EMPIRE AND THE WOOLFS: ANTI-IMPERIALISM IN
THE VILLAGE IN THE JUNGLE AND “KEW GARDENS”
By
Kerry Lynne Marsden
A Project Presented to
The Faculty of Humboldt State University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts in English: Literature
Committee Membership
Dr. Michael Eldridge, Committee Chair
Dr. Christina Accomando, Committee Member
Dr. Nikola Hobbel, Graduate Coordinator
May 2013
ABSTRACT
EMPIRE AND THE WOOLFS: ANTI-IMPERIALISM IN
THE VILLAGE IN THE JUNGLE AND “KEW GARDENS”
Kerry Lynne Marsden
In this project I compare and contrast Leonard Woolf’s novel The Village in the
Jungle and Virginia Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens,” in order to explore how each
author describes, defines, and decries British intercontinental imperialism. Troubling the
critical consensus regarding the gendered distinctions between the work of Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, I will trace how the authors variously exploit and expose Victorian
demarcations of gender, sexuality, race, and class to motivate their anti-imperialist
critiques.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would first like to thank the faculty of the English and CRGS departments,
particularly Nikola Hobbel, David Stacey, Barbara Curiel, and Kim Berry. My time at
Humboldt State working in these departments has made me both a better scholar of the
humanities and a better human. Second, I would like to thank Janet Winston whose
scholarly interest in the Woolfs inspired my own, and whose mentorship has been an
essential aspect of my academic development. I also especially thank Michael Eldridge
and Christina Accomando for their encouragement and insightful critique of this project.
I am thankful to Mary Ann Creadon and Arlene Britt for helping me navigate the
sometimes choppy waters of graduate study. Thanks also to my parents, Paul and Kim,
who instilled in me a love of learning—and a special thanks to my mother for never
letting me forget how much I am loved. Thanks to my friends Laura Exline and Sarah
Ben-Zvi for their invaluable emotional support and writing advice. Finally, I would like
to thank Sean Zadarnowski for his patient support without which I would have been
unable to complete this scholarship.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
A MORAL MODERNIST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
POLITICAL PARTNERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
MANICURED INTO SUBMISSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
WORKS CITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .68
iv
1
INTRODUCTION
Both Leonard and Virginia Woolf were born at the end of the Victorian age, the
“age of imperialism.” They witnessed the climax and decline of Empire occur in tandem
with the rise of modern global warfare. The writing of both Leonard and Virginia is
suffused with their experiences of and distaste for these conflicts.
Pointing to the lives of the Woolfs to illuminate their writing is not new. Indeed,
an understanding of their lived experiences—as recorded in their diaries, letters, and
(auto)biographies—has long colored the ways in which their work has been seen. But
despite their shared experience of Britain’s cultural shift into the self-consciously modern
age, early scholarship on the Woolfs defined their work as being divided along
conventionally gendered lines. The division allocated art and beauty to Virginia while
confining politics and rationality to the realm of Leonard.
In the popular imagination, Leonard was created as a man of facts and order
whose administrative service abroad prepared him to effectively and patiently manage
both Hogarth Press and Virginia. And she, as a feminine and fragile genius, was too
lugubriously mystical to understand or cope with the realities of life. Quentin Bell’s 1972
biography of his aunt helped to authoritatively establish this tone. Bell describes Leonard
as having “angelic qualities” which were tested by an ill and “frigid” wife (196, 6). Her
nephew’s biography also perpetuated the image of Virginia Woolf as an apolitical
aesthete—a vision of Woolf already popularized in Britain due to the critical attentions of
F.R. and Queenie Leavis. To know his aunt, Bell explains, was to know that while she
was “sympathetic” to liberal politics “her prose could never be an effective vehicle for
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conveying political ideas” (186). He further suggests that this deficiency characterized
not only her work, but was fundamental to her person.
She belonged, inescapably, to the Victorian world of Empire, Class and
privilege. Her gift was for the pursuit of shadows, for the ghostly whispers
of the mind and for Pythian incomprehensibility, when what was needed
was the swift and lucid phrase that could reach the ears of unemployed
working men or Trades Union officials. (186)
She is set “inescapably” apart from reality and practicality, sequestered in a time and
place apart and symbolic of an older cultural order. Pursuing ghosts and shadows in
isolation, she is herself ghostly, ethereal, and mystical. Further, Bell’s description of
Woolf as oracle-like, suggests that she is not in control of her own writerly language or
labor. Like an oracle, she utilizes her divine “gift,” performing an encrypted recitation of
external truths rather than making deliberate choices as a writer. Such apolitical prophesy
is fundamentally feminine, and Bell implies that Woolf’s language and mind are too far
removed from practical reality to reach “the ears of … men” (186).
It is this image of Woolf that has been routinely reproduced in television and film,
crafting the collective understanding of Virginia Woolf as artistic icon. In a 1996 BBC
documentary, for example, author Edna O’Brien echoes Bell’s representation of Woolf as
a delicate and alien mind, controlled by rather than in control of her genius. O’Brien
describes Woolf as “afraid of life,” living “totally in her head,” and writing “in a state of
trance” (Great Writers). This is the popular image of Woolf—that of the tortured artist
whose alienation enlivened her art.
3
While in his documentary for Channel Four, Tom Paulin modified this
understanding of Virginia Woolf’s separateness to represent her as a malignant poète
maudit. Paulin indicates, as Bell did before him, that Virginia Woolf’s alienation was the
result of her anachronistic world view and that it did not successfully transgress the status
quo: “She was too rooted in Victorian values to become a truly modern writer”
(J’Accuse). Paulin attributes Woolf’s lasting popularity (despite his consideration of her
as “one of the most over-rated literary figures of the 20th century”) to a general ignorance
of the Victorian class snobbery, anti-Semitism, racism, and imperialism betrayed in her
diaries and letters. But it becomes clear that it is not only Woolf’s expressions of
superiority that offend Paulin when he acknowledges that he would forgive her bigotry
were she only a better writer. And for Paulin, Woolf’s writing is bad because in it
“loveliness and stillness reign … it belongs in Homes and Gardens.” His deeply gendered
attack on Virginia Woolf’s “conventional imagination” and “simply decorative” prose
reveal the ways in which the complexity of Woolf’s writing is ignored or dismissed
because of its focus on the domestic sphere. Such obfuscations indicate an attachment to
the prevalent misconception that the home is not a site in which political action or
thought can be meaningfully expressed.
Following the critical tradition of Bell and Paulin, Peter Alexander examines
Virginia Woolf’s fiction as largely devoid of political intention, while simultaneously
indicative of her prejudiced personal beliefs. Alexander actually credits Virginia’s
interest in the feminism and anti-fascism expressed in her polemic essays A Room of
One’s Own and Three Guineas to her husband’s political engagement: “It is hard to resist
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the conviction that had Leonard not been politically active she would have paid little or
no attention to the rise of totalitarianism” (179). Alexander attempts to illustrate
Virginia’s apathetic politics by noting that she “cared much more for the doings of
royalty than for those of dictators, and when she listed current affairs in her diary, the
wedding of the Duke of Gloucester was apt to appear before the General Election or the
Abyssinian War” (179). Here too Virginia Woolf’s apparent Victorian snobbery and
limited politics are expressed via profoundly gendered systems of value.
But in his book, Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Literary Partnership, Alexander
also tracks the ways in which Virginia influenced the writing of Leonard. Rather than
encouraging his iconic ideologies or acting as an “unobtrusive” helpmate providing “the
peace of mind, and the time, to get on with … writing,” as Leonard had done for his wife,
Virginia poisons her husband’s intellectual labor (Alexander 158). For example,
Alexander points to Leonard’s desire to please his wife and Virginia’s anti-Semitism to
explain the “snobbish distain” expressed for the Woolf family in Leonard’s novel The
Wise Virgins (5).
Furthermore, Alexander continues the tradition of characterizing the life and work
of the Woolfs as deeply gendered and oppositional by stressing Leonard’s firm grasp on
fact and reality while describing Virginia as incapable of understanding or enduring
reality. When comparing “The Three Jews” with “The Mark on the Wall,” for example,
Alexander concludes:
[Virginia’s] inability to cope with [reality] was given painful clarity of
focus by her marriage, for it naturally allowed her to observe Leonard
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more closely than she had any man except her father and to compare
herself with Leonard: and he, she came increasingly to realize, was
spectacularly good at coping with facts. His extreme scholarly precision
made Virginia ever more clearly aware of her own inability to cope with
facts and with physical reality…. (104)
Alexander points to the disparate writing styles of the Woolfs to define and delimit the
authors as people. Leonard’s rational rhetoric and straightforward writing style are
evidence of his ability to be “spectacularly good” at managing the realities of life, while
Virginia’s meandering and aesthetic compositions are evidence of a lack of control that
also characterizes her practical and mental abilities.
Meanwhile, in Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf, Irene Coates recasts Leonard into
the role of villain, but maintains the typical art/rationality dichotomy that has come to
typify the critical consensus about the Woolfs’ work and relationship. Rather than
making him out to be the patient and “saintly” caretaker of Virginia’s mind and legacy,
Coates identifies Leonard as a calculating man who worked strategically to secure his
wife’s wealth by labeling her mad and encouraging her death (65). But even in Coates’s
description, Leonard maintains a monopoly on political enthusiasm. For her, however, his
rationality is repressive rather than inspiring: “trips to [Leonard’s] political meetings not
only tired and bored [Virginia] but made her feel that she was being plunged into an alien
world that broke into the quiet time she needed for her writing” (133). In this way, Coates
also intimates that Virginia’s art was at odds with political engagement and so maintains
the conventional distinction between art and politics.
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Such antiquated ideas about the Woolfs still have a surprising amount of currency
both inside and outside academia. However, in the last thirty years a number of critics
have shown that straightforward and oppositional divisions between the Woolfs are gross
oversimplifications. Scholars such as Naomi Black, Mark Hussey, Hermione Lee, and
Jane Marcus have convincingly interpreted Virginia Woolf’s work as representative of
her complex feminist and anti-fascist politics, while critics like Douglas Kerr and
Christopher Ondaatje have noted the modernist aesthetics of Leonard Woolf’s short
stories and novels.
In this project, I add my own voice to this chorus. I will trouble the gendered
dichotomies that have been attached to the Woolfs’ work and lives. First, I examine
Leonard Woolf’s first novel, The Village in the Jungle, critiquing the literary tropes and
traditions he used to construct a narrative that he defined—and which has been largely
accepted as—a vehicle for his early anti-imperialist politics. Further, I argue that the
logic of these politics was complicated and somewhat compromised by Woolf’s
paradoxically complex feelings about wielding colonial power. Subsequently, I explore
Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens,” arguing that the experimental short story is a deeply
political piece that represents Britain’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial
agenda and systems of global capitalism as fundamentally violent and tethered to other
systems of oppression, principally gender and class relations.
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A Moral Modernist: Ambivalence, Anxiety, and Colonial Science in Leonard Woolf’s
The Village in the Jungle
Leonard Woolf served as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, from
the years 1904 to 1911. Two years after his return to Britain, he published his first novel,
The Village in the Jungle, inspired by his time there. Woolf later explicitly identified his
novel as an expression of his developing anti-imperialist politics. As he explains in the
introduction to his official diaries as an Assistant Government Agent, before his time in
British Ceylon, Woolf had “had very few political opinions and had given little or no
thought to the problems of imperialism” (lxxviii). But after his seven years in the Ceylon
Civil Service (a branch of the Indian Civil Service), Woolf was left “more and more
doubtful whether [he] liked the prospect of spending [his] whole life as an imperialist
ruling non-Europeans” (lxxviii). He communicates his ideological awakening in his novel
by disputing the notion that Britain’s presence abroad was a necessary or effective force
of social and moral salvation. Further, true to modernist aesthetic principles, Woolf’s
novel works to challenge established literary conventions and narratives of imperial
expansion. The perilous jungle, popularized in colonial travel writing as a place of danger
galvanizing British masculinity and dominance, is, for example, shown by Woolf to be a
place of human defeat, incapable of being dominated. I argue, however, that also
embedded in Woolf’s text are omissions and deferments of the power accessible to white
British government agents and, so too, of the colonial power he experienced and
practiced first-hand. Woolf sanitizes and de-emphasizes the violence and antagonism that
accompany colonial rule, and these silences and deflections are significant in that they
8
represent Woolf’s subtextual attempt to absolve himself of his early colonial complicity
and to retroactively construct himself as an innocent imperialist. Woolf’s guilty
ambivalence is communicated in the content, form, and purpose of his novel, and as a
result, colonial ambivalence is the defining feature of The Village in the Jungle.
