Carey J. Snyder (Auth.) - British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters - Ethnographic Modernism From Wells To Woolf-Palgrave Macmillan US (2008)

British Fiction and
Cross-Cultural Encounters
British Fiction and
Cross-Cultural Encounters
Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf
Carey J. Snyder
BRITISH FICTION AND CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS
Copyright © Carey J. Snyder, 2008.
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For Mark and Zachary
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction Ethnographic Observers Observed 1
1 Explorer Ethnography and Rider Haggard’s

African Romance, She 23
2 Bewilderment as Style and Methodology in the Writings

of Mary Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad 59
3 Self-nativizing in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out 97
4 E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and the Limitations

of Ethnographic Rapport and Understanding 119
5 “When the Indian Was in Vogue”:

D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ethnological
Tourism in the Southwest 157
Conclusion 189
Notes 193
Works Cited 221
Index 245
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T his book began as a conversation with the late Michael Sprinker

over a pint of ale at the Printer’s Devil in Port Jefferson, New York.
Energized by having read James Clifford’s Predicament of Culture, I
proposed that ethnographic ideas and relationships were somehow
at the core of literary modernism. Michael encouraged me to pursue
the idea (perhaps rashly, given its scope); it eventually yielded a dis-
sertation and now, in a much different and expanded form, the book
before you. Given the project’s long evolution, Michael is the first
of a long list of individuals whose contributions I am pleased to
acknowledge, for without their support, inspiration, and feedback,
this book could not have been written.
At the dissertation stage and beyond, I benefited greatly from the
professional mentorship and constructive criticism of S.U.N.Y. Stony
Brook faculty members Helen Cooper, Eric Haralson, and Adrienne
Munich, as well as from the feedback and support of a wonderful
cohort of graduate students, including Melissa Bradshaw, Julie
Burton-Swift, Jenni Frangos, Matthew Herman, Heidi Johnsen, Chris
Nagle, Sarah Stow, Patricia Vassos, and Jessica Yood. Renato
Rosaldo’s input as an outside reader was also indispensable at this early
stage. To the roll call of Stony Brook faculty and alumni who have
contributed to this project, I must add Celia Marshik, the modernist
who, to my misfortune, was hired the year after I graduated, whom I
have nevertheless had the pleasure of coming to know on the confer-
ence circuit, and whose feedback and support I have valued.
At Ohio University, I am fortunate to be a member of an excep-
tionally collegial department, which has fostered my professional
and personal development in many ways. English Department chairs
Ken Daley and Joe McLaughlin both served as advocates, gener-
ously affording me time for researching and writing this book. Joe
also attentively read and commented on large portions of the
manuscript. Andrew Escobedo’s faculty colloquium series created an
Acknowledgments ix
important forum for sharing work and ideas; additionally, he has

been a helpful reader of my work. Other colleagues I’d like to thank
include Josie Bloomfield, Mark Halliday, George Hartley, Mara
Holt, Paul Jones, Beth Quitslund, Nicole Reynolds, Lisa Stein, Jeremy
Webster, and Johnnie Wilcox. I also appreciate David Bullock’s able
assistance with citations. My thanks, too, to the anthropologist Steve
Rubenstein, with whom I have enjoyed many stimulating debates
and conversations and whose input, on Chapters 4 and 5 especially,
was important. I am grateful to the late Dean McWilliams for offer-
ing indispensable editorial input on the completed manuscript.
Colleagues at other universities, especially Eric Aronoff and John
Marx, have made significant contributions to this project as well.
Thanks also to Molly Maloney, for her unstinting support.
In a category of their own are Marc Manganaro, Melba Cuddy-
Keane, and James Buzard whose encouragement, shrewd attention
to the manuscript, and repeated, generous support helped cultivate
and bring this project to fruition. Melba Cuddy-Keane served as an
inspiring role model and mentor; her intervention on an early draft
of Chapter 3 proved a turning point in reshaping the project as a
whole. Marc Manganaro’s stimulating seminars on modernism and
anthropology at the Modernist Studies Association’s annual confer-
ences (2002–4) provided a much-valued forum for sharing ideas; his
expert input, enthusiasm, and example left an important mark on
this book. James Buzard’s astute scholarship, as well as his valuable
feedback and support, has also significantly influenced my work.
Research for Chapter 5 was made possible by a grant from the
Ohio University Research Council. Tomas Jaehn, the archivist at
the Fray Angelico Chavez Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
ably aided me in locating materials used in that chapter. It was pub-
lished in article form in Modern Fiction Studies 53.4 (Fall 2007); my
thanks for permission to reprint it here. Thanks also to Woolf Studies
Annual for allowing me to reprint Chapter 3, which appeared as
“Woolf’s Ethnographic Modernism: Self-Nativizing in The Voyage
Out and Beyond” in Woolf Studies Annual 10 (2004): 81–108.
Throughout the writing of this book, I have been sustained and
encouraged by my family. Such debts of gratitude are impossible to
properly tally. However, I would like to especially acknowledge my
mother, who inspired not only a love of reading but also an early
interest in anthropology, and my grandmother, who has been a life-
long inspiration. For their unwavering confidence in me, I would
x Acknowledgments
also like to acknowledge my father and his wife. For their encour-
agement and good humor, I am indebted to my sister and brother.
And for living with this project for eight years, doing a better job
than I in translating its ideas into common parlance, and taking up
the household slack to enable me to finish it—as well as for abundant
love, encouragement, and patience—I must thank my husband,
Mark. Lastly, I must thank the delightful Zach, though he only
arrived when I was undertaking final revisions, for he humbled and
inspired me, and put all other labor into perspective.
4
I N T R O D U C T I O N
E T H N O G R A PH I C O B S E RV E R S O B S E RV E D 1
Psychology, . . . ethnology, and The Golden Bough have con-

curred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago.
Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical
method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern
world possible for art.
—T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth”
W riting across a timespan that saw the peak and the first signs of
the decline of the British Empire, the literary writers considered in
this study—including canonical modernists Joseph Conrad, Virginia
Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster, as well as the popular
writers, Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley—set their
fiction in colonial outposts or other exotic locations and dramatized
encounters between British travelers and people from other, often
tribal, cultures. In doing so, they grappled with new ideas from the
primary discourse for understanding the many cultures that the
empire brought within their imaginative horizons—namely, ethnog-
raphy. British modernists and their predecessors read widely in
anthropology and ethnography, sometimes conducted their own
“fieldwork,” and thematized the challenges of cross-cultural
encounters in their fiction, letters, and essays. To a degree that schol-
ars of modernism have not fully appreciated, literary writers of the
period engaged ethnographic discourse on multiple levels, depicting
characters who function as amateur ethnographers, emulating
ethnographic techniques on a narrative level, and, at the same time,
2 BRITISH FICTION AND C R O S S -C U LT U R A L E N C O U N T E R S
questioning the very premise of ethnography through a pervasive

attitude of epistemological uncertainty.
While Joseph Conrad was sending Marlow on his voyage up the
Congo in Heart of Darkness (1898), and Virginia Woolf was launch-
ing a group of English tourists on a journey into the Amazonian jun-
gle in The Voyage Out (1915), British and American anthropologists
were inaugurating the new fieldwork method of participant-obser-
vation, which would be formalized in Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1922
classic, Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Henceforward, ethnogra-
phy—referring both to fieldwork and its textual form—came to be
regarded as the foundation for the emergent science of anthropol-
ogy. To adapt T. S. Eliot’s language, how did ethnography help
make these literary imaginings possible? Conversely, by staging
ethnographic encounters and exploring the methods of this emerg-
ing discipline in their fiction, how do literary modernists reflect and
subvert the practices and assumptions of ethnographic discourse? By
bringing together a selection of travel writing, formal ethnographies,
tourist literature, and other anthropological texts, British Fiction
and Cross-Cultural Encounters seeks to answer these questions,
recreating an often overlooked context for a constellation of modern
literary writings and revealing that ethnographic ideas and methods
not only informed the subject matter of literary modernism, but also
stimulated many of its most important aesthetic innovations.
As subsequent chapters will detail, some of the novelists in this
study (such as Forster and Lawrence) vied with travel writers and an
emerging class of professional anthropologists for the authority to
represent other cultures, while others adapted ethnographic tech-
niques and scenarios to literary ends. If the ethnographic context
enriches our understanding of this significant strand of British mod-
ernist fiction, the fiction, in turn, elucidates that which was effaced
in ethnographic accounts as anthropology emerged as a professional
discipline: whereas professional anthropology increasingly relegated
the observer’s subjective impressions to the margins of ethnographic
accounts in order to create the impression of an objective, authorita-
tive voice, the literary texts considered here foreground the
observer, representing ethnographic encounters as murky, power-
laden, and inconclusive.
James Clifford defines ethnographic modernity broadly as the con-
dition of being “rootless, mobile, . . . [and] off-center among scat-
tered traditions,” “a state of being in culture, while looking at
INTRODUCTION 3
culture”— a “predicament” shared by twentieth-century literary

writers and anthropologists alike (Predicament 3, 9). Defined as a
pervasive outlook rather than a specific set of ideas and practices,
ethnographic might be a fitting label for a great many of the writers
we associate with Anglo-American modernism, that movement of
exiles and expatriates. Although this provocative definition opens
possibilities for fruitful interdisciplinary connections, it also risks
expanding the term to encompass more than it excludes, such that it
loses its explanatory power. Hence, throughout this study, my dis-
cussion of the “ethnographic” is rooted in a set of specific, if eclec-
tic, traditions: primarily, those of British Social Anthropology (or
functionalism) associated with Malinowski and the movement’s pre-
cursors, including W. H. R. Rivers, and, to a lesser extent, those of
the (Franz) Boas School of American Cultural Anthropology,
including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. (I also devote consid-
erable space to the “explorer ethnography” of the late nineteenth
century, one tradition out of which formal ethnographies emerge, as
Mary Louise Pratt has shown, and draw in other individuals where
pertinent, such as the Cambridge Ritualist, Jane Ellen Harrison.)
What these distinct traditions have in common is the unprecedented
emphasis they place on ethnographic fieldwork as the basis of
anthropological authority. This new emphasis, which George
Stocking has called the “ethnographicization” of the discipline
(“Paradigmatic Traditions” 722), constituted a methodological rev-
olution in the practice of studying others.2
What was novel about the intensive fieldwork method may be
briefly signaled here. To begin with, the modern ethnographer fused
what had previously been two distinct roles: data gatherer and theo-
rist. Victorian armchair anthropologists like E. B. Tylor, who
became the first lecturer of anthropology at Oxford University in
1884, and Sir James Frazer, the author of the tremendously influ-
ential, multivolume The Golden Bough (1890–1915), took as their
premise that all peoples past and present fit into an evolutionary
continuum; their task was an ambitious one of writing a complete
history of civilization, a master narrative that entailed the progres-
sive shedding of illusions, the movement from superstition to rea-
son. To complete their compendia in comparative anthropology,
these scholars culled from whole libraries of mythology, ancient
history, folklore, archaeological data, and the writings of “men-
on-the-spot”—missionaries, officers, colonial administrators, and
travelers—thus creating a division of labor between the stay-at-home

theorist and the remote data-gatherers. Insisting upon the value of
empirical observation and of theoretical training, the new fieldwork-
ers made a case for their professional legitimacy by simultaneously
discrediting armchair generalizers and amateur observers.
The new participant-observation methodology required the field-
worker to develop a close rapport with the natives, take part in native
customs and rituals, and observe them. The new object of study,
rather than the transhistorical, transcultural study of the evolution of
customs, institutions, or beliefs, was the individual culture, con-
ceived of as a well-integrated, circumscribed whole. (The shift from
Frazer’s method to Malinowski’s also represented a shift from the
diachronic to the synchronic: the new paradigm consigned natives to
a perpetual present tense, denying, in Johannes Fabian’s term, their
“coevalness.”3) As Marilyn Strathern puts it, in modern ethno-
graphic monographs, the “difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was
conceived not as a different stage in evolutionary progression but as
a difference of perspective” (99). Thus a new relativity of perspec-
tives was intrinsic to both modern ethnography and literary mod-
ernism. Furthermore, the new ethnography emphasized understanding
the culture from within, through a process Adam Kuper aptly calls
“psychological transference” (69). In Malinowski’s words, “The
goal is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life,
to realize his vision of his world” (Argonauts 25).
Though Malinowski represents sympathetic identification as the
cornerstone of the new method, grasping the native’s perspective is
only half of the participant-observation formula. From Malinowski’s
view, cultural insiders suffer conceptual myopia in relation to their
own culture; they are too close to make sense of its details: in his
words, “The natives obey the forces and commands of the tribal
code, but they do not comprehend them” (11). For this reason, the
fieldworker must balance vicarious participation in a foreign culture
with critical observation of it from an outside vantage point. Clifford
suggests that the “complex subjectivity” of participant-observation
is mirrored by ethnographic writing: “‘Participant observation’ serves
as a shorthand for a continuous tacking between the ‘inside’ and
‘outside’ of events: on the one hand grasping the sense of specific
occurrences and gestures empathetically, on the other stepping back
to situate these meanings in a wider context” (Predicament 34).
James Buzard labels this oscillating voice of ethnographic narratives
INTRODUCTION 5
a “self-interrupting” style, whereby the narrator strategically dis-

rupts the impression of empathic identification with the “natives”
to provide an exegesis of the culture from an assumed distance
(Disorienting Fiction 34). In this way, participant-observation may
be regarded as a narrative technique as well as a methodology for
the field.
Finally, a common justification for the ethnographic enterprise
was the idea that studying the other could freshly illuminate one’s
own culture—an anthropological version of the modernist dictum
“make it new.” As Malinowski explains, the principal justification for
anthropological fieldwork is that by studying other cultures, “we
shall have some light shed on our own” (Argonauts 25). If one
impulse of modern ethnography was to demystify exotic others
by showing that they are not so different from ourselves (what
Strathern calls “the discovery of the ordinary in the bizarre” [100]),
an important secondary impulse could be characterized conversely as
the discovery of the bizarre in the ordinary. Malinowski would sug-
gest that “[b]y dwelling mentally for sometime among people of a
much simpler culture than our own, we may be able to see ourselves
from a distance, we may be able to gain a new sense of proportion
with regard to our own institutions, beliefs, and customs” (First
Year 104).4 In this way, ethnographic study defamiliarized the home
culture. This propensity of cross-cultural encounters to pull the rug-
of-familiar-associations out from under the observer is exploited in
much modernist fiction: it is Marlow, not the Congolese, who
becomes “scientifically interesting” as he voyages “into the heart of
darkness,” much as Rachel Vinrace is more struck by the oddity of
English than of South American customs as she journeys into the
Amazonian rain forest.
The emerging norms of academic ethnography serve as the
touchstone for my discussion of a broad range of texts that fall out-
side the boundaries of professional fieldwork—including those of
explorers, armchair anthropologists, and the tourist industry. The
eclecticism of this selection of texts reflects, on the one hand, the
openness and incoherence of the field of ethnographic writings prior
to the professionalization of fieldwork and, on the other, the wide
range of nonliterary texts engaged by the literary authors I examine.
Thus although the emergence of academic ethnography forms the
backdrop for the entire study, in correlating specific works of liter-
ary modernists with ethnographic and anthropological texts, I am
equally concerned with narratives of exploration, travel writing, com-

parative anthropologies, and tourist advertisements, as I am with the
professional monographs of ethnographers; these nonliterary texts
are selected, in the first place, on the basis of what literary mod-
ernists were reading and, in the second place, on the basis of strong
formal or thematic resonance with literary texts. To differentiate
these distinct, but related, strands of ethnographic discourse from
the professional variant, I endeavor to qualify my terms where ambi-
guity may arise. For example, the first two chapters examine what I
call explorer ethnography—portraits of customs and manners of
“exotic” (in this case, African) cultures embedded in hybrid texts
that combine adventure narrative with cultural, botanical, and geo-
graphical exposition5—while the last chapter investigates the phe-
nomenon of what I term tourist ethnography—tourism that caters to
the twin desires to observe exotic cultures and be entertained.
Part of the impetus for this study is the realization that British
modernists were more deeply engaged with ethnographic writings
and practices than has been previously assumed, whether as armchair
generalists (such as Woolf, whom Malcom Bradbury and James
McFarlane misleadingly label a “domesticated Modernist”6) or as
travelers investigating specific cultures: for instance, Woolf read Ruth
Benedict and, like Lawrence, was influenced by the classicist and
anthropologist Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual; Conrad
voyaged up the Congo and greatly admired the works of explorer
ethnographers like Mary Kingsley and Richard Burton; Forster stud-
ied Hindu and Muslim cultures before traveling to India and spent a
total of sixteen months there as a makeshift participant-observer;
and Huxley read not only Malinowski and Mead but also Lawrence’s
“ethnographic essays” on Southwest Indians, together with the
writings of lesser known ethnographers, including Ruth Bunzel and
Leslie White, while researching the Southwest episodes of his novel,
Brave New World. These writers in turn wrote novels that reveal
their investment in anthropological issues by representing ethno-
graphic encounters between British travelers and tribal or non-
Western people.
In labeling the emergent practices of early-twentieth-century
ethnography modern, I follow Marc Manganaro who asserts that
titling his edited collection Modernist Anthropology “constitutes a
claim that anthropology vitally participated in the century’s most
important cultural (and more specifically, in this context,) literary
INTRODUCTION 7
movement” (vii). Manganaro observes that such labeling is a “con-

testatory act” because many scholars have maintained that these dis-
ciplines are “out of phase”: anthropology has been envisioned as
lagging behind literature in terms of its rhetorical modes and sensi-
bility (6).7 Yet by correlating ethnographic writings and fiction from
the 1880s to the 1930s, my work, like the Manganaro collection,
reveals that there are important continuities between the disciplines,
even as modern fiction prefigures some of the rhetorical tropes and
ethical concerns of postmodern anthropology. With converse
emphasis, my subtitle, Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf,
signals a claim that modern novelists significantly engaged the
ethnographic discourse of their day—sometimes mirroring and
sometimes critically commenting on its assumptions and practices.
With the phrase ethnographic modernism I intend to delineate the
features of a significant category of modern fiction, which I hope will
have applicability well beyond the boundaries of the current study—
encompassing works I do not have space to examine here, such as
Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Seas fic-
tion, Katherine Mansfield’s Maori Notebooks, George Orwell’s
Burmese Days, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, and so on. I
mean the phrase to signal, first, literary texts that emulate modern
ethnographies, in which metropolitan observers voyage into foreign
cultures, regarded as exotic, primitive, or traditional.8 In some cases,
these texts purport to be, or were read by contemporaries as, ethno-
graphic—that is, they seem to elucidate a foreign culture for out-
siders, from the liminal perspective of a participant-observer, who
mediates between “inside” and “outside” of that culture. As Clifford
notes, “[a]t the close of the nineteenth century, nothing guaranteed,
a priori, the ethnographer’s status as the best interpreter of native
life—as opposed to the traveler, and especially to the missionary and
administrator, some of whom had been in the field far longer and
had better research contacts and linguistic skills” (Predicament 26).
Ethnographic modernists like D. H. Lawrence, who was on a salvage
mission every bit as anxious as that of Claude Levi-Strauss, compete
with ethnographers for the authority to interpret native life (see
Chapter 5). Contemporary reviewers regarded A Passage to India as
providing a window onto “native” life, and when Forster published
his letters and journals from India nearly thirty years later (in the vol-
ume Hill of Devi), like Lawrence, he situated himself as an eyewit-
ness of vanishing traditions (see Chapter 4).
Although only a few of the novelists I examine actively situate

themselves as amateur ethnographers, all of them represent ethno-
graphic scenarios in their fiction, and many of them adapt ethno-
graphic tools or perspectives to literary ends. Rather than T. S.
Eliot’s “mythical method,” ethnographic methods are redeployed by
these writers, I argue, to generate many of the central tropes and aes-
thetic devices we have come to associate with modernist literature—
including the use of multiple perspectives, the showcasing of
incoherent identities, and the pervasive trope of disorientation. For
example, in Chapter 3, I contend that “adapting the native’s point of
view”—that cornerstone of new fieldwork methods—helps to pro-
duce the fluid, discontinuous, fragmented “self” associated with
modernism generally, and Woolf’s fiction in particular. Chapter 2
connects the rhetoric of bewilderment surrounding the contact zone
in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Mary Kingsley’s fieldwork experi-
ence recorded in Travels in West Africa—an experience elided from
the professional monographs of an emerging discipline striving for
scientific objectivity. It contends that in this text, thwarting the
ethnographic project (obfuscating, rather than elucidating, the
“other”) becomes a mechanism for generating the author’s literary
impressionist style. Finally, Chapter 4 links A Passage to India’s
notoriously “slippery” narrative voice to the oscillations of partici-
pant-observation but argues that the technique is given a modernist
stamp that disrupts and decenters the authoritative voice of an
ethnographic account.
What unites all of the ethnographic modernists in this study is the
self-consciousness they bring to the representation of cross-cultural
encounters. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
ethnographers sought scientific status by contriving to banish the
subjective from their accounts, while literary modernists troubled
ethnography’s authoritative pose by honing in on the uncertain-
ties and problematic power dynamics of ethnographic encounters.
Addressing the double bind of the modern ethnographer, Pratt
explains that although the fieldworker’s authority was rooted in per-
sonal experience, the very subjectivity of the field encounter threat-
ened to undermine ethnography’s legitimacy as science: “Fieldwork
produces a kind of authority that is anchored to a large extent in
subjective, sensuous experience. One experiences the indigenous
environment and lifeways for oneself, sees with one’s own eyes, even
plays some roles, albeit contrived ones, in the community. But the
INTRODUCTION 9
professional text to result from such an encounter is supposed to

conform to norms of a scientific discourse whose authority resides in
the absolute effacements of the speaking and experiencing subject”
(“Fieldwork in Common Places,” Writing Culture 32). The modern
fieldworker, as self-mythologized by Malinowski, was at once sup-
posed to be deeply, personally engaged in native life and disengaged,
or objective, in the deity-like omniscience of an ethnographic
account. Both the idealized image of the empathic fieldworker and
the dream of “creat[ing] a formal vocabulary of analysis purged of all
subjective reference” (Local 34) have been thoroughly criticized in
the postmodern period.
Literary modernists’ self-reflexivity anticipated the attitude of
anthropologists who in the 1970s became mired in self-conscious-
ness, in a postcolonial and poststructural age when ethnographic
representations became suspect because they potentially colluded
with imperialist ideology and because language itself came to be
regarded as unreliable.9 In 1967, the posthumous publication of
Malinowski’s diary of his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands ignited
a controversy within the discipline, tarnishing the reputation of the
figure most responsible for creating the public image of the com-
passionate, engaged fieldworker. The diary showed another side—
a comingling of frustration, desire, bewilderment, and even
contempt for the people he was studying (see Chapter 4). Clifford
argues that publishing Malinowski’s Trobriand diary disrupted the
whole field of ethnographic inquiry: “Henceforth an implicit mark
of interrogation was placed beside any overly confident and consis-
tent ethnographic voice. What desires and confusions was it smooth-
ing over? How was its ‘objectivity’ textually constructed?” (Writing
Culture 14).
Much like the field of literary studies today, for several decades
anthropology has been preoccupied with self-consciously reinvent-
ing itself—critically reexamining its own founding texts and ques-
tioning these texts’ entanglement with ethnocentric, racist, and
imperialist assumptions.10 Clifford Geertz observes in anthropology
since the 1970s a “rise of radically critical and dispersive ‘post-’
movements, brought on by increasing uncertainty, self-doubt, and
self-examination, both within anthropology and in Western culture
generally” (“An Inconstant Profession” 4). In light of competing
claims for self-representation among formerly colonized nations and
new linguistic theories that reject the possibility of language serving
as a neutral medium for conveying experience, “Questions [have]

multiplied rapidly about anthropology’s colonial past, its orientalist
biases, and the very possibility of disinterestedness or objective
knowledge in the human sciences” (ibid. 9). Modernist fiction,
which is self-conscious about representation and which questions
the epistemological possibility of knowing another culture, thus
expresses the rhetorical stance and epistemological dilemma con-
fronting anthropology a century later, though with very different
stakes involved.
Postmodern anthropologists confront and navigate these cri-
tiques of the discipline by implementing a self-reflexive approach to
fieldwork. Describing new developments within the discipline,
Adam Kuper writes that the “postmodernist ethnographer . . .
[regards the] . . . assertion of objectivity in traditional ethnogra-
phy . . . [as] . . . a display, promoting a claim to authority, political as
well as intellectual,” and, to remedy this fault, aims to be “reflexive,
critically aware of what he or she [is] doing, conscious of the prob-
lematic nature of ethnographic writing” (188). Ethnographer
Kamala Visweswaran further elaborates on new approaches to field-
work, in language that could readily apply to the representations of
cross-cultural encounters in the fiction of Conrad, Woolf, or Forster:
“In experimental ethnography, ‘pursuit of the other’ becomes prob-
lematic, not taken for granted. The text is marked by disaffections,
ruptures, and incomprehensions. Skepticism, and perhaps a respect
for the integrity of difference, replaces the ethnographic goal of total
understanding and representation” (20–21). The ethnographic
modernists, too, problematize the “pursuit of the other”; their texts
replace a totalizing quest for knowledge with “disaffections, rup-
tures, and incomprehensions.” The fiction I examine emphasizes
gaps in knowledge, the incommensurability of experience, and the
opacity of other cultures.
Anticipating postmodern critiques of modern ethnography and
the reflexivity of postmodern ethnographies that are mindful of those
critiques, ethnographic modernists foreground the observer and
reflect upon the dynamics of cross-cultural observation. To take one
example (from Chapter 5), Lawrence adopts a posture that resembles
that of the modern fieldworker in his Southwest essays, but unlike
his contemporary Ruth Benedict (who writes about the Zuni in her
classic ethnography, Patterns of Culture), he puts himself in the
frame of his observations: his writing is a patchwork of observations,
INTRODUCTION 11
self-questioning, and reflection. Lawrence’s Southwest writings belie

