
when you cannot command yourself?” (8). Gil cannot be said to have reached manhood until he learns to command himself, to restrain his anger and reroute his male energies into productive work. He describes his undisciplined emotions as “bubbl[ing] up like the carbonic acid gas in a chemical experiment,” causing his body to react “involuntarily,” (9) and bringing to mind Thomas Carlyle’s conception of the male body as discussed by Sussman. Carlyle, Sussman explains, imagines the male psyche and physical anatomy as “characterized by unstable fluidity,” born of the turbulent masculine energies coursing through the body (19). These fluid energies both empower masculinity and endanger it, in Carlyle’s model, for if unrestrained, the male energies degenerate into chaos and sickness. Thus masculinity does not inhere in this hydraulic essence, this seminal energy—as it would in earlier conceptions of masculinity—but instead masculine achievement consists of “a continuous process of maintaining a perilous psychic balance characterized by regulation of this potentially destructive male energy” (Sussman 25).
The masculine plot, as employed by Carlyle and others, serves to teach the self-regulation that acts as the lynchpin of nineteenth-century masculinity. Clearly Gil, who ashamedly admits to having a “horrible temper,” needs a masculine plot to teach him how to command his unstable energies (12). If he can “learn to subdue” his temper, Crucie assures him, it will “make a better soldier” of him: “It means spirit and decision, properly schooled” (12).
Straight after scolding him for the juvenilistic fisticuffs, General Crucie informs Gil that he has been commissioned and will be joining the army in Calcutta, making him the youngest officer in the east. Upon hearing this news, Gil imagines he feels his boyhood “dropping away,” but to be a “man commanding men” he must first learn to regulate his turbulent temper (7).
Because he faces such a difficult obstacle on the road to masculinity (his temper being so infamous as to garner about two dozen mentions in the first ten pages), Gil can perform a virtuoso feat by managing to master himself, thus proving that he deserves his good fortune in the form of a remarkably early commission. After all, as James Eli Adams reminds us, “self- mastery is worth applauding only if one has wayward passions to master” (111). Having already left the domestic sphere of his childhood home for the military school world of boys, Gil now
further removes himself from the bourgeois realm of England and sails away to serve in the Indian army, a geographically removed world of men where the masculine plot can begin in earnest.
Though prone to childish outbreaks of temper, Gil does not begin his journey towards full masculine status devoid of traditional manly attributes. He exhibits no lack of bravery, for example; as his ship sets sail from London, the boy courageously dives fully dressed into filthy dock-water to rescue a drowning young woman, “without calculating the consequences,” which happen to be nearly drowning himself as the panicked girl clings to him (24). His abundant courage, however, has more negative consequences for Gil than this brush with death. Gil cannot distinguish between bravery and merely flashy gallantry—a particularly dangerous flaw in an army officer. During his Indian adventure, Gil acquires two surrogate father figures who will demonstrate to him the virtue of choosing the right moment to be brave: his superior officer, Captain Brace, and a rajah fighting for independence from the British, Ny Deen. Primarily through his complex relationships with these men, Gil develops the discretion to know courage from ostentatious display, and acquires the all-important self-mastery needed to crystallize his masculinity.
Though its masculine plot ends appropriately (and not with a wedding for the protagonist, like In Times of Peril) and involves an appropriate protagonist (and not a girl, like Bryda), Fenn’s novel presents potent threats to masculinity along the way. The masculine plot requires a homosocial setting, but in Gil the Gunner, the homosocial relationships frequently stray into the territory of the homoerotic. Gil’s interaction with both Brace and Ny Deen is more than tinged with homoeroticism, a threat to Gil’s blossoming masculinity banished only with the marriage of Brace and the death of Ny Deen in the final pages of the book. The dynamic between Gil and these two men demonstrates the difficult paradox at the heart of the masculine plot: the boy requires the guidance and manly example the men provide in order to cement his masculinity; yet the often erotic intimacy inherent in his bonds with these surrogate fathers endangers the project of acquiring a firm masculine identity.
Brother-Officer, Surrogate Father, Beloved Friend
The first meeting between Gil and Captain Brace, in the cramped confines of the cabin they share on the sea voyage from England to India, does not go well. Gil rather doesn’t like the “tall, dark, youngish” Brace, a still-grieving widower whom he finds “wintry” (22). But after being hauled out of the water, half-drowned from his daring rescue attempt, Gil must accept Brace’s offer to help him change into dry clothes, though he finds it embarrassing. Soon, though, the two are holding hands during moments of high emotion with a startling frequency, beginning with the scene in which Brace tells Gil about the death of his wife: “He was silent for some moments,” Gil narrates, “and I could feel his hand tremble as he pressed mine very hard” (33).