Set in the rural village of Beddagama, Woolf’s novel follows the lives of Silindu,
a poor hunter, and his two daughters, Punchi Menika and Hinnihami. They are outsiders
in a village surrounded by an “evil” jungle. When Silindu’s wife dies shortly after giving
birth, it solidifies the resentment of her cousin and the village’s headman, Babehami.
Silindu, with the help of his sister, raises Punchi Menika and Hinnihami in a way that
exacerbates the family’s liminal place in the village; flouting codes of caste and gender,
Silindu brings the girls with him into the jungle to hunt and commune with the animals
there. Despite its evils, the girls’ exposure to the jungle seems to benefit their growth and
they become especially beautiful, free from the dirt, disease, and pettiness of the other
villagers. But this development only increases the resentment and mistrust against them.
However, Babun Appu, the equally beautiful and capable brother-in-law of
headman Babehami, is attracted to Punchi Menika. She ultimately reciprocates his
affections, and Babun Appu joins Silindu’s compound to live with Punchi Menika as her
husband to the furious dismay of Babehami. Meanwhile Hinnihami’s beauty is admired
by Punchirala, the village doctor and “dealer in spells” (48). Unlike Babun Appu,
Punchirala is ugly and manipulative; he exploits his power to curse Silindu after
Hinnihami rejects his marriage proposal. To cure Silindu, the family makes a pilgrimage
to a neighboring city. While there, a holy man (introduced by Punchirala) announces that
9
Hinnihami must be given to the doctor to cure Silindu’s illness. Punchirala’s sexual
coercion is subsequently successful, Silindu recovers, and Hinnihami becomes pregnant.
Despite her pregnancy, Hinnihami refuses to marry Punchirala and threatens him with the
evils of the jungle should he attempt to molest her again.
When Hinnihami gives birth, Silindu brings her a jungle-born fawn. She nurses
infant and fawn together and raises them as siblings. Although her infant dies, she
continues to rear the fawn as her child. The villagers, suspicious of the fawn and of
Hinnihami’s affection for it, blame the animal for various hardships perpetual to the
village. Their overt suspicions become overt hostilities, and the villagers kill the deer by
stoning. Hinnihami dies from her grief shortly thereafter.
While his daughters are sexually exploited and assaulted, Silindu’s experiences
increasing economic hardship and debt. Babehami maliciously interferes with Silindu’s
ability to acquire chena licenses and to subsequently cultivate crops. When the
moneylender, Fernando, comes to the village to personally collect his debts, he too
attempts to forcefully seduce Punchi Menika. She rebuffs his overtures, and Fernando
turns to the incessantly resentful Babehami to orchestrate the imprisonment of Babun
Appu and Silindu. The scheme is only partially successful: framed for robbery, Babun
Appu and Silindu are taken to court, but only Babun Appu is charged and imprisoned.
After returning to Beddagama, Silindu takes his hunting gun and shoots both
Babehami and Fernando, killing them. He then turns himself in to the colonial magistrate
and is sentenced to hang; that sentence is later commuted then to 20 years imprisonment.
Before he dies, Silindu finds prison to be a place of peace and contentment. But back in
10
the jungle, the village deteriorates. Babun Appu dies in prison and the rest of the village
families leave or also die. Punchi Menika is left alone, deteriorating along with the
village. She slowly succumbs to the consumptive creep of the jungle, until a wild boar
enters her home and kills her.
***
In his autobiography Growing, Woolf explains his motivation for writing the
novel as arising out of a paradoxical emotional experience:
The jungle and the people who lived in the Sinhalese villages fascinated,
almost obsessed me in Ceylon. … The Village in the Jungle was a novel in
which I tried somehow or other vicariously to live their lives. It was also,
in some curious way, the symbol of the anti-imperialism which had been
growing upon me more and more in my last years in Ceylon. (212)
In this passage, Woolf identifies his colonial ambivalence as a central theme of his novel.
Colonial ambivalence, Homi Bhabha explains, complicates the dichotomous relationship
between colonizers and colonized, between absolute authority and unquestionable
conquest; it is a complex interaction of affective opposites—attraction and repulsion.
Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence illuminates Woolf’s fictionalized colonial experience,
then, as a complex and ambiguous delivery of his anti-imperialist politics. For example,
while explicitly communicating his attraction to the “jungle and the people” of British
Ceylon in the passage above, Woolf’s language contains an aversive edge. His
“fascination” and near “obsession” stress his outsider status and contain the possibility of
desire and disgust in equal measure. Moreover, Woolf does not explicitly identify the
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tension between denouncing British imperialism and his desire to access and personally
possess life as Other. Instead he suggests, fifty years after writing the novel, a lasting
discomfort with his desire to live as native by hedging his admission with the critically
passive, yet desperate, idiom “somehow or other.” He does, however, obliquely
acknowledge that fictionalizing his confused desire to know and be Other makes for a
“curious” articulation of anti-imperialism.
Woolf’s simultaneous antipathy towards the reality of imperialism and his
attraction to imperial fantasy is manifested in his novel via his narrative descriptions of
the jungle as a place both hostile and titillating. In his introductory descriptions of the
jungle and its component botanical life, Woolf’s narrator characterizes jungle plants as
“evil-looking and obscene, with … great fleshy green slabs … from which … oozes out a
milky, viscous fluid” and so conflates the exotic and the erotic (Village 10). This
description, and Woolf’s general shifting between imperial disgust and desire, recall Julia
Kristeva’s description of the abject as a fetid border that absorbs as it alienates,
destabilizing identity in an “ambiguous opposition [of] I/Other, Inside/Outside,” the
experience of which is attended by feelings of fear and jouissance (7-9). The jungle of
Woolf’s description is, for example, frightening and strongly sexualized, answering its
own “obscene” incitement to lust with postcoital oozing.
Both the novel’s narrator and its characters respond to the abject fecundity of the
jungle in this way. For example, the sexual encounter of Babun Appu and Punchi
Menika, which anticipates their amorous cohabitation, is a ravishing—a rape that is both
violent and pleasurable:
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A strange feeling of excitement came over the girl, of joy and fear, as
Babun leant towards her, and put out his hand to take her by the wrist. A
great desire to fly from him, and at the same time to be caught by him
came over her. She stood looking down until his fingers touched her skin;
then with a cry she broke from him, and ran …. She heard his breathing
very close to her as she ran; and when she looked over her shoulder she
felt his breath on her face, saw his bright eyes and great lips, through
which the teeth shone white. Another moment and she felt the great
strength of his arms as he seized her. … She allowed him to take her into
the thick jungle, but struggled with him, and her whole body shook with
fear and desire as she felt his hands upon her breasts. A cry broke from
her, in which joy and desire mingled with the fear and the pain. (Village
35-36)
Again fear and jouissance characterize Woolf’s description of life in the jungle. But
where Woolf was fascinated by a people, Babun Appu is fascinated with a person—
Punchi Menika, and he observes her with a sexualized gaze “watch[ing] in painful
excitement her swelling breasts and … soft folds at her hips” before forcing himself on
her (Village 34). She is an object to be gazed on and subsequently acted on—succumbing
to the force of both penetrative actions.
Indeed, the forcefulness of Babun Appu’s gaze, desire, and action are central to
Woolf’s representation of sexual pain and pleasure, fear and delight; and their use in this
coupling is permitted, accepted, and desired because of Babun Appu and Punchi
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Menika’s otherness as well as by the otherness of the space they occupy. It is significant
that the pair’s sexual meeting culminates in the “thick jungle” (36). In this private
moment far from the view of other villagers and even farther from white colonial
authorities, Woolf’s narrative penetrates the jungle veil as Punchi Menika is penetrated
by Babun Appu. He has access to both woman and environment and writes both to be
seen, to be sexually provocative, and, in this way, refracts and animates his own desire
through Babun Appu. This visual proximity integrates the experiences of author and
character (and reader) creating a more compelling illusion of “genuine participation in the
most private [moments of] Oriental life” (Oueijan 14).
Woolf’s vicarious experience requires Babun Appu and Punchi Menika to enact a
familiar colonial sexual fantasy, one that fuses violence with seduction, to intrigue and
arouse the readership at home. Indeed, I attribute some of the exuberance of the scene to
a self-conscious attempt by Woolf to entice his readers into a position in which they
would be more susceptible to his anti-imperialist purpose. However, to so situate his
audience, he relies on discourses and language that parallel the exotic landscape with
exotic femaleness. As a result, Woolf’s novel taps into tropes that represent colonized
women as synecdoches of their colonized countries and as ripe and ready for the forcible
taking—a connection that the description of Punchi Menika’s “blooming … golden” skin
makes nearly explicit (Village 23).
In his sexual assault of Punchi Menika, Babun Appu is made deeply animalistic;
he is a frightening beast of the frightening jungle. His dominance, and her corresponding
submission, is thus fictionalized as an irresistible force of an immoral landscape. But
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Woolf has projected this fierce desire, which is also his desire, onto Babun Appu. In his
autobiography, Woolf acknowledges that the ferocious and hungry desire written onto
Babun Appu, and manifested in that character’s frightening combination of “great lips”
and shining teeth, was a part of his experience of British Ceylon when describing how he
“enjoyed the fleshpots of imperialism” (Village 33; Growing 159). The phrase epitomizes
the belief in British might and right to rule, connoting indulgence and debauchery as well
as a dehumanizing violence that equates bodies to meat. Yet Woolf accompanies the
recognition of his imperial arrogance with his self-identification as “an anti-imperialist
who … loved the subject peoples and their way of life, and knew from the inside how
evil the system was beneath the surface” (Growing 158-159). In countless ways, then,
Woolf’s fiction and literary self-reflection are suffused with the tension between his
political ideals and his visceral attachment to Western literary traditions of exoticism that
were at odds with his anti-imperialist outlook.
However, one of the foremost reasons Woolf’s novel is routinely praised as an
indictment of British colonialism is because of his narrative focus on rural Sinhalese
farmers and the ways in which British colonial policies negatively impacted their lives
(Carey 90). Throughout the novel Silindu’s family is economically depressed, and the
British colonial government’s strict allocation of agricultural land and licensing practices
are implicated as contributing to their poverty. Chena permits, which were distributed by
the crown via a system headmen, required payment in advance, and so required villagers
to borrow against their future crops also permitted by the license. As a result, British land
use procedures ingrained debt into the lives of rural farmers.
15
This representation of an one-sidedly beneficial economic exchange defies
sentimental visions of colonial management as morally altruistic, and so represents a
challenge to British imperial power and logic that was not typically expressed in English
literature until after the First World War. At that time, in the widening wake of
international independence movements, Britain became increasingly disenchanted with
its own imperial practices and gradually aware of the similarities between imperialism
and totalitarianism (Childs 125). In other words, after the domestic experience of landgrabbing violence, the English did not (wish to) see “territorial occupation, expansionism
and enforced rule [as] English traits, whereas their nineteenth-century synonyms, moral
leadership and the civilizing mission, had been” (Childs 125). Coupled with uprisings for
independence, which were, as Said notes, “too far gone to be ignored or defeated,”
denunciations of English imperialism began to assert their way into national narratives
(Culture and Imperialism 291). Peter Childs suggests that the 1910 editorial manifesto of
The Round Table, an imperial studies journal, reflects the typical pre-war opinion of
empire: “The truth, of course, is that all who have grown up under the Union Jack are in
their hearts devoted to it for it stands to them for a great tradition in the past … and a still
greater promise in the future” (qtd. in Childs 119). In his novel, Woolf utterly discredits
the idea that the “children” of empire are at all beholden to or in awe of England.