the romantic myth of “discovery,” by representing the region as a
kind of ethnological theme park, choked with tourists who regard
native ceremonies as if they were circus performances. (The sense
that native culture has been co-opted by a tourist industry is under-
scored in Lawrence’s novella St. Mawr when the protagonists arrive
in New Mexico to find “the fiesta over”: “Indians, Mexicans, artists
had finished their great effort to amuse and attract the tourists”
[132].) Lawrence and his protagonists mirror some of the conven-
tions of the new fieldwork methodology—for instance, by distancing
themselves from other white travelers and endeavoring to identify
with the native population—but in other respects, they diverge from
these emerging norms. One such moment occurs in the essay
“Taos,” when Lawrence notes of a group of Apaches performing a
“bird dance” before a gathering of tourists, “it must have been a sort
of ordeal to sing and tread the slow dance between that solid wall of
silent, impassive white faces” (Mornings in Mexico 103). Such reflec-
tions play little or no part in formal ethnographies that seem to issue
from the vantage point of a disembodied observer, invisibly looking
on while the natives continue to dance “the old dances of the gods”
(Benedict 57).
Hence the literary writers examined in this study negotiate some
of the same terrain as fieldworkers while also prefiguring the self-
reflexivity that has come to characterize postmodern critiques of
anthropology. In foregrounding the limitations of the ethnographic
gaze, however, these writers do not transcend other limitations
intrinsic to their perspectives: like all (fallible, human) observers,
they are liable to be blinkered at times by racism, classicism, or eth-
nocentrism. Though by spotlighting the power inequities of the
ethnographic contact zone or by casting doubt on the attempt to
fathom the other, these modernists challenge the practices of their
contemporaries, they do not offer any simple solutions to the prob-
lems confronted by professional fieldworkers, then or now. While
this study juxtaposes ethnographic and literary writers, it is ever
mindful that these writers were subject to different generic con-
straints and liberties. Professional distance enabled novelists to com-
ment critically on the emerging attitudes and practices of the newly
recognized scientific discipline. Moreover, the form of the mod-
ernist novel arguably encouraged subjectivism and self-reflexivity
whereas the conventions of scientific texts have traditionally aspired
to disembodied objectivism.11 At a moment when ethnographers

were amassing new authority for their discipline by assuming unim-
peded access into native minds, novelists relinquished the stance of
omniscience, favoring the partiality of multiple perspectives. By
treating the stuff of anthropology with the ambivalence, self-con-
sciousness, and open-endedness that came to be valued as part of the
modernist aesthetic—often dwelling in their fictions on the “messi-
ness” of ethnological encounters and the partiality of all perspec-
tives—writers like Conrad, Woolf, Forster, and Lawrence achieved
their own professional aims.
E THNOGRAPHIC M ODERNISM IN THE F IELD
The assortment of writers considered in this study under the rubric

of ethnographic modernism makes for some strange bedfellows. It
means, for example, perversely grouping Woolf with H. G. Wells, a
writer Woolf derided as stylistically retrograde, and Conrad together
with the writer of popular adventure-romances, Rider Haggard,
whom Conrad loathed. Yet the tendency in modernist studies to
treat popular genres like the adventure romance in isolation from the
more stylistically innovative works of high modernists obscures
important connections between these literary “camps” that I seek to
establish here. While my work is attentive to important aesthetic dis-
tinctions among these literary writers, I make a case for reading
across what Andreas Huyssen has influentially termed the “great
divide” of high and low modernism—thus attesting to the perva-
siveness of ethnographic themes and motifs in the period and reveal-
ing that there was more intellectual and aesthetic exchange among
these writers than is usually acknowledged. An equally persistent
critical assumption that this study seeks to redress is the view that
modernism is an urban movement, associated with metropolitan
centers such as London, Paris, and New York. My study demon-
strates that modernism is as much a product of the “bush,” or
ethnographic field, as of the city.
Frederic Jameson’s essay, “Modernism and Imperialism” (1990)
illustrates this set of biases in favor of the metropolitan and the
canonical, which too rigidly excludes more popular forms from con-
sideration. In reckoning the impact of imperialism on modernism,
INTRODUCTION 13
Jameson summarily brackets off from discussion what he terms “the

literature of imperialism, since that literature (Kipling, Rider
Haggard, Verne, Wells) is by and large not modernist in any formal
sense, and, emerging from subcanonical genres like the adventure
tale, remained ‘minor’ or ‘marginal’ during the hegemony of the
modern and its ideology and values (even Conrad explicitly draws on
more archaic storytelling forms)” (44). In this way, he artificially
partitions the field of colonial writings—denying Conrad’s obvious
debt to contemporaneous adventure narratives (especially Haggard)
and too facilely divorcing the work of writers such as Wells from that
of the major canonical writers who take up similar themes.12
Jameson makes the curious choice in this essay to focus on the met-
ropolitan narrative Howards End and its representation of European
Otherness, rather than examining Forster’s icon of imperial litera-
ture, A Passage to India, which he dispatches unsatisfactorily with a
footnote. He assumes that “the more radical otherness of colonized,
non-Western peoples tends to find its representational place in non-
canonical adventure literature of imperialism” (49) and so ignores
not only A Passage to India but also Lawrence’s Southwest and
Mexican writings, much of Conrad, and Virginia Woolf’s first novel,
which is in self-conscious dialogue with the adventure tradition—all
canonical fiction that features encounters with what is figured as
“radical otherness.” While Jameson interestingly and persuasively
makes a case for the “traces of imperialism” constituting Western
modernism at the level of form, he affixes the qualification that “we
must not look for them [those traces] in the obvious places, in con-
tent or representation” (64). This line of reasoning leads us to ignore
the obvious, however, leaving ethnographic themes, along with
imperial ones, hidden in plain sight. The current study seeks to
demonstrate that these “high” and “low” modernists form a natural
constellation of writers engaged in representing, and often prob-
lematizing, cross-cultural encounters. Compartmentalizing the work
of writers like Haggard and Wells (too popular), or, for that matter,
Forster and Lawrence (too traditionally realist), prevents us from
seeing the period’s pervasive engagement with ethnographic ideas
and scenarios.
Scholars have long recognized the important influence of anthro-
pological writing on modernism, but until recently, the bulk of this
scholarship has regarded anthropological texts (such as Frazer’s The
Golden Bough or Jane Harrison’s Themis) as inert source material,
which provided literary writers with a collection of exotic stories

then transformed into literature. This critical orientation, character-
istic of the school of myth criticism that flourished after World War
II, was stimulated by the tendency of modernist texts (such as Eliot’s
The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Yeats’s In the Seven Woods) to
foreground their overt borrowing of ancient myths, as reinterpreted
by modern anthropology—the approach Eliot dubs the “mythical
method.”13 Countering the trend of myth criticism have been a
number of interdisciplinary studies of the 1980s and 1990s that have
traced the connections between anthropological and literary texts
with a new focus on these works’ ideological underpinnings and on
their rhetorical construction. These studies have benefited, as my
work also does, from the work of revisionary historians, anthropolo-
gists, and cultural critics who have drawn attention at once to the
tropological nature of anthropological texts and to the discipline’s
entanglement with imperialism during this period. Several of these
recent studies (Bentley, Ethnography of Manners; Hegeman, Patterns
for America; Manganaro, Culture, 1922; Evans, Before Cultures) are
dedicated to elucidating shifting definitions of the “culture concept”
in literary and anthropological texts across the period; others
(notably Torgovnick; also Barkan and Bush) investigate the pro-
nounced “primitivism” of modern literature and art. My work prof-
its from and complements this existing scholarship but shifts the
emphasis away from the representation of the primitive or of culture
per se and onto literary modernists’ ambivalent representations of
the subjectivity of cultural observers and their creative redeployment
of ethnographic methods and scenarios. Furthermore, much of this
scholarship focuses on American modernism. Given that the empire
thrust the British into contact with peoples around the globe and
that literature and imperialism studies abound, surprisingly little
attention has been paid to British modernism’s traffic with ethno-
graphic discourse—an oversight the present study seeks to correct.
Only two book-length studies take up the connection between
British modernism and ethnography per se—Marc Manganaro’s
Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept (2002) and Gregory
Castle’s Modernism and the Celtic Revival (2001)—and these focus
exclusively on the modernism of Ireland among the British Isles. As
the title suggests, Manganaro’s study traces with impressive detail
the emergence of the culture concept in the modern period, inves-
tigating “how models of culture are created, employed, elaborated
INTRODUCTION 15
upon, transformed, resisted, and ignored” (6). The central literary

texts he examines are The Waste Land and Ulysses, those high-mod-
ernist masterworks that have generated copious scholarship, which
Manganaro reads as closely and convincingly as the works them-
selves. In his discussion, Joyce and Eliot emerge as co-architects of
the culture concept, alongside anthropologists like Boas and
Malinowski. My study builds on this one but casts a wider net,
encompassing popular, nonliterary, and canonical texts. Also, while
acknowledging that the categories of “observer” and “observed” are
mutually constitutive, the present study focuses on the former, shift-
ing attention from the culture concept to modernism’s self-con-
scious representation of observers and observation. British Fiction
and Cross-Cultural Encounters finds that modernist texts are con-
cerned not so much with other cultures as with encounters with other
cultures—encounters that I argue generate an array of stylistic and
thematic tropes associated with the period.
Castle’s Modernism and the Celtic Revival also enriches our appre-
ciation of the interplay between ethnographic texts and literary ones,
making a compelling case that that Anglo-Irish modernists situated
themselves as participant-observers vis-à-vis the Irish-Catholic folk-
ways they represented by deploying anthropological methods to for-
ward their own cultural-nationalist agenda. Castle underrates the
pervasiveness of the ethnographic imagination in the modern period,
however, when he asserts that “the anthropological modernism of
the Celtic Revival bears only a passing resemblance to the mod-
ernism of Eliot and others, like E. M. Forster and Conrad, who were
interested in ‘primitive’ non-Western people and societies” (29). His
characterization of Yeats’s poetry as enacting “cultural preservation
and authentication” bears more than a passing resemblance to the
impulse that animates E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Hill of
Devi, or D. H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico. Likewise, his asser-
tion that Joyce employs an ethnographic perspective as “a strategy of
cultural critique” readily applies to the fiction of Virginia Woolf. By
stressing the novelty of Anglo-Irish writers’ deployment of ethno-
graphic tropes, Castle sequesters the rhetorical modes of the Celtic
Revival from mainstream modernism, failing to appreciate the
importance of the ethnographic to modernism in general.14 Castle
goes on to argue—again, too exclusively—that the modernist sen-
sibility he attributes to Bronislaw Malinowski’s posthumous
Trobriand diary (written 1914–18) “emerged out of a conflict
between a civilized observer and a primitive society, a conflict which

we find in no European modernist context save that of the Anglo-Irish
Revivalists, for colonial and anthropological interventions in Ireland
created entirely different social conditions from those found in New
York, Paris, or London” (29, emphasis mine). Though justified in
asserting the distinctiveness of Ireland among these metropolitan
sites, Castle here expresses a too-typical urban bias that ignores the
rest of the colonial periphery as a vital generative space for modernist
experimentation. The confrontation between a “civilized observer”
and a “primitive” or non-Western society that Castle associates with
the Celtic Revival alone is at the heart of much modernist fiction, as
this book shows.
In the sphere of Victorian Studies, Christopher Herbert’s ground-
breaking 1991 study traces the history of the ethnographic imagina-
tion through a series of nineteenth-century texts, devoting at least
one chapter to the reciprocal definition of the emergent (yet unnamed)
“culture” concept and the figure of the participant observer. As
Buzard notes, however, with the exception of the fiction of Anthony
Trollope, Herbert regards novels as “antiethnographic in tendency
by virtue of their supposed exalting of individual psyche over social
‘background’” (Disorienting Fiction 37). Buzard’s recent study (2005)
amply corrects this oversight, arguing that nineteenth-century writ-
ers prefigure an anthropological perspective in representing a dis-
tinctly English way of life in their fiction. British Fiction and
Cross-Cultural Encounters extends and complicates Buzard’s argu-
ment, for modernism’s engagement with ethnographic discourse
diverges in important ways from that of Victorian realism. To begin
with, unlike the “metropolitan auto-ethnographies” that Buzard dis-
cusses, the novels I consider map a trajectory into the colonial
periphery and away from relatively familiar realms of Englishness.
Moreover, by making the cross-cultural encounter central to the nar-
rative, ethnographic modernists foreground the epistemological
uncertainty that surrounds ethnographic fieldwork, even as many of
them facilitate the project of turning English culture into an ethno-
graphic object.15
British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters answers the call,
articulated by Melba Cuddy-Keane’s recent provocative article, for
scholars to formulate with greater nuance and precision the ways in
which modernist literature helped to produce an “emerging global
consciousness.” Challenging Edward Said’s influential model of
INTRODUCTION 17
Orientalism in particular as the dominant mode of conceptualizing

global consciousness in the humanities, she reads “modernist litera-
ture’s engagement of perspectivism and pluralism as a generative site
for an alternative discourse of globalization—one that at the very
least complicates the specters of exploitation and homogeneity that
are often assumed to be the inevitable consequences of a globalized
world” (540). The present study confirms that many British modern
novels were preoccupied with resituating personal and cultural iden-
tities vis-à-vis cultural others, while crucially supplementing Cuddy-
Keane’s framework by establishing that these modes of global
thinking closely parallel, and in many cases were informed by, ethno-
graphic discourse.16
O F M ETHODS AND M ANIFESTOES
In order to begin to illustrate some of the echoes and intersections

of modernist literary and ethnographic texts, I turn now to a pair of
manifestoes, which figure centrally in the writers’ respective discipli-
nary histories: Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” (1925) and Malinowski’s
preface to Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). In these texts, the
writers situate themselves at once as practitioners in the field and
chroniclers of a disciplinary history unfolding in the present. The
simultaneity of these traditions is worth noting: elsewhere, both
novelist and anthropologist would identify 1910, somewhat arbitrar-
ily, as the year of rupture, signaling the emergence of new move-
ments and methods.17 Published within the space of a few years, each
denouncing outworn methods and heralding new ones that the writ-
ers helped to pioneer, these documents may serve to show the paral-
lel tracks on which modern fiction and modern anthropology run
and where these tracks diverge.
In delineating a new set of principles and objectives for practi-
tioners of their disciplines, both writers condemn their contempo-
raries for focusing excessively on empirically observable details while
neglecting the inner life. Of H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John
Galsworthy—that trio Woolf famously derides as “materialists”—
Woolf writes, “It is because they are concerned not with the spirit
but with the body that they have disappointed us” (2088). She sug-
gests that Bennett “can make a book so well constructed and solid in
its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to
see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. . . . And yet—
if life should refuse to live there?” (Ibid.) In short, Woolf charges
these “Edwardian” writers with continuing an outmoded tradition
of realism, which represents external details slavishly, while ignoring
characters’ interior lives.
In the preface to Argonauts, Malinowski similarly finds fault with
contemporaries who excel in describing minute details of native life,
while failing to capture what is essential—subjective experience.
Although some “men-on-the-spot” succeed in vividly presenting
“intimate touches of native life, in bringing home to us these aspects
of it with which one is made familiar only through being in close
contact with the natives” (17), like armchair theorizers who present
“wholesale generalizations” (3), they miss “the real spirit of the
natives, the true picture of tribal life” (6). Much as Woolf finds fault
with materialists, Malinowski criticizes contemporary ethnographers
for too strictly adhering to “concrete facts” and missing the heart of
the matter: “In certain results of scientific work—especially that
which has been called ‘survey work’—we are given an excellent
skeleton, so to speak, of the tribal constitution, but it lacks flesh and
blood” (17).18 The flesh and blood of native life is to be found in
the ephemeral qualities of subjective life that both Woolf and
Malinowski state as their aim to record.
Notably diverging from the positivism of the Cambridge School,
Malinowski calls for a new effort to “penetrate . . . the mental atti-
tude” of the native (19)—a directive that corresponds to Woolf’s
celebrated call to the modern novelist to probe “the dark places
of psychology” (“Modern Fiction” 2152). For Malinowski, as for
Woolf, the goal is to “grasp the inner meaning and the psychological
reality” of native life (Argonauts 517). Anticipating his scientific
readers’ skepticism, the self-appointed father of modern anthropol-
ogy poses the rhetorical question, “But is this possible? Are these
subjective states not too elusive and shapeless?” (22)—a question he
heads off with practical, methodological advice about recording
native statements verbatim and seeking the generalizable rather than
the anomalous in the realm of psychology (“As sociologists . . . , we
are interested only in what [individuals] feel and think qua members
of a given community” [23]). It is, of course, stalking elusive and
shapeless subjective states that provides the major impetus for much
modernist fiction, though Woolf, too, owns that this new object of
INTRODUCTION 19
study is “difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predeces-

sors” (“Modern Fiction” 2091).
Both writers stress empathy as a means of gaining entry into the
elusive, uncharted domain of the human psyche. Much as
Malinowski directs the modern ethnographer to endeavor to “grasp
the native’s point of view” (25), Woolf tells the would-be modern
fiction writer to “[l]earn to make yourself akin to people” (2091).
For both, though tooled to different professional ends, the new
method of identity-hopping is exhilarating and liberating. In the
concluding pages of Argonauts, Malinowski speaks of the thrill of
trying on a new identity: given to the ethnographer is the opportu-
nity “for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his
eyes to look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to
him to be himself” (517). Resonating powerfully with these lines is
a passage in Woolf’s 1930 essay “Street Haunting: A London
Adventure,” which describes the allure of “put[ting] on briefly . . .
the bodies and minds of others”—“penetrating . . . [each] . . . far
enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a sin-
gle mind” (Collected Essays 165). There is a surprising kinship, I am
suggesting, between the persona of the modern ethnographer and
the modern novelist, engaged in parallel “adventures” that entail
imaginatively inhabiting foreign identities.19
Twined with this emphasis on the inner life is a new appreciation
for the everyday. Both writers place an emphasis, unprecedented in
their respective fields, on the ordinary: as Woolf puts it, “Let us not
take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly
thought big than in what is commonly thought small” (2151).
Malinowski remarks of the “survey” school, “We learn much about
the framework of [the tribal] society, but within it, we cannot per-
ceive or imagine the realities of human life, the even flow of every-
day events, the occasional ripples of excitement over a feast, or
ceremony, or some singular occurrence” (17). Malinowski’s “even
flow of everyday events” recalls the well-known passage in Woolf’s
“Modern Fiction” essay that bids the reader to “[e]xamine for a
moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day”—to consider the
“myriad impressions . . . [that] . . . shape themselves into the life of
Monday or Tuesday” (a subtle reference to Woolf’s collection of
experimental short fiction) (2150). Malinowski’s “everyday” is also
associated with his concept of the “inponderabilia of actual life,”
by which he means both seemingly inconsequential externals (“the
routine of a man’s working day, the details of his care of the body, of
the manner of taking food and preparing it; the tone of conversa-
tional and social life around the village fires”) and something closer
to modernist interiority (“the mental attitude” expressed in these
social actions) (19). Both Woolf and Malinowski charge their con-
temporaries with accumulating an impressive mass of details, yet fail-
ing to appreciate the importance of the seemingly trivial and only
subtly detectable interior realm of experience, where, these self-
styled iconoclasts insist, meaning resides.
Woolf’s modern writer and Malinowski’s fieldworker alike are
assigned the task of recording the seemingly haphazard details of
lived experience in textual form. Woolf likens the “myriad impres-
sions” of everyday life to “an incessant shower of innumerable
atoms . . . [coming] . . . from all sides” (2150), while Malinowski, to
similar effect, compares the ethnographer’s jumbled impressions of
tribal life to the disorienting view through a “kaleidoscope” (4). At
this point, however, their objectives diverge. The job of the ethnog-
rapher-as-writer is to shape these seemingly chaotic details into the
coherent whole of a polished monograph—to assume a kind of
panoramic perspective of his/her subject that eludes the modern
writer. Aldous Huxley describes the new orientation of modern fic-
tion in this way: “The God’s eye-view of those novelists who really
know, or pretend they know, exactly what is going on in the minds
of their characters, is exchanged for the traveler’s-eye view, the view
of the stranger” (Complete Essays 1:434). In other words, anthropol-
ogy claims an omniscient stance just as modern fiction rejects one.
Employed by a novelist and a fieldworker, similar methods yield
widely different generic results. Despite Malinowski’s famous decla-
ration that “W. H. R. Rivers shall be the H. Rider Haggard of
Anthropology, I shall be the Conrad,” the form of the ethnographic
monograph he pioneered bears little generic resemblance to a mod-
ernist narrative, other than the loose narrative structure of an out-
sider “penetrating” an exotic culture.20 Taken on the whole, the
mode of Argonauts is much more that of Victorian Realism—with its
minute detail of the web of native life, its elaboration of the inter-
connections among a whole people, and its copious description of
material artifacts—than that of a modernist text. Kuper asserts that
“Malinowski brought a new realism to social anthropology, with his
lively awareness of the flesh-and-blood interests behind custom,
and his radically new mode of observation” (35). Indeed, the next
INTRODUCTION 21
generation of anthropologists, including Edward Evans-Pritchard

(Malinowski’s student), criticized functionalism for its excessive “cul-
tural realism”: in Evans-Pritchard’s view, functionalist ethnographies
presented a rambling compendium of details, insufficiently synthe-
sized (96). The self-reflexivity surrounding cross-cultural encounters
that characterizes the representations of ethnographic modernism
find closer analogues in travel writing (see Chapter 2), field diaries
(see Chapter 4), and postmodern critiques of anthropology, as I have
suggested, than in the ethnographic monograph, with its panoramic
eye, confident mode of illuminating the ways of others, and episte-
mological certitude. While the linear narrative of the ethnographic
monograph reciprocally fashioned the identities of a complex,
integrated culture and the confident, authoritative persona of the
fieldworker (Predicament 104), modernist fiction, with its formal
experimentation and its fragmentation of personal and cultural iden-
tities, challenged these fictions in its fictions of fieldwork.
My discussion of these two manifestoes is meant to suggest that
in significant ways, Woolf and Malinowski—novelist and ethnogra-
pher—were engaged in parallel projects. The chapters that follow
pursue a chronological scheme, spanning from the late nineteenth-
century vogue of exploration and adventure to the era of modern
tourism. They further elaborate the parallels between ethnographic
and literary texts, while suggesting that modernists engaged ethno-
graphic discourse in advertent and inadvertent ways. As subsequent
chapters will show, literary modernism not only mirrors the attitudes
and rhetorical modes of the new ethnography but also self-con-
sciously borrows, mimics, and critiques its methods and modes.
4
C H A P T E R 1
EXPLORER ETHNOGRAPHY AND RIDER

HAGGARD’S AFRICAN ROMANCE, SHE
Sigmund Freud called H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886–87) a “strange

book, but full of hidden meaning” (The Interpretation of Dreams
453). From its cannibal rituals and catacombs piled with skeletons,
to the funereal femme fatale at the narrative’s center, who reigns
over a savage tribe living on the ruins of a once glorious civilization,
She has lent itself to psychoanalytic and mythical interpretations.1
Marysa Demoor writes that Haggard’s African tales translate “the
suppressed elements hidden in the personal and the collective
unconscious into fiction” (207). Fin de siècle proponents of romance
encouraged such readings. Haggard’s close friend and supporter,
Andrew Lang, believed that romances like She “tapped universal,
deep-rooted, ‘primitive’ aspects of human nature” (Rule of Darkness
231). Such readings—focusing on the work’s mythical, archetypal,
or latent psychological dimensions—entail reading She as a code, a
sign system that references meanings that lie on a different register.
These interpretive modes tend to pry Haggard’s romances out of
their historical moment, overlooking their resonance with other tex-
tual forms, including the ethnographic writings of explorers like
Richard Burton and Henry Stanley, with which, I will demonstrate,
Haggard’s fiction was in dialogue. Building on the obvious psycho-
analytic readings, I historicize the gothic elements of She in terms of
the scramble for ethnographic data and the unprecedented imperial
aggression of the fin de siècle “Scramble for Africa,” in which all
three writers played a part.
In an early study (1975) on the influence of Victorian anthropol-

ogy on popular fiction, Brian Street classifies Haggard’s African
romances as “anthropological fiction,” a category that includes G.
A. Henty, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Rudyard Kipling, and consists
of “mass produced stories of far-off lands and their inhabitants” (4).
Although the armchair anthropologists E. B. Tylor and Sir James
Frazer figure prominently in Street’s study, he misses the more
obvious kinship between this fiction and the writings of explorers
whose narratives most closely resemble imperial romances.2 Patrick
Brantlinger connects what he calls the “nonfictional quest romances”
of Burton, Stanley, and Livingstone—“in which the hero-authors
struggle through enchanted, bedeviled lands toward an ostensible
goal: the discovery of the Nile’s sources, the conversion of the can-
nibals” (184)—with adventure romances, like Haggard’s, which
“imitated the explorers, producing quest romances with Gothic
overtones in which the heroic white penetration of the Dark
Continent is the central theme” (189). These writings share not only
the quest motif, however. Like the “explorer ethnographies” of
Burton and Stanley, Haggard’s adventure fiction showcases the
intrepid ethnographic observer, who swaggers through the text,
sometimes violently dominating indigenous people, but also pausing
to record their “vanishing” customs. Alternating between the pseu-
doscientific and the militaristic, these narratives of exploration and
adventure are a product of their historical moment.
She signals its engagement with ethnographic and anthropological
texts by incorporating mock-scholarly footnotes, ostensibly written
both by its (fictional) editor and its narrator, Ludwig Horace Holly,
a Cambridge don; reproducing a supposed facsimile of a potsherd
that provides an archaeological clue to the culture whose mysteries
the heroes unravel; proffering pseudoobjective descriptions of the
customs and manners of a fictitious African tribe; and dedicating this
“history” to an actual anthropologist (also a critic, fantasy writer,
and fairy tale anthologist), Andrew Lang.3 Read one way, the
authenticating devices Haggard employs encourage the reader to
suspend her disbelief; they also replay, in an imaginative idiom, an
historical tug-of-war for the authority to represent ethnographic
others.4 By trumpeting the authority of the eyewitness observer,
Haggard engaged in a struggle for professional credibility that paral-
leled that of the explorer-ethnographers.
EXPLORER ETHNOGRAPHY AND SHE 25
By explorer ethnography, I mean portraits of the customs and man-

ners of indigenous cultures, embedded in hybrid travel narratives
combining tales of personal adventure with descriptions of local
flora, fauna, and geography. These writings differ from professional
monographs of fieldworkers like Malinowski not only in their eclec-
ticism and popularity but also in their employment of the personal
voice and their foregrounding of the explorer as the central charac-
ter in a drama of discovery. It is against this tradition of amateur
travel writing that modern ethnography defines itself as a profes-
sional, scientific endeavor. Yet, as Mary Louise Pratt argues, “despite
the disciplinary boundary” dividing the two, modern ethnography
“lies in direct continuity” with this earlier tradition (“Fieldwork”
35). The explorers I consider anticipate modern fieldworkers in
insisting on the value of firsthand ethnographic observation.
Like Chapter 2, geographically, this one is centered on Africa, the
site of imperial expansion that most dominated the British imaginary
in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as explorers scrambled
to chart regions unknown to Europeans, fortune hunters scrambled
for diamonds and gold in South Africa (these “rushes” got under
way in 1867 and 1884, respectively), and foreign governments
scrambled for territory, up to and after the formal partition of Africa
among European nations at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. The
reputations of Burton, Stanley, and Haggard were inextricably
bound to the image of Africa that they helped to create. Burton’s
widely publicized quarrel with John Hanning Speke regarding the
source of the Nile in the 1860s ensured the enduring fame of the
man who made a pilgrimage to Mecca the decade before. Tracking
down the lionized Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who had
gone missing in Central Africa, catapulted the expatriate Stanley to
fame in Great Britain. His subsequent expedition verifying the
source of the Nile earned him professional and public accolades,
albeit mitigated by some derision in the popular press and charges
from Exeter Hall of commercialism and excessive violence against
the native population (see Driver 122–25). Haggard aligned himself
with affairs in South Africa in the colonial service in Natal in 1875,
and the publication of his best-selling King Solomon’s Mines in the
second year of the Berlin Conference (1885) linked his name indis-
solubly with Africa. A steady stream of publications kept Africa and
these men in the forefront of British imaginations: among them,
Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), Lake Regions of
Central Africa (1868), and Two Trips to Gorilla Land (1876);

Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone (1872), Through the Dark
Continent (1878), and In Darkest Africa (1890); Haggard’s King
Solomon’s Mines; its sequel, Allan Quartermain (1887); and She,
published serially in Graphic in 1886–87 and in a single volume by
Longmans, Green and Company in January 1887.
Each of these men fashioned an identity for himself (and, in
Haggard’s case, for his fictional proxies) in ethnographic writings
about Africa.5 Feeling marginalized in various ways, each sought
social and perhaps personal approbation, affiliating himself with an
economically and politically formidable empire and fortifying his
position with assumptions of racial and cultural superiority, which
imbued nineteenth-century “race science” and the increasingly pro-
fessionalized discipline of anthropology.6 Scholars like E. B. Tylor,
the first lecturer in anthropology at Oxford and author of the disci-
pline’s first textbook (Primitive Culture), applied the theory of bio-
logical evolution to culture, suggesting that human societies
progressed through a series of stages en route to becoming civilized
and that living peoples such as the Bushmen, Swazi, and Zulu were
fossils of Western Europe’s own past, living in what Anne McClintock
calls an “anachronistic space,” surveyed from a privileged Western
standpoint. Explorer-ethnographers shared with armchair anthro-
pologists the assumption that in the record of human development,
with each race assigned its rung on the evolutionary ladder, the
Anglo-Saxon male stood on top. George Stocking suggests that in
“the expansive phase of Western colonialism, evolutionism in
anthropology was both the reflection of and the justification for the
invasion, appropriation, and subjugation of the ‘savage,’ ‘barbarian,’
or ‘semi-civilized’ regions of the earth by the representatives of
European ‘civilization’” (Colonial Situations 4). The same may be
said for adventure fiction, which Martin Green has characterized as
providing “the energizing myth of imperialism” (3). In this way, the
kindred genres of exploration and adventure both reflect and rein-
force imperialist ideology.
In the more general context of Orientalism, Edward Said
describes a “flexible positional superiority which puts the Westerner
in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without
ever losing the upper hand” (7). This is an apt description of the
ethnographic self-fashioning discussed in this chapter. Haggard’s
imperial romances stage encounters between intrepid Englishmen
(Ludwig Horace Holly, Allan Quartermain) and groups of Zulus,

Basutos, or imaginary tribes such as the Amahagger, which echo the
ethnographic writings of Stanley and Burton: all constituted them-
selves as ad hoc authorities, helping to delineate the figure of the
ethnographer in popular discourse. Yet even as these amateur
ethnographers (fictional and real) position themselves as confident,
rational, civilized men confronting cultures that seem strange or
menacing, their self-assured personae seem compensatory. They
express rage they barely stifle, such that their moral high ground
condemning the “savagery” of the natives is untenable, verging on
hypocrisy. The relentlessly morbid focus of Haggard’s She and the
aestheticization of physical aggression in King Solomon’s Mines are
matched by similar tendencies in Burton’s and Stanley’s writings to
gravitate toward the violent, which undermines these explorers’
imperial stance. They allude to feelings of unease and uncanny sen-
sations at odds with their postures of self-assurance.
B ECOMING E THNOGRAPHERS
While Haggard, Stanley, and Burton came from markedly dissimilar

social and economic backgrounds, all felt marginal to the British
mainstream and garnered professional recognition through writing.
According to his mother, as a child Haggard was “heavy as lead in
body and mind,” and in the infamous words of his father, only “fit
to be a greengrocer” (Days 1:5, 7). As the eighth of ten children,
and the only son of seven not to be furnished with private schooling
and a university education, Haggard comprised part of England’s
“superfluous male population,”7 such that the opportunity to go to
South Africa as an unpaid secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer, the lieu-
tenant governor of Natal, meant the possibility of carving out a rel-
atively respectable, lucrative place for himself. Haggard records in
his autobiography that when he returned to England prematurely,
after a failed venture as an ostrich farmer as well as a stint in the colo-
nial service, his father’s low hopes for him had not improved; Squire
Haggard “remarked with great candour that I should probably
become ‘a waif and a stray’” (Days 1:162). It was through Haggard’s
romances of imperial adventure, featuring encounters between
heroic English men and so-called primitive people, that he avoided
the social failure his father predicted.
In South Africa, Haggard learned the Zulu language and took

assiduous notes of local customs; his first publications were pre-
sented as documentary accounts of the politics and ethnography of
the region. In his African romances, Haggard credits his protago-
nists with the ethnographic knowledge rooted in empirical observa-
tion that he claims for himself in his nonfiction writings. Haggard
thus situated himself, and has been read, as authoritatively repre-
senting black Africans in his writing—ethnographically, artistically,
and even politically, in the idiom of imperial paternalism.8 It may
seem like a stretch to claim that Haggard made his reputation as an
ethnographer, when he was most obviously a writer of romances,
yet many of his contemporaries believed Haggard’s experience in
the “Dark Continent” gave him insight into the “savage mind.”
Despite couching representations of Zulus in popular fiction,
Haggard was credited with having an “authentically native” perspec-
tive. Robert Louis Stevenson commended Haggard’s “command of
the savage way of talking” in King Solomon’s Mines, and Lang
admired his “natural gift of savagery” (Days 1:235). In Nada the
Lily, Haggard ventriloquizes the voice of a Zulu native, leading
Hartwig Vogelsberger to assert that the English writer “give[s] the
impression of having immersed himself deeply in the minds of war-
rior people” (126). Likewise, Morton Cohen declares that Haggard’s
writings provide “a perfect mirror of the Zulu as he was before he
was touched by civilization” (229). These statements confirm that
Haggard used ethnography to carve a place for himself among the
literate, ruling classes of England.
Stanley’s prospects were initially much slimmer than Haggard’s.
Born John Rowlands to an unmarried mother in Wales, he was raised
in a workhouse until he ran away, finding employment as a cabin boy
on a ship to America. He made his way to New Orleans, where he
secured work with the cotton broker Henry Hope Stanley, whose
name he adopted, though the two were quickly estranged. A lifelong
search for a father figure ensued; Stanley’s shame about his origins
manifested in a tendency to suppress or fictionalize the circum-
stances of his childhood.9 He served on both sides of the American
Civil War before becoming a roving journalist, reporting on Native
Americans and the Wild West, until he was commissioned by
Gordon Bennet to find Dr. Livingstone. The veracity of Stanley’s
claim to “discover” Livingstone was at first regarded by the Royal
Geographical Society and the press with suspicion: Stanley was
viewed as an American interloper of obscure and degraded Welsh

origins working for a disreputable, foreign paper.10 Even after his
account was verified, the British scientific establishment disdained
Stanley for his perceived lack of professionalism. At a reception by
the British Association in a concert hall in Brighton, Francis Galton
complained that they were “gathered to hear about geographical
discoveries in the dispassionate mode of scientific inquiry, not sensa-
tionalism” and then demanded impatiently, “are you Welsh or
not?”11 The turning point in Stanley’s British reputation occurred
when he was invited to visit the Queen.12 Though he would nurse
the wounds of his initial rejection in England, he was quickly con-
verted into an explorer-hero in the public eye: reflecting his new-
found celebrity status, Stanley had cartes-de-visite made of himself,
in khakis and pith helmet, with his East African servant, Kalulu (see
Figure 1.1);13 Madame Tussaud’s had wax statues made of this pair;
Figure 1.1 Henry Morton Stanley and Kalulu (Ndugu M’hali). Credit:
Henry Morton Stanley and Kalulu, Dr. Livingstone’s boy. Carte-de-visite.
Circa 1872. © Royal Geographical Society.
his book How I Found Livingstone became a bestseller; he was deco-

rated twice by the Royal Geographical Society; he served the last five
years of his life in the British Parliament; and in 1899, he was
knighted by Queen Victoria. His reputation, however, remained
mixed: ridiculed in Punch and “subjected to relentless parody on
stage and street,” Stanley was as much mocked as admired, even at
the height of his popularity (Driver 121). And though Stanley
received many professional accolades in Europe and America, he was
never fully embraced by the British establishment. After taking the
British oath of allegiance in 1892, he was married (but not buried)
in Westminster Abbey and has become, as the atrocities of the colo-
nization of the Congo Free State perpetuated by Stanley under King
Leopold II of Belgium have come fully to light, more notorious
than celebrated.14
Burton likewise looked down on the British establishment, while
longing to be part of it. His marginality was a product of his
upbringing: his mother was from “a good English family” and his
father, a lieutenant colonel in the British army, was of mixed English,
Irish, and possible French descent, with a distant connection to
British aristocracy. Thus Burton lived a nomadic life, moving contin-
ually between France, Italy, and England.15 By age nine, he had
formed an unfavorable impression of what he described as “dolor-
ous” England, dreading “the cold plunge into English life,” and
considering “the national temper, fierce and surly . . . a curious con-
trast to the light-hearted French” (Rice 13). Burton placated his
father, who wished him to be a clergyman, by going to Oxford, but
his habitual disrespect for authority soon got him expelled. Entering
into service with the East India Company, he moved to Bombay
where for the first time he kept an ethnological journal (Rice 32).
There he distanced himself from other colonial servants, whom he
found “not brave, nor clever, nor civilized, nor anything but sur-
passing rogues” (Rice 72), and alienated his superiors with his insub-
ordinate behavior. Burton’s interest in translating erotic writings and
his focus on the puerile in his anthropological writings further mar-
ginalized him in English society,16 as did his penchant for cross-
dressing as an Arab, which earned him the racist epithet “white
nigger” among his fellow officers in the East India Company.17
Flaunting his distance from mainstream colonial society, Burton
dubbed himself an “amateur barbarian” (First Footsteps 60).
But if Burton was dismissive of upper-class British society, he also

resented being deprived of the advantage necessary to succeed in it:
The conditions of society in England are so complicated, and so arti-

ficial, that those who would make their way in the world, especially in
public careers, must be broken to it from their earliest days. The
future soldiers and statesmen must be prepared by Eton and
Cambridge. The more English they are, even to the cut of their hair,
the better. In consequence of being brought up abroad, we never
thoroughly understood English society, nor did society understand
us. And, lastly, it is a real advantage to belong to some parish. It is a
great thing when you have won a battle, or explored Central Africa,
to be welcomed home by some little corner of the Great World, which
takes a pride in your exploits, because you reflect honour upon itself.
In the contrary condition you are a waif and a stray; you are a blaze of
light without a focus. (Life 1:32) 18
Burton uses the same phrase employed by Squire Haggard to refer

to his son—each was in danger of becoming “a waif and a stray.”
Although Burton positioned himself on the outskirts of a society
that provided him many avenues for success (at Oxford, the East
India Company, and later the Royal Geographical Society), the
regret that permeates this passage suggests that he felt unwelcome in
the society he enjoyed rejecting. As “a blaze of light,” he lacked the
national or local affiliation that might have brought his character
into greater focus when venturing out from and returning to
England.
Thus Haggard and Stanley were significantly excluded from the
opportunities and privileges of the ruling class at the onset of their
careers, and even the self-distancing Burton expressed misgivings
about exclusion. The empire and ethnographic writing provided
them all with opportunities for prominence. Each ventured to
Africa, for along with the imagined blank places on the map went a
social tabula rasa, the chance to reinvent oneself as a willful, impe-
rial subject, an authority on the peoples and places observed. Burton
describes the personal liberation he associated with travel in a diary
entry on December 2, 1856: “Shaking off with one mighty effort
the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many
Cares, and the slavery of Civilization, Man feels once more happy.
The blood flows with the fast circulation of youth, excitement gives
a new vigour to the muscles, and a sense of sudden freedom adds
an inch to the stature” (qtd. “from his own notes” in Life 1:258).
Similarly, Holly, Haggard’s amateur ethnographer in She, rejoices
“in that splendid vigour of a new found self” that his adventures in
Africa allow him to discover (288). Stanley, too, celebrates the “per-
fect independence” afforded him in Africa, where his character “is
not repressed by fear, nor depressed by ridicule and insults . . . but
now preens itself and soars free and unrestrained, which liberty, to a
vivid mind, imperceptibly changes the whole man” (Autobiography
533). These three writers aimed to overcome their relative insignifi-
cance by fashioning masterful identities for themselves (or their char-
acters) as ethnographic observers. They also challenged generic and
scholarly hierarchies that subordinated travel narratives and adven-
ture romance, insisting on the value of writing that mirrored the
expansiveness of an imperial age.
“M EN - ON - THE - SPOT ”
In the late nineteenth century, the practice of anthropology was

bifurcated into two distinct roles: the armchair theorist and the ama-
teur observer, or “man-on-the-spot”—a category that included mis-
sionaries, colonial administrators, and travelers. Burton (overtly) and
Stanley (implicitly) insisted on their authority on ethnological mat-
ters, even as, in the attempt to professionalize the discipline, arm-
chair anthropologists aimed to delimit such authority by controlling
and subordinating the role of the data-gatherers on whom they
relied for their firsthand observations of supposedly vanishing tribes.
The division between anthropologists and amateur ethnographers
was formalized in the 1874 Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for
the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands, which pro-
vided questionnaires for men-on-the-spot to administer to the
“uncivilized” people they encountered and guidelines to apply to
their interaction. One of the leading proponents of the question-
naires was Augustus Lane Fox (later Pitt Rivers).19 In his 1875 pres-
idential address to the Anthropological Institute, Lane Fox
expressed disdain for the misguided priorities of those explorers who
failed to take advantage of the opportunity for ethnographic study
provided by their travel to remote lands: “it is lamentable to think of
the opportunities for anthropological investigation that have been
lost by some expeditions, the main results of which have been to
determine which way the water runs in particular places, while the
flow of human races and of human culture has been made a second-
ary consideration.”20 Travelers and residents in colonial outposts
were enlisted in the project of procuring ethnographic data because
of the perceived urgency of the task, though they were regarded as
imperfect instruments for data-gathering, capable of “distorting”
ethnographic data “to render it in harmony with preconceived
ideas.”21 In Lake Regions of Central Africa (1868), Burton refused
to honor this distinction between anthropologist/authority and
amateur observer: “Modern ‘hints to travellers’ direct the explorer
and the missionary to eschew theory and opinion. We are told some-
what peremptorily that it is our duty to gather actualities not infer-
ences—to see and not to think, in fact, to confine ourselves to
transmitting the rough material collected by us, that it may be
worked into shape by the professionally learned at home. But why
may not the observer be allowed a voice concerning his own observa-
tions?” (xiv, italics mine). With the concluding rhetorical question,
Burton stakes a proprietary claim to his observations, anticipating
the fusion of armchair theorist and amateur observer in the modern
fieldworker. Stanley also implicitly insists on the value of eyewitness
observations, fashioning himself as an authority on the people he
observes.22 Sensitive to their exclusion from the upper echelons of
learned, respectable society, these writers turned their eccentricity
into a mark of special qualification.
Like these self-aggrandizing explorers, the protagonists of
Haggard’s adventures wed an imperious persona to a self-pro-
claimed cultural observer who vies with armchair scholars to make
authoritative claims about the tribes he represents. Although Allan
Quartermain (the hero of King Solomon’s Mines and its sequels) is
“more accustomed to handling a rifle than a pen,” he fashions him-
self as an ethnographic authority, based on “forty years [living]
among savages, and stud[ying] their ways” (Allan Quartermain
xvii, 10). Haggard peppers Allan Quartermain with the narrator’s
footnotes, explaining native customs, and, as Brian Street notes,
“devotes a whole chapter to detailed ethnography of the Zu-Vendi
tribe, going well beyond the exigencies of the story to show his
concerns for the facts of native life” (139).23 This is comparable to
the hybrid structure of explorer ethnographies, which alternate
chapters that narrate an adventure quest with synchronic descrip-
tions of native manners and customs—a pattern Pratt calls the
“narration-description duality” of travel writing.24 While Haggard’s

protagonist Allan Quartermain enacts the fantasy of the rough-and-
tumble man-on-the-spot emerging as ethnographic authority in the
field, Ludwig Horace Holly of She—the Cambridge don who is
transformed into a hero of an African adventure—enacts the fantasy
in reverse. Norman Etherington speculates that Lang may have
served as inspiration for the fictional scholar-adventurer Horace
Holly (211). If so, Haggard anticipates the emergence of the mod-
ern fieldworker by transplanting the learned armchair anthropologist
to the ethnographic field and transforming him into a scholarly man-
on-the-spot.25
She also insists on the value of firsthand observations through
pseudoscientific descriptions of the customs of an African tribe—the
fictitious Amahagger. In a chapter entitled “An Early Christian
Ceremony,” the scholar-narrator Holly justifies the seemingly pre-
sumptuous behavior of Ustane, who abruptly kisses his companion
Leo, by comparing it to the British marriage ceremony: “when we
came to understand the customs of this extraordinary people the
mystery was explained. . . . [T]here is, even according to our
canons, nothing immoral about this Amahagger custom, seeing that
the interchange of the embrace answers to our ceremony of mar-
riage, which, as we know, justifies most things” (81). Holly’s confi-
dence in his ability to read Ustane’s actions appropriates the function
armchair theorists reserved for themselves: this man-on-the-spot
does not merely record what he observes and learns through inquiry,
but presumes to arbitrate meaning, placing cultural practices within
a larger conceptual framework—in this case, an evolutionary para-
digm that understands the ways of “primitive” peoples as early ver-
sions of our own.26
Both Haggard’s narratives echo the plea Burton made for the
observer to “have a voice concerning his own observations.” This
power struggle dramatized within Haggard’s fiction is replayed in
related form in the writer’s career, for, like the explorer-ethnogra-
phers, Haggard also jockeyed for status as a writer of a discredited
genre. He fashioned himself not only as an ad hoc ethnographic
authority (in his Zulu essays) but also as a great writer of romance,
in contrast to domestic writers of realism, a genre he represents as
moribund. In an arrogant essay called “About Fiction,” published in
The Contemporary Review in 1887, Haggard takes on the entire
French, English, and American literary establishment—categorically

declaring that “most of this crude mass of fiction is worthless”
(172), calling realism “dreary” and the Naturalism of Zola “an
accursed thing” (176), and proclaiming romance deserving of the
highest place in the ranks of contemporary fiction, as “the most dif-
ficult art practiced by the sons of men” (172). Haggard wrote this
hyperbolic praise of the genre as one of its leading authors; Laura
Chrisman continues to identify Haggard as possibly the most signif-
icant “formative agent in the development of the genre of the impe-
rial romance” (39). “About Fiction” is at once an exercise in
self-promotion and a plea from a popular writer for a discredited
genre to be taken seriously.
Despite Haggard’s efforts to elevate the genre of romance, his
acerbic critique of “serious” writers only provoked hostile response
toward him and his work (see Cohen 124–25). Though his popular-
ity continued unabated, critics found, and continue to find, fault
with his style, which has been characterized as “overhasty and slap-
dash” (Katz 37). Haggard defended his crude construction of plot
and character, boasting about the speed with which he completed
She: “Let the characters be definite, even at the cost of a little crude-
ness”; “Tricks of ‘style’ and dark allusions may please the superior
critic; they do not please the average reader” (Days 2:92, 96).27 At
the same time, he painstakingly made modifications to the serial ver-
sion to improve the impression of verisimilitude for the first book-
length edition, including commissioning his old headmaster of
Ipswich Grammar School, H. A. Holden, a scholar of classical
Greek, to select a more credible version of the Greek text for the
Sherd of Amenartas, and his friend Dr. Raven, to provide medieval
Latin and Old English translations of this version (Days 1:252). He
also went to some lengths, assisted by his sister-in-law, to create a
reasonable fakery of the antique potsherd, a photograph of which
appeared as the frontispiece to the Longmans edition. In his autobi-
ography, Haggard boasts that the anthropologist Sir John Evans, “a
great expert on such matters,” was sufficiently convinced as to its
authenticity to remark only that “it might possibly have been forged”
(248). These efforts suggest that Haggard was invested in vicari-
ously assuming the stature of a university don, even as he dismissed
scholarly criticism of his work, ostensibly catering to the average,
unschooled reader. The scholarly framework enables him to assume
the authoritative voice of the scholar-scientist—to masquerade, in
other words, as one of the learned. Given that Haggard was denied
a university education, his co-optation of a scholar’s voice seems
fraught with wish fulfillment.
Meanwhile, by championing romance over realism, Haggard
entered into a larger turf war played out at the time. His close friend
and supporter Lang was another defender of romance:
[M]en of imagination and literary skill have been the new conquerors,
the Corteses and Balboas of India, Africa, Australia, Japan and the
isles of the southern seas. . . . [T]hey have at least seen worlds for
themselves; have gone out of the streets of the over-populated lands
into the open air; have sailed and ridden, walked and hunted; have
escaped from the fog and smoke of towns. New strength has come
from fresher air into their brains and blood; hence the novelty and
buoyancy of the stories which they tell. Hence, too, they are rather to
be counted among romanticists than realists, however real is the
essential truth of their books. (Lang, Letters on Literature 133)
Lang figures romance writers as heroic explorers; the value of their

prose relies on firsthand experience: “they have at least seen worlds
for themselves.” Implicit in the rhetoric of escape, manly action and
vitality is a critique of the stultifying ambiance of modern life and,
presumably, its stagnant modes of domestic fiction. The romance
writers, these “new conquerors” of lands and fiction, are the men-
on-the-spot, exalted in contrast to armchair realists. Thus like the
explorer-ethnographers, romance writers and their defenders chal-
lenged hierarchies that subordinated them, locating the validity and
vitality of their work in that quality that becomes all-defining for the
contemporary fieldworker: what Clifford Geertz calls “having been
there” (Works and Lives 1–24).
T HE C OLONIAL G AZE AND S WAGGER
The explorer ethnographies of Burton and Stanley, like Haggard’s

African fiction, spotlight the adventures of self-aggrandizing men-
on-the-spot, who alternately defend themselves against “hostile
natives” and record their vanishing customs. This section considers
three encounters with “savage royalty”—Burton’s with the Amir of
Harar, Stanley’s with King Mtesa, and Haggard’s with Chief
Secocoeni—which provide a template for the scene in She where

