Paris and Vienna, the classic fin-de-siècle capitals, as its native environment. In Paris, the master of ceremonies was Jean-Martin Charcot, who began to treat hysterics at the Saltpetrière in 1870. By observation, examination, and the use of hypnosis, he proved that their symptoms were genuine and genuinely disabling. Freud, who studied at the Saltpetrière from October 1885 to February 1886, credited Charcot with establishing the legitimacy of hysteria as a disorder. Charcot demonstrated that it afflicted men as well as women and was not simply related, as tradition had it, to the vagaries of the female reproductive system (the wandering womb). Even so, hysteria remained symbolically, if not medically, a female malady, and one associated with sexual disorders.
In an obituary written shortly after Charcot's death in 1893, Freud summed up his mentor's understanding of the etiology of hysteria: 'Heredity was to be regarded as the sole cause.' French psychiatrists, like their English counterparts, were wholehearted advocates of degeneration theory. Charcot's narratives of hysteria, with their genealogical trees full of interconnecting cases of alcoholism, epilepsy, criminality, and suicide, resemble the story line of Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels.
Freud argued, in a series of papers published in the 1890s and in Studies on Hysteria (1895), that Charcot and his followers had been «dazzled»
-628- by the apparently all-encompassing concept of heredity. In this, he added, they were responding to a pervasive belief in the degeneracy of Western societies. To reject heredity as a cause of mental illness, as Freud did, was to reject determinism; that is, a life story shaped by events not merely beyond the individual's control but beyond his or her experience.
Freud began to study cases of «acquired» rather than inherited hysteria, and to uncover a rather different story line. He decided that hysteria did not begin in the life of an ancestor, with an organic 'lesion,' but in the life of the patient, with a traumatic experience. During that experience, the patient was confronted with a feeling which she could not bring herself to acknowledge, and which she repressed, thus dividing her consciousness. This feeling, which could neither be acknowledged nor ignored, was then converted, after a period of latency, into hysterical symptoms.
Hysteria, then, began and ended within individual experience. Where women were concerned, Freud said, the 'incompatible ideas' that produced trauma were likely to 'arise chiefly on the soil of sexual experience or sensation.' He gave two examples: a girl who blamed herself because, while nursing her sick father, she had thought about a young man; and a governess who had fallen in love with her employer. These two cases, written up in Studies on Hysteria, reveal the new story line: the origin in trauma, the latency period, the physical symptoms.
We might compare the first to the case of Sophia. Left alone in the house to watch her paralyzed father, Sophia spots Gerald and rushes down to speak to him. The encounter confirms her desire, her sexual awakening. When she goes back upstairs, she finds her father dead. Her body expresses the intensity of a guilt she can neither acknowledge nor ignore. 'As she stood on the mat outside the bedroom door she tried to draw her mother and Constance and Mr. Povey by magnetic force out of the wakes into the house, and her muscles were contracted in this strange effort.' Split between desire and remorse, she represses the latter and elopes with Gerald. But it is surely the remorse that returns, converted into facial paralysis. Sophia's hysteria begins in trauma and ends in physical symptoms. If Zola's narratives resemble Charcot's, then Bennett's resemble Freud's; and that is a measure of the lengths to which English fiction had gone, by the turn of the century, in its avoidance of naturalism.
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Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie: Imperialism to Postcolonialism
IT is now more than half a century since Auden wrote that time had 'pardoned Kipling and his views,' pardoned him for 'writing well,' and yet each successive generation has felt itself the first to be able-finally-to come to terms with him. The New Critics, for example, seemed to believe that the end of the British Empire had made Kipling's «views» a dead issue. And in fact Indian independence did make it hard, at mid-century, to read the literature of imperialism with anything but a simplistic notion of progress in mind. The new day for which E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) had longed had come to pass. The empire had been gotten rid of, and Kipling was therefore obsolete. If he were to be read at all, it would be for his 'artistic merits' alone, though in practice that meant concentrating on what Edmund Wilson called 'the Kipling that nobody read,' the highly wrought late stories of English life, such as 'The Gardener' or 'The Wish House.' Not coincidentally, these are in political terms among his least controversial tales. In contrast, the richly contextualized readings on which contemporary criticism relies allow for the engagement with politics that the New Criticism shunned, and so our attention has swung back toward the Indian fiction that established Kipling's fame. There the problem Kipling has always presented will always remain, even for those who believe that his early stories especially are more complex and ambivalent than his reputation as the Bard of Empire would make one expect. And yet it is precisely because of that problem-because the issues he raises -631- have a renewed importance in a postcolonial world-that he now seems so central.
Kipling's work insists on the inseparability of imperial rule from military might, but he also reminds his readers, in his 1897 poem 'Recessional,' that trusting to 'reeking tube and iron shard' alone will only ensure the British Empire's oblivion; that it is no substitute for the observance of some unspecified 'Law.' Written for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the poem is quite rightly seen as his sternest warning against imperial excess. Yet those fears had been in his work from the start, most notably in his first great story, 'The Man Who Would be King' (1888), a deceptively anxious parable of imperial conquest. Like most of Kipling's short fiction, the story carries an elaborate frame. One hot and stifling night, two former soldiers, Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, appear in the office of the unnamed narrator, a newspaperman, asking about a region called Kafiristan in the Hindu Kush. They have decided that 'India isn't big enough for such as us.' Administration has been so regularized that there is no longer any room for an initiative exercised on one's own behalf, and so 'The country isn't half worked out… they that governs it won't let you touch it.' They see Kafiristan as 'A place where two strong men can Sar-a-whack'-an allusion to the private kingdom of Borneo's 'White Rajah,' James Brooke-a land they can seize for their own. The narrator obliges them with maps, surveys, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But he warns that they'll be 'cut into pieces' in the Afghan hills and that 'no Englishman has been through' Kafiristan. That was a half-truth. An initial British foray into what is now called Nuristan had turned back after a few days in 1885, while the first ethnographic survey was done in 1889 and 1890; dates that effectively sandwich Kipling's tale. It was, however, known that the people were neither Hindus nor Muslims, and it was believed that, like many hill tribes, they claimed descent from