Patriotic symbols of England are superfluous to the lives of the villagers in Woolf’s story.
Indeed the emblematic crown of empire appears only as a symbol of economic lack, as
the far away and abstract owner of land: “The villagers owned no jungle themselves; it
belonged to the Crown, and no one might fell a tree or clear a chena in it without a permit
16
from the Government” (Village 27). It is this system of ownership that promises not a
greater future, but one dominated by lack and mired by debt.
Woolf portrays a system of economic control determined by bureaucratic logic
and systems far removed from jungle life as facilitating the financial and emotional ruin
of Silindu and his family. Therefore, the tragedy of The Village in the Jungle is
transgressive. Woolf tells his story through the lives of the disenfranchised and colonized,
using the many misfortunes that befall Silindu’s family to portray the mechanisms of
colonialism as psychologically damaging. In focusing on the emotional and
psychological harm instigated by Britain’s colonial presence, Woolf transforms the
terrain of colonial fiction and imperial travel writing. Rather than romanticizing the
civilizing mission and adventure of the colonial project by placing white experiences
before colorful colonial backdrops, Woolf rotates the lens—focusing on that background
and placing white British experiences into a fuzzy periphery. From this new perspective,
The Village in the Jungle represents non-Europeans as suffering from the psychological
injuries of colonialism and, in so doing, stands in contrast to the work of other colonially
critical modernists like Conrad who fictionalized disillusionment with colonial master
narratives by representing “the horror” inflicted on the minds of white colonizers who
chased the promise of adventure and wealth into foreign jungles.
In this way, Woolf constructs his novel around a subtle critique of imperial power
and promise. And yet, by pushing British colonizers to the margins of the book inspired
by his own work as a British colonial agent, Woolf dilutes his critique of colonial rule in
general and of his own actions in particular. By placing white colonizers in so peripheral
17
a position, Woolf represents the evils of British governance (and government agents) as a
far less prominent force contributing to Silindu’s family tragedies than are the continual
malice, antagonism, and sexual violence of Babahami, Fernando, and Punchirala.
Babahami’s ill feelings for Silindu are, for example, responsible for his refusal to grant
Silindu the colonial farming permits that allow him to cultivate the crops on which
Silindu and his family largely depend for survival. Access to land in Woolf’s novel thus
appears to be less directly affected by colonial regulations than by petty personal
vendettas. And while chena licensing creates a cycle of debt, white imperialists are never
directly implicated as the agents of economic violence. Instead, it is the imperialists’
subordinates of color who are depicted as the means and managers of colonial injustice.
The villagers lived upon debt …. At the time of the reaping a band of
strangers … would come to the village. Mohamadu Lebbe Ahamadu
Cassim, the Moorman boutique-keeper had supplied clothes to be paid for
in grain, with a hundred per cent interest … and among the crowd of
smaller men the sly-faced low-caste man [whose] real name Andrissa
would have revealed his caste … dressed in dirty white European trousers
and coat …. With their little greasy notebooks, full of unintelligible letters
and figures, they descended upon the chenas; after calculations,
wranglings, and abuse, which lasted for hour after hour, the accounts were
settled …. (Woolf 25-26)
Describing this group of men as a “descending horde” identifies them as a violent and
savage crowd, subjecting the villagers to a cruel economic coup and a reaping of a
18
different sort. Although Cassim recalls the white colonial power structure that enables
this economic exploitation through his “white European” dress, his is an offensive and
literally sullied version of it. Woolf’s narrator further distances himself1 from the group
by indicating that he cannot read the “unintelligible” writing in the group’s “greasy
notebooks,” so foreign is this brutality from him and those he represents.
The violence of this event stands in sharp contrast to the scene in which Silindu
directly interacts with a white European government agent. After Silindu murders
Babehami and Fernando, he turns himself into the local magistrate, a “white Hamadoru,”
a position Woolf occupied during his time in Sri Lanka (Village 143). Silindu is
immediacy struck by the magistrate’s similitude, discovering that the magistrate is also a
hunter and that he too “know[s] the jungle” (145). Silindu is relieved and comforted by
the connection: “Good; then the Hamadoru will understand” (145). The two men are
shown as having a bond, both know the jungle and so too the nature of evil. Silindu trusts
and respects the magistrate, and Woolf indicates that these feelings are not misplaced
when the magistrate compassionately responds to Silindu’s tale with the pronouncement
that he is a “very bad” judge because “[i]t does not seem at all a simple case to me. I
shouldn’t like to hang Silindu of Beddagama for killing your rascally headman” (Village
146, original emphasis). The magistrate refers to Silindu by name and title, a gesture of
respect, when explaining that he regrets the inevitable and violent punishment of Silindu.
The stressed “I” of the magistrate’s comment highlights the difference of his opinion with
that of the Ratemahatmaya (“a Sinhalese gentleman”) who identifies Silindu as ignorant
and inhuman (146). The magistrate has listened to, believed, and understood the
19
complexity of Silindu’s transgression. And despite his belief that Silindu will be
executed, the magistrate’s leniency is not unique. Following Silindu’s initial trial and
execution order, his death sentence is commuted to twenty years of hard labor. In
Woolf’s fictionalized Ceylon, there is no white authority that will directly or spitefully
take Silindu’s life.
Alternatively, the Ratemahatmaya has no sympathy for Silindu, answering the
magistrate’s question: “He’s a human being, isn’t he?” with the pronouncement: “They
are very ignorant. They become angry suddenly, and then, they kill like—like—animals,
like the leopard” (146-147). For the Ratemahatmaya, Silindu is an uncivilized threat to
the colonial order and hierarchy. As Joseph Sramek points out, colonial comparisons to
tigers and leopards often coded South Asian men as rebellious and in need of colonial
mastery (662). But the magistrate dismisses this observation as ignorant of jungle truths:
You don’t shoot … so you don’t know the jungle properly. But it’s really
the same with the other jungle animals …. [T]hey just want to be left
alone.… But if you worry ‘em enough … they get angry as you call it, and
go out to kill. I don’t blame them either. (Village 147)
While the Ratemahatmaya’s comparison implicitly suggests a need for colonial control,
the magistrate explicitly calls for a policy of non-interference. Yet, neither man is able to
affirmatively answer the question of Silindu’s humanity. Instead, both use animalistic
comparisons to construct truths about “these jungle people” (147). In this way, the
magistrate articulates his distaste for conquest by simultaneously reinterpreting and
20
relying on the language and ideas that function as a propaganda justifying and
encouraging conquest.
The logic of a policy of non-interference is made elsewhere in Woolf’s text.
British law and order (of which Woolf was a personal proponent, as he says in Growing,
“I am all and always upon the side of law and order”) breaks down in the chaos of an
uncontrollable and dangerous jungle (79). In the second volume of his autobiography,
Woolf would define imperialism as “the absurdity of a people of one civilization and
mode of life trying to impose its rule upon an entirely different civilization and mode of
life” (Growing 193). Beddagama’s “rascally” headman, Babehami, embodies this
incompatibility in Woolf’s novel (Village 146).
Babehami had been made a headman because he was the only man in the
village who could write his name. He was a very small man, and was
known as Punchi Arachichi (the little Arachichi). Years ago, when a
young man, he had gone on a pilgrimage to the vihare at
Medamahanuwara. He had fallen ill there, and had stayed for a month or
two in the priest’s pansala. The priest had taught him his letters, and he
had learnt enough to be able to write his own name. (15)
Babehami’s power over the village and his ability to torment Silindu and his family are
described as both arbitrary and accidental. He was allocated governmental powers and
benefits not based on his aptitude or respect within his own community but on his ability
to sign his name and so represent the village in the documents of bureaucratic rule.
Rather than being a worthy local representative of the colonial government, Woolf
21
emphasizes Babehami’s smallness of stature and rank by explaining, via footnote, that
Arachichi is the lowest rank of headman. Woolf ultimately indicates that Babehami’s
character and mind are correspondingly small and petty. Indeed, Babehami seems to
represent all that Woolf disliked about governance by headmen. He laments in Growing
the inefficiency of using a network of headmen to maintain colonial law and order: “it
was extremely difficult to prevent effectively the primitive and illegal methods of the …
headmen in dealing with crime” (79). Rather than creating a bridge between villagers and
the colonial government, Woolf describes headmen who, like Babehami, actively
undermine British law and order even as they enforce it.
In this way, Woolf indicates that the British colonial presence in Sri Lanka
cleared the way for unworthy and petty men of color to accumulate and exercise power.
The psychological and physical damage caused by these men eclipses the policies and
complicity of the white British colonial agents. Woolf thus displaces and defers the
actions of white colonizers that maintain the regulations facilitating emotional and
economic harm. Furthermore, white colonizers are absolved entirely of committing any
bodily violence. Neither with their hands nor with their offices do white colonial agents
participate in physical violence in Woolf’s novel. Instead, white government agents are
depicted as essentially good men who are as wrapped up in Britain’s imperial machine as
those over which they rule.
Woolf’s autobiographical account of colonial administration does not, however,
corroborate this non-violent fictionalization. In Growing, Woolf describes floggings,
flaying, and executions under the watch and command of white government agents like
22
himself (166). Indeed, Woolf describes how “easy and natural” it was for him to motivate
fishery laborers with “a loud voice” and a swing of “a walking stick” (Growing 93).
Personally, the use of capital punishment and torture offended Woolf on a moral and
rational level; he called the practices “repulsive” and “disgustingly inefficient” (Growing
168). But his decision to omit any reference to this kind of violence implicitly
characterizes government agents abroad as benevolent and reasonable men well-suited to
compassionate rule.
Furthermore, by rewriting white colonial authorities as essentially good and
sympathetic men who do not have the desire to violently, or even forcefully, police and
regulate, Woolf significantly diminishes their (and his own) colonial accountability.
Instead, Woolf implicates the bureaucratic governing system that colonialism put into
place, which empowered supposedly lesser men of color, like Babahami, Fernando, and
Cassim, as the source of the evils of British imperialism. In this manner, Woolf suggests
that it is the attempt to impose European order on the natural chaos of the undisciplined
jungle and “the primitive conditions of life in … Ceylon” that allow for economically and
sexually exploitive “hordes” of “low-caste” men to acquire the power and authority who
ultimately lead to Silindu’s self-preserving act of murder and to his family’s tragedy and
doom (Diaries lxxv; Village 25-26).
Consequently, while Woolf’s novel does disrupt standard Eurocentric
representations of center and margin, his work does not wholly break with the
conventions of colonial fiction and travel writing that defined the jungle as a place of
23
danger and lust, home to animalistic natives, and as wholly foreign to the order and
civility of Europe.
***
As I earlier argue, Woolf’s use of exotic/erotic tropes was “common to travel
writing of the time [and was] designed to enliven and capture the interest of the
metropolitan reader” (Carey 92). Because Woolf pairs of the continual sexual domination
and assault of the characters Punchi Menika and Hinnihami with the subjugating poverty
of the title village, his text conforms to the themes of sentimental travel writing which
was, as Mary Louise Pratt describes, preoccupied with “[s]ex and slavery” (Pratt 86).