These moments of intimate contact often provide Gil the opportunity to observe Brace’s superior self-mastery. In the above instance, Gil watches as Brace “seem[s] to be making a desperate effort to be calm, and master the emotion which evidently thrill[s] him” (33). A mere moment passes before Brace suppresses the thrill of emotion, shifting from passion and sorrow to cheery efficiency so quickly that Gil reaffirms his fears that he cannot like this strange man, though now he wishes he could befriend his mournful brother-officer.
When Brace expresses a pained awareness of Gil’s dislike for him while still on the ocean passing, Gil “colour[s] up like a girl” and apologizes.6 Despite Gil’s doubts about his ability to like Brace, however, the two develop an uneasy but powerful bond after arriving in India. Even when Gil disapproves of Brace’s behavior he cannot escape the hold the older man has on him. After Brace defends Gil from another officer’s abuse but declines to fight the man, Gil feels disappointed in his friend, thinking him a coward. Yet rather than entirely losing esteem for Brace, Gil finds himself subject to an internal upheaval that responds strongly to Brace’s very gaze: “I saw that Brace was looking at me fixedly, and there was something very singular in his gaze; but for some time he did not speak, and there was so strange a tumult in my breast that no
6 Gil’s habit of blushing is not the only marker of femininity identified by the narrator and other characters in the book. Gazing rapturously at the beautiful scenery of India, Gil exclaims “Lovely!,” only to be rebuked for a “gushing girl” by a fellow officer more interested in the hunting prospects of the land (62).
words would come” (69). Such moments betray a depth of unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, emotional turmoil concomitant with this male-male bond. “I loved him, but his conduct frightened me,” Gil further explains, “for I could not see the bravery of the man’s self-control” (70). Thus Gil’s two problems—his inability to tell courage from foolish self-display and his trouble controlling his temper—are bound up with one another, both based in one crucial deficiency. Until he learns discipline, he will lack both discretion and self-mastery.
Gil’s conflicting feelings about Brace are born of his misrecognition of true masculinity. But Gil does not remain ashamed of Brace for long; the regiment’s doctor advises Gil to “stick to him” for “he’ll make a man out of you,” and sure enough Gil and Brace’s friendship tightens once more as the revolt breaks out around them (77). The danger and excitement mount, and Gil and Brace can be found clutching one another’s hands five times in less than a hundred pages.
Along with the hand-holding often come whispers, breathing hotly into one another’s ears, and gasping one another’s names. One particularly erotic episode involves a reconnaissance mission through an Indian village that Gil and Brace tackle alone and in the middle of the night. In the impenetrable darkness, Brace leads Gil by the hand, slowly feeling his way between huts with his unsheathed sword. “Keep close to me,” Brace whispers, and Gil responds, “As close as I can.” (120). Surrounded by silence, the only sounds the man and boy hear include their “laboured breathing” and swiftly beating hearts as “a feeling of excitement...almost unbearable” grows upon them (121, 122). This excitement, ostensibly due to the possibility of discovery by hostile mutineers at any moment, seems to encompass a danger that extends beyond mortal peril to include the risky prospect of an escalating physical and emotional intimacy between the youth and the man alone in the dark.
The friends fight side by side, successfully leading a dashing expedition to recover guns and horses stolen by the insurrectionists. Under the tutelage of Brace, Gil gains much ground toward becoming an effective officer and thus a masculine man. As Gil observes firsthand Brace’s bravery in battle, he realizes his mistake in thinking his friend a coward for refusing to duel earlier. In watching Brace choose the appropriate time to be brave, Gil begins to learn how
to discern between giving in to one’s temper and directing those energies into productive action. Midway through the book,though, the so-far-inseparable brother-officers get separated, interrupting Gil’s instruction under the care of Brace. In a skirmish at Arbagh, Gil receives a grievous wound, and as he loses consciousness, counting himself as good as dead, wonders, “have I done my duty like a man?” (217). He wakes to find himself the prisoner of a rajah, with Brace nowhere to be found. One surrogate father has been removed before the masculine plot has finished running its course (as indicated by Gil’s uncertainty in the above self-questioning).