Holly first faces Ayesha, or “She who must be obeyed.” As sites
where competing claims of political and ethnographic authority are
at play, these encounters illuminate the instabilities in the authority
explorer-ethnographers claimed as cultural observers. They fore-
ground the production of an imperial persona, a “mask” that main-
tains the impression of the staid, seemingly confident amateur
ethnographer—despite significant insecurities that lurk beneath that
mask.28 George Orwell, later and from a politically liberal stand-
point, exposes this colonial posing as a practice that, while maintain-
ing power, elicits behavior the colonial “actor” finds morally
insupportable.29 But Stanley and Burton show the manufacturing of
this persona not as a sham; rather, they boast of having effectively
concealed their anxieties beneath the mask. The ethnographer’s per-
formance is calculated to inspire respect or admiration in readers as
well as in its “savage” audience. In She, the production of a confident
imperial persona is similarly shown to cover for underlying insecuri-
ties, but these insecurities, rather than being finally contained by a
confident persona, instead threaten to overwhelm the protagonist’s
assertion of control.
Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa conforms to the structure
of a nonfiction quest romance, as the text records the explorer’s trek
across Somalia, disguised as an Arab merchant, and his successful
penetration of the “forbidden city” of Harar, where the “bigoted
ruler and barbarous people threatened death to the Infidel who ven-
tured within their walls” (45). Burton frequently freezes the narra-
tive of the journey to describe botanical, geological, or ethnographic
details including descriptions of marriage customs, funeral rites,
diverse religious practices, physical artifacts, dress, and dwellings.
Readers continue to appreciate these passages, which display a gen-
uine curiosity about other cultures that was rare in its day: Alan Jutzi
writes that “few Englishman [sic] traveling in the British Empire
shared Burton’s desire to understand and appreciate the Empire’s
cultural diversity” (96). Said offers a more measured assessment of
Burton’s achievement: “what we read in his prose is the history of a
consciousness negotiating its way through an alien culture by virtue
of having successfully absorbed its systems of information and behav-
ior.” Although this feat is remarkable for the time, Said concludes
that Burton’s attempt to identify with alien cultures (in particular
with Arabic ones) is ultimately foredoomed by his inevitable identi-

fication with “the voice of Empire” (Orientalism 195).30
Burton’s alignment with an imperial perspective is apparent in his
dehumanizing descriptions of Africans, which typify the colonial
ethnographic gaze that dissects and inscribes ethnographic others.31
Consider Burton’s description of the Bedouin people: “In personal
appearance, the race is not unprepossessing. The crinal hair is hard
and wiry, growing, like that of a half-caste West Indian, in stiff
ringlets which sprout in tufts from the scalp. . . . The Bedouin, true
specimens of the ‘greasy African race,’ wear locks dripping with ran-
cid butter. . . . As far as the mouth, the face, with the exception of
high cheek-bones, is good. . . . The jaw, however, is almost invari-
ably prognathous African . . . the broad, turned-out lips betray
approximation to the Negro; and the chin projects to the detriment
of the facial angle” (88–89). The passage freezes the Bedouin in the
present (as opposed to the past tense employed to describe Burton’s
adventures), and, by placing them in another temporal “space,” in
Johannes Fabian’s terms, “disavows their coevalness” with the
writer-observer (Time and its Other 37). It also collapses a heteroge-
neous group of individuals into an anthropological “type”; some-
one’s chin, or a variety of chins, become “the chin.” Elsewhere,
Burton acknowledges that the pursuit of racial, national, or local
“types” is the pursuit of a chimera; to some degree, types are fictive,
lacking a specific referent. Yet he unquestioningly deploys types for
dark-skinned African people, using them to make unqualified truth-
claims for an entire people.32 Moreover, his gaze transcends the
external limits of the body, as Burton describes the gums of the
Bedouin—deploying a probing, penetrating gaze, like that of the
anatomist, as though the living bodies Burton observed were cadav-
ers. (I return to the morbidity underwriting these narratives of
exploration and adventure later in this chapter.) Thus despite
Burton’s interest in the particulars of African cultures, he nonethe-
less shores up an imperial identity by objectifying and dehumanizing
those he observes.
Burton’s self-fashioning as a “monarch of all I survey,” in Pratt’s
phrase (from her book of that title), is complicated when he con-
fronts an African ruler, whose visible authority draws into question
the Englishman’s imperial positioning. His account of his reception
at the court of Harar, the forbidden Moslem city in Somaliland,
reveals that the persona of the undaunted explorer-ethnographer has
to be performed (both “on the spot” and in the text). Burton

describes his entry into the court, the inner sanctuary of the cultural
“secret” of Harar, as impeded by linguistic and material obstacles:
there “ensued a long dispute, in tongues mutually unintelligible,
about giving up our weapons: by dint of obstinacy we retained our
daggers and my revolver. The guide raised a door curtain, suggested
a bow, and I stood in the presence of the dreaded chief” (174). The
curtain marks an obvious threshold that Burton represents in order
to transgress, situating himself as one who is privy to cultural secrets,
who can transgress boundaries impenetrable by other men. His
refusal to yield his gun embellishes this impression of boldness,
implying that though an interloper, Burton defies local authorities.
Isabel Burton’s biography amends to this passage a paragraph taken
from her husband’s personal writings, where Burton represents him-
self as outwardly bold, though inwardly anxious:
I walked into a vast hall, a hundred feet long, between two long rows
of Galla Spearmen, between whose lines I had to pass. They were
large half-naked savages, standing like statues, with fierce moveable
eyes, each one holding . . . a huge spear, with a head the size of a
shovel. I purposely sauntered down to them cooly with a swagger,
with my eyes fixed upon their dangerous-looking faces. I had a six-
shooter concealed in my waist-belt, and determined, at the first show
of excitement, to run up to the Amir, and put it to his head, if it were
necessary, to save my own life. (Isabel Burton, 1:207)
Burton ritually distances himself from the Galla spearsmen: they are
half-naked, he is clothed; they are “savages,” his cool swagger pur-
ports to be urbane; they are menacing yet inanimate, objects in a
museum with moving eyes, while he is highly animated—sauntering,
swaggering, plotting his next move. It would be theoretically naïve
to read this private writing as without artifice; nonetheless, the idiom
is one of candid revelation: Burton seems to confess his trepidation by
asserting that despite his cockiness, privately he was nervous, calculat-
ing measures of self-preservation. Fashioning himself as an “ethno-
graphic hero,” Burton performs identities for two audiences: before
the court of Harar, he “purposely” saunters, “cooly with a swagger,”
in the shape of an imperious, fearless visitor, while within the text of
his private writings, a layered identity emerges, the composite of the
brazen persona and the understandably anxious speaker who orches-

trates the first performance.
By highlighting the disparity between “felt” alarm and “shown”
bravado, Burton implies that adopting the appearance of composure
is itself a feat. Burton’s diction suggests that the situation called for
such display of confidence: the exigencies of diplomacy with poten-
tially savage tribesmen require him to adopt a “swagger”—the word
implying excessive or compensatory behavior, boasting and bluster-
ing his way. He underscores the implication that he survived a life-
threatening mission later in First Footsteps, where he gloats about
having “penetrated” yet another cultural mystery: “I was under the
roof of a bigoted prince whose least word was death; amongst a peo-
ple who detest foreigners; the only European that had ever passed
over their inhospitable threshold, and the fated instrument of their
future downfall” (177). Burton thus conceives of himself as instru-
mental both in the downfall of a way of life in Harar (which he
understood to be the center of the East African slave trade) and in
the preservation of that way of life, in his ethnological observations
in First Footsteps. Content with having smuggled out “cultural
secrets” the more precious for their impermanence, ultimately
Burton might be said to strut across the page with satisfaction equal
to that with which he saunters up to the Amir. He draws the con-
tours of the ethnographic explorer by inscribing an image of himself:
poised under pressure, overcoming all manner of adversity, and con-
tributing to that ambitious anthropological project of filling in the
record of cultural evolution.
The tension in Burton’s narrative between commemorating a way
of life and being instrumental in its destruction is a pervasive attitude
in the colonial period that Renato Rosaldo has labeled “imperialist
nostalgia”: the attempt “to establish one’s innocence and at the
same time talk about what one has destroyed” (Culture and Truth
70). It is an attitude evident in Haggard’s writings, too, as we shall
see. More overtly militaristic than Burton or Haggard, Stanley is less
concerned with establishing “innocence” than with boasting of
exploits in a continent he did much to keep “dark” in the public
imagination.33 But even the bellicose Stanley extols the way of life of
the people of Uganda in Through the Dark Continent, duly taking
note of their abodes, customs, and physical artifacts for the anthro-
pological record. The idealized portrait seems out of place in a nar-
rative that largely constructs African others as “hostile savages.”
Although all three writers admire facets of the African cultures they
encounter, the destruction of these cultures, through assimilation or
conquest (and in some cases genocide), serves as the ultimate ballast
for these interlopers’ precarious identities in the contact zone.
The morbidity of Victorian explorer ethnography stems from the
convergence in the last half of the nineteenth century of the anthro-
pological project with Britain’s aggressive imperial expansion.
George Stocking locates the roots of British anthropology in the
eighteenth century in the humanitarian Aborigines Protection
Society (Victorian Anthropology 242–44); in the twentieth century,
the discipline branches out into the ostensibly politically disinter-
ested forms of functionalism in Great Britain and cultural relativism
in the United States. During the time in which Burton, Stanley,
and Haggard were writing, however, empire was not an embarrass-
ment to anthropology: the shift from regarding indigenous people
as “the enemy” in one breath to regarding them as objects of sci-
entific scrutiny in the next is consonant with the period’s ideologi-
cal norms.
This is nowhere more evident than in Stanley’s writings, where
violence coexists disturbingly with ethnographic illustrations and
descriptions. In Through the Dark Continent, he intersperses repeated
references to “advance columns” and “hostile natives” with long
passages of descriptions of musical instruments, diet, huts, weapons,
and physical portraits. Stanley boasts about the violent punishment
he metes out, insisting on the necessity of “keeping the upper hand”
and quelling potential “mutinies.” He brags about telling a native
bearer who was carrying the box with Livingstone’s papers on his
head while crossing a shallow river, “drop that box and I’ll shoot
you” (Livingstone 344, 642). Daniel Bivona asserts that Through the
Dark Continent “reads very much like a mid-Victorian textbook in
management, containing the whole science of how to discipline an
unruly African” (British Imperial Literature 60). Although Stanley
may be extreme in conjoining violence and anthropology, his will-
ingness to harshly reprimand his own party finds justification in the
then widely accepted European perception of Africa as lawless.
Francis Galton espouses this attitude in more liberal terms, in his
immensely popular The Art of Travel,34 which contains a section on
the “management of savages”: “Some countries, no doubt, are gov-
erned with a strong arm by a savage despot; to whom or to whose
subordinates appeals must of course be made; but, for the most
part . . . there is no civil law . . . each man is, as it were, a nation in

himself; and then the traveller ought to be guided in his actions by
the motives that influence nations, whether to make war or to
abstain from it, rather than by the criminal code of common civilised
countries” (309). Stanley depicts himself behaving like “a nation in
himself,” and an aggressively imperial nation at that, frequently “tak-
ing the law into his own hands.” (Though not as apt to revel in san-
guinary details as Stanley, Burton adopts like attitude when he
asserts pugnaciously that “the traveller cannot practice pity: he is
ever in the dilemma of maltreating or being maltreated. Were he to
deal civilly and liberally with this people he would starve” [Lake
Regions 99]). Galton counsels travelers not only to take the law into
their own hands but also to “help themselves” to the bounty of
Africa by seizing food grown or gathered by tribal peoples at will
(albeit leaving “adequate payment”), for it “is absurd to be over-
scrupulous in such cases” (309). As part of a general sense of enti-
tlement, explorer-ethnographers assumed the license to roam freely
in a vast continent and, when they deemed necessary, to enforce
their will with violence.
The line between the figurative violence of Stanley’s ethnographic
descriptions and his literal acts of violence blurs. This is illustrated by
his description of the Warundi in How I Found Livingstone: “Suspended
to their necks are the thin curved pieces of ivory, hippopotamus
teeth, and boar tusks; and at the back of the neck heavy pieces of
carved ivory. . . . Encircling their wrists are armlets of sami-sami or
blue mutunda, which latter is a favorite bead; belts of these beads
also surround their waists” (554). Stripping the Warundi of their
humanity, Stanley’s description reduces diverse individuals into an
indistinguishable collective, fragmenting their bodies into a collec-
tion of inanimate parts. The passive voice erases human agency: the
Warundi (a generalized group) are not credited with adorning them-
selves with necklaces or bracelets, but instead, in a bizarre formula-
tion, beads are made to mysteriously “encircle” their wrists and ivory
to be “suspended” from their necks. As if to illustrate this rhetorical
effect, Stanley includes sketches of disembodied hands and feet dis-
playing leglets, wristlets, and other ornaments (535). The morbidity
of these sketches of disembodied limbs is literalized in Stanley’s In
Darkest Africa, as the corpse of a military enemy becomes the object
of anthropological inquiry. In this later text, Stanley examines the
dead body of an Avisibba man whom he has had killed in an attack
orchestrated near Panga Falls.35 He ascribes the corpse the status of

scientific artifact, “interesting” and “valuable” for what insight it
offers into the early record of human societies: “The head had a crop
of long hair banded by a coronet of iron; the neck had a string of
iron drops, with a few monkey teeth among them” (172). The figu-
rative violence of How I Found Livingstone’s ethnographic portraits
echoes acts of real violence recorded in In Darkest Africa, which
have come fully to light in subsequent historical accounts of the
inhumane treatment of the Congolese in the 1880s—including
Stanley’s practice of amputating the hands and feet of those who
resisted his system of forced labor.36
The persona Stanley creates is always ready to physically dominate
and, in many cases, brutalize others. In Through the Dark Continent,
he boasts of his treatment of the Wagogo he figures as “insolent”:
“Perceiving that a little manliness and show of power was something
which the Wagogo long needed, and that in this instance it relieved
me from annoyance, I had recourse to my whip whose long lash
cracked like a pistol shot, whenever they overstepped moderation”
(187). Stanley inflates his importance by employing the familiar
stereotype of the infantilized native: “though the Mgogo is a fero-
cious man . . . he is an attractive figure to a white traveller. . . . This
sturdy native, with his rich complexion, his lion front, menacing
aspect, bullying nature, haughty, proud, overbearing, and quarrel-
some, is a mere child with a man who will devote himself to the
study of his nature, and not offend his vanity” (251). He implies he
is just such a man—who presents evidence of having “studied the
nature” of the Mgogo to his reader. For all the menacing adjectives
that he associates with this group, Stanley still makes himself emerge
as intrinsically superior, not only by asserting his physical prowess
but also by relying on Victorian stage theory that assumes black
Africans are on a lower evolutionary rung than Anglo-Americans and
have inferior mental capacities.37
Given his self-aggrandizement in the rest of the narrative, Stanley
seems surprisingly tentative in his encounter with “savage royalty,”
roughly comparable to Burton’s encounter with the Amir. Like
Burton, Stanley conveys outward poise and inward insecurity in this
scene, describing his reception by “thousands” of Wagwana people
at the court of King Mtesa:
Half a mile off I saw that the people on the shore had formed them-
selves into two dense lines, at the ends of which stood several finely
dressed men, arrayed in crimson and black and snowy white. . . .
Numerous kettle and bass drums sounded a noisy welcome, and flags,
banners, and bannerets waved, and the people gave a great shout.
Very much amazed at all this ceremonious and pompous greeting, I
strode up towards the great standard, near which stood a short young
man, dressed in a crimson robe which covered an immaculately white
dress of bleached cotton, before which Magassa, who had hurried
ashore, kneeled reverently, and turning to me begged me to under-
stand that this short young man was the Katekiro. Not knowing very
well who the “Katekiro” was, I only bowed, which, strange to say, was
imitated by him, only that his bow was far more profound and stately
than mine. I was perplexed, confused, embarrassed, and I believe I
blushed inwardly at this regal reception, though I hope I did not
betray my embarrassment. (188–89)
Though he is taken aback by the formality of this greeting, Stanley

maintains outward composure, striding toward “the great standard”
and taking a bow. Unlike Burton, though, who is armed with a “six-
shooter” and professedly ready to use it, Stanley is disarmed both lit-
erally and figuratively; not fearing for his life but for his lack of
composure. The Achilles’s heel of this otherwise cocksure explorer is
his uncertainty about royal protocol, which parallels the self-con-
sciousness he felt in formal social settings in the United States and in
Britain. Stanley’s dread of not measuring up under social scrutiny is
evident in his anticipation of his encounter with Dr. Livingstone:
“He was an Englishman—perhaps a man who used an eye-glass,
through which he would glance at me ferociously or icily—both
amounting to the same thing. . . . I should not have been surprised
if he had said, ‘Might I ask you sir, if you have a letter of introduc-
tion for me?’ But what a question this had been on the shores of
Lake Tanganyika! I would have just ordered a retreat to the hill
above Ujiji; there rested two days, and then returned, to tell the
world I had been snubbed” (Livingstone 559–60). The dread of
social humiliation that Stanley conveys in the beginning of this pas-
sage—a fear of being subjected to a “ferocious” or “icy” glance, of
being required to present a “letter of introduction” that vouches
for his worthiness in “respectable” social circles—is not really
counteracted by the posture of indifference with which Stanley
finishes the passage, the assertion that he would have reacted to
this imagined snub by broadcasting it “to the world.” A hyphen-

ated citizen of lower-class origins (as a Welsh-American), Stanley
is not very comfortable in his own skin. His class anxiety bleeds
into the imperious persona he has fashioned for himself in the “wilds
of Africa.”
At the court of King Mtesa, Stanley’s admission that the Katekiro
(the prime minister) conducts himself in a more “stately” fashion
than Stanley himself, together with his intimation that this episode
confuses and embarrasses him, would significantly deflate the impe-
rious persona Stanley constructed for himself through his African
writings, if the scene did not ultimately confirm his ingenuity. He
compares his treatment at the hands of the Waganda to an “exami-
nation”: “hosts of questions were fired off at me about my health,
my journey, and its aim, Zanzibar, Europe and its people, the seas
and the heavens, sun, moon, and stars, angels and devils, doctors,
priests, and craftsmen in general; in fact, as the representative of
nations who ‘know everything,’ I was subjected to a most searching
examination, and in one hour and ten minutes it was declared unan-
imously that I had ‘passed’” (189). These lines cut at least two ways,
belittling the idea of these “quaint natives” serving as schoolmasters
to a white man; yet gloating about the results. Albeit half-jokingly,
Stanley stages a confirmation of his own intelligence here (a stance
subtly undermined by the Waganda’s positioning as schoolmasters
and examiners in the first place). A man of limited formal educa-
tion, he emerges as one who knows a great many things, or who
can in any case play the part of the “man of genius” that he pur-
portedly is deemed by the Waganda to be, and it would seem that
for Stanley, playing the part is what counts most in the game of
knowing.
Haggard’s self-positioning in his article, “A Visit to Chief
Secocoeni,” published incongruously in The Gentleman’s Magazine
in 1877, provides an interesting comparison with the more overt
ethnographic swagger that characterizes Burton’s and Stanley’s self-
portraiture:
As we drew near, Secocoeni, who had inspired such terror in the bold
Burghers of the Republic, the chief of seven thousand warriors, the
husband of sixty-four wives, the father of a hundred children, rose
from the ox-hide on which he was seated, under the shade of a tree,
and came to the gate to meet us. And a queer sight this potentate was
as he stood there shaking hands through the gate. Of middle size,

about forty-five years of age, rather fat, with a flat nose and small,
twinkling black eyes, he presented an entirely hideous and semi-repul-
sive appearance. . . . It was very curious to see this wild old savage
shoving a handful of leaves into his mouth, and giving his head a
shake, and then making some shrewd remark which went straight to
the bottom of whatever question was in hand. At length we bade
Secocoeni good-bye, having promised to deliver all his respectful
messages to our chief, and, thoroughly wearied, arrived at our own
hut. (315)
Haggard neither strides, nor saunters, nor swaggers. On the con-

trary, as with the explorers’ ethnographic portraits discussed earlier,
Haggard is barely inside the frame. Perhaps this is partly because he
had a limited role to play on this mission: as a subaltern within
British colonial society in South Africa, he serves only as a mediator
between the Basutu chief and his “chief,” Shepstone (Days
1:83–87). Although Haggard belittles the Basutu chief in one
breath—describing him as a middle-aged, somewhat overweight
man of “entirely hideous and semi-repulsive” appearance—in the
next, he compliments his shrewdness. Absent is the obvious self-
aggrandizement of Stanley or Burton.
Yet, though Haggard does not preen before the reader by threat-
ening the chief with his physical prowess or dazzling him with his
general knowledge, nonetheless this writing does shore up a public
identity. Like Burton, he reminds the reader of the extreme danger
of undertaking such an expedition; he represents himself melodra-
matically emerging “out of the jaws of death” and as having gained
privileged access to observe native rites and customs that will soon
be obsolete (Days 1:318). Thus he looks for validation to the read-
ing public but not to the chief or the Basutu people.
In his autobiography, Haggard represents this same meeting but
figures himself more prominently, as a faithful recorder of events:
“In the midst of this throng we squatted for four long hours. I
remember that I was perched upon a log in the blaze of the sun, tak-
ing notes to the best of my ability—those which are before me
now—as the interpreters rendered the conversation from Sesutu into
Dutch and English. . . . On comparing the report we finally sent in
signed by Osborn, Clarke, and myself (C-1776, Enclosure 6 in No.
III)—which report I remember I wrote—with my original pencil
notes, I observe, however, that not much escaped me” (Days 1:88).
He insists on the accuracy of his observations, which he verifies,
rather circularly, with an earlier report he also wrote. Though he
does not strut across the page like a Burton or a Stanley, it matters to
Haggard that he is taken seriously as a man who can contribute to
imperial history and to the ethnographic record of vanishing cus-
toms and ceremonies. A closer examination of the richly overdeter-
mined She: A History of Adventure magnifies the fissures in the
observer’s mask of confidence.
S HE W HO M UST B E O BEYED
She establishes its affiliations with explorer ethnography by employ-

ing a pseudoscholarly voice, alternating synchronic ethnographic
details with a diachronic narrative of adventure, and reproducing
images of ancient cultural artifacts, including the potsherds and a
“scarabaeus” (ceramic gem) that figure centrally in the adventure
narrative. The apparatus of scholarly footnotes and scattered state-
ments that announce their anthropological intent establish the
amateur ethnographer Holly’s Oxbridge authority. Yet there is dis-
sonance between the voice that makes scientific truth-claims and
that which admits to feeling “nameless terror” or to being “thor-
oughly disgusted” with some of the ceremonies of the Amahagger
people, a fictional tribe probably based on “the Lovedu” of south-
east Africa, purportedly ruled by a white queen.38 Noticing the
incongruities that abound in She, as between “lurid Gothic fantasy”
and “earnest anthropological account,” Daniel Karlin observes that
the “system of representations in the book is incoherent and unsta-
ble: it is a work which contradicts itself at every level of genre,
theme, and style” (xvii). Emotive outbursts belie the composure of
matter-of-fact ethnographic description.
Customs that an “earnest anthropological account” would
demystify and explain, Holly dismisses as revolting, repulsive, and
ghastly. The gothic terror pervading the description of the “hot-pot-
ting ceremony,” a cannibalistic ritual involving the sacrifice of
Holly’s and Leo’s Arab guide Mahommed, more than counterbal-
ances the cool voice of rationality conjured up by a footnote,
explaining the object of what is described in the body of the text as
“some ghastly formula that had to be gone through” (99). Holly’s
scholarly guise as an objective interpreter of Amahagger customs is

in tension with his role in a gothic narrative and with his lack of com-
posure, as in the scene where he first meets the “savage queen.”
Whereas Haggard mutes his presence in “A Visit to Chief
Secocoeni,” while insisting on the veracity of his claims and the value
of his observations, he imagines a much bolder role for Holly. When
he pays a visit to Ayesha, the light-skinned queen of the dark-skinned
Amahagger people, Holly objects to squatting before her, as
Haggard was forced to do in front of Chief Secocoeni: “I was an
Englishman, and why, I asked myself, should I creep into the pres-
ence of some savage woman as though I were a monkey in fact as
well as in name? . . . So, fortified by an insular prejudice against
‘kooting’ [kowtowing] which has, like most of our so-called preju-
dices, a good deal of common sense to recommend it, I marched in
boldly after Billali” (140). Holly earns Ayesha’s respect by refusing
to prostrate before her, whereas the Amahaggers’ compliance with
her crawling order confirms for her their supposed inferiority: “I
would not see thee crawl before me like those slaves. I am aweary
of their worship and their terror” (145). Holly’s insistence on
remaining upright before Ayesha reinforces his privileged posi-
tion as one who is or appears to be in control; his refusal to stoop
is converted into a matter of national pride and entitlement—“I
was an Englishman, and why . . . should I creep in the presence of
some savage?”
But the halting progress Holly must make behind his guide Billali
significantly undermines his imperial stance: “several times I was
sorely tempted to help him on with a good kick. It is so absurd to
advance in the presence of savage royalty after the fashion of an
Irishman driving a pig to market” (141). Prejudices bleed into one
another in this representation of Holly’s violent impulse to assert his
“dignity” at this meeting. Mary Douglas’s influential study of purity
rituals resonates with this impulse to rigidly demarcate boundaries.
Douglas argues that human beings share a necessity for “separating,
placing boundaries” such as those between dirty and clean, or pure
and impure, and that we assert these demarcations more forcefully
when our sense of order is threatened, as in an alien environment:
“our pollution behavior is the reaction which condemns any object
or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications” (36,
68). The Amahagger threaten these “cherished classifications,” and
consequently Holly asserts them with a vengeance. As a member of
a “civilized” nation, Holly distances himself from the “savage”

crawling before him (even though Billali is portrayed elsewhere as a
noble savage); a gentleman scholar, he is differentiated from the
working-class farmer with whom he is ironically compared; an
Englishman, he is distinguished from the stigmatized category of
Irishness that he is made to “absurdly” resemble. Animal imagery
labors to differentiate upright Holly from Billali, who is likened to a
pig and a slithering snake. Like the explorers discussed in this chap-
ter, Holly constitutes an imperious identity by rehearsing a familiar
set of binaries and performing a fearless identity.
Holly’s nickname among the Amahagger, “baboon,” renders
this move to cordon off the bestial ineffectual, however. With long
arms and too much hair, Holly is physically degenerate, albeit
strong—a sort of walking “missing link.” The frame narrative’s ficti-
tious editor describes his first encounter with Holly: “he was short-
ish, rather bow-legged, very deep-chested, and with unusually long
arms. . . . Altogether he reminded me forcibly of a gorilla” (2).
Bearing the stigmata of primitivism or racial decline, Holly muddles
racial schema, for his outward appearance provides no clue to his
character.
This muddling of racial categories is linked to a pervasive atmos-
phere of uneasiness that saturates Haggard’s ethnographic writings,
signaled by repeated use of the word uncanny—commonly meaning
“partaking of a supernatural character,” “unsafe,” or “uncomfort-
ably strange or unfamiliar.”39 Haggard refers to a Zulu war dance
that he observes as “uncanny,” and Holly refers to the Amahagger in
the same terms: “there was an aspect of cold and sullen cruelty
stamped upon them that revolted me, and which in some cases was
almost uncanny in its intensity” (77). Freud’s understanding of the
uncanny (unheimlich) as the recognition of the familiar in the
strange—“the class of the frightening which leads back to what is
known of old and long familiar”—supports a reading that argues
that more than pointing to an uneasiness surrounding ethnographic
encounters, “the uncanny” signals the breaking down of ethnocen-
tric categories—the recognition of a “self” in an “other.”40 Holly
might be horrified by seeing his own reflection in these unfamiliar,
“savage” people—a reflection encoded by the apelike construction
of his body.41
Holly manages his uneasiness by adopting a courageous stance
and by wielding a gaze that sets him apart from the Amahagger, who
are forbidden to look on their female ruler whose beauty is reputed

to be fatal. Holly risks the penalty of death by gazing on the femme
fatale Ayesha: “no living man there except myself had ever seen her
face” (172). Rather than the depersonalized, omniscient gaze of sci-
ence, this is a furtive voyeuristic gaze, aligned with sexual desire.
Holly’s insistence on breaking the taboo establishes his bravery; his
ability to withstand her fatal beauty establishes his mastery of himself
and the situation. But if Holly is differentiated from the Amahagger
by his privileged gaze, he is in turn the object of Ayesha’s gaze. This
reversal unsettles him, undercutting his imperial stance. As he
approaches the unknown queen, Holly expresses his agitation: “I felt
the gaze of the unknown being sinking through and through me,
and filling me with a nameless terror” (141). Haggard likewise
expresses uneasiness (if not terror) when the Basutu regard him as a
spectacle at the kraal of Chief Secocoeni, rather than granting him
the privilege of a naturalized spectator: “it was an uncanny kind of
place. If you got up at night, if you moved anywhere, you became
aware that dozens or hundreds of eyes were watching you” (Days
1:86). Here the word uncanny is attached not to a “savage” other
but to the strange, uncomfortable feeling of being perceived as an
“other” himself.
Despite Holly’s efforts to assume control, assert his knowledge of
tribal customs, and distinguish himself as both a-man-of-action and
an ethnographic scholar, his position is contrived and unstable.
Repeatedly, fear of the unknown overwhelms his confident persona,
as when he reflects at a feast of the Amahagger that “we were
absolutely in the power of this alarming people, who, to me at any
rate, were all the more formidable because their true character was
still very much of a mystery to us” (98). Belying the ethnographic
certainty of explorers’ writings, Holly concedes that the Amahagger’s
character is largely obscure to him. The unease surrounding the
encounter is only laid to rest when its source is destroyed, through
the slaughter of Amahagger and Ayesha’s sensational death.
OTHERS W HO M UST B E D ESTROYED
The morbidity I have alluded to is a product of the late Victorian

moment, of attitudes about empire that permeate fin de siècle explorer
ethnography. Like the armchair anthropologists who published
Notes and Queries, amateur ethnographers Burton, Stanley, and