Furthermore, Woolf’s text is punctuated by orientalist depictions marking both the heroes
and villains of The Village in the Jungle as figures of racial and sexual alterity. Woolf’s
description of Fernando as a “fat Moorman” who “was always wanting a woman”
pointedly reproduces the image of the dark, licentious Muslim man whose immorality is
manifest in his corporeal appetites (Village 110; 91). Alternatively, Babun Appu
represents a less threatening vision of exotic male otherness:
He was tall for a Sinhalese, broad-shouldered, and big-boned. His skin
was a dark-chocolate brown, his face oval, his nose small, his lips full and
sensual. His expression was curiously virile and simple, but his brown
eyes, which were large and oval-shaped, swept it at moments with
something soft, languorous and feminine. The impression of a mixture of
virility and femininity was heightened by the long hair, which he tied in a
knot at the back of his head after the custom of the villagers. He was noted
24
for his strength, his energy, and his good humour. The minds of most
villagers are extraordinarily tortuous and suspicious, but Babun was
remarkable for his simplicity. (33)
Babun Appu’s “remarkable” beauty is enticing—his “chocolate” skin suggesting various
sensory delights. His body stands apart from the other diseased, desiccated, and maimed
villagers who are largely afflicted with “the filthy sores of parangi,” or yaws disease1
(Village 14). Babun Appu’s beautiful and unsullied body is indicative of a similarly pure
mind and personality, and he stands in sharp contrast to the other “extraordinarily
tortuous and suspicious” villagers. As a result, Babun Appu is more appealing to the
aesthetic tastes of a European audience. Woolf pushes his readers to ally with Babun
Appu by describing him as living up to ideal standards of white British masculinity
indicated by his height, his “virility … his strength, his energy, and his good humour.”
Babun Appu is the acceptable, agreeable Other because of his dissimilarity from the other
villagers as Woolf imagines them. And yet, Woolf also stresses Babun Appu’s difference,
his otherness, from white masculine Englishness by carefully describing his feminized,
sexualized features and his intellectual “simplicity.” Just as Babun Appu’s difference
from the other villagers designates him as sympathetic to an English audience, his
differences from that audience also make him non-threatening. His feminized features
represent the ability of those with greater masculine authority to coerce his body, but his
simplicity of mind suggests that no such force will be necessary to maintain control.
Unlike Fernando, who grew up in Colombo looking into the houses of “white
Mahatmayas and their women” contemplating “how fair are the women, fair as the lotus
25
flower,” Babun Appu does not (to paraphrase Fanon) look on the settler’s town with lust
or envy (Village 95; Fanon 39). He is sympathetic and safe because he is beautiful object
who does not wish to supplant colonizers—he does not desire “to sleep in the settler’s
bed, [nor] with his wife” (Fanon 39). Indeed, rather than wanting to “take [the] place” of
white colonizers, as Fernando does, Babun Appu serves as an attractive and realistic
“black mask” (who follows “the custom of the villagers”) through which Woolf’s
audience can vicariously experience the exotic and erotic frontiers of the Empire (Fanon
39; Village 33; Growing 212).
But Woolf complicates the pleasure of this performance by dooming Babun Appu
to incarceration, hard labor, and death following the scheming of Fernando and
Babehami. Woolf uses Babun Appu’s unpleasant descent from the story to again
illustrate English order as incompatible with jungle life. The superimposed law of
England is ineffective because it does not thwart Fernando and Babehami’s malicious
designs, but rather contributes to their ability to harm Silindu’s family. When Babun
Appu appears in the court presided over by “a white Hamadoru, an English man” (the
same magistrate who will later sympathize with Silindu) confusion and
miscommunication trump justice (Village 114). The law and order of England literally
does not translate; conversations are “unintelligible,” the reliability of translators is
suspect, and Babun Appu is convicted despite his innocence, simplicity, and beauty
(Village 114, 115). The tragedy of Babun Appu’s ruin is made more potent to the
audience predisposed to see him as guileless; and it becomes clear that Woolf’s
orientalist objectification and racial masquerade also scaffold the emotional impact of his
26
anti-imperial critique. Woolf has again ambiguously married the discourses of imperial
desire with a contravening political disgust.
***
Ancillary to Woolf’s ambivalent racial masquerade is a linguistic ventriloquism—
an impersonation of orality, song, and folklore.
Aiyo! Aiyo! Will the trees never end?
Our women’s feet are weary; O Great One, send
Night on us that our wanderings may end.…
Aiyo! Aiyo! The way is rough and steep,
Aiyo! The thorns are sharp, the rivers deep,
But the night comes at last. So sleep, child, sleep. (Village 18)
Although the jungle here too is normalized as a place of pain and danger, Sri Lankan
writers Mervyn de Silva and Yasmine Gooneratne have praised Woolf’s handling of
Sinhalese linguistic cadences. This artistic borrowing (also used by “high modernists”
like Conrad, Stein, and Eliot) appropriates and supplants the voice of the subaltern while
simultaneously authorizing counterhegemonic narrative strategies and resisting dominant
discursive structures of colonialism. As Peter Childs notes, “the mongrel figures of
modernism were in many cases acts of writerly appropriation but the effect was often to
challenge imperial fixities and so to make possible new understandings of colonial
subjectivity” (Childs 83). Woolf, however, mitigates his linguistic disruption of
conventional colonial discourse; he resists the subversive linguistic hybridity of his own
text by continually interrupting the narrative with points of cartographic and
27
anthropological fact. As a result his novel includes exactly the kind of information a
colonial administrator would record to pace the features of a holding so as to assist in its
governance and mastery.
Woolf fastidious footnotes and narrative asides recall the literary conventions and
genres of “the great ‘realistic’ narratives of the nineteenth century” that claim to
command “the stability of the world they represent” and so too conflate the quest to know
the world with the desire to rule it (Gikandi qtd. in Childs 85). The epistemological
power that Woolf wields is manifested through his narration of the lives and thoughts of
the Sinhalese characters as well as in the repeated uses of anthropological and
cartographic voice. It is here that the genres of sentimental and scientific travel writing
meet in Woolf’s text. While Woolf unfolds his narrative of economic and sexual intrigue
within a single village, for example, he punctuates his exotic drama with scientific fact:
There are two distinct races in Ceylon, Tamils and Sinhalese. Their
language, customs, and religions are different. The Tamils are Dravidians,
probably the original inhabitants of India; they are Hindus in religion. The
Sinhalese are Aryans, and their religion is Buddhism. The Tamils inhabit
the north and east of the island, the Sinhalese the remainder. (168)
Woolf has conflated the roles of novelist and natural historian. Here, Woolf exploits and
re-deploys notions of race popularly believed at the beginning of the twentieth century
which understood racial difference in terms of species level distinctions. In explaining
that the Tamils and Sinhalese are “distinct” races, Woolf represents cultural difference as
biological difference. His charting and cataloging of racial difference also includes data
28
on the religions and geographical locations of Tamil and Sinhalese communities.
Defining details such as these expose the mutually supportive relationship between
science and colonialism; they act as a “means for narrating inland travel and exploration
aimed not at the discovery of trade routes, but at territorial surveillance, appropriation of
resources, and administrative control” (Pratt 39). The authority on the jungle Woolf
claimed by echoing the language and speech patterns of the villagers he supervised in
Hambantota is therefore buttressed by his simultaneous use of official languages of
colonial management which sought to classify and fix the colonial landscape and its
residents in an effort to make them knowable, (hence) controllable objects. In this way,
Woolf deploys and extends the voice and gaze of the white colonial explorer/agent by
appropriating the voices and experiences of villagers to fix the parameters of their place
and identity. Woolf, then, reasserts the standard imperial definitions and modes of
knowing the Other in the same breath he uses to represent voices othered.
In doing so, Woolf’s novel combines opposing genres, using both an
anthropological voice to explain the landscapes and peoples of rural Sri Lanka and a
folkloric narration that has been compared to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
(Kanaganayakam 2). Woolf’s ambivalence is thus woven into the very structure of his
text, and his narrative wavers between expressing empathy for rural villagers and
publishing the records that effect the mastery of colonial holdings and populations. This
tethering of opposing frames is awkward but central to Woolf’s particular mode of
literary and colonial ambivalence. By bringing together these competing voices of
29
European and Sinhalese authority, Woolf erects his narrator as the ultimate expert,
disallowing and overwriting other knowledges of land and people.
***
Woolf’s version of the jungle has received high praise from critics such as
Douglas Kerr, who compares it to descriptions like Orwell’s, whose Burmese Days
defines the jungle as a place of “enmity, estrangement, and violence” (159). Kerr
commends Woolf’s novel “for the respectful attention it gives to the lives of those
indigenous people of Ceylon” and categorizes the text as a “singular symbolic
decolonization … giving autonomy to the point of view of the people for whom a
colonized space is not a possession but a native habitat “(159). But I have attempted to
show, that despite his perspective shift, Woolf’s jungle is not so different from the
malevolent and ominous trope presented in Burmese Days, or in so much of colonial
travel writing.
The unnamed narrator of the novel immediately impresses readers with the
pervasive and consuming threat that the jungle poses, not only to Europeans but to those
for whom the jungle is, as Kerr puts it, a “natural habitat”: “All jungles are evil, but no
jungle is more evil than that which lay about the village of Beddagama” (Village 10). In
calling all jungles “evil” Woolf’s narrator implicitly invokes other travel writing that
depicts the colonized jungle as a dark nemesis to the peaceful civility of Europe. But
Beddagama’s jungle, the narrator tells readers, is far more menacing than those we have
already read about from the likes of Conrad (or will read from Orwell)—in addition to
30
posing a danger to the white men who have come to control it, this jungle is threatening
even to its denizens of color.
Beddagama is literally defined by its relation to the “evil” jungle, both fighting
against its overwhelming and oppressive encroachment and a part of its presumably
primitive wildness.
The village was called Beddagama, which means the village in the jungle.
… It was in, and of, the jungle; the air and the smell of the jungle lay
heavy upon it …. The jungle surrounded it, overhung it, continually
pressed in upon it …. It was a living wall about the village, a wall which,
if the axe were spared, would creep in and smother and blot out the village
itself. (Village, 9 emphasis added)
By describing the village as both “in and of the jungle,” Woolf is able to associate it, and
its inhabitants, with European notions of the exotic and frightening unknown while
simultaneously normalizing the view of the jungle as an ominous peril by indicating that
the villagers too must viciously combat the jungle if they wish to survive it. This is a
place of extreme alien cruelty and wildness. It is not a home but a brutish and grotesque
“habitat,” even for its indigenous residents.
The demonizing images of the jungle Woolf uses to establish the tone of his
exotic drama are followed by dehumanizing images of its residents. Woolf’s narrator
begins by describing one of the “liars, boasters, or fools’ who does not share his fear and
anxiety of the jungle:
31
a little man with hunched up shoulders and peering, cunning little eyes,
and a small dark face all pinched and lined, for he spent his life crouching,
slinking, and peering through the undergrowth and the trees. He was more
silent than the leopard and more cunning than the jackal. (Village 9)
These animalistic analogies evoke notions of biological and evolutionary differences
between races that define certain peoples as lower forms of human because of their
presumed lack of evolutionary difference from beasts. The description of this un-named
man emphasizes his inferiority. The narrator repeatedly mentions the man’s size calling
him “little” and “small;” his slight stature contributes to his representation as stunted and
primitive. He is further portrayed as primitive in ability and behavior with his life-long
“crouching, slinking, and peering.” More recognizably animal than human, the man of
the narrator’s (and Woolf’s) gaze is made object and other. In doing so, the narrator
implicitly reveals himself as the unnamed norm. He is defining the object of his gaze
against the difference from himself.
The hunter of the narrator’s gaze is described as being not only animalistic and
subhuman, but also as ignorant of his own surroundings. Despite his likeness to the
animals of the jungle, he does not know the jungle as the narrator has defined it, and his
lack of fear of the jungle is exposed as folly.
