Horizon

I don't think Veraswami is as stupid as is supposed. It's interesting that shortly after he reminds Flory that the Englishman "does not understand Oriental cunning", he brings up the issue of membership of the European Club - in a fatalistic, woe-is-me way, but Flory takes the bait immediately. Veraswami already knows that the token membership of one non-white member has already been broached, and he wastes no time in staking his claim, although he has to do this in a way that makes it look as if it were Flory's idea all along. I imagine this was part of Orwell's design, and he was slyly suggesting that even the sympathetic Indian is not as naive as everyone thinks.

By introducing the two sparring characters Elizabeth and Ma Hla May, and the tragedies that their conflict creates, Orwell is raising the question of the "disruptive female", still an important historiographical concern in Empire studies. Briefly, the theory goes that the relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans in the early period of Empire - the 18th through the first half of the 19th Centuries - was relatively free of racial or cultural condescension, and this was largely because the only Westerners who went East were men. They settled down into Oriental society, openly took native mistresses, raised mixed-race families (whether the children were legally recognized or not), and were open-minded about Eastern culture, adopting local dress and habits. But all this changed after the mid-1800s when steamship technology made it practical for the first time for wives to live for periods in the colonies. The men, now under western female scrutiny for the first time (and don't forget, these women were reporting back home on what was going on), had to change their act: they abandoned or hid the mistresses, and introduced a much stricter caste system of behavior which isolated West from East. I think Orwell buys into this theory quite strongly, given how so many of the problems of Kyauktada are ultimately attributable to the problems of staying 'respectable'. I should say that recent feminist historians have (as you might expect) criticized the "disruptive female" theory quite strongly, arguing (amongst other things) that the number of European women in the Empire was so tiny that it's absurd to suggest that their presence transformed the whole relationship between Westerners and Easterners.

You see I found Veraswami's tactics there so obvious that I just chalked it up to a low, rather than high, cunning. Both Veraswami and Ma Hla May know what they need to do to survive, but they don't hide it very well. But you may have a point. I shall re-read the chapter with this in mind.

OK, I guess my brilliant insight wasn't quite as brilliant as I thought ;-)

Did Orwell ever have the relationship with women that he thought he wanted? Did he or any of his male characters get women? I’m not sure that he ever got very far outside his own head, as far as character studies go. Actually, I guess he didn’t do character studies. I’d almost say he peddled in types. And maybe he had to, for a couple reasons: 1) that was how he saw people; 2) he was always trying to make a point. It’s difficult to make a point with living, breathing people. Which is not to say his characters were uninteresting or wooden or unbelievable. But they did have to conform to where Orwell wanted them to go.

Burmese Days seems to be stocked with varying types of prostitutes. This is a little strong but I don’t think completely off the mark. If there is anything sympathetic about the British characters it’s that they have some sense of guilt over this prostitution. They assuage the guilt by bullying the natives and then having a couple drinks and bullying them some more.

About the "disruptive female" -- this tale about a previous state of grace and a fall brought about by the meddling of Woman sounds as likely to be literally true as the book of Genesis.

As counterexample I'm afraid I can only offer a small-scale one. It's from the mining boom town of Yreka (pronounced why-reeka, believe it or not), which is now the county seat of Siskiyou County, California, the northernmost county against the middle section of the California-Oregon border.

Yreka was a wide-open place in the 1850s, housing many newly arrived white male miners but very few emigrant women. So the men bought local Indian women. I do mean "bought." Indian slavery was openly practiced. And it didn't improve the status of local Indians. It sounds as though, after the late arrival of smallpox killed many of the older Modocs, far too many of the younger Modoc survivors ended up cadging and pimping at the edges of the miners' society.

Then a good judge (by the standards of the time) came to town, I think in the early 1860s, and ordered the miners either to marry the Indian women or set them free. The choice was, apparently, offered only to the men, but comparatively I suppose it was a start.

It happens of course that trusting partnerships emerge even in the darnedest circumstances. A miner named Frank Riddle first bought and then married a local Modoc woman who became known as Toby Riddle. During the Modoc War they served as essential translators and negotiators, without whom the bloodshed probably would have been worse. Accounts of that stupid, wretched, and avoidable war suggest that the Yreka judge and Toby Riddle were the only people with common sense in that entire part of the country.

About the "disruptive female" -- this tale about a previous state of grace and a fall brought about by the meddling of Woman sounds as likely to be literally true as the book of Genesis.

Well, like all grand narratives, if taken in isolation then it's a gross oversimplification that can't hope to fulfill its ambitious explanatory goals. On the other hand, something about the relationship between colonisers and colonised does seem to have changed around the mid-19th Century, and the fact that European women were present in significant numbers for the first time is part of that, though by no means the only part.

On further thought about Yreka, there's this: the California miners were pretty horrible to the Indians, up to and including wholesale massacre, but in Yreka there was at least a certain live-and-let-live spirit despite all the inequality. It was the Oregon/Applegate Trail farmer emigrant families farther inland who were straight-up eliminationists. This is an oversimplifaction of course, but I'm wondering if it might have had to do with the Yreka miners having arrived by boat plus comparatively short and safe land journeys, while the overland covered-wagon migrants were embittered and hardened by the long road across. Been reading Joan Didion on the subject of moral sacrifices made on the wagon trails. Some of her ancestors actually started out with the ill-fated Donner Party but turned a different way before getting into the Sierra.

As someone who has lived in an Asian British colony (pre-1997 Hong Kong) I claim some first hand experience of this white women in the East being at the root of all mischief issue.

In general it's true, but like any generality there are many exceptions and a large number of white women who, for example, are the complete opposite of BD's Mrs Lackersteen.

Explanation for it? Perhaps a reaction to white male sexual preference for Asian women (note Mr Lackersteen's prediliction for Burmese girls and see Kipling's poem The Road to Mandalay), or to a white wife's position as an adjunct to her husband, or to the ready availability of domestic servants and child carers leaving her with no significant role other than to hold teaparties to bitch with other white women who find themelves in the same boat.

Now, as I said, this is a generalisation. It's quite easy to provide counter examples. If you want some from the 19th and early 20th Centuries take a look at Susanna Hoe's "Private Life of Old Hong Kong"
see: http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/019582797X/qid=1102744775/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_0_1/702-5047365-4595262

Paul Stables
(who is married to a beautiful Filipina and has three beautiful mixed race children)

I think the disruptive female thing is a red herring. It's clear what Flory wants is a European woman--why else is he teaching Ma Hla May these gestures? I tend to agree with Bobby's assessment of things: that Orwell dealt in types and didn't really get women himself.