Haggard reflect an ideology that values primitive cultures when they
are safely relegated to the pages of notebooks, made into textual and
other material artifacts, while devaluing the living people and cus-
toms on which these representations are based.42 In an important
sense, “She who must be obeyed” is also “She who must be
destroyed.” Likewise, the Amahagger seem destined to perish and
deserving of that fate, in Haggard’s representation of them.
The authors of the 1874 preface to Notes and Queries invest the
anthropological project with urgency, obliquely acknowledging the
threat posed to indigenous societies by men-on-the-spot: “The rapid
extermination of savages at the present time, and the rapidity with
which they are being reduced to the standard of European manners,
renders it of urgent importance [to fill in the record of ‘human
development’] as soon as possible” (v). The passive voice obscures
the reality that Europeans are at once the recorders of customs per-
ceived as vanishing and the agents of violent conquest and assimila-
tion. Haggard echoes this urgency in his essay, “A Zulu War-Dance”
(1877), cuing the reader to the value of his observations by making
explicit the historical conjunction of the civilizing mission and the
growing interest in anthropology. Yet Haggard maintains that
indigenous cultures must be destroyed for “civilization” to prevail:
“The old customs, the old forms, the old feelings, must each in turn
die away. The outer expression of these will die first, and it will not
be long before the very memory of them will fade out of the barbaric
heart. The rifle must replace, and, indeed, actually has replaced, the
assegai and the shield, and portions of the cast-off uniforms of all the
armies of Europe are to be seen where until lately the bronze-like
form of the Kaffir warrior went naked as the day he was born” (97).
Positivism marches through these sentences with all the conviction
that faith in the civilizing mission has to offer. Haggard’s fatalism
with regard to indigenous cultures leads him to adopt resigned mor-
bidity toward his subject matter.43
Given the dim prognosis for indigenous cultures that Haggard
shared with many contemporaries, his observations serve to preserve
endangered experience; the customs he describes will soon fade
into obsolescence or be crushed beneath the imperial bulldozer
that he sees inexorably and righteously moving forward. Not only
are armchair readers barred from viewing a Zulu war dance, but, if
such customs are to die out, then the only route to witness them
will be vicarious, in the form of descriptions like Haggard’s. The

fascination that this cultural rite holds for Haggard is transferred to
his text—ultimately, he implies, the only site where the “wild cere-
mony” will be preserved for European inspection.
Though a steadfast imperialist,44 Haggard nonetheless expresses
deep ambivalence about the destruction of indigenous customs:
“Surely even the most uncompromising of those marching under
the banner of civilisation must hesitate before they condemn this
deep-rooted system to instant uprootal. The various influences of
the white man have eaten into the native system as rust into iron,
and their action will never cease till all be destroyed” (107). With
imperial nostalgia, Haggard registers regret and even complicity in
the destruction of tribal life—much of his corpus reads as a sus-
tained lament for, as much as a celebration of, vanishing traditions.
Tentatively, he suggests that Zulu customs might have a distinctive,
relative value; even polygamy and chieftainship, those customs that
pose the greatest threat to British sovereignty in his eyes, should not
be rashly uprooted, for they “are not the less venerable and good in
their way because they do not accord with our own present ideas”
(107). But Haggard’s patriotism and faith in empire compel him to
brush aside this questioning of English cultural hegemony. He
concludes, “It is the undoubted duty of us English, who absorb
peoples and territories in the high name of civilisation, to be true
to our principles and our aim, and aid the great destroyer by any
and every safe and justifiable means” (107). By a rhetorical sleight of
hand, the English are absolved of responsibility for the destruction
Haggard describes with such ambivalence; they are not perpetrators
of acts of cultural aggression, they are mere accessories, duty-bound
to help drive the civilizing machine. We have seen that the unre-
solved tension between Haggard’s admiration for Zulu culture and
his commitment to its full destruction is characteristic of the emerg-
ing discipline of anthropology and the writings of the explorer-
ethnographers.
Like the explorers, Haggard juxtaposes scenes of violence with
ethnographic description. In addition to glorifying native warriors in
his fiction and nonfiction, Haggard designs heroes like Holly and
Allan Quartermain who can hold their own in a fight. The
Englishmen whom Haggard envisions going to battle against black
Africans that stand in the way of adventure do so in a gritty, unro-
mantic idiom. Quartermain observes that “for a timid man, . . . [he
has] . . . been mixed up in a deal of slaughter” (15), while Holly

describes being seized in the African wilderness by an “awful lust for
slaughter” (103).
In She and Haggard’s other African romances, the narrative tacks
between what masquerades as a scientific perspective on tribal peo-
ples and a militaristic perspective that identifies these same people as
the enemy. Whereas “An Early Christian Ceremony” gestures toward
the comparative method of anthropology, demystifying an unfamil-
iar custom by comparing it to a familiar one, the hot-potting cere-
mony is described in a subjective, condemnatory voice as repulsive
and terrifying. One of many instances of what the text figures as sex-
ual anarchy, where predatory women emasculate men, Holly relates
that an Amahagger woman “began to fondle . . . [the servant
Mahomed], patting his cheeks, and calling him by names of endear-
ment, while her fierce eyes played up and down his trembling form.
I do not know why the sight frightened me so. . . . The caressing was so
snake-like, and so evidently a part of some ghastly formula that had to
be gone through” (99, italics mine). The fear and repulsion that Holly
expresses in response to what is figured as a woman’s predatory sex-
uality characterizes his repeated response to black Africans in gen-
eral, beginning with the stone monument in the shape of a black
Ethiopian man’s head, towering above the Englishmen as they
approach the coast of East Africa, on which Holly perceives “was
stamped a most fiendish and terrifying expression” (58). In the case
of the hot-potting ceremony, rather than being presented as having
its own, different logic, this custom is bracketed off as “ghastly,” all
the more so because it is associated with a menacing woman, prefig-
uring the threat to life and male autonomy that Ayesha embodies.
The ceremony’s representation as beyond the pale serves to justify
white men’s actions of violent retaliation.
The hot-potting ceremony ends in bloodshed initiated not by the
Amahagger but by Holly, who accidentally kills Mahomed while also
killing his “seductress.” The excuse for bloodshed in Haggard’s
romances resembles the implicit justification for violence in Stanley’s
tales of “bold exploits” against what are figured as hostile or menac-
ing natives—in the white colonial imaginary, Africa is imagined as a
lawless country, with barbaric inhabitants who do not warrant
humane treatment. A graphic description of mutilating bodies with
a hunting knife, cracking ribs of “swarthy devils” with bare hands
follows: “I was mad with rage, and that awful lust for slaughter
which will creep into the hearts of the most civilised of us when
blows are flying” (103). Similarly, in King Solomon’s Mines,
Quartermain confesses that after missing once, he was determined to
kill a man to save face: “I was brute enough to feel delighted at the
sight” (143); “there came upon me a savage desire to kill and spare
not” (156). The moral indignation that Haggard’s heroes express
when confronted with the “savage” customs of ritual human sacri-
fice and cannibalism rings hollow, as a conventional but unconvinc-
ing justification for imperial domination, when the ambassadors of
civilized values express such violent longings and are implicitly fig-
ured as “barbaric” themselves. Quartermain asserts that “civilization
is only savagery silver-gilt” (16), which though more cynical is not
wholly divergent from the prevailing view of developmental anthro-
pologists.45 But the seemingly subversive move to posit even a low
common denominator between white English men and black
Africans (“all of us are ‘savage’ at the core”) does not undo the
hypocrisy that this narrative pattern involves; Holly and Quartermain
have license to “lapse” into “barbaric,” violent behavior, without
their supposed superiority over the indigenous population ever
being drawn into question, while what are posited as barbaric prac-
tices of the Amahagger or the Kukuana are offered up as a narrative
pretense for the civilizing mission.
Not only does demonizing the Amahagger justify white violence,
but also violence is the means by which Holly, set off balance in an
alien environment, regains his sense of control over others and him-
self. The fear and anxiety that the Amahagger elicit in Holly are
quelled violently in scenes that provide this character cathartic
release. Even Lang criticized Haggard for the excessive violence of
the hot-potting scene, and in response Haggard toned down some
of the gratuitous gore.46 Haggard’s penchant for violent description
earned him the nickname “Rider the Ripper” among disapproving
Victorian readers (Vogelsberger 125).
It is not only (or, from a narrative standpoint, not even primarily)
the Amahagger who are violently targeted for destruction. The
misogynist ethos dictates that Ayesha, as an obstacle to Leo’s and
Holly’s homosocial bonding, must also be melodramatically
destroyed such that the English men may regain control over their
own destinies. Holly’s resentment of female authority is established
early, when he refuses to hire a female nurse to care for the young
Leo, because, as he explains, “I would have no woman to lord it
over me about the child, and steal his affections from me” (19).
Moreover, his hatred of women, and conversely, his homoerotic
attachment to Leo are also well established, such that Ayesha is rep-
resented initially as coming between them; Holly is resentful when
she first summons him away from his ailing companion: “my mind
was full of dear Leo, for whose life I began to have great fears”
(138). Though Holly, mesmerized by the femme fatale’s beauty,
ceases to resent Ayesha overtly, jealousy begins to mar the relation-
ship between the men in this triangulated romance (200). Moreover,
the narrative suggests that there is something monstrous in having a
woman wield so much power, however much the men may swear
their adoration for her. Haggard concocts a gruesome end for her,
shriveling her into a monkey-like form and finally a genderless
mass—evolution running in reverse. Even in excising her from his
text, the fate Haggard imagines for Ayesha links her with the dubi-
ous hero Holly, whose form is also degenerate.
As in the explorers’ accounts, Holly’s ethnographic authority is
troubled by Ayesha’s regal status; if he fancies himself “a monarch of
all I survey,” here is an actual monarch, and a female one. Although
Holly and Leo, powerless before this femme fatale, relinquish con-
trol of their own destinies in agreeing to follow her to the “fire of
life,” this surrendering has to be read in the context of Holly’s pro-
found gynophobia, as a kind of antifantasy of female engulfment.
The death of Ayesha is symbolically associated with the Amahagger’s
death, for there is the sense that left to their own devices, the back-
ward tribe among the rocks will go the way of the lost people of Kôr
or continue to degenerate in a slower version of Ayesha’s fate.
Heroic white identities are restored by quelling female and indige-
nous threats to their autonomy. Ultimately, Holly and Leo flee the
land of the Amahagger, whose matrilineal kinship system represents
an inversion of the British norm, their return to England with the
manuscript (before departing on more adventures) marking a
restoration of order that includes patrilineal descent. The manuscript
then functions in a similar way as Haggard’s ethnographic articles
do, preserving in written form a culture that must, according to the
logic of cultural evolution, perish.
While fortifying imperial identities and fueling Leo and Holly’s
adventure, this morbid premise cannot but haunt these heroes,
even as they come away with their lives, and cast a shadow on the
British Empire in its prime. The novel is saturated with gothic
details that drive home the theme of mortality, of both individuals

and civilizations. Ayesha is ghostly and funereal; acres of skeletons
fill dark catacombs; Holly and Leo sleep on sepulchral slabs and eat
in ancient embalming rooms; and the Amahagger use mummies for
torches, prompting Holly to ponder the ignoble ends of “once-great
men”: “the function of these dead Caesars of the past was to light up
a savage fetish dance” (218). Allusions to the rise and fall of “great
civilizations” like Rome serve as reminder of the impermanence of
economic and political prosperity at the height of the British
Empire, a powerful counternarrative to the resigned positivism of
social evolution that Haggard rehearses in “A Zulu War-Dance.”
Holly is at once fascinated and terrified by the relics of the lost
people of Kôr. The foot fetish that Billali gives him, which he appre-
ciatively regards as “a triumph of embalming,” elicits in him a mix-
ture of “astonishment, fear, and fascination” before he wraps it up to
bring it home (112). According to Morton Cohen, Haggard shared
with his protagonist this enthusiasm for ancient relics and artifacts of
so-called primitive cultures; he collected objects from places such as
Zululand, Egypt, Burma, Mexico, Greece, and Rome, such that his
private residence, Ditchingham House, resembled a private museum
(140). (Haggard reputedly clutched one such “relic” while writing
She.) This impulse—to collect, preserve, catalogue, hold, and gaze
on fragments of vanishing cultures—is analogous to the fetishization
of “primitive tribes” that occurs in Haggard’s African tales.
If Africa is represented in Haggard’s romances as “full of relics of
long dead and forgotten civilisations” (She 62), the controlling white
intellect is represented as uniquely capable of putting these frag-
ments together. Haggard and Leo are consoled (however unsatisfac-
torily) by their contribution to the grand narrative of human
progress, for which they are willing to risk their lives. As Holly
“boldly” announces, “We are a brave race who fear not death . . .
that is, if we can get a little fresh information before we die” (78).
As “the whole of mankind becomes a kind of imaginary museum”
filled with living cultures that are viewed as relics of a European past,
Burton, Stanley, and Haggard help to draw the contours of the
“heroic” amateur ethnographer who risks his life to make a contri-
bution to the grand narrative of cultural evolution.47 Haggard’s pro-
tagonist Holly, though shaken by the strangeness of his encounters
with “primitive others,” manages to construct a sense of willful,
imperial selfhood by wielding an ethnographic gaze, constructing
an authoritative persona for himself, and dominating (sometimes

violently) the feminized “natives,” as Burton and Stanley do. Unlike
the later anthropological tradition (including Jane Harrison and lit-
erary primitivists like D. H. Lawrence), which inverts the progress
narrative and advocates a “return” to so-called primitive ways (to
“simpler” times, a stronger sense of community, greater wonder in
the world), these writers share the premise of armchair anthropolo-
gists like Tylor that human societies are gradually evolving into a
more rational, hence preferable state, and so implicitly endorse the
destruction of the cultures they observe.
H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, whom I discuss in the Chapter 2,
dwell on the fallibility and insecurity of cultural observers, further
undermining the confident, authoritative voice of explorer ethnog-
raphy provisionally assumed by Burton and Stanley. The self-doubt-
ing protagonists of Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau and The Time
Machine and the bewilderment of those of Conrad’s “Outpost of
Progress” and Heart of Darkness, coincides with the disorientation
that Mary Kingsley expresses in the field. Unlike the aggressive
explorer-ethnographers whose writings proclaim the need for assert-
ing rhetorical and physical mastery over the societies they encounter,
Kingsley undercuts her own authority and proclaims the value of
defamiliarization.
4
C H A P T E R 2
BEWILDERMENT STYLE AND AS

METHODOLOGY IN THE WRITINGS OF
M A RY K I N G S L E Y , H. G. W E L L S , A N D
JOSEPH CONRAD
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming

us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our
surroundings.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind—a strange animal in

an unknown world.
—H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
Nor indeed do I recommend African forest life to any one. . . .

Still, it is good for a man to have an experience of it, whether he
likes it or not, for it teaches you how very dependent you have been,
during your previous life, on the familiarity of those conditions
you have been brought up among, and on your fellow citizens;
moreover it takes the conceit out of you pretty thoroughly during
the days you spend stupidly stumbling about among your new sur-
roundings.
—Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa1
In her widely read Travels in West Africa (1897), 2

Mary Kingsley
expresses feelings of bewilderment and alienation induced by her
encounter with the Fan tribe and the African jungle—sentiments
echoed by the fiction discussed in this chapter: H. G. Wells’s The
Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and Joseph Conrad’s two “African

tales”: “An Outpost of Progress” (1896) and Heart of Darkness
(serialized in Blackwoods, 1899). All three writers amplify the uncer-
tainties glimpsed behind the ethnographic swagger of the explorer-
ethnographers discussed in Chapter 1. They situate their texts within
the closely allied traditions of explorer ethnography and adventure
romance, often invoking these traditions’ conventions to undercut
them, thus, in Kingsley’s phrase, “taking the conceit” out of ethno-
graphic observers. Given the rhetoric of arrogant mastery that char-
acterized late-Victorian explorer-ethnographers’ relationship to
Africa and Africans, this emphasis on squelching personal and cul-
tural conceit is striking.
As several critics have noted, in comparison to the self-aggrandiz-
ing and authoritarian posturing of explorers such as Stanley and
Burton, Kingsley subverts the conventions of heroic travel through
her pervasive use of irony and parody. Kingsley’s self-conscious, fre-
quently self-mocking representation of her travels in West Africa is
conceived in deliberate contrast to the normative, masculinist mode
of science that effaces the observer. Yet if Kingsley disturbs the impe-
rial gaze and the ethnographic swagger of the male explorers, as
Mary Louise Pratt has shown, she nonetheless adopts “a monarchic
female voice that asserts its own kind of mastery even as it denies
domination and parodies power” (Imperial Eyes 213). I argue that
this mastery is ironically linked to a gendered subjectivity: Kingsley
converts the stereotypically female posture of self-effacement into a
new approach to ethnographic observation, one that anticipates
modern fieldwork methods that would, in turn, marginalize “lady
travelers” like Kingsley.
This chapter shows that with different stakes and objectives,
Conrad’s and Wells’s texts also destabilize the confident stance and
the presumption of rhetorical and physical mastery of “primitive”
people adopted by Burton, Stanley, and Haggard, and in this way
resonate with the ethnographic attitudes figured in Kingsley’s
Travels in West Africa. Like Wells, who depicts the reluctant adven-
tures of an antihero in The Island of Dr. Moreau, Conrad eschews the
posture of ethnographic mastery that characterizes the genre of
adventure fiction to which his African tales are obviously indebted.
Yet whereas Kingsley values the experience of disorientation for its
humbling effects on Western European observers, Conrad and Wells
depict protagonists who recoil from the feeling of being “cut off”
BEWILDERMENT AS STYLE AND METHODOLOGY 61
from the familiar. For Kingsley, I argue, the sensation of bewilder-

ment in the contact zone leads to a new field methodology; for
Wells, it is a frame of mind befitting the atmosphere of science fic-
tion; and for Conrad, it helps to generate a new style, the aesthetic
for which he is famed.
The period during which Kingsley, Wells, and Conrad were writ-
ing witnessed the emergence of the theory and methodology that
would come to be associated with functionalism in Great Britain and
cultural relativism in the United States and with a gradual turning
away from the ideas of cultural evolutionism and the comparative
method associated with such central texts as Tylor’s Primitive
Culture (1871) and Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915). Like
George Eliot’s Edward Casaubon, the character in Middlemarch
(1871–72) who hoped to uncover the “key to all mythologies,”
armchair anthropologists such as Tylor and Frazer ambitiously
sought the key to modern civilization in their research into primitive
origins, a quest premised on the belief that the meanings of ancient
traditions could be unlocked in toto through rigorous study. As John
Burrow argues in Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social
Theory, although the comparative method created a potentially
uncomfortable juxtaposition between so-called savages and civilized
people, for many people Tylor’s theory of survivals “drew the sting
and stimulus from the comparison by regarding the former as relics,
aliens from another era” (240). The writers discussed in this chapter
register shaken confidence in narratives of national and cultural
superiority that anthropology’s evolutionary paradigm had sus-
tained, a paradigm that by 1896 was “in disarray.”3
E MERGENT M ODERNISMS
Frederic Jameson reminds us that modernism emerged not only

from Victorian literature but also from its disavowed fictional
cousins in “popular or mass culture” (The Political Unconscious
206). By reading across the fluid divides of not only periods and dis-
ciplines but also high and low culture, we can regain a sense of the
indebtedness of canonical texts to popular ones. To that end, this
chapter examines four texts that are sites of emergence of, and con-
testation among, literary and anthropological modernisms. A con-
sideration of the stakes for each author in negotiating the high/low
divide sheds light on their ambivalent relationships to the antecedent

genres of adventure and exploration.
Having deemed Conrad part of “the great tradition,” F. R. Leavis
is troubled by this author’s traffic in popular literary forms: “Conrad
must . . . stand convicted of borrowing the arts of the magazine-
writer (who has borrowed his, shall we say, from Kipling and Poe)”
(180). The author of Heart of Darkness cannot quite be cleared from
his “guilty” entanglement with popular genres, especially romance
and adventure fiction. This was a matter that concerned Conrad as
much as it has his critics. He admired Kipling and (begrudgingly)
Stevenson but found Haggard “too horrible for words,” though
contemporary readers could not miss the grounds for comparison.4
John Marx argues that Conrad’s literary identity rested precisely on
this potentially incriminating connection to popular fiction; Conrad
found his market niche by “salvaging” romance and adventure.
Conrad’s pair of African texts may be viewed within this context,
as part of his struggle to secure a reputation as a serious artist while
treating subject matter that has been deemed the province of low-
brow writers such as Haggard. In “An Outpost of Progress,” which
has been viewed as a preliminary sketch for Heart of Darkness, an
omniscient narrator adopts a direct, expository style, makes themes
overt and does not venture far into characters’ subjectivity. In these
respects, the tale conforms to the generic expectations of adventure
fiction. Although Andrea White has suggested that Conrad wrote
“Outpost” as “an artistic response to complaints about the diffuse-
ness of his first two novels” (164), he deemed the experiment a fail-
ure. Expressing disappointment with the tale’s lack of subtlety,
Conrad referred to it as “the lightest part of the loot I carried off
from Central Africa.”5 Conrad’s frustration with “Outpost” derived
not only from its flimsiness but also from its “conscious construc-
tion.” Conrad explains to Edward Garnett, “The construction is
bad. It is bad because it was a matter of conscious decision and I
have no discrimination—in the artistic sense.”6 From “Outpost,”
Conrad salvages the exotic setting, the core ethnographic encounter,
and the theme of Westerners’ confronting their own psychic thresh-
olds in “Darkest Africa,” in order to rewrite this tale as Heart of
Darkness. The result—the stylistic haziness or “literary impression-
ism” with which Conrad is associated7—represents Conrad’s move-
ment away from the aesthetic attributes that may have threatened to
classify his fiction as popular in the pejorative sense. One of my
principal points here is that this famed (or notorious) style regis-
ters on an aesthetic plane the epistemological and ontological uncer-
tainty that for Marlow and Conrad surrounds the ethnographic
encounter.
Meanwhile, Wells often gets left behind, chronologically and in
the high/low split. Woolf groups Wells among the retrograde stylists
she deemed “Edwardians,” and Leavis summarily dismisses him as a
novelist of ideas.8 Given that Wells made his reputation as a romance
writer, it is ironic that he criticizes Stevenson, whom he otherwise
admires, for choosing this form as well: “It is the tragedy of
Stevenson’s career, that the friendly critic, his own emotional patri-
otism, and the book-buying public, conspired to drive him along the
pathway of traditional romance. . . . The romance form prohibits
anything but superficialities of self-expression; and sustained
humour, subtle characterization, are impossible” (“Lost Stevenson”
604). Wells was dismayed that his own popular appeal meant that
he was “doomed to write ‘scientific’ romances and short stories
for . . . cretins of the mob” while his novels served only for his “pri-
vate dissipation.”9
Just as Conrad’s relationship to the adventure tradition from
which critics have attempted to “rescue” him is being reconsidered,
Wells’s position with relation to “the great divide” of periods and of
popular/elite culture has been reevaluated as well. J. R. Hammond
argues that Wells is “a transitional figure like Conrad” (16), more
modern than Victorian in that he responds to a “climate of uncer-
tainty and doubt” precipitated by Darwin, Frazer, and Freud, and
his novels “implicitly challenge realist conventions, . . . are self-con-
scious and pessimistic, . . . [and] focus increasingly on the inner lives
of their characters” (15). Among the literary writers I discuss, Wells
resists easy categorization, for he subverts the conventions of adven-
ture romance and explorer ethnography at the level of plot and char-
acter, though not of style.
In a sense, Kingsley also strides the high/low divide. As Julie
English Early reports in “The Spectacle of Science and Self,”
Kingsley made the news in serious scientific and scholarly journals
such as the Royal Geographical Society’s Geographical Journal and
the Edinburgh Review and in popular journals such as Punch and The
Illustrated London News (218). Her marginality in terms of gender
and education required her to be more savvy about self-promotion
than male travelers, converting herself into a “spectacle” in her
writing and in person (for instance, her lantern slide show and lec-
tures attracted 1,800–2,000 spectators) (Early, “Spectacle” 219).
Yet much as setting a narrative in an exotic location could be per-
ceived as “incriminating” for a fictional author during this period,
fraternizing with “savages” meant joining the low-rank club of field-
workers, according to the hierarchical division of labor between the
“armchair anthropologists” and “men-on-the-spot” described in
Chapter 1. In asserting that firsthand observation is superior to the
armchair approach to anthropology, Kingsley participates in the
movement to make ethnographic fieldwork the primary basis for
anthropological authority.
It is worth remembering that it is at this messy juncture, from
which modernism emerges, that the representation of an ethno-
graphic encounter becomes canonized as high art. In making
“encounters with the primitive” fit subject matter for high culture,
Kingsley and Conrad were at the forefront of a movement that
would yield such works as Pablo Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon
(1907), which was inspired by African masks from the Musée de
l’Homme in Paris. Although ethnographic encounters in exotic set-
tings continued to sustain a market for adventure fiction (for exam-
ple, in the form of the Tarzan stories), this subject matter became a
topic for serious fiction for the first time in the modern period, as
anthropological ideas were more broadly disseminated among the
British public and as ethnographic texts gained status.10 By subvert-
ing the ideological certitudes of explorer ethnography and adventure
romance, Conrad and Wells critique these genres, even as they remain
indebted to them. Conrad further subverts the straightforward real-
ism associated with these genres, helping to pioneer a new aesthetic
and converting the field encounter into the stuff of “high art.”
Such encounters would also serve as the basis for the ethno-
graphic monograph, which would, in turn, authorize a new profes-
sion—that of the modern fieldworker. Though situated on the
periphery of retrospective histories of anthropology, we will see that
Kingsley energetically defends the importance of fieldwork for the
burgeoning discipline.
O UTSIDERS WITHIN B RITISH C ULTURE
As with the writers in Chapter 1, those discussed in this chapter