One day he took his axe in hand … and went out [into the jungle] …. He
never returned to the village again, and months afterwards in thick jungle I
found his bones scattered upon the ground, beneath some thorn bushes,
32
gnawed by the wild pig and the jackal, and crushed and broken by the
trampling of elephants. (10)
It is an inglorious and humiliating death. The hunter’s lack of fear for the jungle has
resulted in the devastation of his life and remains. The jungle poses a threat not only to
life but is posthumously violent and traumatizing. Woolf’s jungle is fundamentally and
perpetually threatening and fearsome.
But the description of this nameless hunter’s audacity and death do more than
illustrate the violent nature of the jungle. By sacrificing this character’s life, one whose
knowledge of the jungle differed from that of the narrator, Woolf is able to erect his
narrator as the ultimate authority on the jungle. He has created the perfect colonial guide
for his European audience: someone in but not of the jungle, who can omnisciently and
objectively relate the truth of the jungle and of those living within it to the delight, terror,
and education of readers back home.
***
Authoritative narration combining scientific exploration, sexual access, and
organic danger is manifested in descriptions of women’s bodies as particularly
susceptible to the physical violence of the jungle. For example, the aging of Karlinahami,
Silindu’s sister, is accelerated in the jungle; it is an experience typical for jungle-dwelling
women and especially for “a woman without a husband” (Village 166).
The jungle had left its mark on her. Her body was bent and twisted, like
the stunted trees which the … wind had tortured into grotesque shapes.
The skin, too, on her face and thin limbs reminded one of the bark
33
of the jungle trees; it was shrunken against the bones, and wrinkled, and
here and there flaking off into whitish brown scales, as the bark flakes off
the kumbuk trees. … The eyes were not blind, but they seemed to be
sightless—the pupil, the iris, and even the white had merged—because the
mind was dying. It is what usually happens in the jungle—to women
especially—the mind dies before the body. (167)
The “swelling breasts” and “soft folds” Karlinahami likely had (as her niece had) in her
youth now more closely resemble the “thin shriveled breasts” of other old women in the
village (Village 34; 24). Her decaying body and its inability to gratify the male gaze is
used to illustrate the dangers of being too long exposed to the jungle. But Karlinahami is
also exposed under the narrator’s description of her aging body. His ability to access and
describe her illustrates his power to classify and define her body, which is constructed as
a place of lack: lacking beauty, lacking awareness, and lacking humanity. Where the
jungle is personified, actively acting against Karlinahami, she is dehumanized—the
pronoun “her” shifts to the article “the.” This change in word choice classifies
Karlinahami as specimen. Her body is mapped as a place of decay indicative of all
women who make their homes in the jungle. She is described as becoming
indistinguishable from her surroundings, as succumbing to the expanding jungle just as
abandoned huts and walls of the village become consumed by the creeping undergrowth.
She becomes an extension of the jungle, and her condition is presented as the inevitable
conclusion to a life there. The narrator indicates that women’s insufficiently robust minds
exacerbate this kind of decayed merging. The suggestion demonstrates an acceptance of
34
the notion, popularized by “the men who constructed the colonial world of the nineteenth
century,” that women, especially non-European women, “were closer to nature” and so
too father from civility (Levine 199).
This distance is made literal by the end of the novel when Punchi Menika is left
alone to face the ever advancing jungle. She is isolated in a decomposing hut;
Beddagama has been completely abandoned by the other villagers; the land is being
reclaimed by the jungle, and it is now coming for her: “She was dying and the jungle
knew it; it is always waiting; can scarcely wait for death” (Village 180). The jungle
devours her—its agent, a wild boar, enters her hut to consume her. It is a sexualized
death: “as she fell back, the great boar grunted softly, and glided like a shadow towards
her into her hut” (Village 180). The seductiveness of the words “glided” and “softly”
coupled with the boar’s hungry and lustful “grunting” recalls Punchi Menika’s
animalistic seduction by Babun Appu whose “breath [she also felt] on her face” and
whose “great lips” and white teeth foreshadowed the tusks of the coming boar (Village
35-36). The woman who once stood as a conquerable parallel to the jungle around her
has, in fact, been conquered by that jungle. Fear trumps jouissance, and Woolf’s narrator
uses his commanding authority to warn readers away from this all-devouring writhing
mass.
***
The fear that Woolf expresses and attempts to inspire, he felt alongside his
“fascination” (Growing 212). In his autobiography he writes,
35
The jungle and jungle life are … horribly ugly and cruel. When I left
Ceylon, and wrote The Village in the Jungle, that was what obsessed my
memory and my imagination and is, in a sense, the theme of the book. The
more you are in the jungle, particularly if you are alone, the more one
tends to feel it personified, something or someone hostile, dangerous. One
always has to be on one’s guard against it or against—one never quite
knows what. (212).
Woolf projects and universalizes his fear of the exotic jungle by shifting the “I” of his
experience to the generalizing “one.” In his novel too, Woolf projects his fear onto his
narrator, who, in turn, projects that fear onto the villagers. His fear is of a mysterious,
timeless, and unconquerable jungle. It and its evils can be neither defeated nor destroyed,
only temporarily kept at bay. Yuko Ito argues that Woolf’s fear, and the fear he imposes
onto the villagers, could be understood as implicit encouragement “to conquer not only
the jungle but also the people and the nation” (139). While it certainly could, I ultimately
do not understand Woolf’s fear as advocating conquest, he too strongly fictionalizes it as
unsustainable. Rather, I find that The Village in the Jungle underscores the argument of
the magistrate to whom Silindu confessed and who explains that “these jungle people …
want to be left alone, to reap their miserable chenas and eat their miserable kurakkan, to
live quietly … in their miserable huts” (147). Miserable, frightening, and overwhelmingly
dangerous, the major thrust of Woolf’s anti-imperialist advocacy seems to be located in
his attempt to convince readers of the poor emotional cost to profit ratio of governing
Ceylon.
36
But this would have been an impossible sell, even Woolf’s official diaries from
his time as a colonial administrator do not support the representation of Sri Lanka’s
jungle as an ever-encroaching, perpetually threatening, consumer of land and life.
Instead, it is described as a limited resource that the British government wished to protect
for their own uses. Sri Lanka, explains Lennox Mills, was an attractive colonial holding
for multiple reasons; “[besides] being of great strategic importance, Ceylon also is a
source of war materials,—rubber, copra and coconut oil, graphite—and [was], next to
India, the world’s largest tea producer” (218). It is the desire to conserve these resources
of power and pleasure for the Crown that led to the chenas system of controlled and
limited land use that Woolf so strongly criticized in his novel, biography, and diaries.
Conservation, while contributing to the debt of villagers, was deemed necessary by the
British government because chenas were an unsustainable agricultural method. The
glossary of Woolf’s official diaries describes the process of farming with chenas:
The cultivator buns down a portion of jungle, roughly clears it and then
sows a crop …. No manuring or care of the plants is taken, but the return
is good as the soil is virgin soil. After a few crops, however, the plot is
abandoned for another new plot. [Such] shifting cultivation impoverishes
the soil …. (Diaries lxii)
This image of a limited and abused resource—“virgin soil” becoming “abandoned” and
“impoverished”—is a far cry from the all-consuming organic danger Woolf fears as
perpetually descending on the village of his novel.
***
37
Said describes Orientalism as “a form of paranoia” (Orientalism 72); such
paranoid projection of hostility and duplicity onto the Other motivates the stereotypes of
the lying or shifty native. This figure, who resists the definitive authority of the colonizer,
inspires feelings of persecution or anxiety. Woolf’s novel is characterized by his failed
attempt to transcend this paranoia. It is a failure that infects his landscape, his narrator,
and his characters.
To generate compassion for colonized peoples, Woolf creates a jungle symbolic
of all evils assaulting mankind, which encloses the struggles of both Silindu and the
magistrate. The evils of the jungle also encompass the greed fundamental to the British
imperial system. But to articulate his critique of Britain’s attempts to control cultural and
racial Others, Woolf appropriates the bodies and voices of colonized people and so relies
on a kind of cultural imperialism to denounce economic imperialism. As a result, the
politics of Woolf’s novel are profoundly paradoxical—his ambivalent sympathies are
colored by condescension, and his anti-imperialist argument rearticulates the very
discourses used to justify and rationalize the imperial project. Woolf’s narrative
participates in the exploration and mapping of empire, but ultimately indicates that
colonialism is dysfunctional because maintaining control over the jungle (and
universalized evil) is impossible. Thus Woolf does not forcefully condemn the hubris of
imperial knowledge-making or the associated right to rule that such knowledge
authorized. Indeed, Woolf seems unable to shed the Conradian idea of the British
Government Agent as an essentially moral man working in a woefully inefficient system.
The Government Agent of Woolf’s writing, fictional and autobiographical, recognizes the
38
inefficiency of empire in a way that allows him to feel sympathy for colonized people
whose lives and psychological health are marred by an incompatible and inappropriate
system of government. But Woolf’s unwillingness or inability to challenge the underlying
logic that authorized imperial expansion ultimately damns British imperialism as
ethically uncomfortable rather than ethically untenable.
39
Political Partners
The most unambiguously anti-imperial aspect of The Village in the Jungle is its
very existence. When Woolf left Sri Lanka in 1911 on his first official leave, he chose to
remain in England, marry Virginia Stephen, and become an author rather than return to
his work as a colonial administrator. His homecoming also heralded his emergent
contribution to the liberal politics of modern Britain. Woolf soon met Margaret Llewelyn
Davies and quickly began working with the Women’s Co-operative Guild, a feminist,
socialist, and pacifist organization. He also became an active member of the Labour Party
and Fabian Society. Although Woolf wrote only two novels, as a political activist and
writer he was impressively influential, a fact evidenced perhaps most clearly by the
impact of his book International Government on the organizing ideologies of the League
of Nations (Wilson 248).
Because Leonard was active and visible on a national and international stage, it is
not difficult to understand why, in the critical history of the Woolfs, his political
investment and interest have never been questioned. When it comes to Virginia, however,
some scholars have found it more difficult to discern the ways in which her politics were
manifested. I do not attribute this to a lack of political action or intellectual interest on
Virginia Woolf’s part, but to her early framing as apolitical by those close and
contemporary to her as well as to the occasional inability of some scholars to
subsequently recognize political action when it is less explicitly connected to political
parties and international policies.
40
Despite indictments of Virginia’s political engagement, including Leonard’s
famous identification of his wife as “the least political animal that has lived since
Aristotle invented the definition,” Virginia Woolf significantly shaped the political
trajectory of her husband’s post-imperial life (Downhill 27). Virginia was acquainted
with Margaret Llewelyn Davies through Janet Case and belonged to the Women’s Cooperative Guild (Glendinning 146). It was she who introduced Leonard to the cooperative movement which, in turn, helped set Leonard on his “non-revolutionary path
toward socialism” (Kintzele 49). Furthermore, despite his reluctance to re-enter colonial
service, Woolf explains in Growing that if Virginia had rejected his proposal and if he
could have maintained a modest post, he would have considered returning to Ceylon to
immerse myself in a District like Hambantota for the remainder of my life
… I might welcome it as a final withdrawal, a final solitude, in which
married to a Sinhalese, I would make my District or Province the most
efficient, the most prosperous place in Asia. (247)
Notwithstanding his growing anti-imperialist politics, then, Woolf might well have
returned to the colonial jungle to access the bodies and lives of colonized people had it
not been for Virginia. Thus the genesis of Leonard’s political reputation lay in his
relationship to his wife. The political life that would come to define Leonard Woolf’s
legacy and to distinguish from his wife, was one shared and collaboratively created via
Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s intellectual and emotional relationship
But Virginia Woolf’s politics are visible beyond the influence she had on her
husband. She was a “grass roots” political activist, leading meetings of the Women’s Co-
41
operative Guild and assisting with the practical operations of the Rodmell Labour Party
(Downhill 27). Before her marriage she taught composition and history at Morley
College, an institution for men and women of the working class (Whitworth 11-12). And
diffused throughout her writing is her analysis of the ways in which the subordination of
women was deeply linked to war through national institutions which fostered masculine
bellicosity.