Brace and Gil will reunite before the end, but for the second half of the book a new man will fill the place of surrogate father in Gil’s masculine plot.
Gil’s Gilded Cage
Weeks after the battle at Arbagh, Gil awakes in unfamiliar but lavish surroundings to find himself being tended by an Indian doctor who evades his feverish questions about his own whereabouts, the outcome of the battle, and the fate of Captain Brace. The polite and skillful physician will tell Gil only that he is currently in the charge of a great rajah. When his captor appears in his tent, Gil experiences a highly ambivalent moment of recognition that sets up a complex of conflicting emotions in regards to this man even more deeply disturbing for the boy than his early contradictory feelings about Brace. The recognition scene, worth quoting at length, emphasizes the emotional tug-of-war Gil will struggle with for the remainder of the novel:
He crossed at once to my couch, and stood looking down at me, his handsome, thoughtful face, with its dark eyes, being wonderfully familiar, as he bent over me; and as he gazed, a smile crossed his lips, and there was a look of sympathy in his countenance which was unmistakable. But there was no smile on mine, for as I met his eyes I saw in him, in spite of his gallant bearing and gorgeous dress, the bloodthirsty traitor and schemer who had risen against us and headed the mad savages who had cut down my brother-officers and friends. He was the man too, who held me prisoner...whose arm had been stretched out to save me [in the battle at Arbagh], and had undoubtedly brought me where I was, and had me carefully tended back to life. And with these thoughts filling my mind, I lay looking up at him angry, and yet grateful.We neither of us spoke, he evidently contenting
himself with watching me, and enjoying the surprise I felt at recognising him as the disguised chief—groom no longer, but as the powerful leader of a large native
force; I, in my weak state, fascinated by his peculiar smiling eyes, that were one moment haughty and fierce and full of triumph, the next beaming with friendliness. (227-8)
The riot of feelings Gil experiences during this protracted moment of mutual gazing—fascination with the beauty and wealth of the rajah, horror at the deeds of the rebel, gratitude toward the man who has now repeatedly saved his life—will only grow more anguished and complicated as Gil spends the next several weeks with the rajah and learns to respect him as a great warrior and leader and to love him as a caring and attentive friend. Like Bryda’s Indian friend Wazir, the brave, handsome and faithful Ny Deen will act as a model of masculinity for Gil. Unlike, however, the utterly chaste bond between the man and little girl in Field’s novel, the bond shared by Fenn’s English boy and Indian man will push the boundaries between the chaste affection and homoerotic desire.
Gil recognizes the rajah, Ny Deen, as the long-suffering servant of Lieutenant Barton, an abusive drunkard who enjoys nothing more than beating his servant with little or no provocation. When Gil first goes to meet Barton upon arriving in India, he runs into Ny Deen leaving Barton’s bungalow, where the rajah posing as servant has just received a head wound from his cruel master. Confronted with the “good-looking, dark-faced man, bleeding from the temple,” Gil produces his handkerchief and fashions it into a bandage (42). Ny Deen allows Gil to tie the cloth over his wound, and then their eyes meet, and Gil states that he cannot “read” the look in the man’s eyes (43). The following day, Gil receives a bouquet of “fragrant white blossoms,” delivered without a card by Ny Deen. Again, Gil struggles to read the man’s meaning: “An Englishman would never have dreamed of sending flowers like that. I dare say it means something, if only one knew” (54). Eventually, in his later recuperative days with Ny Deen, Gil will learn to read the meaning of those looks and gestures as a desire to possess—a desire he reciprocates, if in guarded terms. As Gil argues with Ny Deen’s master about the appropriate treatment of Indian servants, the cruel officer taunts, “You’re jealous, Vincent. You want him yourself” (65). Gil admits a desire to possess Ny Deen as a servant: “Yes...I should like to have
him, and show him that all English officers are not alike” (65). The question of who is master— Gil or Ny Deen—will persist until the two finally part.
From the moment Gil shows compassion for the abused servant, “tall, handsome” Ny Deen shows a special affection for Gil, which only increases when Gil hospitalizes a fellow gunner after catching him assaulting Ny Deen (53). Out of gratitude, Ny Deen, whose pose as a servant he has used to mastermind a revolt among the Indians in the British camp at Rajgunge, ensures that Gil leaves the cantonment for a hunt on the day the servants and Sepoys rise up, thereby most likely saving his life. Ny Deen then saves Gil’s life a second time by interposing between the boy and an Indian rebel poised to kill him. Finally, for a third time, Ny Deen saves Gil by spiriting him away to a sumptuous private camp in the wilderness and providing him with a personal physician to treat the horrible wound he suffers at Arbagh.