stand at an oblique relationship to mainstream British culture: Wells,
as a former member of the service class who has penetrated the intel-
ligentsia; Kingsley, as a woman in a man’s field; and Conrad, as an
emigrant to England. Though this outsider stance does not furnish
a consistent ideological position, it does prompt these writers to
gravitate to an ethnographic perspective. In Kingsley’s case, social
and professional marginality precipitates a novel approach to field-
work, in Wells’ and Conrad’s, a self-consciousness about the rela-
tionship between selves and others in the contact zone.
It was Wells’s lower-class origins that provided him with an out-
sider’s vantage point from which to view the upper echelons of
British society. His mother, Sarah Wells, was a housekeeper at Up
Park, a country house, and his father was a gardener who considered
emigrating to Australia or America “as a way out of the galling
uncertainties of ‘service.’” Instead of doing so, Joseph Wells invested
all the family savings in Atlas House, a crockery shop that was a com-
plete failure, and thereafter he felt perpetually “caught” (Draper
38–39). H. G. Wells thus had much experience with the “upstairs,
downstairs world” of a class-stratified society, having lived beneath
Atlas House, visited his mother at Up Park, and stayed in under-
ground dormitories when he worked as a shop apprentice. He felt that
he made a “narrow escape” from a life of service when he received a
scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington to
train in science under T. H. Huxley. Like George Ponderovo, the
protagonist in Wells’s Tono Bungay, the social climber Wells felt as if
he were “hit by some unusual transverse force, . . . jerked out of [his]
stratum and live[d] crosswise for the rest of time” (9).
In Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells articulates a sense
of social dislocation, isolation, and progressive estrangement, refer-
ring to his own situation in the third person: “The new stratum he
enters regards the social riser as ‘an intruder,’ the language of the
people of the new stratum is not his mother tongue, though their
manners and customs fit him like a slop suit, he has acquired just
enough of these things to be equally out of his element below”
(345). Like many of his displaced protagonists, Wells felt that he was
caught between what amounted to two different cultures (in this
case, two socioeconomic strata), complete with different manners
and customs. Though Wells traveled little, he treated the English
upper and lower classes alike as alien realms and likewise represented
encounters between different classes, races, or species in ethno-
graphic terms, as clashes of different cultures.
Wells regarded his literary credentials as a passport to new experi-

ences—or new worlds: “The literary life is one of the modern forms
of adventure. Success with a book—even such a commercially mod-
est success as mine has been—means in the English-speaking world
not merely a moderate financial independence, but the utmost free-
dom of movement and intercourse. A poor man is lifted out of his
narrow circumstances into familiar and unrestrained intercourse with
a great variety of people. One sees the world” (357). Elsewhere,
Wells figured his career as a man of letters as an “invasion,” pene-
trating “the world of influential and authoritative men.”11 With
terms like “intruder,” “adventure,” and “invasion,” Wells assigns
himself as writer a role analogous to that of his protagonists. He
would liken the creative process to “peering into remote and myste-
rious worlds ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our
common sanity” (Country of the Blind iv); a description that unites
the ethos of scientific romance with that of ethnographic inquiry,
recalling Malinowski’s description of ethnology as introducing “law
and order into what seemed chaotic and freakish” (Argonauts 9).
Wells’s critical distance from British culture was a product of his
scientific training as well as his “social dislocation” (Draper 54).
Linda Anderson points out that in Wells’s fiction, science is not just
inert subject matter but “a way of thinking” (108). In particular,
Anderson notes that Wells’s interest in experimentation and in “sys-
tem” derive from his scientific perspective: “‘Experiment’ was a cru-
cial term for Wells, suggesting not only the attitude of inquisitiveness
and openness which he valued so highly, but also a necessary inter-
action between system or idea and the data used to check or validate
it” (110). For Wells, society is a system to be described in scientific
terms. Accordingly, in addition to studying biology, Wells consid-
ered himself a social scientist and even went so far as to seek a chair
in sociology. In Wells’s scientific romances, this interest in looking at
society as a system gets cast in anthropological terms, in the form of
cross-cultural encounters.
Much as Wells felt he had “escaped” lower class existence, Kingsley
represented African travel as liberating her from domestic servitude;
at the same time, like Wells, she felt alienated in her new domain.
Because quitting the domestic sphere to embark on an expedition to
Africa in search of “fish and fetishes” meant risking public and pro-
fessional disapproval, Kingsley had to carefully negotiate her posi-
tion as a “lady of science.” Despite the fact that dozens of women
did participate in the fervor for botanizing, geographical explo-

ration, and ethnographic study, public opinion deemed them unfit
to make serious contributions to these areas of inquiry. Lord
Curzon, for instance, protested in 1892 when twenty-two women
were offered memberships in the Royal Geographical Society: “We
contest in toto the general capability of women to contribute to sci-
entific knowledge. . . . Their sex and training render them equally
unfitted.”12 Although Kingsley in some ways capitulated to
Victorian attitudes about women’s supposed physical and intellec-
tual inferiority, attitudes that excluded women from the masculine
ranks of scientists and explorers, she nevertheless insisted on the
value of her innovative scientific methodology.
Like many Victorian women writers (and some modern ones,
including Virginia Woolf), Kingsley was acutely conscious of having
been deprived of the education that her brother Charles had
enjoyed. Possessed of an inquisitive mind and yet denied access to a
formal education, she became an autodidact, devouring the volumes
in her father’s library indiscriminately. This policy led to a humiliat-
ing encounter with a young scholar, which impressed on her the
deficiencies of her education: “I happened on a gentleman who
knew modern chemistry and tried my information on him. He said
he had not heard anything so ridiculous for years, and recommended
I should be placed in a museum as a compendium for exploded
chemical theories, which hurt my feelings very much and I cried bit-
terly at not being taught things” (“In the Days of My Youth,” qtd.
in Early 218). While being female meant being denied access to
opportunities, being male was associated with the freedom to pur-
sue ambitions and roam freely. In Travels in West Africa, Kingsley
describes how, relieved of domestic responsibilities, armed with an
ample inheritance, and ready to embark on her first African adven-
ture, she “felt like a boy with a new half-crown in his pocket” (xx).
Much scholarship has explored Kingsley’s complicated navigation
through professional and gender stereotypes of the day.13 On the
one hand, like Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, Kingsley dra-
matically overcame stultifying roles assigned to women by exploring
Africa as a solo European (with extensive help from African porters);
on the other hand, in some ways she succumbed to and even rein-
forced gender stereotypes. For instance, she adamantly rejected
the allegation in the Daily Telegraph that she was a New Woman,
insisting that far from being a paragon of independence, she had
consistently relied on the “assistance of the superior sex” in her trav-

els.14 Kingsley also went to some lengths to fulfill gender-based
expectations about women’s appearance and behavior. With a high-
necked blouse, jacket with muttonchop sleeves, and black taffeta
skirt, Kingsley’s attire in a widely circulated studio photograph was
prim to the point of being anachronistic; she became known as “the
explorer in petticoats” (Frank 224–25) (see Figure 2.1). Her hyper-
femininity suggests latent anxiety about incurring public scrutiny for
transgressing gender norms, as when she insisted that she was “not a
shrieking androgyne.”15
The contradiction between the assertiveness of Kingsley’s life as
an explorer, which was accompanied by shrewd self-promotion and
subtle political interventions in the realm of colonial policy,16 and
her overt endorsement of conservative gender ideology reveals that
Kingsley embodied contradictions, reinscribing the separate spheres
even as her own life seriously drew into question the roles they pre-
scribed. Kingsley’s reflex endorsement of conservative gender roles
suggests how difficult it was to think beyond the limited alternatives
that her culture offered women, even when she had suffered from
conforming to the selflessness dictated by the Victorian ideal of
femininity. The year before she died nursing soldiers in the Boer
war (in 1900), Kingsley lamented having led, in Catherine Barnes
Stevenson’s phrase, the “shadow life of a self-abnegating Victorian
woman”: “I am no more a human being than a gust of wind is. I
have never had a human individual life. I have always been the doer
of odd-jobs—and I have lived in the joys, sorrows, and worries of
other people.”17
As adamantly as she insisted on her own femininity and defended
the ideology of the separate spheres even to her own detriment,
Kingsley nonetheless refused to placate her readers by downplaying
what her publisher Macmillan criticized as the gender ambiguities of
her writing: “I really cannot draw the trail of the petticoat over the
Coast of all places. Neither can I have a picture of myself in trousers
or any other little excitement of this sort added. I went out there as
a naturalist, not as a sort of circus.”18 In her narrative, Kingsley
deploys multiple personae, destabilizing fixed gender and racial
categories and, as Early observes, simultaneously subverting the
figures of “the proper woman” and the “proper scientist” (Natural
Eloquence 221).
Figure 2.1 Mary Henrietta Kingsley. Credit: Photogravure of Mary

Henrietta Kingsley (1900) by Arthur King. © National Portrait Gallery,
London.
Although Kingsley makes a show of her secondary status, adver-

tising her dependence on “the superior sex” in her travels and
opposing women joining male professional societies, she is far from
demurring to scientific men when she rejects the armchair approach
of such anthropological luminaries as Frazer and Tylor, in favor of
her own intensive-study model, which would come to characterize
modern fieldwork: “These white men who make a theory first and
then go hunting travellers’ tales for facts to support the same may say
what they please of the process. Give me the pleasure of getting a
mass of facts and watching them. It is just like seeing a crystal build
itself up. But it is slower I own.”19 In his important study of the
intellectual precursors to British social anthropology, James Urry
cites Kingsley—erroneously—as a figure that dutifully conforms to
the nineteenth-century division of labor between armchair theoriz-
ers and firsthand observers, refraining from theorizing about the
ethnographic data that she collects (43). In fact, like Burton and
Stanley, Kingsley challenged the armchair scholars, making an
emphatic claim for her own expertise based on empirical observation.
Indeed, she gently chides Frazer for the conceit of being all-knowing
in Travels in West Africa when she remarks: “I was particularly con-

fident that from Mr. Frazer’s book, The Golden Bough, I had got a
semi-universal key to the underlying idea of native custom and
belief. But I soon found this was very far from being the case. His
idea is a true key to a certain quantity of facts, but in West Africa only
to a limited quantity” (435). Despite her self-conscious and often
playful recognition of her exclusion from the mainstream of natu-
ral history and ethnography, Kingsley insists on the value of her
alternative methodology, converting her outsider stance into an
enabling perspective.
Conrad, who in 1899 praised Kingsley as “un voyageur et un
écrivain trés remarquable,”20 epitomizes the complex subject posi-
tion of the exilic modernist. Though he became a British citizen in
1886, he resisted assimilation by retaining a foreign accent, gestures,
and dress and by never buying a house. Conrad (then Korzeniowski)
was first exiled with his family when he was six for his father’s revo-
lutionary activity, but even before that, the Korzeniowskis would
have had the feeling of rootlessness inasmuch as Poland had been
partitioned among Russia, Germany, and Austria since 1795—a his-
torical event Conrad would characterize in 1919 as the “crime of
partition.” Frederick Karl argues that Conrad’s fiction is informed by
his early experience of displacement, born “in an occupied country,
which was hardly a nation, a land partitioned, its national language
relegated to the home, with its patriots imprisoned, exiled, or soon
to be killed in the 1863 insurrection and its aftermath” (26). The
writer’s acute sense of cultural deracination is conveyed by the fol-
lowing passage: “Other writers have some starting point, something
to catch hold of . . . they lean on dialect—or on tradition—or on his-
tory—or on the prejudice or fad of the hour; they trade upon some
tie or conviction of their time—or upon the absence of these
things—which they can abuse or praise. But at any rate they know
something to begin with—while I don’t. . . . [M]y very being seems
faded” (Letters, Garnett 142). This passage is strongly evocative of
Burton’s self-characterization as “a blaze of light without focus.”
Without a firm cultural context to “catch hold of,” Conrad feels that
his “very being” lacks definition. Although alienation and exile typ-
ify the condition of many modernist writers (such as Joyce, Lawrence,
Eliot), Watt points out that in Conrad’s case, exile was “more
absolute” and not freely chosen (7). Many critics have observed that
as a member of the dispossessed Polish gentry Conrad was “uneasy
about foreign rule over subjugated people,” and this heritage set him
against the most rampant imperial jingoism of the day.21
Perpetual exile, combined with a career as a merchant mariner,
exposed Conrad to a wide variety of places and cultures. He was also
a polyglot, well versed in Polish, French, and English, and thus he
arguably acquired—at least linguistically—more than a superficial
knowledge of the cultures attached to these languages. Yet unlike
Haggard in South Africa, Conrad rejected the role of amateur ethno-
grapher. When his friend Sir Hugh Clifford, a colonial administrator
who engaged in ethnographic study in Malaya and Ceylon, criticized
Conrad’s representation of the Malay people in Almayer’s Folly as
“superficial and inaccurate in an infuriating degree,” Conrad retorted
defensively, “I have never pretended to any such knowledge.”22
Karl’s biography divides Conrad’s life into threes—a Pole, a mariner,
and a writer—and establishes that in the last segment, Conrad wrote
consciously as an English novelist, even if placing him in this tradi-
tion is problematic for critics such as Leavis who must then go on to
“stress his foreignness” (17). Stressing his own foreignness as others
did, Conrad asserted that although his point of view was decidedly
English, “the conclusion should not be drawn that I have become an
Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in my case more
than one meaning.”23 While most of Conrad’s protagonists ulti-
mately reject the role of ethnographer, taking refuge among trans-
ported artifacts of Englishness, Conrad is positioned between
cultures, observing the bewildered observers, an ethnographer of
displaced men like himself.
Kingsley, Wells, and Conrad are variously marginalized, but unlike
the explorer-ethnographers of Chapter 1, they do not compensate
for their status by adopting swaggering personae for themselves or
their characters. Instead, they register the crumbling of confidence
in the field and the scaling down of ethnographic objectives, as the
observer’s self-reflection becomes more acute.
S TUMBLING THROUGH A FRICA : T HE A LTERNATIVE

VALUES OF M ARY K INGSLEY
You must make allowances for my love of this sort of country, with its
great forests and rivers and its animistic-minded inhabitants, and for
my ability to be more comfortable there than in England. Your supe-
rior culture-instincts may militate against your enjoying West Africa,
but if you go there you will find things as I have said. (Travels in West
Africa, xxiii)
Kingsley presents herself in the preceding quotation as an authority

on West Africa and “its animistic-minded inhabitants,” so assimi-
lated to West African life that she is more comfortable there than she
is in her native England. Although fashioned as an apology, the
gist of these lines is to insist on the accuracy of the work that follows,
making it credible (and marketable) even to those with “superior
culture-instincts.” She insists upon the value of her observations for
both the scientific elite and common readers.
As a “lady traveler,” Kingsley relinquishes the assumption of per-
sonal and cultural superiority and the fantasy of control (over others,
over herself) that characterized the ethnographic writings discussed
in Chapter 1. Karen Lawrence captures Kingsley’s attitude in Travels
perfectly when she writes, “As opposed to the command of a Stanley,
we get a kind of blow to the traveler’s equilibrium that knocks stable
ideas, as well as the body of the traveler, upside down” (136). Like
the other texts discussed in this chapter, Kingsley upsets the conven-
tions of ethnographic travel writing and adventure by focusing on
the disequilibrium of the traveler-observer. She recommends surren-
dering to feelings of bewilderment, disorientation, and alienation
that terrify the amateur ethnographers in Wells’s and Conrad’s fic-
tions and suspending one’s culture’s codes in order to begin to deci-
pher the webs of meaning of a different culture. For Kingsley,
bewilderment is a phase to pass through en route to understanding;
unlike the explorer-ethnographers—who virulently assert their own
subject position—she proclaims the value of occupying a liminal
space. This liminality is connected to Kingsley’s approach to ethnog-
raphy, which involves intensive observation and close identification
with the people she is studying. Seemingly at odds with Kingsley’s
abundant humor and self-deprecation in Travels in West Africa is the
author’s insistence that her methodology is serious and valid, even
preferable to that of the armchair anthropologists who theorize
without immersing themselves in particular cultures or to that of the
male travelers who go out “hunting for facts to match their theo-
ries.”24 A closer look suggests that the self-effacement Kingsley
advocates in the field converts a female-coded value into the basis of
a new methodology. Decades before Malinowski formalized the
methods of modern anthropology, Kingsley advocated the partici-
pant-observer approach to fieldwork.25
Even when Kingsley represents the anxiety surrounding travel to

an unknown region, she transforms this response into a source of
retrospective humor. Near the beginning of Travels, she asserts,
“The details of the first voyage are more amusing than instructive,
for on my first voyage out I did not know the Coast, and the Coast
did not know me, and we mutually terrified each other” (5). The
reciprocity that Kingsley imagines—between an English explorer
and an African colony, on relatively equal footing—is perhaps naive.
At the same time, against the self-aggrandizing tradition of English
exploration, the gesture works to install a different mode of author-
ity for the explorer.
Rather than shoring up a heroic self as the explorer-ethnogra-
phers do, Kingsley speaks without apparent regret or alarm of her
dissolving identity in Africa: “The majesty and the beauty of the
scene fascinated me. . . . I just lose all sense of human individuality,
all memory of human life, with its grief and worry and doubt, and
become part of the atmosphere” (178). This melting away of the self
in an alien environment will be replayed in Virginia Woolf’s novel
The Voyage Out, where Rachel Vinrace feels her fragile identity dis-
solving in the South American tropics. In both cases the psycholog-
ical dissolution could be read as tragic: in Woolf’s bildungsroman,
rather than witnessing the building of a character, we watch her dis-
sipate before she comes fully of age, and in Kingsley’s travel narra-
tive, this passage could be read as expressing a kind of death wish.
Kingsley claimed to have come to Africa to die, after her duty to her
family had been fulfilled and both of her parents had passed away,
and she wrote bitterly (in a previously quoted passage) about having
never lived at all but instead having only served others. However,
the next line reads: “If I have a heaven that will be mine, and I ver-
ily believe that if I were left alone long enough with such a scene as
this or on the deck of an African liner in the Bights. . . . I should be
found soulless and dead; but I never have a chance of that” (178).
Kingsley’s tone here is not elegiac; she does not lament losing “all
sense of human individuality” (perhaps because she “never had a[n]
individual life”). Rather, she describes the experience as “heavenly.”
The image of the dissolving self can thus be read instead as part of
Kingsley’s formula for a successful ethnographic encounter, trans-
forming stereotypical feminine self-abnegation into a means of com-
prehending ethnographic others.
The earlier passage is one of the most famous in Travels in West

Africa; because it is essential to my discussion, here it is in its
entirety:
As you get used to it, what seemed at first to be an inextricable tangle

ceases to be so. . . . Nor indeed do I recommend African forest life to
anyone. Unless you are interested in it and fall under its charm, it is
the most awful life in death imaginable. It is like being shut up in a
library whose books you cannot read, all the while tormented, terri-
fied, and bored. And if you do fall under its spell, it takes all the colour
out of other kinds of living. Still, it is good for a man to have an expe-
rience of it, whether he likes it or not, for it teaches you how very
dependent you have been, during your previous life, on the familiar-
ity of those conditions you have been brought up among, and on your
fellow citizens; moreover it takes the conceit out of you pretty thor-
oughly during the days you spend stupidly stumbling about among
your new surroundings. (102)
“Life in death” awaits those (like Conrad’s characters Kayerts and

Carlier, discussed later in this chapter) who are incurious about
“African forest life.” But for the inquisitive, open mind, the experi-
ence provides what Kingsley posits as necessary schooling in humil-
ity. One has to pass through this phase of disorientation to untangle
what are at first incomprehensible webs of meaning.
The simile of a library filled with unreadable books is evocative of
Kingsley’s first rite of passage, mastering the books in her father’s
well-stocked library. She would have been familiar with the frustra-
tion of ignorance and the reward of systematic, persistent study. The
cluster of emotions that she associates with the initial confrontation
with the indecipherable forest—feeling “tormented, terrified,
bored”—are applicable to the characters in the fiction of this chapter
as well, but the fictional would-be ethnographers ultimately aban-
don the project of trying to decipher the unknown.
The obscure or illegible forest in turn becomes a metaphor for the
Fan tribe whom Kingsley studies: “As it is with the forest, so it is
with the minds of the native. Unless you live alone among the
natives, you never get to know them; if you do this you gradually get
a light into the true state of their mind forest. At first you see noth-
ing but a confused stupidity and crime; but when you get to see—
well! as in the other forest,—you see things worth seeing” (104).
Kingsley’s emphasis on immersion and close observation (living
“among the natives”) anticipates the research methodology that will

gain wide disciplinary acceptance as the basis for anthropological
fieldwork with the 1922 publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts of
the Western Pacific. Her insistence on the initial illegibility of Africa
and Africans to the European observer derives not from the mystify-
ing impulse that we will see in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but rather
from an acknowledgment of a different system of meaning at play
within the unknown culture, with an alternative logic. The point of
the baffling library or the mind forest is that close observation will
transform the bewildering into the comprehensible.
Anticipating Malinowski’s directive to the ethnographer to “grasp
the native’s point of view,” Kingsley boasts in a letter to Tylor, “I
seem to have a mind so nearly akin to that of the savage that I can
enter into his thoughts and fathom them.”26 Tylor echoes this senti-
ment in his memoir, crediting Kingsley with the power of “getting
to the back of the negro mind.”27 It is worth noting that this
method entails a paradox: the observer masters the unknown by giv-
ing up control and abandoning the self. Christopher Herbert elabo-
rates on this paradoxical formula at the heart of modern fieldwork
methods: “The mission of ethnography thus defined can be fulfilled
only through an act of almost violent self-effacement on its practi-
tioners’ part: one needs to divest oneself wholly of European values
and prejudices in order to attain sympathetic understanding of one’s
exotic subjects” (15). I would add that such “violent self-efface-
ment” was normative for women in the Victorian period, the plight
of those living for and through others that Kingsley decries but ulti-
mately converts into an enabling methodology.
Kingsley’s articulation of a flexible, chameleon model of ethno-
graphic subjectivity is given further expression in another passage
from Travels. Here she describes the ethnographic collector’s mind
as a disorganized vessel, containing a conglomeration of discordant
ideas, facts, and observations: “the state of confusion the mind of a
collector like myself gets into on the West Coast is something simply
awful, and my notes for a day will contain facts relating to the kraw-
kraw, price of onions, size of fish caught, cooking recipes, genealo-
gies, oaths (native form of), law cases, and market prices. . . . As for
one’s personal memory, it becomes a rag bag” (73). Emphasizing
the disorderly process of “mental collecting,” Kingsley stresses the
process, rather than the product, of acquiring knowledge. At the
same time, she rejects the traditional model of a unified self,
describing instead a tenuous construct, which is heterogeneous and

confused—a “gust of wind,” an identity that dissolves “into the
atmosphere,” memory that is a “rag bag”—anticipating modernist
articulations of subjectivity (discussed in Chapter 3).
Malinowski would also refer to the cluttered mass of data that the
ethnographer would collect, which would have to be interpreted and
organized before presenting the “facts” to the public. But the end,
for Malinowski, is the polished authoritative monograph, not a
record of the process of imposing order on mental chaos. His
emphasis shifts away from the ethnographer’s disorganized memo-
ries to the material—implying that it is the “information” that is
unwieldy, not the mind that perceives it. In contrast, in Travels,
Kingsley does not try to extricate the observer from the observed,
nor does she hide the “messiness” of doing fieldwork.
Along with tolerating confusion, Kingsley advocates adopting a
state of mental pliancy in the field. Deploying the aggressive
metaphor of “the hunt,” playfully evocative of the testosterone-
driven ethnography of Stanley or Burton, she elaborates on the
necessity of mental flexibility in practicing ethnography: “The diffi-
culty of the language is, however, far less than the whole set of diffi-
culties with your own mind. Unless you can make it pliant enough
to follow the African idea step by step, however much care you take,
you will not bag your game. . . . [I]f you go hunting the African idea
with the flag of your own religion or opinions floating ostentatiously
over you, you will similarly get a very poor bag” (435). It is illumi-
nating to compare this passage with a later one written by
Malinowski, who would also figure the ethnographer as a “hunter,”
cautiously pursuing his ethnographic prey: “But the Ethnographer
has not only to spread his nets in the right place, and wait for what
will fall into them. He must be an active huntsman, and drive his
quarry into them and follow it up to its most inaccessible lairs”
(Argonauts 8). The politics of this metaphor have been interrogated
by Trinh T. Minh-ha, who places it in the context of the imperial
domination in which anthropology has historically been enmeshed.28
As with the previous example, though they employ similar rhetoric
to describe the experience of ethnographic fieldwork, Kingsley uses
the figure of the hunt to very different ends from Malinowski. While
Malinowski stresses the importance of being aggressive, of actively
tracking “quarry . . . to its most inaccessible lairs,” Kingsley focuses
on the ethnographer/hunter rather than on the informants/game,
stressing the importance of conducting research without precon-

ceived ideas or prejudice. The point of the metaphor in Malinowski’s
text is to encourage ethnographers to be tenacious and circumspect
in cross-examining their (possibly untrustworthy) informants; the
point in Kingsley’s text is to encourage fieldworkers to leave their
religious or personal biases at home, to step out of their own cultural
frameworks as much as possible. Hence in myriad ways, Kingsley’s
methodology prefigures that of mainstream British ethnography but
with a different inflection—one that is coded female within the gen-
der roles of Victorian England.
Even as she challenges masculine traditions of explorer ethnogra-
phy and adventure, Kingsley reproduces cultural biases that inform
these traditions. She asserts that to understand Africans, the field-
worker must risk “infection” by “the African point of view,” “as sure
to linger in your mind as the malaria in your body”: “your own mind
requires protection when you send it stalking the savage idea
through the tangled forests, the dark caves, the swamps and the fogs
of the Ethiopian intellect” (440). Thick with the tropes of Darkest
Africa, this description reminds us that Kingsley was not immune to
the prejudices of her own culture, even as she respected African cul-
tures and “deplore[d] [their] corruption by a ‘rubbishy white cul-
ture’ which [was] undermining African institutions” (Stevenson 115).
Obviously the same could be said of “the father of modern field-
work,” whose methodology Kingsley in many ways anticipates.
Though Kingsley replicates some of the racist attitudes of her time
and culture, in significant ways, she also transcends their limitations
by stressing the importance of an open mind and a willingness to be
knocked off balance. The next sections will explore the very differ-
ent attitude expressed in Wells’s and Conrad’s fiction about the
destabilizing experience of the contact zone.
I SLAND OF D R . M OREAU : T HE R ELUCTANT A DVENTURES