In “Kew Gardens,” Woolf’s seemingly innocuous botanical setting extends her
characteristically complex analysis to demonstrate how the connections between imperial
commerce and subjugation by class and gender are sanctioned and encouraged by
overlapping systems of patriarchal power. Masculine mastery is not only performed in
the far away jungles of Ceylon; it inscribes the reality of everyday life. Woolf indicts
these interactive systems of dominance by satirizing the hubris of European empire
making, placing the likeness of those at the vanguard of empire in a lowly and limp snail.
More clearly critical, however, are the conversations between four couples that surface in
the brief narrative. Woolf uses these interactions to represent the ways in which
patriarchal dominance affects and is institutionalized in the everyday lives of common
people. Her work illustrates how deeply national and interpersonal systems of value
imbue all aspects of experience and existence.
42
Manicured into Submission: Virginia Woolf’s Critique of Imperialism and Patriarchy in
“Kew Gardens”
In the fifth volume of his autobiography, Downhill All the Way, Leonard Woolf
describes “Kew Gardens” as “a microcosm of [Virginia Woolf’s] then unwritten novels,
from Jacob’s Room to Between the Acts” (60). Leonard points to the story’s “rhythms,
movements, imagery, [and] method” as hallmarks of his wife’s writing (60). But as Alice
Staveley cogently argues, “Kew Gardens” is actually representative of Woolf’s larger
body of work because in it:
Woolf maps and interrogates orthodox intersections of romance, gender,
class, and war through the concrete voices of [the]story, showing precisely
how her characters negotiate and rearrange their discursive relationships—
their ‘footings’—with respect to hierarchies of power and subordination.
(48)
Indeed, “Kew Gardens” in particular, and Woolf’s work in general, are characterized by
feminist insight and inquiry into the manner in which patriarchal power infiltrates the
materials and relationships of everyday life in England. However, this nuanced feminist
message has been largely ignored by a succession of critics who, like Leonard Woolf,
have “duly focused on ‘rhythms, movement, imagery, [and] method’” (Staveley 43). I
argue that “Kew Gardens” is deeply political and that these formal writerly elements
mobilize the complexity of her feminist anti-imperialist critique exposing how patriarchal
power works to structure and connect familial, national, and international spheres.
43
Published in 1919, “Kew Gardens” is one of Virginia Woolf’s earliest short
stories. Written in an experimental style, the text dissolves clear distinctions between
time and perspective into a colorful “atmosphere” (“Kew” 167). Woolf fluidly moves the
reader’s eye and ear between human speakers and the creatures living at their feet, giving
“Kew Gardens” its literary rhythm. Fragments of conversations from four strolling pairs
are connected by their shared location and by a snail traversing a nearby flowerbed. The
snail’s slow movement acts as a somewhat stable spatial and temporal reference point as
the conversing couples “zig-zag” past like “white and blue butterflies” (161).
Woolf opens her story in extreme close-up. From beneath the stalks of flowers,
and immersed in color, readers share the snail’s view. This manipulation of traditional
perspective creates an “impressionistic, painterly style” (Stevenson144)—a kind of
written pointillism that uses color and symbolism to transform a mundane flowerbed into
a vast exotic and erotic wilderness.
From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks
spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half-way up and
unfurling at the tip … and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat
emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the
end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer
breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one
over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath … falling into a
raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin
walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. … Then the
44
breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into
the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew
Gardens in July. (“Kew” 161)
The language Woolf uses is reminiscent of what Mary Louise Pratt identifies as “the
monarch-of-all-I-survey scene” or the commodifying gaze of European Victorian
explorers which is characterized by “mastery of the landscape,”—“estheticizing
adjectives, [and a] broad panorama anchored in the seer” (201, 209). The trope, Pratt
explains, is “decisively gendered” for the reason that “[explorer]-man paints/possesses
newly unveiled landscape-woman” (213). Indeed, Woolf’s description of flowers in this
passage is particularly erotic and passionate. The “spreading” of stalks suggests a
feminine or feminized sexual readiness that is intensified by the mention of “heart” and
“tongue-shaped leaves.” The transition from stem to petal is described as an orgasmic
release, an “unfurling at the tip.” Here, at the “throat” of the flower, sexual “stirring” and
“staining” takes place leading to an anticipated “bursting.”
This sexualized aesthetic also marks the defamiliarized (and so foreign)
microenvironment as a lush and potentially exploitable landscape. The vivid colors and
“walls of water” connote a quintessentially colonial tropical or jungle-like environment
(165). Moreover, Woolf’s description of the “perhaps a hundred stalks” promises that the
rich and foreign wilderness is expansive but quantifiable. The numerical determiner
functions as report or data-collection on untapped natural resources. Similarly, the “gold
dust” of the flowers’ stamens implies awaiting wealth. The whole fecund panorama is
catalogued and presented for the pleasure of the spectator—for “the eyes of the men and
45
women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.” The landscape exists to be seen and enjoyed.
It is a sight that the visitors of Kew Gardens literally possess after paying their
“sixpence” (“Kew” 165).
Woolf’s apparent adoption of artistic colonial tropes to describe the
defamiliarized flower-bed directs viewers to remember the international origins of their
domestic gardens. As Lucile Brockway explains in Science and Colonial Expansion, the
flowers of Kew were botanical markers of Britain’s colonial presence and power: “in the
gardens [of Kew] we … see many … flowers and shrubs which originated in the
Orient—the Persian lilac, the tulip brought from Turkey … day lilies, chrysanthemums,
and camellias brought from China and Japan” (4). The naturalists and botanists whose
explorations of international territories via “inventories, classifications, and
transplantations” brought flowers to Kew that were fundamental to the imperial project
(Schiebinger 11). These scientists and adventurers mapped and catalogued the territory of
empire, establishing the means and motivation for imperial expansion. Botanical
collecting and cataloguing was necessary to generating wealth for the empire. Plants from
the colonies were precious because they provided “a cheap supply of drugs, foods, and
luxury items for domestic markets” (Schiebinger 11). To secure possession of these
plants, botanists “employed their technical expertise to transport and acclimatize valuable
plants to the soils of European territories around the world” (Schiebinger 11). This
process was necessary to the large scale cultivation of crops like coffee, tea, indigo,
cinchona (from which quinine is derived), rubber, and sugarcane within areas of empire
in which colonial government and commercial management had already been firmly
46
established. Transportation and acclimatization required a network of botanical
laboratories and gardens. As a result, botanical sciences was shaped by “colonial
enterprise,” and by the end of the eighteenth century, Europeans had peppered the globe
with “sixteen hundred botanical gardens … [that] were not merely idyllic bits of green
intended to delight city dwellers, but experimental stations of agriculture and way
stations … for domestic and global trade, rare medicaments, and cash crops”
(Schiebinger 11). In England, the flagship laboratory and acclimatization center was Kew
Gardens.
***
It was during the Victorian age—the age of Empire—that Kew became imperial
and was transformed into the world’s leading institution for botanical science. Under the
direction of William Hooker, his son, Joseph Hooker, and most acutely under William
Turner Thiselton-Dyer (son-in-law to Joseph) Kew became the center of “botanical and
agricultural exchanges across the British empire” (Drayton 172). The botanical sciences
and technologies forged at Kew were responsible for wide scale botanical
interpenetration and distribution, and by the start of the twentieth century “the practical
influence of Kew … penetrated the interior of every continent” (Drayton 262). The
search and cultivation of medicines, food, and manufacturing resources justified such
intrusion as morally and commercially necessary, as William Turner Thiselton-Dyer
explained in his 1905 history of Kew:
There are some sixty distinct governments under the British Crown and in
any technical difficulty all … resort to Kew. It did what was possible
47
when coffee-leaf disease brought financial disaster to Ceylon; the
fortunate identification of a single leaf started the rubber industry of the
Gold Coast; Kew sent tea to South Africa; it gave cinchona to India … it
transferred the South American rubber plants to the East, with results
which have been described as fraught with “wealth beyond the dreams of
avarice.” (qtd. in Brockway 101)
Thiselton-Dyer curiously describes the wealth that Kew’s botanical stores created for the
empire as “beyond … avarice,” a characterization of Britain’s colonial botany that
classifies the worldwide exchange of botanical assets as wildly lucrative and yet justifies
the accumulation of wealth as a practical and moral good. For him Kew is primarily a
botanical bulwark, benevolently staving off plant disease and ensuring the supply of
medicines. The wealth that these plants brought and the colonial control they helped to
secure and maintain (by protecting the health of occupying agents) is only mentioned as a
secondary or incidental benefit. In this way, Thiselton-Dyer’s portrayal of Kew uses “the
science of plants” to, in the words of Richard Drayton, “[garland] imperial power with
natural legitimacy” (172).
***
Echoing this history, the human and animal figures of Woolf’s story recapitulate
the patriarchal and imperial domination symbolized in the gardens around them. Woolf’s
initial close-up perspective of the flowerbed, which transformed the flowers into an
exotic wilderness, also transforms the snail beneath and within that wilderness into a
colonial explorer-agent. In the exotic enclave, the snail re-enacts the exploration of the
48
naturalists and botanists who helped shape both Kew and empire. The exploring snail
has “a definite goal” to which it devotes its “labours” and rational thought (“Kew” 163).
When the snail encounters an obstacle in its path, it deliberates, “consider[ing] every
possible method” before pushing straight on, further penetrating its exotic environment
by “insert[ing] his head” into the barrier (165). Its purposeful forward movement along
straight lines sets down a “grid of reason” over the “labyrinthine flower-bed”
(Schiebinger 11; Stevenson 144). Overwriting the circular, organic shapes of the flower
bed, and radiating outward from the center of a similarly “circular, continually circlingback text,” the snail’s lines of movement are like the “meridians centered on Greenwich”
demarking and tracking dominion (Stevenson 144; Childs 122). The snail’s actions thus
recall those of colonial explorers and naturalists who also made progress by penetrating
exotic wilds.
The snail is most explicitly figured as a colonial explorer in the passage in which
it takes on a gendered pronoun:
[The] snail … now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell …. It
appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from
the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in
front of it, and waited for a second with its antennae trembling as if in
deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite
direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, bladelike trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast
crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across
49
the snail’s progress … to his goal. Before he decided whether to
circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the
bed the feet of … human beings. (163)
The snail is genderless until it encounters and is contrasted with the “angular green
insect.” Though they exist on the same plane, the unidentified insect is made multiply
foreign. The phonetic overlap of “singular” and “angular” suggests a connection in
meaning, and the alien sharpness of its appearance further establishes its difference from
the common snail. Although, like the snail, the insect is somewhat anthropomorphized. It
is described with the humanizing “who” rather than the inanimate “that.” But unlike the
snail, the insect does not “have a definite goal,” disqualifying its identification as British,
male, or human-like. As a result, the insect only appears to “deliberate,” it does not
actively make decisions or participate in rational goal-oriented thought. The snail’s
masculinity emerges all the more clearly in the contrast. His purpose and progress as the
“explorer-man” is to survey the exotic, feminine landscape and her equally foreign
inhabitants (Pratt 213).
But the snail conforms to the colonial traveler trope not only as a progress-making
“he,” but also as an explorer of the dangerous unknown. The landscape in which he is
immersed connotes the violence and danger commonly associated with the colonial
wilderness. The “blade-like trees” are obviously threatening, but so too are the spaces of
unexplored depth; the “deep green lakes” and “vast crumpled surfaces” are sublimely
mysterious and intimidating. But the snail soldiers on and the verbs used to describe his
actions recall the language of military planning and attack: to “breast” an opponent is to
50
“meet in full opposition,” and to “circumvent” is “to surround or encompass by hostile
stratagem, especially so as to cut off or capture” (OED). Nevertheless, this epic
strategizing is interrupted by the reminder that the colonial hero in question is a mere
snail at “the feet of … human beings.” Via the manipulation of perspective and the
conventions of colonial discourse, Woolf mocks the hubris and heroism of the (British)
colonial explorer-agent by superimposing his likeness on an insignificant and flaccid
gastropod.