During his recuperation, Gil forms a bond with Ny Deen that surpasses his relationship with Brace in level of homoerotic tension. Because Gil remains bedridden for weeks, he spends most of his time anxiously waiting for Ny Deen to visit him between battles and meetings.
Though the rajah plans to use the Mutiny to vanquish the English and make a great and peaceful nation of fractured India, he takes plenty of time out from nation-building to kneel beside Gil’s bed, hold his hand, and gaze intently into his eyes. Illustrator W. H. Overend depicts one such moment (the recognition scene), lavishing attention on the intricate details of Ny Deen’s eastern costume and the ornate furniture in Gil’s tent. Yet it is the intense gaze between the prostrate Gil and the looming Ny Deen that draws the viewer’s eye. Though in the text Gil struggles to break off these moments of emotionally potent contact with the rajah, simultaneously ashamed and fascinated by his ardent responsiveness to the attentions of this man, the illustration allows their “intent” gaze to continue indefinitely (see fig. 3).
Fig. 3
Gil may repeatedly find himself fascinated by the “handsome pale-brown eastern face” and “searching gaze” of Ny Deen, but the homoerotic fascination is tinged with a homophobic fear—a horror well-illustrated by an episode involving a snake and a dream (229). One night Gil awakes in his dark tent to discover a large snake coiled on his chest. His fear, “the idea of being bitten, of receiving the two sharp fangs of the monster in my flesh,” keeps him from calling out for help (238). When an attendant checks in on the convalescent and finds, kills, and removes the snake, he informs Gil that the serpent would not have bitten him: “This kind does not bite and poison, only twists round and crushes. It is very strong” (239). Gil sleeps restlessly that night,
plagued by nightmares in which the snake and Ny Deen merge into a grotesque and menacing monster:
Then Ny Deen himself came to me, all glittering with gold and gems, but in a confused way. He did not seem to be any longer a man, for his face looked serpent-like and treacherous, and one moment there were glittering jewels, the next it was the light shimmering upon his brilliant scales...as I lay there, it came nearer and nearer, till it was close to my couch in the full light of the lamp, and then, to my horror, it raised itself up, bent...over me, and glared down with its horrible eyes threatening to strike. (243)
Gil still fears the penetrating fangs of the snake, even though he has been told that the one found in his bed does not bite. The fear of penetration thus must be bound up with the fact that the snake and Ny Deen have merged in the boy’s unconscious, the snake-man monster of Gil’s dream posing a sexual threat as it bends over Gil’s couch, just as Ny Deen does during his visits with the boy.
Ny Deen’s mastery over Gil during the period of convalescence both thrills and unmans Gil: “I felt that I was only a poor, weak, wounded lad, lying there at the mercy of this fierce rajah” (229). Ny Deen may master Gil by virtue of strength, but Gil masters Ny Deen by way of the rajah’s intense love for the boy, a love that surpasses the chaste male-male ties of the masculine plot and veers sharply towards the homoerotic. During such moments, Ny Deen too is unmanned—coded female already by his gorgeous, bejeweled finery, in his loving attention to Gil his manner becomes womanly, even as he masters Gil’s will:
I believe I pressed his hand in return as he held it in his, and laid his left upon my brow, smiling down at me. Then in a low whisper he said, as softly as a woman could have spoken--”You are weak, and need sleep.” He drew his hand over my eyes, and they closed at his touch, a feeling of exhaustion made me yield, my will seeming to be gone.so weak, so very weak, that this man seems to master even
my very will. (255)
The rhetoric of mastery abounds between the friends. His hands clasping Gil’s shoulders, Ny Deen declares, “You master even me, and make me quite your slave” (314).
Ny Deen is anxious to cater to Gil’s desires. After a longer than usual absence from the camp where Gil convalesces, Ny Deen guiltily inquires, “Is there anything you want? I have been a long time without coming” (252). Gil finds himself unable to voice his desire, but his eyes drift to Ny Deen’s sword, a “gorgeous weapon” that lies in the rajah’s lap as they converse (252). The boy’s desire may leave him speechless, but his gaze betrays him by resting on this powerfully phallic symbol. Ny Deen readily volunteers to give the blade to Gil, but the boy recoils from the offer and insists that he desires not the rajah’s weapon, but his own liberty. “You will let me go?” Gil begs, to no avail:
“No,” he said gravely. “I could not lose my friend.” “No?” I cried passionately. “Is this your friendship?”