OF AN E XPLORER -E THNOGRAPHER
In contrast to the narratives discussed in Chapter 1, which ultimately

find in evolutionary theory support for a progress narrative (albeit
one that allows room for spectacular degeneration, in the case of
Haggard’s Ayesha), much of Wells’s work is “designed to discredit
what he called ‘Bio-Optimism’ or ‘Excelsior Biology,’ the hopeful
belief that life must steadily improve, move ever upwards from the
slime toward nobility” (Kemp 12). Through his characterization of
the hapless protagonist of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells amplifies
the anxiety surrounding cross-cultural encounters and undermines
the heroic pretenses of adventure fiction. Whereas Haggard glorifies
Englishmen, confirming their prowess and their ethnographic
expertise, Wells focuses on the observer’s self-doubt, questioning
the accuracy of his impressions.
Though Wells’s formal scientific training under T. H. Huxley was
in biology, he gravitated toward the study of society and of human
nature. It was not uncommon to enter the social sciences with train-
ing in the physical sciences in this period. For instance, the two fig-
ures whom Stocking identifies as the “intermediary generation” in
the transition from Victorian to modern anthropology, Walter
Baldwin Spencer and Alfred Cort Haddon, came to the burgeoning
field of anthropology from different branches of biology—zoology
and physiology, respectively. Given this background, it is not surpris-
ing that when studying Torres Straits’s natives during the 1898–99
expedition, their focus was on material culture and physical anthro-
pology; for these scientists, the “behavior, cries, physical characteris-
tics of animals [including humans] were all part of a simple
observational syndrome.”29 Similarly, Wells conceives of a character
who has trained in biology under Huxley (like himself), and who
becomes, when stranded on Dr. Moreau’s island, an ad hoc ethnog-
rapher with a particular focus on the physical characteristics of the
“tribe” he encounters.30
Wells entered into contemporary anthropological debates, writ-
ing and thinking about the development and transformation of cus-
toms, beliefs, and social practices over time and taking issue with
practitioners of this emerging discipline, such as Armand de
Quatrefages, a French anthropologist who wrote a pioneering study
on Pygmies (1887), and the American Lewis H. Morgan, who
charted the evolution of “Human Progress from Savagery through
Barbarism to Civilization” (1877). In essays such as “Human
Evolution, An Artificial Process” (1896), “Morals and Civilization”
(1897), and “Pygmy Philosophy” (1895), Wells addressed some of
the most important anthropological questions of the day concerning
“primitive” marriage, belief, and spirituality. Additionally, he was
acquainted with the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, a British anthro-
pologist who wrote on the aborigines of Australia, Malaysia, and the
Amazon, and Henry Balfour, who catalogued the Pitt-Rivers collec-

tion at Oxford, the first ethnological museum in England. The high
esteem in which he held their work is reflected by his assertion that
the “great things of the science of Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, and
Balfour remain mainly untold” (Textbook 12).
While Wells was writing The Island of Dr. Moreau, then, he was
formulating questions that were of central importance in defining
new fieldwork methods in anthropology. In his review of
Quatrefages’s The Pygmies, for example, he criticizes the author’s
attempt to “establish the high moral standards of these primitive
people, and to imply the primordial elevation of humanity.”31 Wells’s
critique is not only ideological (objecting to the author’s potential
idealization of these people); it is also methodological. He questions
the fieldwork methods of one of the ethnographers Quatrefages
cites: “One would like to have a fuller report of [E. H.] Man’s ques-
tions and answers; did he put leaders [i.e., “ask leading questions”]?
Did he really have an idiomatic grasp of the language?”32 Wells finds
“something pathetic in the way in which Quatrefages clutches at
straws of evidence” (4). The skepticism about whether or not the
fieldworker asked leading questions reflects a concern of the newly
reformed British Anthropological Institute, which was striving to
create an empirical basis for anthropology; the institute’s manual for
“travellers and residents in uncivilized lands” counseled observers to
keep a careful record of observations and to avoid “prior assump-
tions.”33 The emphasis on linguistic proficiency in the field antici-
pates a concern that would occupy anthropology in the decades
leading up to the Great War.34 The sticky problem of interpreting
another culture is one that Wells would also take up in his fiction of
this period.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is a forum for Wells to explore what can
go wrong in a field encounter. It is the story of a biologist, Edward
Prendick, who is rescued from a shipwreck only to be delivered to
an island where, unbeknownst to him, Dr. Moreau is using vivisec-
tion to mold the flesh of animals into human beings.35 Prendick
encounters the “Beast People” of Moreau’s experiments, figured
according to standard tropes of savagery, as grotesques, lunatics,
animals, and potential cannibals. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Moreau
ultimately meets a fitting death for his hubris when he is killed by
one of his creations.
Rather than the confident posture that Burton urges for the trav-
eler in “uncivilized lands,” Prendick is beset by cowardice and self-
doubt. Early in his adventure, he reports, “I began to realise the
hardihood of my expedition among these unknown people. The
thicket about me became altered to my imagination. Every shadow
became something more than a shadow, became an ambush, every
rustle became a threat. Invisible things seemed watching me” (98).
Prendick worries that he will be subject to the same scrutiny he pays
to these “unknown people,” an observer observed. Although fear is
not incompatible with the conventional hero’s construction,
Prendick’s response verges on paranoia. Holly’s response to Ayesha
is presented as a rational response to a legitimate threat; in contrast,
Prendick is so “nervous” that he can barely control “the impulse to
headlong flight” (100).
Like the explorer-ethnographers, Prendick attempts to present a
façade of courage and self-possession: “I was anxious not to show
the fear that seemed chilling my backbone . . . I advanced a step or
two looking steadfastly into his eyes” (100). Unlike those swagger-
ing prototypes, however, Wells’s protagonist fails to live up to either
the heroic proportions of the “man-on-the-spot” or the confident
authority of the scientist at home. In this fictional staging of an
ethnographic encounter, the observer is made to look timorous, and
the empirical basis for his observations is drawn into question.
Whereas Haggard’s heroes typically gain the upper hand in any con-
flict, for half the story Prendick is pursued; he is a reluctant explorer
who flees one terror to encounter another. Continually, Prendick
calls into question his own impressions, hinting that they may be the
“creation of [his] disordered imagination.” Pursued by one of the
Beast People, he attempts to muster an air of authority, only to fail
again at his posturing: “I opened my mouth to speak, and found a
hoarse phlegm choked my voice. I tried again, and shouted, ‘Who is
there?’ There was no answer” (103). Finally he hurls a rock at his
imagined assailant and then dissolves into “trembling” and “profuse
perspiration” (103). These are the adventures of an antihero, who
must overcome his own anxieties and inadequacies, as well as the tri-
als of adventure. They are also the strategies of an ad hoc ethnogra-
pher, whose curiosity about these strange inhabitants of Dr.
Moreau’s island has coaxed him into the thicket in the first place.
Parodying conventional explorer ethnographies, which alternate
chapters of narrative with chapters describing ethnographic, botanical,
or geographical particulars, Wells entitles chapter 15 of Moreau

“Concerning the Beast Folk.” Coming across “three grotesque
human figures . . . swaying their feet and waving their arms” in uni-
son, Prendick attempts to discern the meaning of this “mysterious
rite” but is thwarted by his ignorance of the language: the leader
seems “to be reciting some complicated gibberish” (99). In another
scene, when interviewing one of the Beast People (the “Ape Man”),
Prendick becomes frustrated that the informant’s “chattering
prompt responses were, as often as not, quite at cross-purposes”
with the questions (113). Here, Wells illustrates the skepticism he
articulates in “Pygmy Philosophy” about fieldwork conducted by
ethnographers who fail to have an “idiomatic grasp” of the native
language or who approach fieldwork with a preconceived agenda. By
describing Prendick’s terror of the Beast People, Wells belies the
objective voice of ethnographic description, magnifying the distor-
tions of an imagination that keeps “running away . . . into a morass
of unsubstantial fears” (188).
Wells’s send-up of an ethnographic encounter, highlighting the
biases in contemporary fieldwork, is subordinated to the larger
agenda of creating a fable that illustrates how easily the thin veneer
of civilization may be stripped off, and how evolutionary “progress”
may be reversed. In “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process,” pub-
lished in The Fortnightly Review the same year as Moreau, Wells
argues that “mentally, morally, physically” human beings have not
evolved beyond our Paleolithic ancestors: at the core, we are stuck in
the Stone Age; only on the surface have we adopted the customs and
habits of mind of the “civilized” (Island 232). Like his mentor T. H.
Huxley, Wells objected to the placid optimism of Spenserian Social
Darwinism, focusing instead on social plasticity, the element of
chance inherent in natural selection, and retrograde tendencies that
some thinkers felt were concomitant with evolution.
Moreau’s experiments serve as Wells’s vehicle for making evolu-
tion “run in reverse” in The Island of Dr. Moreau. The premise of
these experiments is that living forms are highly malleable and may
be modified through the controversial practice of vivisection and,
more particularly, grafting. Wells first published the argument for
“the plasticity of living forms” separately as a nonfiction essay in the
Saturday Review, before putting it in the mouth of the title charac-
ter of Moreau.36 The argument extends beyond the physical to the
“mental structure” of human beings: “Very much, indeed, of what
we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perver-

sion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice,
and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion” (Moreau 136). The
point of the narrative is to show that the reverse is also true; if civi-
lization and the “moral programming” on which it is predicated are
artificial processes, “all the habits a man ever acquired can be decon-
ditioned again” (qtd. in n. 136).
Wells’s narrative can be read as a cautionary tale about the kind of
immersion in the unknown advocated by Kingsley. Moreau’s assis-
tant is represented as an “outcast from civilization” who, like
Conrad’s Kurtz, has gone over to the dark side of primitive custom
and behavior, and Prendick admits, “I, too, must have undergone
strange changes,” becoming “one among the Beast People” (198,
191). When these strangers literally begin to degenerate, he
expresses “horror” at recalling “the quasi human intimacy . . . [he]
had permitted” himself with them (177). Even when Prendick
returns to London, he is haunted by the specter of the Beast
People’s devolution. Misanthropic, transformed by his experience
(“even now my eyes have a strange brightness, a swift alertness of
movement” [198]), he retires to the country and becomes an ama-
teur astronomer, directing his gaze desperately away from the
morass of biological and cultural evolution. The preservation of
Prendick’s sense of personal sovereignty is thus predicated on a lit-
eral distancing of his encounter with the gothic island and its repul-
sive, and yet uncannily familiar, inhabitants. It is a significant revision
of the adventure script followed by Haggard that unlike Holly and
Leo, at the end of the narrative, Prendick does not set off to explore
new lands and cultures; instead he cloisters himself away, recoiling
from the possibility of any human encounters.
Highlighting the self-doubting, fear, and terror of recognition of
observers in the contact zone, Wells undermines the genres he
invokes, dwelling in the fissures in the authoritative façade of late
nineteenth-century adventure writing and explorer ethnography.
Conrad likewise challenges the assumptions and rhetorical modes of
these antecedent genres, and in his “weightier” African tale, translates
the trope of ethnographic disorientation into an aesthetic register.
“C UT OFF FROM C OMPREHENSION ”

The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incompre-
hensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us,
welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the compre-
hension of our surroundings. It could only be obtained by con-
quest—or by surrender, but we passed on indifferent, surprising, less
than phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would
be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse.37
In the manuscript of Heart of Darkness, Marlow asserts that there are

two ways of comprehending Africa and “prehistoric man”: “by con-
quest—or by surrender.” Crudely speaking, these are the two ethno-
graphic approaches that have been illustrated by Stanley and Kingsley
respectively, two figures who loomed large in British culture, and
with whose work Conrad was well acquainted.38 Like Prendick,
Marlow eschews both options, distancing himself from the “con-
quest of the earth”—“which mostly means the taking it away from
those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than
ourselves” (10)—and pulling back terrified from the kind of “sur-
render” advocated by Kingsley and enacted in a perverse manner by
Kurtz—who combines conquest and surrender in a violent rendition
of ethnographic practice. Instead, Heart of Darkness insists on the
inscrutability of Africa and Africans, making a monument to the
incomprehensible, while its protagonist, like its author, adamantly
rejects the role of ethnographer.
Conrad’s African fiction echoes Kingsley’s trope of incomprehen-
sibility and similarly subverts the posture of certainty assumed by
the explorer-ethnographers of Chapter 1. Although his fiction owes
much to the traditions of exploration and adventure about which
Conrad was so ambivalent, the insistence on the illegibility of signs,
the aborted attempts at understanding alien customs, and the
emphasis on uncertainty or “oppressive wonder” depart significantly
from the confident presumption of ethnographic mastery that char-
acterizes these antecedent writings. In eschewing the confident cer-
tainty found in writings of exploration and adventure, Conrad, like
Wells and Kingsley, challenges the assumptions and rhetorical modes
of these contemporary discourses about ethnographic others.
In a reading that partially dovetails with mine, John Griffith reads
Heart of Darkness as paradigmatic of a “cultural hermeneutic,” or
the problem of how we come to know another culture, insofar as

Conrad’s text centers on the anthropological dilemma of negotiat-
ing complete immersion in a culture (going native, risking insanity)
and distanced, empirical observation (staying sane, coming back).
Griffith asserts that “Marlow is unwilling or unable to break down
the cultural boundaries that he often hints may be the only safe-
guards to sanity in the colonial experience; he is unwilling to surren-
der his cultural identity, a mistake he views as Kurtz’s downfall”
(64). In this way, Griffith argues that Marlow is a transitional figure
in anthropology: an observer but not a participant, exhibiting “nas-
cent cultural relativism” but failing to achieve empathy, failing to
“surrender.” Although I agree that Marlow fails to surrender, I find
Griffith’s attributing to Marlow the desire to know about the
Congolese in the first place unconvincing. Instead, I argue that in
lingering in realms of indeterminacy, both Heart of Darkness and
“Outpost” abandon the project of making truth-claims about oth-
ers and in this depart from their textual forerunners in adventure
and exploration.
Before going on to discuss Marlow’s retreat from ethnography in
Heart of Darkness, I turn first to “An Outpost of Progress,” for in
this less nuanced tale, Conrad wrangles with some of the problems
of cultural encounters more directly. The omniscient narrator of
“Outpost” makes the theme of white men’s moral disintegration in
Africa overt: two British colonial agents, Kayerts and Carlier, are in
effect exiled to a remote trading station in the Congo; after their
black assistant Makola exchanges a group of native servants for ivory,
Kayerts gradually loses his mind and kills Carlier and then himself.
These estranged agents illustrate the flip side of Kingsley’s celebra-
tion of the dissolving self and her passionate interest in seemingly
indecipherable landscapes and cultures. Kayerts and Carlier confirm
Kingsley’s warning that incurious outsiders in Africa will be “tor-
mented, terrified, [and] bored” in a culture that is incomprehensi-
ble to them.
The narrative illustrates how identities crumble when deprived of
the comforting reflection of their own cultural mirror: “Few men
realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capa-
bilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief
in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the
confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every
insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd:
to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its insti-
tutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinions”
(462). This passage suggests that individual identities require famil-
iar social support, which Kayerts and Carlier lack. Anthropologist
Roy Wagner’s description of the phenomenon that since the 1950s
has been known as “culture shock” reinforces Conrad’s point: “To a
degree that we seldom realize, we depend upon the participation of
others in our lives, and upon our own participation in the lives of
others. . . . Culture shock is a loss of the self through the loss of
these supports” (7). While Kingsley considered such “loss of self” a
prerequisite for fieldwork, Conrad wrote that he had “a positive hor-
ror of losing even for a moment full possession of [himself]” (A
Personal Record 10). Accordingly, like Wells’s protagonists, the
bewildered travelers in Conrad’s fiction recoil from the feeling of
disintegrating identity.
Coupled with Kayerts’s and Carlier’s cultural estrangement is the
perceived threat of “contamination” from contact with “savagery”:
“But the contact with pure, unmitigated savagery, with primitive
nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into
the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear
perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations—
to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affir-
mation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things
vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion
excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish
and the wise alike” (462). Dislodged from their normal social con-
text, Kayerts and Carlier are terrified and repelled by their encounter
with “unmitigated savagery,” and they do not recover equilibrium.
Incurious about their surroundings and the natives they encounter,
Kayerts and Carlier are taunted by the possibility of meanings that
elude them: “they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly
left unassisted to face the wilderness; a wilderness rendered more
strange, more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of the
vigorous life it contained” (462). The Africans who drift by the sta-
tion remain enigmatic to these characters, who rely on Makola to
interact with itinerate native traders. The displaced white men seem
to live in a void: “Out of that void, at times, came canoes, with
snowy shells and glistening brass wire, perfect of limb. They made an
uncouth babbling noise when they spoke, moved in a stately man-
ner, and sent quick, wild glances out of their startled, never-resting
eyes” (465). Conrad is obviously critiquing both the incompetence

of Kayerts and Carlier—two “victims of progress” as they are
dubbed by the original title for this story—and the late capitalist,
bureaucratic society that has produced them. Chinua Achebe’s cri-
tique of Heart of Darkness is applicable here, that Conrad’s use of
Africa as a convenient site of darkness is chauvinistic, even if he
makes white men partake of the attributes associated with darkness
(that is, ignorance, evilness, superstition). Even as “Outpost,” like
Heart of Darkness, ironizes the categories of progress and civiliza-
tion, showing whites to be equally prone to senseless violence and to
superstition, it reinforces ethnocentric stereotypes about Africans.
Nonetheless, in this more crudely told tale, in the characteriza-
tion of Africans who miss their homeland, the servant Makola, and a
local chief named Goblia, Conrad goes further than he does in
Heart of Darkness in trying to render the perspective of “savages”
and in implying a kind of mutual bewilderment in the ethnographic
contact zone. Although Makola’s character is described as “taciturn
and impenetrable” we are given other details that make this charac-
ter moderately sympathetic, at least as a foil to his white companions
at the station. While Kayerts and Carlier are described as “untidy,”
“stupid,” “useless,” and “lazy,” Makola is depicted as orderly,
resourceful, and “quietly diligent.” Although the white men remain
blind to local customs and deaf to African languages, Makola under-
stands Western bookkeeping methods and is fluent in English and
French (like Conrad), as well as some regional languages. The reader
certainly understands why Makola would despise the two white men,
who have almost no redeeming qualities.
Yet the African servant comes in for his share of satire as well. This
orderly, literate “savage” is mocked by the narrator for cherishing
“in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits.” Like the helms-
man in Heart of Darkness, Makola’s incomplete assimilation to white
ways is represented as ludicrous: each of these characters falls into
the category Homi Bhabha usefully describes as “not white, not
quite”—a reminder of the ethnocentric and racist thinking that
underwrites Conrad’s whole perspective.39 Moreover, gestures of
reciprocity are limited when they serve to show the moral bank-
ruptcy of the whites, not the value of African customs in themselves.
As I’ve suggested, the main thrust of the story is to demonstrate
how individual identities depend on societal scaffolding and how,
deprived of this support, identities begin to crumble. Kingsley’s
formula of “surrender” and close observation to make sense of the

unfamiliar is not considered an option by Kayerts and Carlier, bewil-
dered observers who never recover their bearings. Significantly, the
trope of mutual incomprehension is rendered in tones of certitude
by an omniscient voice that absorbs none of the characters’ sense of
confusion. Mark Wollaeger notes that “Outpost” is free of the
“troubling ambiguities and ambivalences” of Heart of Darkness, as
the characters walk lockstep to their tragic end on the path not of
“progress” but of narrative predetermination (Fiction of Skepticism
24). Rather than observing the disorientation of the ethnographic
field from a distance as in “Outpost,” Heart of Darkness plunges the
reader into an atmosphere of bewilderment. I will return to the
stakes of the aesthetic distinctions between Conrad’s two African
tales in a moment.
Like Kayerts and Carlier, Marlow rejects the possibility of surren-
der, but unlike these hapless victims of circumstance, he responds to
the disquieting effect of dislocation by retreating into work. As
Marlow ventures into the Congo in Heart of Darkness, he describes
himself and his men as “cut off from the comprehension” of their
surroundings—a phrase implying a passive condition that abdicates
responsibility for that severance. Griffith, taking Marlow (as well as
Conrad) at their word, hones in on the novel’s problematic of
obscured vision: “The sights which Marlow perceives are not easily
imparted; thus the language in which experiences are related is noto-
riously inexact. Nevertheless . . . Marlow’s audience, like the readers
of anthropology, travel literature, and ethnographic fiction, is being
asked to see new sights” (36). This reading resonates with Conrad’s
artistic manifesto laid out in the preface to The Nigger of the
“Narcissus”—“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power
of the written work, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before
all, to make you see” (xiv)—but this still begs the question of what
we are supposed to see. What the reader sees most vividly in Heart
of Darkness is Marlow looking agape at the inscrutable; we see vision
thwarted, in fog, in darkness, in signs that can’t be decoded. Marlow
is often frustrated or uneasy with the unintelligibility of signs, but
unlike Kingsley, he does not strive to make sense of them; on the
contrary, he actively cuts himself off from his surroundings and
deliberately forfeits the attempt to understand a bewildering culture
and landscape. It is a wishful reading that considers Marlow “the
quintessential observer who resolutely remains at the border, . . .

although he wants to understand” (Griffith 61).
Instead of thrilling to the unknown, Marlow is overwhelmed by
what he perceives as “oppressive wonder”: “Nowhere did we stop
long enough to get a particularised impression, but the general sense
of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary
pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares” (37, italics mine). Even
nightmares are only hinted at in what is for Marlow a maddening
state of indeterminacy. The excuse offered for Marlow’s failure to
“get a particularised impression” of the coastline or the natives is
that there is never time to decipher what is represented, stereotypi-
cally, as the enigma of Africa and Africans. Yet during the first half of
his journey, Marlow is repeatedly made to wait: “It was upward of
thirty days before I saw the mouth of the big river” (18); “I had to
wait in the station for ten days—an eternity” (21).
It is not that Marlow doesn’t have time to “look,” it is that look-
ing is associated with idleness. Driven by the Victorian work ethic,
Marlow has no patience for idle observation: “I went to work the
next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way
only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts
of life” (26).40 Scrutinizing the unfamiliar requires tolerance of the
kind of disorientation and a relinquishing of control that Marlow,
like Conrad, abhors. Marlow longs for a “world of straightforward
facts” that eludes him (17). Associated stereotypically with the irra-
tional, insane, and instinctual, Africa and Africans are represented as
antithetical to fact, muddling familiar classificatory systems. Amidst
the seeming disorder of a group of itinerate tribes whom Marlow
encounters—a caravan of “savages” noted for their “violent babble
of uncouth sounds”—the Company’s chief accountant, with his fas-
tidious appearance, is presented as a kind of heroic (if absurd) figure
of order: “In the great demoralisation of the land he kept up his
appearance” (21). The accountant, in turn, views the Africans as
forces of chaos who intrude on his cherished system of classifica-
tion41: “When one has got to make correct entries one comes to hate
those savages—hate them to death” (22). An analogous move to
grasp order in “the wilderness” is the “extraordinary find” of the
English book on seamanship that Marlow stumbles on, giving him
“a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably
real” (39). Thus Marlow takes refuge in familiar English artifacts,
“the world of rivets and steamboats,” and any fixed points of refer-
ence he can find, rather than trying to unravel African enigmas.
Whereas for Conrad, work and observation are in opposition, for
Kingsley, observation is work. Her metaphor for the safeguard
against “contamination” from savage ideas, brings her very near to
Conrad: “to my mind, the wisest way is to get into the state of mind
of an old marine engineer who oils and sees that every screw and bolt
of his engines is clean and well watched, and who loves them as liv-
ing things, caressing and scolding them himself, defending them,
with stormy language, against the aspersions of the silly uninformed
outside world, which persists in regarding them as mere machines”
(441). With this bizarre analogy, she at once dehumanizes the peo-
ple she studies (likening them to a well-loved, nearly human boat
engine) and defends the value of this kind of work.
For the most part, then, observation of Africa and Africans is
depicted as a fruitless endeavor in Conrad’s novella. Much like the
vague impression of the coastline, the impression of Africans in
Heart of Darkness is abstract and generalized; Marlow perceives a
crowd as a tangle of eyes, limbs, heads, which do not even resolve
into individuals. A notable exception occurs when out of “a confu-
sion of shadows” one discernible face comes into focus, and Marlow
observes that the young man has “tied a bit of white worsted round
his neck.” He asks himself a series of ethnographic questions regard-
ing its significance: “Why? Where did he get it. [sic] Was it a badge—
an ornament—a charm—a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all
connected with it?” (23). In a text that insists on indeterminacy—
reflecting a general attitude of hermeneutic skepticism—these ques-
tions seem futile. The meaning of the adornment remains obscure,
as Marlow’s gesture of inquiry is aborted: “I didn’t want any more
loitering in the shade and I made haste towards the station” (21).
If Marlow is little disposed to closely observing the natives, iron-
ically, he himself becomes the object of the scientific gaze. In the
“sepulchral city,” before he embarks for Africa, a Belgian doctor
measures Marlow’s cranium, telling him, “you are the first Englishman
to come under my observation” (15). This scene recognizes that the
tools of physical anthropology and scientific colonialism can be
applied to measure and evaluate European colonizers as well as those
they colonize. The Englishman, as foreigner, becomes an object of
ethnographic scrutiny—a kind of attention with which the exilic
Conrad would have been familiar. As the Europeans venture further
into the Congo, Marlow comments, “I felt I was becoming scientif-

ically interesting” (24). Besides expressing self-consciousness about
encounters with ethnographic others, this reversal is indicative of
Conrad’s interest in observing the observer: or, to put it less charita-
bly, it reflects the fact that “Conrad is far more interested in what
happened to whites in Africa than to blacks” (Tilson 107).
In addition to questioning the utility of ethnographic observa-
tion, Heart of Darkness is adamant about the dangers of “surrender.”
Like Prendick, Marlow is disturbed by the thought of his kinship
with so-called prehistoric man: “[T]hat was the worst of it—this sus-
picion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one.
They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what
thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the
thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate
uproar” (38). As in Moreau, kinship between “civilized” Europeans
and a “savage” tribe is constructed as sobering, even horrifying.
Marlow defends his refusal to join in with the by now familiar gospel
of work: “You wonder I didn’t go ashore for a howl and a dance?
Well, no—I didn’t. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments be
hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and
strips of woollen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky
steam-pipes—I tell you” (38). In this figure, Conrad’s protagonist
turns his attention away from humans to attend to a humanized
machine (like Kingsley’s engine), bandaging it like a convalescent.
Of course, the limiting case of “participation in savage life” is rep-
resented by Kurtz. As Benita Parry observes, Marlow’s “academic
tolerance” of cultural difference is transformed into “visceral revul-
sion” after seeing the specter of a white man who has gone native,
and he “retreats” into the “imperialist heartland” (34). Kurtz’s par-
ticipation in native culture is horrifying because that culture is fig-
ured as monstrous, diabolical, brutish, and insane. Kurtz is a
Faustian figure who has gone “beyond the bounds of permitted aspi-
rations,” and Marlow is unable “to break the spell, the heavy mute
spell of the wilderness that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast
by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory
of gratified and monstrous passions” (65). In terms that reiterate
familiar late-Victorian anxieties, going native here represents a brush
with the demonic; it also represents a form of atavistic regression:
the terrifying idea that the “civilized” could revert to a prior evolu-
tionary state.
Both Stanley and Burton have been suggested as potential mod-