The adventure of the snail in his island of botanical wildness, illustrates that the
beautiful ornamentation of Kew Gardens is underpinned by colonial exploration and
exploitation. The snail’s miniature colonial mission, however, is only one layer of
Woolf’s complex critique. Woolf periodically draws her narrative focus away from the
snail to attend to fragments of conversation from the ambling flȃneur moving like
butterflies above the canopy of the flowerbed (“Kew” 161). This “chain-like fluid
movement” between subjects is, argues Christine Reynier, particularly characteristic of
Woolf’s short fiction because it is structured “in terms of association, connection, [and]
expansion” (44). Appropriately then, the connection between the snail and the insect-like
strollers is more than animalogical. The interactions of the visiting couples and the exotic
exploration of the snail symbolize a bidirectional relationship between the metropolis and
empire. Traveling back on the lines of control and commerce, the empire enters the
metropolis to compose the structure and material of everyday life. In these mundane
moments at Kew, Woolf reveals how patriarchy, imperialism, and war are interconnected
and mutually supporting.
51
***
The four couples moving through the gardens represent “a cross-section of social
class, generation, and familial relation” (Staveley 52). Two couples signifying
heterosexual marriage and courtship enclose two single-sexed pairings—two men and
two women. The heterosexual couples demonstrate the ways in which patriarchal power
is manifest in intimate familial contests, while encoded in the “interior dialogues” of the
homosocial pairs are “references to the Great War—that great political conflict raging
outside the garden” (Staveley 52). But the plant-based commodities of imperial Kew
mentioned in those inner dialogues also allude to the colonial competition that
contributed to the outbreak of that war. Further, as Staveley convincingly argues, by
“placing the war [and Kew’s commercial influence] at the conversational core of the
story, but encrypting [their] presence there … Woolf insinuates just how closely personal
and political, domestic and national ideologies intertwine” (52).
Woolf exposes the ways in which domestic masculinist hierarchies compel and
condone ideologies of British international dominion most clearly in the interior
conversation between two men. The elder man, whose “delusions” and erratic behavior
are likely the result of traumas experienced in war, is haunted by the spirits of the dead
whose numbers “with this war” have increased dramatically (Staveley 55; “Kew” 163).
To mitigate his grief (and the grief of those “Widows! Women in black” who, like him,
have survived the war), he proposes creating an electronic device with “a piece of rubber
to insulate the wire—isolate?—insulate?—well, we’ll skip the details” (“Kew” 164). The
“machine” would enable communication with the dead, and would be “convenient[ly]”
52
housed in English bedrooms atop “neat mahogany stand[s]” (164). In these details, Woolf
demonstrates that the man’s device is a doubly absurd attempt to resolve the terrible
effects of war. Rather than theorizing a means of avoiding international conflict, he seeks
only to come to terms with war’s inevitable outcome. To do this, the man embraces the
contemporary technologies “responsible for [the] unprecedented destruction” of the First
World War (Staveley 55). The necessity of rubber and mahogany to his invention will
require that its manufacture tap into the lines of colonial trade attending colonial
conquest. The demand for English-made mahogany furniture was largely responsible for
the boom in the global trade of that wood which persisted through most of the nineteenth
century (Revels 1-2). By suggesting that his machine adorn mahogany bedroom furniture,
the man unquestioningly endorses Britain’s right to the decorative rewards of colonial
control.
Rather than an ornamental asset, rubber was a commodity fundamental to
industrial technologies and mechanized warfare. Rubber was so vital a material of war
that the British maritime blockade on Germany preventing its resupply significantly
accelerated that nation’s defeat (Tully 24-25). Rubber was also an essential tool of
colonial management; it was used in the manufacture of the “electric telegraph, which
consolidated the grip of the European powers on their colonial empires” (Tully 21).
Britain secured its access to this most valuable commodity by implementing its
cultivation via plantation systems throughout their tropical colonies. And as the central
hub of botanical science and trade, tens of thousands of seeds used to establish those
plantations passed through Kew Gardens (Tully 72).
53
It is details such as these that the man chooses to ignore as he describes his
device. His confusion of “insulate” and “isolate”—and of the difference between
protection and alienation—also suggests that his inability to recognize the ways in which
colonial commodities and international conflict are mutually supporting will only
exacerbate his painful loneliness.
The man’s class and education denote this flawed and ineffective logic as
institutionally learned. As the product of the British patriarchal educational system and
having been taught the importance of hierarchy and the Classics, the man calls on his
learning to manage his trauma: “Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly … and
now, with this war, the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder” (163). His is
the class of war-makers and national leaders, and his training in the chain of patriarchal
order and the cultural canon have prepared him to understand war as recursive and
heroic. Despite his sadness at the thunderous volume of the dead, the man is again unable
to recognize or challenge national ideologies authorizing international control and
contest. Ultimately, his evocation of classical heroic reward is too ironic to be
comforting, because Greece’s involvement in the war means that even Heaven is not safe
from the war’s destructive presence.
To distract the man from his meditations on death, his companion, William,
“touch[s] a flower with the tip of his walking stick in order to divert the old man’s
attention” (164). Effectively distracted from death, the elder man begins speaking “about
the forests of Uruguay” which he claims he “had visited hundreds of years ago” (164).
Inspired by the exotic flora of Kew, the man’s speech recalls a new canonical fantasy of
54
English male heroism, one recalling colonial adventure. Surviving the war has damaged
his psyche, yet he continually turns to the grand narratives of military and imperial glory
to sooth the pain of his invisible injury. Unable to image alternatives to these twin
discourses of violence, he is psychologically trapped by them. In this way, Woolf
represents the mechanisms and discourses of international patriarchal contest as cocomplicit and traumatic.
But Woolf’s short story shows that the traumas of patriarchal systems are not
confined to the international arena. Through the dialogue between “two elderly women of
the lower middle class,” Woolf “invokes the war through her insistent repetition of the
word ‘sugar’” because sugar “was a rationed commodity during the war” (“Kew” 164;
Staveley 55-56).
“Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says—”
“My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar,
Sugar, flour, kippers, greens,
Sugar, sugar, sugar.” (164-165)
The repetition of sugar—an iconic colonial commodity—also invokes Britain’s long
imperial history and participation in the slave trade, connoting the overlapping
relationship between military and colonial conflict while simultaneously implicating the
day-to-day rituals of English domesticity as fundamentally structured by those conflicts.
The class position these women occupy reinforces this connection between the national
and international.
55
Woolf explicitly and subtly emphasizes the women’s class by specifying their
“lower middle” status and by expressing their dialect via non-standard verb conjugation
and use of informal names. But by placing the anxious repetition of “sugar” in the mouths
of noticeably poor women, Woolf alludes to the ways in which sugar rationing
disproportionally affected poorer Britons. As Sidney Mintz demonstrates, “the enforced
rationing of sugar [during World War I] was regarded as among the most painful and
immediate of the petty hardships caused by war—and … [one] more acutely felt by
[those] poorer and less privileged” (187). Sugar had become an important way for the
lower classes to “fill [their] caloric gap” (Mintz 149). Moreover, sugar was a particularly
important food source for women and children because “costly protein foods [were]
largely monopolized” by adult working men (Mintz 149). Viewed in this way, Woolf’s
repetition of sugar illuminates the ways in which the circumstances of war, class, and
gender intervened on the everyday lives and concerns of English women.
Woolf also uses the conversation between these women to complicate her
portrayal of the gardens by describing them as a space in which one of the women is able
to achieve temporary respite from external anxieties and emotional labors. In their
abstract dialogue, the women exchange litanies of domestic responsibility—“interlacing
discussions of familial goings-on with grocery lists and recipe ingredients” (Staveley 55).
But in the presence of the snail’s flowerbed, “the ponderous woman” slips out of the
conversation and into an extra-linguistic reverie:
So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the oval-shaped flowerbed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was
56
saying. She stood there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top
part of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers.
(“Kew” 165)
Mesmerized by the flowers—seeing them “as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep”—the
woman forgets her anxieties about rationing and war. She becomes an organic extension
of the flowerbed, feeling words “fall over her” like water while mirroring the “swaying”
movements of the flowers “stirred by the … breeze” (165). The lightness and relief
suggested by this language counteracts the multiple references to the woman’s “heavy”
body indicating that her experience at Kew has lightened her corporeal burdens. The
leisure and beauty of Kew Gardens has provided a space in which the demands on her
attention lose their urgency and significance for a time.
The garden’s ability to provide a space of momentary resistance to and reprieve
from domestic demands is also present in the conversation between the married couple,
Eleanor and Simon. Strolling through Kew with their children, Simon and Eleanor
occupy divergent gender roles characteristic of the Victorian family. In their sojourn at
Kew, each contemplates his or her position along those gendered lines. For Simon, his
wife and their children are impediments to the formulation and enjoyment of his ideas:
“The man kept his distance in front of the woman purposely … for he wished to go on
with his thoughts” (“Kew” 161-162). He must separate himself from the familial group
physically and emotionally to reflect on his romantic past and re-live the “love” and
“desire” he felt for Lily, the woman he loved before he married Eleanor (162). The
longing Simon felt for the remembered Lily underscores his detachment from Eleanor.
57
But Simon ultimately stops musing on his present lack of passion or emotional
satisfaction by reasoning that his national duty to marry and beget children has been
fulfilled in the absence of such passion: “But the dragonfly [onto which he projects all of
his love and desire] went round and round: it never settled anywhere—of course not,
happily not, or I shouldn’t be walking here with Eleanor and the children” (162). Simon
understands emotional fulfillment and masculine duty as being at odds; and in true
Victorian fashion, the respectability of appearing emotionally satisfied is preferable to its
substance And so, he jerks himself out of thinking of his unattached passions by relying
on the voice of patriarchal order and certainty: “of course not, happily not.” Simon
dismisses the temporary exploration of his love and desire to assert the paramount
importance of heterosexual duty.
Despite the reasoned self-control he exerts over his passions, Simon’s recollection
of the past seems to have caused him to doubt the “happiness” of his circumstances.
Accordingly, he turns the voice of patriarchal order onto his wife and demands to know if
she too experiences weakness or regret: “Tell me, Eleanor. D’you ever think of the past?”
(162). Eleanor’s response (“Why do you ask, Simon?”) provides him with the
opportunity to share his anxieties and desires, but Simon is too preoccupied with reestablishing himself as a contented patriarch to communicate such intimate information.
Instead, he attempts to dismiss his lingering affection for Lily and to reassign his anxiety
on to Eleanor by asserting his ability to treat women as interchangeable objects of desire:
“Because I’ve been thinking of the past. I’ve been thinking of Lily, the woman I might
have married” (162). Eleanor resists the stinging demonstration of power with silence.
58
But Simon refuses to acknowledge her resistance, and he again demands that she assuage
his fears by exposing her own when he asks, “Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my
thinking of the past?” (162). His sense of his own rationality and familial achievement
has been disrupted by his remembered desires. To reign in his discomfort, he becomes
emotionally tyrannical. He relies on his access to gendered familial control to relocate
emotional experience onto his wife, while simultaneously demanding her sympathy and
acceptance of his emotional transgression. In this way, Simon appears to prefigure Mr.
Ramsay, another Victorian patriarch of Woolf’s, whose “narcissism and rigidity of
outlook prevent him from bonding with his children and enjoying life’s interpersonal and
sensory delights” (Winston 81).
