Late Victorian Orientalism Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 FitzGerald’s timelines
- Chapter 2 Empires and scapegoats: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Near East
- Chapter 3 Aja’ib, mutalibun and hur al-ayn: Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne and the Arabian Nights
- Chapter 4 The use of contradictions in John La Farge’s prismatic syncretism
- Chapter 5 ‘Strange webs with Eastern merchants’: The Orient of aesthetic poetry
- Chapter 6 Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and the elusive monkey
- Chapter 7 Borrowed verses: Code and representation within the first travelogue of the city of Hong Kong, 1841–42
- Chapter 8 Newby and Thesiger: Humour and lament in the Hindu Kush
- Chapter 9 The exoticism of Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë: The dream of an impossible elsewhere
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and the elusive monkey
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 FitzGerald’s timelines
- Chapter 2 Empires and scapegoats: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Near East
- Chapter 3 Aja’ib, mutalibun and hur al-ayn: Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne and the Arabian Nights
- Chapter 4 The use of contradictions in John La Farge’s prismatic syncretism
- Chapter 5 ‘Strange webs with Eastern merchants’: The Orient of aesthetic poetry
- Chapter 6 Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and the elusive monkey
- Chapter 7 Borrowed verses: Code and representation within the first travelogue of the city of Hong Kong, 1841–42
- Chapter 8 Newby and Thesiger: Humour and lament in the Hindu Kush
- Chapter 9 The exoticism of Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë: The dream of an impossible elsewhere
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Mark of the Beast (1890) appears to be built on the antinomic relationship between the English and Indian cultural realities. The marginalisation of the protagonist Fleete from the reality of the natural world in India and his painful fall into a dark and oppressive, depressing and deadly situation is the central nucleus of the narrative. In this story an infraction is committed: on the night of New Year's Eve the white Fleete, whose knowledge of India and Indians is limited, is drunk and on the way home desecrates a temple, extinguishing his cigar-butt on the image of Hanuman, the Monkey God. Soon after his blasphemous action, he is embraced by a leper (a priest of the Hanuman temple) and then gradually degenerates towards animal behaviour.
The aim of this chapter is to highlight the ambivalence of the monkey portrayed by Kipling in The Mark of the Beast. The monkey is on one side the mysterious deity, object of worship by the Hindu natives, on the other side it recalls a fundamental step of Darwinian evolutionary theories of Kipling's contemporary Victorian society. In both cases it is terrifying and haunts the Victorian mind. Blasphemy against an Indian deity might unleash powerful forces. Correspondingly, although indecipherable, the change in Fleete ascribed to the action of the leper might be analogous to ideas of evolutionary regression, which in turn can be linked to Darwinian theory. Kipling allows two kinds of explanation to lie side by side: one, that there are occult forces at work, for which Western thought has no explanation; and two, that Fleete's behaviour is an evolutionary regression – still hard to explain, but at any rate within the framework of evolutionary theory. Significantly, he does not choose between these explanations but allows both to remain. Either, of course, undermines Western (or ‘English’) authority and confidence.
The pantheism pervading the world view of the Indian culture is made clear already in the Incipit of The Mark of the Beast. The conflictual relationship with the rituals of the invaders is clarified from the very beginning of this short story:
East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Late Victorian OrientalismRepresentations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge, pp. 123 - 132Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020