“Yes,” he said, holding the hand firmly which I tried to snatch away, but with a poor feeble effort. (254)
The very feebleness of Gil’s attempt to withdraw his hand from the rajah’s grasp suggests an ambivalence in his desire for freedom.
As Gil gains strength, the rajah dresses him in resplendent, eastern-inflected military costume and gives the boy the previously discussed sword. Gil cannot refrain from “drawing the flashing blade from its sheath, and holding it quivering” in his hand, sending “a thrill right to [his] heart” (318). Another illustration shows Gil in his new attire, lovingly caressing Ny Deen’s blade (see fig. 4). Ny Deen wishes Gil to act as his second in command in uniting and ruling India, and vows to keep him lavishly imprisoned until he agrees: “you must come to me and be more than my friend—my brother and chief counsellor” (263). By accepting the sword and uniform Ny Deen provides him, Gil seems implicitly to agree to consider Ny Deen’s offer, and the rajah, of course, is thrilled to see him in his fine attire, the sword hanging at his side. In fact, replace the sword with a ring, and the entire scene looks suspiciously like an accepted proposal of engagement to marriage.
Fig. 4
The temptation to rise instantly from boy soldier to great general comprises the major test of Gil’s masculinity. He must master his desire for power because it would come at the expense of his manhood, for certainly if he accepts Ny Deen’s offer, he will live as a kept boy and a traitor to his country, not as a man. Gil wavers occasionally (“was I—so young as I was—a mere boy, to give up all this when forced, as it were, by circumstances? I had but to say ‘yes,’ and become the greatest man in the rajah’s domains”) but manages mostly to keep up his refusal to serve Ny Deen (281). He does worry that the rajah will tire of waiting on him to change his mind and threaten to kill him if he does not accept his offer: “He will try first to persuade me; then he
will threaten, in spite of his smooth way, for he can be fierce enough, that’s plain. If he does, shall I have strength enough to hold out, and refuse to promise; or shall I, at last, quite in despair, give way and act as he wishes?” (265). Gil sounds here much like the menaced virgin of Gothic literature, fearfully trying to resist the advances of a violent seducer.
Transplanted to an opulent suite of rooms in Ny Deen’s palace, Gil is welcomed to the city by a celebration in his honor, complete with feasting and fireworks and a grand procession of elephants, one of which carries Gil at Ny Deen’s side. The opulent welcome, in fact, reads a lot like the introduction of a rajah’s new bride to his people. Weakened by the long journey from the camp in the wilderness to the city, Gil must be carried indoors by Ny Deen, like a bride carried over the threshold. Overwhelmed, Gil slips into unconsciousness as Ny Deen gently places him on a couch: “Then I dimly saw the face of the rajah looking down at me, and he said something, but I could not answer, for it was all growing misty and strange” (323). What does that strange mist obscure? If Ny Deen treats Gil like a new bride, is this consummation? The next line denies it. As Gil wakes the next morning, he insists the loss of consciousness was due to mere “exhaustion” (324).
In the palace, Gil awaits rescue by Brace, who has discovered where Gil is held. When Brace, Gil’s father, and a full force of soldiers attack the city, Ny Deen makes one last desperate plea to Gil: “Come, say you will be my friend, and help me now that I want your services” (343). The boy has been unsure whether he will be able to resist the rajah at such a moment: “I could not help a lingering sensation coming over me, and the temptation would, I felt, be a hard one to battle” (308). In the end, though, Gil refuses to serve as Ny Deen’s right hand. He has passed the important test of his masculinity. Ny Deen has helped Gil in attaining his masculinity in another way as well. Despite the boy’s horror at the revolt against the English led by the rajah and the ruse used to precipitate it—Ny Deen’s pose as a lowly servant—Gil learns from Ny Deen’s patient endurance of Barton’s abuse. Just as Brace chose to forgo the opportunity to duel for his honor in favor of saving brave deeds for battle, Ny Deen bided his time as abused servant so that
he might lay his plans for revolution. Together, these two men provide Gil with examples of how to route masculine energy into productive work.