As a Victorian wife and mother, Eleanor does not have the luxury to “[stroll]
carelessly” through Kew (“Kew” 161). Rather, she must “[bear] on with greater purpose”
to manage her children and placate her husband. Despite these responsibilities, the
gardens are a site in which Eleanor is able to carve out time for herself by reliving a
pleasurable memory. For her, such forays into the past are the natural result of visiting a
garden (162). The reflections on past courtship inspired in her by Kew are, however,
much more explicitly melancholy than those of her husband. Her answer to his
domineering questions about past love is laden with a woeful resignation to her lack of
emotional fulfillment: “Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and
women, those ghosts lying under the trees … one’s happiness, one’s reality” (162). It is
not surprising then that Eleanor’s comforting recollection focuses not on the heterosexual
courtship that distorted her happiness, but on homosocial and homoerotic pleasure.
59
Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels … painting the waterlilies, the first red water-lilies I’d ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on
the back of my neck … I took out my watch and marked the hour when I
would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only—it was so
precious … the mother of all my kisses all my life.” (162)
The “lily” of Eleanor’s memory recalls the Lily of Simon’s. But unlike Simon, Eleanor
does not shrink from the pleasure she derives from the transgression of normative social
rules. The significance she attaches to her memory is savored and metered out. As she is
walking through Kew Gardens with her husband and children, she is again taking “five
minutes” from the demands of her domestic responsibilities to enjoy the sensation of
physical love and pleasure outside the bonds of heterosexual marriage and patriarchal
domesticity. Thus Woolf’s representation of Kew Gardens as testament to and evidence
of patriarchal order exists alongside her representation of Kew as a place in which female
visitors are able to stop wandering mechanically through their lives to consider alternate
ways of being. Complicating Kew as a place of apparently paradoxical simultaneity does
not dull the strength of Woolf’s critic of intersecting patriarchal institutions. Rather, these
moments of alternate awareness interrupt the social order, exposing its existence through
its negation.
Although they defy one-dimensional symbolism, each of the characters seems to
be associated with a particular sphere of patriarchal influence bound together by the petty
colonial exploration of a snail at their feet. The public school and military experiences of
the man haunted by spirits allowed him to participate in English exertions of control on a
60
global stage. His speech and experiences associate him with the protection and expansion
of empire; it is an enterprise that has ironically compromised his own psychological wellbeing. Subsequently, the lower middle-class women who consume the commodities of
empire but whose health and wealth are not materially improved by their participation in
English imperial commerce or military conflict illustrate how national patriarchal
hierarchies negatively impact those subordinately positioned by gender and by class.
While, the conversation between Simon and Eleanor, in which he is emotionally
dictatorial, she resigned, and both separated by strictly gendered codes of behavior,
illuminates the way in which patriarchy establishes totalitarian regimes on an intimate
scale. In the final couple, however, these already overlapping threads are wound more
tightly to make visible the patriarchal hubris embedded in international conflict and
domestic order.
Like Eleanor and Simon, Trissie and her beau are at Kew to perform the rituals of
appropriate heterosexual relations. But the happiness that Eleanor attaches to prewedding courtship is absent from the conversation between Trissie and her suitor. Instead
of happiness, Trissie experiences “half-articulated anxieties” about her value in the eyes
of her romantic partner (Staveley 50).
“Lucky it isn’t Friday,” he observed.
“Why? D’you believe in luck?”
“They make you pay a sixpence on Friday.”
“What’s a sixpence anyway? Isn’t it worth sixpence?”
“What’s ‘it’—what do you mean by ‘it’?”
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“O, anything—I mean—you know what I mean.” (165-166)
In this discussion of worth, the language of each lover is weighted with a differing
agenda. In announcing his luck the man reveals his class and his economic insecurities.
The remark suggests that the higher admission price may have prohibited the lovers’
ability to visit the public gardens (Staveley 50). He is lucky, then, because he is able to
re-enact the more moneyed patterns of courtship that have established Kew Gardens as an
appropriate arena in which to perform heterosexual romance.
Alternatively, Trissie’s anxieties are manifest in her question of the value of “it.”
The “it” to which she refers is not the beauty or bounty of Kew, rather it is her own worth
as a romantic partner and spouse (Staveley 49). Sexually subordinate and financially
dependent, Trissie cannot directly demand or supply a sixpence to justify her worth.
Instead, she must rely on manipulation to extract her worth from her lover. To do so,
Trissie models femininity appropriate to patriarchal convention. She is attentive and
linguistically passive. Her lover expresses himself in statements, she in questions. Her
challenge to his focus on money and saving is presented in a question, in need of
approval, acceptance, and male validation. It is a request for gendered intimacy that he
defies by asking her to define her terms. Trissie is unprepared or unwilling to take charge
of the exchange and to explicitly demand from her partner both romance and emotional
security.
The breakdown of their dialectical roles as a result of the transgression of their
gendered linguistic positions leads to an uncomfortable silence between the couple
(“Kew” 166). Unable to speak within the parameters of convention, the two abandon
62
speech to instead rehearse their physical gender roles: “The couple stood still on the edge
of the flower-bed, and together pressed the end of her parasol deep down into the soft
earth. The action and the fact that his hand rested on top of hers expressed their feelings
in a strange way” (166). By pressing the parasol into the ground, the couple is practicing
the sexual behavior that their marriage will authorize and legitimize while simultaneously
enacting the dominance and submission that will characterize their eventual contact and
contract.
But this action is not only a cipher for their sexual future; it implants that future
into Kew’s grounds among the bulbs and seeds of empire. Their romantic and economic
negotiations are cultivated at Kew, reproducing the English order Kew signifies in their
interpersonal relationship. The action fills the couple with a sense of inflated significance,
and the vague awareness that their relationship and its associated discourse are part of a
much larger force. Trissie’s suitor feels “that something loomed up behind her words,
and stood vast and solid behind them” (166). The concrete object embedded in their
conversation is the expectation of the status quo. It is the pressure to participate in
middle-class normality: heterosexual marriage to beget soldiers and explorers to fortify
and expand the Empire.
Kew Gardens symbolizes the greatness of the English nation and empire. Planting
the future of their sexual relationship into that epistemological soil provides order to the
courtship; the awkwardness of their dialogue is gone, replaced with an urgency to
conform to convention. With the parasol still pressed beneath them, the man envisions a
63
café, imagining it as place in which to improve the public performance of their premarriage courtship:
there was a bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was
real, all real, he assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to
everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and
then—but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled
the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find a place
where one had tea with other people, like other people. (166)
The economic and romantic reticence he earlier betrayed is supplanted by the fondling of
a coin in his pocket, marking his preparedness to undertake the sexual and economic
union of marriage. The “mixture of eagerness and secrecy” with which this action is
performed suggests he feels “that he is being initiated into some private club where the
other adult tea drinkers are members awaiting his entrance” (Staveley 51). By yielding to
the patriarchal order and ordering of Kew, the man recognizes the path to his imminent
entrance into social respectability.
Recalling the linear, goal-oriented movements of the snail, Trissie’s lover moves
forcefully forward in pursuit of patriarchal privileges. His “jerk” on the parasol precedes
his aggressive pull on Trissie. He is now in control of their actions and interactions while
her purposeful, prodding questions are replaced with unanswered observations and
unarticulated desire.
“Wherever does one have one’s tea?” she asked with the oddest thrill of
excitement in her voice, looking vaguely round and letting herself be
64
drawn down the grass path, trialing her parasol, turning her head this way
and that way, forgetting her tea, wishing to go down there and then down
there, remembering orchids and cranes among wild flowers, a Chinese
pagoda and a crimson-crested bird; but he born her on. (166)
Both lovers have assumed their socially appropriate roles having been “entrapped by the
intersecting orthodoxies” at Kew (Staveley 52). Trissie’s Orientalized desire to access
and explore the empire through the gardens suggests that she is already anxious about the
new order of her romance, and that she will eventually turn to Kew to momentarily
relieve the pressure of her subordinate position as both Eleanor and the “ponderous
woman” did. Woolf thus represents Kew Gardens as a place of patriarchal respite and reenactment.
Woolf ends her short story not by returning to the microcosmic world of the snail,
but by craning the perspective outward to encompass the broad metropolis of London.
Kew seems as small as a flowerbed in Woolf’s expanding view, and the story swells as
the imperial metropolis swells—expanding outward along roads and train tracks, taking
“an elastic shape, seeking expansion until counter-forces successfully pressurize it into
contraction” (Childs 84). The Kew Gardens of Woolf’s story is not an organic
interruption of the metropolitan center of empire; it is at the heart of that imperial center,
propelling plants between colonies and circulating the resulting wealth back into the
nation. In this way, Woolf interactively connects the objects, individuals, and
conversations of her short story “like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel
turning ceaselessly one within another” (167). Woolf’s experiments with the
65
representation of time and space, her use of painterly color and perspective, subtly
illustrate that the oppressive force of English patriarchal rule is everywhere apparent.
Kew Gardens cultivates the colonial resources over which wars are fought. The
technology used to bend glass and steel into the palm house is the same that is used to
create the aeroplane (“Kew” 167). The voices swelling from everyday corners of the city
repeat the discourses of patriarchal hierarchy calling for domination and submission
internally and internationally.
***
Despite the century-long history of Woolfian literary criticism, contemporary
scholarship must continue to reconsider the Woolfs and their writing, to reassess the
artistry of Leonard and the activism of Virginia particularly in regard to the imperial era
in which they lived and wrote. Because contrary to the conventional understanding, the
Woolfs are not artists whose work and personal lives can be easily defined by Victorian
distinctions of gender. Rather, their aesthetics were marked by their politics. The stylistic
elements of both The Village in the Jungle and “Kew Gardens” prefigure Ezra Pound’s
1934 quintessentially modernist imperative to “make it new.” Leonard creates a linguistic
pastiche while Virginia crafts mosaics of color and perspective, and both defy traditional
notions of subjectivity which placed white, British men at the narrative center. The form
and thought of both texts are co-constructive, and politics are woven into the structure of
their modernist aesthetics. An uncomplicated distinction between Virginia’s art and
Leonard’s politics thus becomes impossible.
66
Equally impossible are profoundly divergent representations of the Woolfs’
opinions as essentially transgressive (Leonard) or regressive (Virginia). Such
oppositional understandings break down in the knowledge that the writing of both
Virginia and Leonard includes expressions of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and class
bias. As Theresa Thompson carefully observes, “[h]ow these writers … confront, ignore,
perceive, and misperceive, accept and reject patriarchal, imperialist and fascist narratives
of their times informs all of their aesthetic developments” (250). Neither art nor politics
singularly defines either of the Woolfs. Maintaining dichotomous visions of the mad
genius and the political pragmatist constrains scholarship and obscures the complex
writing and relationship of the Woolfs who married modernist aesthetics, ethnocentrism,
and anti-imperial politics while married to each other.
67
Notes
1. I define the narrator as “he” not to diminish or ignore the often direct role
women played in the colonial project, but because the narrator speaks with an
omniscience and authority that would have more likely been available to men (and due to
the general absence of European women from Woolf’s novel).
2. Woolf describes parangi as causing the villagers’ “legs [to be] eaten out to the
bone with the yellow sweating ulcers, upon which the flies settle in swarms” (Village 14).
Woolf identifies the causes for parangi as being the result of the “evil food” grown in
chenas which “heating the blood, and bringing fever” leads to parangi infection (Village
14). This description suggests that disease lurks in the very crops and practices villagers
use to feed themselves. In the glossary to Woolf’s diaries, however, it is noted that “[i]n
Ceylon it is popularly believed that the disease was introduced by the Europeans, the
disease itself being called ‘parangi,’ the Sinhalese name for the Portuguese.” And Lesley
Doyal and Imogen Pennell point out that yaws was transmitted internationally via
imperial travel and commerce particularly associated with the slave trade (159). Woolf
thus misses an opportunity to expose one of the incidental violences of imperial
expansion (and one that was often instrumental to conquest) in favor of reinscribing the
notion that endemic to those Other places south and east is perilous disease.
68
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