Rescued by his father in the confusion of battle, Gil requests that when the English capture Ny Deen, they spare his life, for “he has been very good to me” (370). Ny Deen, wisely, flees the city with his troops. Gil’s father, Colonel Vincent, makes a request in turn; he wants Gil to remove the eastern-inflected finery Ny Deen has dressed him in, a suggestion immediately echoed by another soldier and repeated once more by Colonel Vincent just pages later. Gil, though, has nothing to change into and cannot remove his current uniform. Thus the masculine plot’s ritual of acceptance by the father, signified by the casting off of unmasculine clothing, cannot yet be enacted. As he joins the battle, Gil thrills to reunite with Brace, but his friend and superior mistakes him for a rajah’s son because of his rich eastern clothing. When he realizes that Gil stands before him thus attired, Brace assumes that this friend has “turned renegade,” and turns away from Gil with contempt, loosening his hands from the boy’s grasp (372). Emphasized by the fact that it warrants its own one-page chapter, Brace’s rejection of Gil forms the central tension of the final pages of the novel.
Gil pleads with Brace to rejoin his company, but Brace needs convincing that Gil has not been happily consorting with the rajah. He refuses to believe that Gil has been a wounded and helpless prisoner; his spies in the palace have told him that Gil agreed to fight alongside Ny Deen as a rebel. The old Gil would have lost his temper and struck at his friend for impugning his honor, but Gil has learned, it seems, to control himself. He turns to the company doctor, who confirms that Gil has suffered a dire wound that would necessitate a long recovery, just as Gil has claimed. Finally, though, it is Gil’s passionate self-defense that persuades Brace of his loyalty, and Brace apologizes for his doubt, saying “I can’t go down on my knees to you here, but I do believe you, lad” (387). The reconciliation leaves Gil speechless for long moments.
With his bond to Brace restored, Gil fights against Ny Deen’s forces in Nussoor, where Gil’s mother and sister have suffered under a long siege. Gil’s reunion with his sister (the one and only girl to speak in the novel) also happens to be Brace’s first time meeting Grace Vincent.
As Gil withdraws from a happy embrace with his sister, she staggers and nearly falls, but Brace catches her in his arms. Gil thanks Brace for helping his sister, and Brace has a sudden epiphany: “’Your sister, Gil!’ he said; ‘that lady? Ah!’” (393). Clearly intrigued, Brace spends a great deal of time with this young woman, so like her brother in bravery and beauty.
As Gil protects his mother and sister during the battle, he reports, “I felt a boy no longer, but as fierce a man as any there” (396). Gil has finally triumphed over himself. He has learned to tell bravery from making a spectacle of one’s temper, and by channeling that volatile temper into the productive work of the soldier, he has learned self-mastery, that essence of Victorian manhood. Likewise, the English triumph over their Indian foes in the battle at Nussoor. Ny Deen falls at the hands of Colonel Vincent’s soldiers, and thus one of Gil’s surrogate fathers is slain by his real father. The rajah’s death is met with only the briefest moment of sorrow from Gil: “somehow a feeling of bitterness and sorrow came over me, for, in my sight, he was a brave man, and I felt that he was justified in his struggle to cast off his allegiance to our race” (397). A boy no longer, Gil does not need the intense bond to his Indian model of masculinity. Similarly, the bond with Brace, his English model of masculinity, must transform in recognition of Gil’s fully constituted masculine identity. The novel ends with a form of the chaste male-male bond which Sussman describes as the climax of the masculine plot; the bond between Gil and Brace is both transformed and made permanent when Brace marries Gil’s sister, and the masculine plot has run its course.
Man-making, Discipline, and Deviance
George Manville Fenn’s Gil the Gunner concerns itself with two central questions: can Gil learn the discipline necessary to attain masculine status?; and, if so, who will teach him?
Early on in the novel, Captain Brace competes with Lieutenant Barton—Ny Deen’s abusive drunkard master during his pose as a servant—for the privilege of inducting Gil into the manly fellowship of the British army. Barton represents all that Gil could degenerate into if he does not learn to master his manly energies and direct them into productive, masculine activity. His temper flares easily, prompting him to beat his servant, openly insult his fellow officers, and
make a shameful spectacle of his ostentatious pride. Luckily for Gil, his own innate sensitivity and his compassion for the abused and alluring Ny Deen leave him with a horror of this strutting, seldom-sober braggart. His complicated emotions towards the Indian man, then, keep him from falling under the influence of the wrong man. Brace, who treats all with equal respect and controls his errant emotions, earns the right to act as surrogate father to Gil.
In the second half of the book, however, the question of who gets to make a man of Gil arises again when he falls under the power of Ny Deen, now transformed from suffering servant into triumphant rajah. Ultimately, Gil needs both men to reach full masculinity. Ny Deen provides the temptation to rise to power and a sort of false manliness that comprises Gil’s most important test. Gil does not cement his masculinity, though, until his self-restraint and transparent honesty in defending himself to Brace convinces the man of his sincerity and manly behavior. For them to reconcile, Brace must believe that Gil has attained the self-mastery to refuse Ny Deen’s attractive offer of power, wealth and lifelong friendship. And he does.
True to the masculine plot, Gil the Gunner adheres to the belief that it takes a man to make a man. Traditionally, a woman made a boy into a man, providing through matrimony a socially acceptable outlet for the prodigious male sexual energies that could otherwise wreak havoc on society. In the masculine plot, those energies do not find a sexual outlet, but are rerouted into other forms of productivity. The protagonist of the masculine plot becomes a man under the tutelage of one or more other men who teach him the discipline that will allow him to correctly channel those unstable energies. The question of sexuality, though, remains to muddle things up. Male sexuality in the homosocial world of the masculine plot often erupts into homoeroticism, as it does between Gil and his teachers, Brace and Ny Deen.
The homoeroticism of Gil’s relationships offers another sort of temptation for the boy on his route to masculinity: the temptation towards deviant sexuality. The problem of homoeroticism in the masculine plot, Sussman claims, partially explains its ultimate failure as both a literary device and a cultural narrative of man-making. Sexual deviance, it seems, posed too dire a threat to this masculine technology. Yet here we find the masculine plot, and all its
homoerotic problematics, in a boys’ adventure novel of the 1890s , thirty years after Carlyle himself, champion of the masculine plot, rejected it as too fraught with difficulties. Why does such a thing persist? Perhaps Andrew Dowling provides a clue in Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature, in writing that “while Victorian manliness was defined by discipline, these definitions always contained within them the suggestion of deviance” (13). In that case, however one performs the task of making a masculine man out of a Victorian boy— with the masculine plot or otherwise—the discipline attained carries with it a hint of deviance.
Dowling goes on to claim that
Victorian images of male deviance thus served both a voyeuristic and an ideological purpose in that they satisfied a cultural desire to view the deviant man while also underlining the importance, and inevitability, of manly discipline.
However, another function was to forge secret depths for the male subject. The representation of deviance created a knowledge and truth about the dark and dangerous forces within men, a truth that made reserve and control a sign of depth and profundity. (23)
In this view, Gil the Gunner accomplishes three important tasks with its homoerotic deviance. It satisfies “a cultural desire to view the deviant man,” attests to the vital importance of discipline for conquering deviance, and creates for Gil a complex interiority that makes his success at learning self-mastery all the more applaudable for being difficult and dangerous. The reader has the opportunity both to watch the deliciously taboo eroticism between the males of Fenn’s novel and to identify with Gil and thus gain vicariously the triumph of taming the intensely powerful “secret depths of the male subject.”
Conclusion
These three children’s Mutiny adventures—Henty’s In Times of Peril, Field’s Bryda, and Fenn’s Gil the Gunner—each employ the conventions of the masculine plot as outlined by Sussman’s Victorian Masculinities, but in none of them does the masculine plot manage to shape a fully realized and unproblematic masculine identity for the book’s protagonist(s). At the close of a masculine plot troubled by both the strangely slippery identities of its protagonists and the invasion of women into the sacred homosocial universe of colonial war, Henty resorts to an ending drawn from the tradition of domestic fiction, whose marriage plot Sussman defines as the technology of literary man-making which the masculine plot explicitly opposes. The author’s choice to graft a tidy series of marriages onto the end of the resolutely anti-domestic masculine plot suggests a fundamental doubt about the ability of this alternative method of masculine construction to create a stable masculine identity. Sussman acknowledges that one of the shortcomings of the masculine plot is the “often ambiguous” sense of closure it provides (47).
Henty, apparently unsatisfied with this ambiguity in his project of making two boys into masculine men, adopts the more satisfying closure of the marriage plot in order to sidestep this particular limitation.
The very limitations that make trouble for Henty’s Mutiny story open up interesting possibilities for another writer of Mutiny fiction. Field’s Bryda exploits the limited effectiveness of the masculine plot. Because the masculine plot fails to fashion a stable masculine identity, it can be engaged in the service of providing a little girl the opportunity to demonstrate her manly virtues without endangering her eventual entry into the feminine domestic identity deemed proper for women by popular Victorian convention. The masculine plot cannot make a man of Bryda—or arguably anyone, female or male—but it can supply a formula of adventurous manliness that is just as fun, and character-building, for girls as for boys. Field transforms a
fictional mode of boyhood—the adventure story patterned on the masculine plot—into a fictional girlhood.
Fenn makes use of the masculine plot in Gil the Gunner in a manner that is more faithful to the patterns Sussman describes for this device than either Henty’s or Field’s novel, and that very faithfulness to the form makes Gil a powerful demonstration of the critical problematics that plague the masculine plot as a literary instrument and cultural narrative for constructing masculinity. The masculine plot replaces the marriage bonds of normative domestic masculinity with male-male bonds. It removes the protagonist from the influence of females and places him in a homosocial world in which he builds a masculine identity through intense ties with other men. Gil the Gunner exemplifies the tendency of these male-male relationships to veer towards a homoeroticism that is, in Victorian figurations of sexuality, destructive to masculine identity.
Thus three late-Victorian juvenile novels set in India during the Mutiny of 1857 display the uses and limitations of the masculine plot, and even the uses of its limitations. Of course, a question lurks here, begging an answer. Why does late-nineteenth-century children’s literature take up an imperfect device for constructing manliness, one that, as Sussman explains, had proven untenable for successful use in adult literature as early as the 1850s? If by the mid- century anxieties about all-male communities had already made the masculine plot an insufficient technology for producing masculinity, there must be an excellent reason for its resurfacing in the latter half of the century in children’s adventure novels.
The cultural uses of the categories of childhood and children’s literature may offer an explanation for the presence of such a troubled thing as the masculine plot within the pages of children’s stories. Reynolds asserts that for the Victorians, with their post-Romantic ideal of the child, “the image of childhood was simultaneously sentimental, escapist, the repository of all that was good and pure, and also the domain of covert desires and fantasies” (32, italics mine).
Elaborating on this paradoxical notion, Reynolds observes:
It has been suggested that this collective adult use of childhood [to act out covert desires] indicates that children’s literature was regarded by some well-established authors as a safe venue for adult fantasies, because, being innocent, children were incorruptible, and therefore the fantasies...could not hurt them. (32)
In this view of things, children’s literature figures as a sort of naturally guarded stashing place for adult anxieties and subversive fantasies precisely like the dangerous homoerotic nuances of the masculine plot. Carolyn Steedman argues compellingly in Strange Dislocations that the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the concept of childhood develop into a way of representing adult interiority, so that children in literature figure as expressions of the lost and otherwise inexpressible selves buried within adults. The masculine plot was only ever a fantasy of establishing a masculine self, a method of constructing masculinity not viable in reality but still vastly attractive in that it provided an escape from the nervous conjunction of masculinity with domestic femininity. Because this device was not viable for use, Victorian men continued to turn to the older idiom of bourgeois domestic masculinity, and yet still longed for the fantasy of the all-male, martial community. Children’s literature offered a protected place to house this fantasy, a place where one could safely wax nostalgic about lost or discarded versions of one’s self, including a version of the self constructed via the masculine plot.
This concept of the child’s book as a cache of furtive adult desires, the gendered discourse surrounding the Mutiny, and the attractions of 1857 India as an imperial, homosocial setting displaced from late-nineteenth-century England both by distance and time, combine to explain the presence of the masculine plot in Henty’s In Times of Peril, Field’s Bryda, and Fenn’s Gil the Gunner. Mid-century journalistic discourse about the Mutiny cast England in the role of masterful man and India in the role of weak, seductive, dangerous woman. That the Mutiny drama already involved a subtext of gender made it an ideal stage for writers at the close of the nineteenth century to play out the masculine plot and thus explore tensions about masculinity within the arena of children’s literature, where the supposed innocence of children allowed an acting out of forbidden adult fantasies.
A writer in an 1858 issue of The Westminster Review insists that, “This mutiny has proved that there is no lack of men in India equal to every duty—men of the strong head, the ready hand, and the large heart...gallant soldiers and true gentlemen...whose deeds are an eternal assurance of our British manhood” (“The English in India” 199). Yet precisely because masculinity must be constructed, either through the marriage plot or the masculine plot, there can be no eternal assurance of British manhood. Even in children’s adventure novels about the triumph of the English in India, masculinity is constantly in peril.
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