els for Kurtz.42 Conrad registers the shift away from the sometimes
violent ethnographic practice of the explorers discussed in Chapter 1
by moving Kurtz to the edge of his canvas. Marlow retreats from
ethnographic inquiry, a science that had been based in part on impe-
rial dominance Conrad regarded with ambivalence. It is a bizarre
side note, then, to recall that Malinowski, who championed ethno-
graphic empathy, would echo Kurtz in his diary: “At moments I was
furious at them. . . . On the whole my feelings toward the natives are
definitely tending to, ‘exterminate the brutes’” (Diary 69). Yet if
Kurtz serves as a kind of “warning tale” for late Victorians—a justi-
fication for keeping Africa at arm’s length—at the same time, he is
constructed as a tragic-heroic figure, signaling Conrad’s conflicted
views toward the traditions of adventure and exploration in which
his narrative is enmeshed. For Conrad is not far from Marlow, I
think, in rejecting Kurtz’s model of Burtonesque ethnography,
which combines conquest and surrender, while simultaneously
admiring the intrepid masculinity that Kurtz embodies (he’s “man
enough to face the darkness”).
B EWILDERMENT AS S TYLE
Though some critics have found fault with the Conradian trope of
obscurity, arguably, what elevates Heart of Darkness to modernist
canonical status is its thematic and stylistic ambiguity, which goes
under various headings, such as “delayed decoding” (Watt), “literary
impressionism” (Ford), and “complexity” (Leavis). Leavis’s exasper-
ation with Conrad’s style is paradigmatic: “He is intent on making a
virtue out of not knowing what he means. The vague and unrealiz-
able, he asserts with a strained impressiveness, is the profound and
tremendously significant. . . . Hadn’t he, we find ourselves asking,
overworked ‘inscrutable,’ ‘inconceivable,’ ‘unspeakable,’ and that
kind of word already? –yet still they recur” (The Great Tradition
6–7). Allon White is also damning of Conrad’s style, accusing the
author of “indulg[ing] in indiscriminate, sham universalism, created
by making everything into an aspect of some sinister, cosmic mys-
tery.” According to White, “The worst aspect of Conrad’s fiction
resides in this use of enigmas a way of artificially generating value”
(22). Yet with ambivalence that is also characteristic of Conrad’s
critics, White goes on to grant that the author’s use of language has
an interpretative richness in its endless “quest for that elusive, final
meaning just beyond the threshold of expression” (123). These sty-
listic elements—so widely admired and condemned—are tangled up
in the textual insistence on indeterminacy that I have been describ-
ing, which, I want to suggest, is in part symptomatic of the author’s
questioning of old ethnographic (as well as imperialist) certainties.
In relation to the question of style, it is instructive to consider the
vast narrative distance between Conrad’s first and second African
tales. Though Kayerts and Carlier are themselves bewildered observers,
regarding Africa and Africans uncomprehendingly, the all-seeing
narrator commands a clear view of the story’s events and maintains
access to the minds of characters on both sides of the cultural divide.
In contrast, the multiple framings of Heart of Darkness destabilize
any reliable frame of reference, engulfing the contact zone in a sty-
listic haze. Made to share in Marlow’s bewilderment, the reader is
given no guide to interpreting baffling cultural practices or lan-
guages rendered only as “uncouth babble.” Departing from the
norms of realist representation, the text renders the disorientation of
the contact zone at the level of style. “Outpost” also problematizes
the values of the adventure genre, but, much like Wells’s fiction, it
does so only at the level of theme, leaving the pseudoobjectivism of
the genre’s storytelling modes intact. Replacing the black and white
perspective of imperial romance, Heart of Darkness’s “penumbra of
spectral meanings” (Eagleton 139) casts doubt not only on the civi-
lizing mission (celebrated by adventure narratives), but also on the
ability to know others.
Critics like Chinua Achebe have linked the novella’s impressionist
style to the author’s ideological evasions. Conrad’s propensity
toward ambiguity and abstraction, Achebe asserts, “must not be dis-
missed . . . as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of
artistic good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes,
incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic
stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and
other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic
felicity” (253). In Achebe’s view, this authorial slipperiness enables
Conrad to dodge responsibility for the racist attitudes perpetuated
by his text. Though I would not contest the text’s racism, it seems
misguided to read the language in which the narrative is clothed as
inherently deceitful—a showman’s trick, concealing unpalatable
truths. The question is not what does the language hide?; the ques-
tion is what does this indirect language signify? Addressing the view
of literary impressionism as verbal trickery, Michael Moses counters
that Conrad’s style confronts the reader with colonial realities and
power sources rather than concealing them. Moses maintains that
rather than signaling artistic bad faith, Conrad’s stylistic indetermi-
nacy renders the incomprehensibility of the colonial experience and
thus “provides a sustained and unflinching exposé of European colo-
nialism and imperialism at its worst” (5). It is important to Moses’s
argument—and to my own—that this aesthetic emerged from a
colonial encounter, not from the urban spaces so frequently associ-
ated with literary modernism.
I want to suggest more specifically that the tropes of obscured
vision, illegible signs, and indeterminate meanings can be linked to
the author’s profound skepticism about the ethnographic project. I
read the text’s retreat from ethnographic meaning-making in two
main ways. First, it can be linked to Conrad’s self-positioning as an
imaginative writer: in terms (ironically) similar to those in which
Haggard favors romance to realism, Conrad champions imaginative
fiction as opposed to what he regards as the inferior work of nonfic-
tion, with its enforced fidelity to the real. Second, in veiling the
encounter with cultural others in stylistic haze, Conrad rejects the
posture of authoritative observer adapted by the explorers and
adventure writers who precede him. Marlow’s retreat from ethnog-
raphy may be seen as one means by which Conrad subverts the con-
ventions of these antecedent genres in order to attain his own
professional ends.
Conrad made a clear distinction between his artistic craft and the
documentary work of his ethnographic contemporaries. In addition
to avidly reading nineteenth-century explorers, Conrad was
immersed in the works of his friend, the colonial administrator and
ad hoc ethnographer, Sir Hugh Clifford, while composing Heart of
Darkness. In 1898, Conrad favorably reviewed Clifford’s Studies in
Brown Humanity, and in 1899, he wrote to Clifford to acknowledge
receipt of his latest book, In a Corner of Asia, complimenting him
on “the knowledge, the feeling, the sympathy” he brings to this por-
trait of the Malay people (Collected Letters 2:200). In the book
review, Conrad qualifies his praise for the work by affixing the seem-
ingly unnecessary qualification that it would be a mistake to read
what is “unadorned truth” as “art,” though at places, the author
comes close “to artistic achievement” (“Observer” 60). He reiter-

ates the complaint in the letter, where he chides Clifford for “not
leav[ing] enough to the imagination” (Collected Letters 2:200).
Although revelatory of Conrad’s own project, the criticism seems
irrelevant to Clifford’s, given the administrator’s prefatory remarks
to this work: “since I have striven throughout to convey a picture of
realities, not merely to write fiction, . . . [t]he description of native
character, of customs, manners, superstitions and social practices
owe nothing at all to my imagination” (Corner of Asia v–vi). John
Marx shrewdly reads this exchange as evidence of Conrad’s carving
out a professional niche for himself as “one who transformed popu-
lar material into art”—taking the “raw material” of the ethnographic
field represented by a writer like Clifford (or Haggard or Stanley)
and refashioning it into high art (92). Marx does not note that
Clifford, in turn, criticized Conrad’s representation of the Malays for
partaking too much of his imagination, resulting in a subjective
impression of the natives that is “infuriatingly” inaccurate.43
Thus in the terms of these contemporaries’ debate, ethnographic
and imaginative writing are opposed categories. For other writers,
including Haggard (as well as the stylistically “retrograde” mod-
ernists Forster and Lawrence, discussed in subsequent chapters),
ethnographic reportage and the work of the imagination were not
incompatible. For Conrad, however, who made no pretense of prac-
ticing ethnography, the imagination trumped documentary accu-
racy. That is to say that Marlow’s emphatic ignorance on cultural
matters, and beyond that, the text’s insistence on the “mystery” of
Africa and Africans, derives partly from an aesthetic philosophy that
prefers the vague and indeterminate to ethnographic accuracy, as
made clear by Conrad’s well-known artistic credo: “Explicitness . . .
is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all sugges-
tiveness, destroying all illusion.”44
This aesthetic has a politics as well and, not surprisingly given that
it is Conrad’s, an ambivalent politics. Conrad subverts the conven-
tions of adventure romance and explorer ethnography by question-
ing the ability of the imperial observer to know and represent
colonized others. His would-be ethnographic narrator finds African
cultures unreadable, in part, because they have been fragmented and
transformed through violent contact with colonizing nations: “They
were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly
now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation” (20).
Thwarting a discourse that conjoined the militancy of conquest with
the scientific quest for ethnographic knowledge, Conrad converts

his protagonist into a troubled bystander, who refuses to affirm the
values of either project. Thus, on the one hand, Conrad’s impres-
sionism may be read as a critique of the discourse of explorer ethnog-
raphy and as the stylistic manifestation of the bewilderment of the
field experience in a colonial context. On the other hand, though
Marlow may reject the colonial ethnographic gaze, the aestheticizing
gaze is not free of colonial or racial bias. Moreover, although
Conrad’s African tales may deflate the heroic pretences of the swag-
gering explorer-ethnographers discussed in Chapter 1, ethnographi-
cally speaking, they offer no alternatives to the fraught encounters in
the contact zone, only proliferating doubts and questions.
The turn-of-the-century narratives this chapter has explored
focus on the observer’s disequilibrium in the field. For Kingsley, the
anxiety-provoking disorientation is an essential phase to pass through
in order to reach understanding—and to this end, surrendering con-
trol becomes a cornerstone of her fieldwork method. Wells’s and
Conrad’s protagonists, in contrast, are terrified by the thought of
losing control, for the precipice of understanding is also the bound-
ary that marks the limits of sanity and humanity for these writers.
Wells shows the potential pitfalls of ethnographic fieldwork, and
draws the empirical basis of observation into question, while Conrad
translates the atmosphere of uncertainty that engulfs ethnographic
encounters into his impressionist style. As we will see in Chapter 3,
Virginia Woolf also converts an ethnographic perspective into a tool
for modernist innovation.
4
C H A P T E R 3
S E L F - N AT I V I Z I N G I N V I R G I N I A W O O L F ’ S
T H E V OYA G E O U T
From the start of my own field-work, it has been my deepest and

strongest conviction that we must finish by studying ourselves
through the same methods and with the same mental attitude
with which we approach exotic tribes.
—Bronislaw Malinowski, First Year’s Work
A t the heart of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915),
is an expedition to a remote Amazonian village undertaken by a
group of English tourists. The veteran traveler among them, Mr.
Flushing, adopts the role of impromptu ethnographer, biding the
party to “remark the signs of human habitation”—signs he confi-
dently assumes that he can interpret, his imperious approach reflect-
ing the assumption that they are the spectators while the natives are
the spectacle, and that native life is transparent, readily legible to an
outside observer (284). Such assumptions are almost immediately
belied, however, when the observers find that they are observed. A
sleight of perspective turns the English into strangers, as the point of
view shifts from the tourists to the native women who are the subject
of the following sentence:
The women took no notice of the strangers, except that their hands
paused for a moment and their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed
upon them with the motionless inexpressive gaze of those removed
from each other far, far beyond the plunge of speech. Their hands
moved again, but the stare continued. It followed them as they
walked, as they peered into the huts where they could distinguish
guns leaning in the corner, and bowls upon the floor, and stacks of
rushes; in the dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded them, and old
women stared out too. (284)
Reversing the conventional dynamic of a colonial encounter, the

native women’s insistent, wandering eyes pursue the English until
the English look away, ashamed. The encounter is imbued with a
sense of bewilderment by pronoun referents that shift in an unpre-
dictable way—their, they, and them signify interchangeably the
tourists and the natives—such that the reader becomes as disoriented
as the characters. Despite intense scrutiny on both sides, these
would-be ethnographers seem to arrive at an impasse: separated by a
vast linguistic gulf, neither group can understand the other.
By staging a cross-cultural encounter in The Voyage Out, like other
modernists in this study, Woolf taps into the primary discourse for
making sense of imperial England’s newfound cultural diversity:
modern anthropology. Inasmuch as this scene insists on the opacity
of other cultures, it undermines the premise of a discipline that seeks
to elucidate realms of difference. Yet by defamiliarizing English cul-
ture and turning English characters into “natives,” the novel partic-
ipates in a reflexive mode wholly characteristic of ethnographic and
anthropological writings in this period. Clifford Geertz calls this
mode “self-nativizing,” or turning an ethnographic eye back on the
home culture and using “extravagant otherness” as a means of “self-
critique.”1 In the introduction to the disciplinary manifesto,
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski suggests that the prin-
cipal justification for fieldwork is that by studying other cultures “we
shall have some light shed on our own” (25). This statement inverts
fieldwork’s apparent aims by placing emphasis on the ethnogra-
pher’s “own culture” (an ambiguous category in this instance), sug-
gesting, perhaps dubiously, that cultural others should be of
personal use. The self-nativizing move cannot be regarded as simply
“self”-serving, however, for it enables cultural critique and often
destabilizes identities.
In The Voyage Out, Woolf bends modern anthropology’s self-
nativizing perspective to simultaneously scrutinize English culture
and reformulate fictional character, reflecting the profound disloca-
tions and decenterings of modernity. Ordinary English customs,
institutions, and artifacts become strange to the main characters as
S E L F - N AT I V I Z I N G IN V I R G I N I A W O O L F ’ S T H E V OYA G E O U T 99
they travel to a fictitious South American town and into the Amazon,
encountering cultures they perceive to be radically different from
their own. Voyaging out thrusts protagonist Rachel Vinrace into a
morass of existential uncertainties that launch Woolf’s career of aes-
thetic experimentation with and philosophical interrogation of char-
acter. The elaboration of a new model of character—the nebulous,
incoherent, fragmented “modernist self”—is intertwined with a crit-
ical examination of English culture: Rachel is struck both by the way
that “the whole system” in which the English live appears “quite
unfamiliar and inexplicable” (36) and by what she calls “the
unspeakable queerness” of her own being (125), vivified in a foreign
context. For the novelist, then, “nativizing the self” entails not only
looking at English culture in a new light but also revolutionizing
character—a central component of the modernist project.
Adapting ethnographic tools, Woolf makes her first foray into
experimental subjectivity in The Voyage Out. While representing the
protagonist’s disintegration, the novel deflates imperial identities,
limning a scaled-back version of Englishness, anchored in everyday
customs and artifacts. In presenting the English as one culture
among others, and presenting character as more porous and fluid
than it had previously been conceived, Woolf does more than regis-
ter the dislocations of modernity in her first novel: with the anthro-
pologists and ethnographers of her day, she moves toward a new
understanding of English culture and character, one that she will
continue to explore in later writings.
In this chapter, I situate Woolf’s work in an anthropological
milieu that includes the writings of the British classicist and anthro-
pologist Jane Ellen Harrison, who published her influential Ancient
Art and Ritual in the same year that Woolf completed The Voyage
Out (1913), also turning an ethnographic eye back on English cul-
ture. The chapter also traces connections between The Voyage Out
and the U.S. anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture
(1934)—the paradigmatic example of “self nativizing” for Geertz,
and a key text in popularizing the idea of cultural relativism. The
final section shows how Woolf continues to employ and interrogate
ethnographic methods and premises in her later writings, as illus-
trated by “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930), a text
that brings participant-observation geographically home. As this late
essay suggests, much of Woolf’s oeuvre may be considered ethno-
graphic in the broad sense, for though she does not take up the
theme of cross-cultural encounter so overtly again (except perhaps in

the gypsy episode of Orlando), she persistently estranges the familiar
and interrogates the premise that it is possible to know others.2
M ODERN A NTHROPOLOGY: O URSELVES E XPOSED 3
Before proceeding, it will be useful to clarify what I mean by “self-

nativizing.” Following Geertz, I intend self-nativize to signify the
move to regard one’s own culture through the estranging lens of
ethnography, such that familiar customs, artifacts, and beliefs are
rendered strangely visible—an anthropological version of the mod-
ernist dictum, “make it new.” This “homecoming” of anthropology
as Malinowski dubs it, whereby we study “ourselves through the
same methods and with the same mental attitude with which we
approach exotic tribes,”4 may be considered an instance of the fun-
damental reflexivity of modernity, “a major engine” of which,
according to Michael North, “is the oscillation between local and
global points-of-view” (15).
Such self-reflexivity also characterizes what Buzard has termed
“metropolitan autoethnography,” a “utopian” genre whereby “Western
societies self-consciously represent themselves” as a defensive act of
self-definition in the context of increasing global “entanglements”
perceived to threaten cultural integrity (“Ethnography as Interruption”
450). Buzard refutes Stuart Hall’s imputation that in Victorian
England forces of globalization eagerly engulfed ethnic differences,
“translat[ing] everything in the world into a kind of replica of itself,”
by arguing that the nineteenth-century novel performs a kind of
ethnographic salvage of English culture, deliberately “turning away
from that seemingly boundariless world in which the nation’s
destiny, identity, and ‘culture’ (its way of life) are embroiled”
(“Anywhere’s Nowhere” 11). Although autoethnography is a useful
concept, I want to move in a somewhat different direction here.
Unlike the metropolitan autoethnographies Buzard discusses, The
Voyage Out maps a touristic trajectory away from familiar realms of
Englishness; far from being utopian, it shows the perils of acute self-
consciousness. Moreover, The Voyage Out uses the cross-cultural
encounter to foreground the epistemological uncertainty of ethno-
graphic fieldwork, even as it turns English culture into an ethno-
graphic object.
Self-nativize also suits my purposes in that it draws attention to

the cornerstone of the new ethnographic methodology taking shape
while Woolf was writing her first novel: the move to inhabit “the
native’s point of view.” Detailed in a 1912 field manual, the emerg-
ing aim of fieldworkers was “to enter into their [informants’] feel-
ings, to think as they did, and to become for the time being one of
themselves.”5 The notion of presuming to inhabit the perspective of
“the native”—the second meaning I have in mind for self-nativize—
has of course been subsequently criticized as politically and method-
ologically dubious.6 Woolf partially anticipates these critiques, even
as she experiments with the fictional possibilities inherent in a sub-
jectivity that unsettles fixed identities.
Harrison’s writing exhibits both senses of self-nativize outlined
thus far. Part of the Cambridge Ritualist school who believed that art
and myth shared common roots in ritual, Harrison studied Greek art
and archaeology at the British museum, traveled extensively to
archaeological sites, and taught courses at Newnham College for
women at Cambridge after they made her a fellow in 1898—a fact
Woolf playfully alludes to in pretending to glimpse her at “Fernham”
(Newnham) in A Room of One’s Own, paying homage to Harrison’s
stature as an important female intellectual: “could it be the famous
scholar, could it be J— H— herself?” (17). Given that Harrison’s
earlier works, such as Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
(1903), concern themselves with the matriarchal origins of Greek
myth, Woolf scholars have tended to focus on Woolf’s use of
Harrison’s texts as a reservoir of feminist myths, a counterpoint to
James Frazer’s androcentric emphasis on dying-and-reviving gods in
The Golden Bough.7 What I do here instead is explore the self-nativiz-
ing device in Harrison’s work, especially Ancient Art and Ritual,
and its connection to the kind of fluid subjectivity we see in Woolf’s
modernism.
Though she could not have read Harrison’s book before com-
pleting The Voyage Out,8 Woolf had read Harrison’s earlier work, and
it is possible that she would have been familiar with the ideas of
Harrison’s work-in-progress through her friendship with Roger
Fry.9 A study of the ritual roots of classical theater, Ancient Art and
Ritual culminates in a critique of the social stagnation of Harrison’s
own age, and, in particular, the impotence of modern art. Harrison
argues that whereas for her readers, ritual has become “a dull and
formal thing,” a meaningless repetition, for primitive cultures, ritual
is alive, motivated by intense desire, and infused with meaning and

purpose (27). “The earnest, zealous act” of the savage is contrasted
with the “folly and futility” of modern rituals enacted in spiritual
desiccation, by so many “hollow men.” Echoing a refrain of literary
modernism, Harrison laments that modern ritual has been reduced
to hollow mimicry: “We mimic not only others but ourselves
mechanically, even after all emotion proper to the act is dead” (27).
She proposes that anthropologists’ study of “primitive ritual” can
school modern artists in the proper function of their work. For
Harrison, art “rises by way of ritual out of emotion, out of life keenly
and vividly lived” (235), and in turn, revivified by its encounter with
the primitive, art can regenerate society. In its ideal form, Harrison
writes, art “invigorates, enhances, promotes actual, spiritual, and
through it physical life” (209).
Just as Harrison’s critique of modern art as impotent and incom-
mensurate with modern experience is familiar to modernist scholars,
so is her solution: a collaboration between anthropology and art that
T. S. Eliot would also call for in lauding Joyce’s use of “the mythical
method” in place of traditional narrative structure. As if taking a cue
from Eliot, a generation of scholars traced the mythic content of
modernist literary texts to their anthropological or archetypal roots
in Frazer, Jung, or Harrison.10 But the method that I am interested
in here is not the use of myth (or, in Harrison’s terms, ritual) to
impose new order or coherence on the chaos of modern life; rather
it is the methods of the new anthropology and ethnology that poten-
tially unsettle and reformulate identities. Harrison subtly destabilizes
a hegemonic view of English culture: insofar as the new anthropol-
ogy turns the home culture into a defamiliarized object of critique,
it potentially decenters national identities. This autocritique is
achieved partly through the assumption of the native’s perspective,
which enables the ethnographer to speak with authority from an
imaginary position outside her own culture.
Harrison went to unusual lengths for an armchair anthropologist
to “grasp the native’s point of view.” Her theatrical lecturing style at
Cambridge included not only lantern slides and special effects but
also dramatic role playing: in a presentation on the ritual origins of
the Bacchae, for instance, Harrison assumed the part of the inspired
maenad (Jane Ellen Harrison 62). Her teaching involved a kind of
transportation to an alien realm of experience, moving one student
to assert that she “stood for all true magic and mystery of the
unknown” (“Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters” 68). In a review
of Erwin Rohde’s Psyche, Harrison again puts herself in the ancient

worshippers’ shoes, mediating between the perspective of the
Dionysian revelers and that of the “rational,” “modern” scholar:
“To dance till we are dizzy, to toss our heads in ecstasy, may not
seem to us the best means of promoting spirituality, but to anyone
who has watched either the dancing or the howling dervishes at
work the whole faith becomes historically intelligible” (165).
Reminiscent of Woolf’s slippery pronouns in the opening passage,
the referents are unstable here. The sentence enacts a metamorpho-
sis: the Greek maenads, the referent of the collective pronoun of the
opening clause (“we” dance; “toss our heads”), are transformed into
the anthropologist-guided readers dubious about this unfamiliar rit-
ual, the “us” of the main clause. Using the plural form, Harrison
takes the reader with her as syntactically she bodies forth a flexible,
mobile form of identity, moving seamlessly from the ancient “sav-
age” to the “modern” point of view.
In this way, thinking “like a native,” whatever its political dubi-
eties, stretches the boundaries of the self. Harrison’s anthropological
practice (writing and lecturing) may have contributed to her under-
standing of the self as elastic and fluid, in contrast to what she envi-
sioned as an earlier, more clearly bounded model of identity,
reflecting “a time when man was very sure of his own selfhood and
separateness, when lines were sharply drawn and selves were envis-
aged as solid bodies in space mutually exclusive, not as forces inter-
acting” (Alpha and Omega 44). One of the major authors of this
innovative model of selfhood was of course Woolf, whose novels
Harrison read with interest.
Indeed Harrison sounds like a Woolfian character—a Rachel
Vinrace or a Mrs. Dalloway—when she describes how after reading
the psychologist William James, suddenly she “seemed to go to
pieces, to lapse into a stream of consciousness, an ill-defined com-
pound, or tendency, partly [herself], partly other people” (Alpha
and Omega 38). In attributing her altered view of her self to new
ideas from psychology, Harrison overlooks both the propensity
within her own discipline for unsettling identities and the example
of modern fiction, with its fragmented, dislocated characters. The
colliding cultures and decentered identities elaborated in The
Voyage Out answer Harrison’s call to use anthropology to revitalize
art, while at the same time performing a reciprocal critique of that
discipline.
M ODERN F ICTION :
S ELF -N ATIVIZING IN T HE V OYAGE O UT
In nativizing the English, Woolf spotlights not only the fracturing of

modern British society and lack of vitality in modern rituals but also
the complacency of pre-1914 England, based on an inflated image of
the empire as vast and omnipotent—a complacency surprisingly
resilient after such imperial trials as the Boer War. At the same time,
working against the grain of the novel of personal development, The
Voyage Out depicts a character that dissolves further and further into
“unspeakable queerness,” signifying a potent critique of the stability
of personal and national identities, and giving rise to a genre that
perhaps should be dubbed “the novel of personal dissolution.”11 If
“the fashioned wholes of a self and of a culture” can function as
“mutually reinforcing allegories of identity,” as Clifford argues in
Predicament of Culture (104), the converse applies in this case: The
Voyage Out simultaneously unsettles a cultural narrative of national
supremacy and the fiction of a unified self. But rather than leaving
self and society dismantled, Woolf’s text points toward a new, more
fluid, and relativistic model of identity.
The imperial mind-set that the novel undermines is encapsulated
by Clarissa Dalloway’s effusion on the glory of Englishness, uttered
as the tourists approach South America: “Being on this ship seems to
make it so much more vivid—what it means to be English. One
thinks of all we’ve done, and our navies, and the people in India and
Africa, and how we’ve gone on century after century, sending out
boys from little country villages—and of men like you Dick, and it
makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear not to be English! (50–51).”
Clarissa’s expansive remark, encompassing whole continents and
centuries of British rule, is significantly deflated by other descrip-
tions of England and the English in the text. Although the novel
treats Clarissa’s jingoism with irony, her idea that the contours of
national identity become “much more vivid” when thrown into
relief against an unfamiliar backdrop is germane to the concerns of
the whole book. As anthropologist Roy Wagner puts it, “the culture
in which one grows up is never really ‘visible’—it is taken for
granted, and its assumptions are felt to be self-evident” (4). The cer-
emonies, institutions, and artifacts of everyday English lives become
“vivid” (because strange) as the characters encounter cultures they
perceive to be radically different from their own. While the English

characters sporadically seek out these cross-cultural encounters—
yearning for new experiences and insight into different lives—ulti-
mately, the text reiterates the anthropological conceit that to
contemplate another culture is to scrutinize oneself, as the tourists
are converted into objects of ethnographic study.
The self-nativizing tendency of the novel begins when the tourists
glimpse their capital from the vantage point of a departing ship: “It
seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same
spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the
sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt,
eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a
crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser” (17–18). The fin
de siécle slogan for the British empire, “the land where the sun never
sets,” is ironically recast as the idea that “no darkness would ever set-
tle” in London becomes a thing of horror: the abiding light conven-
tionally symbolizing the vastness and supremacy of the empire is
instead “dreadful,” conjuring hellish pictures of being “eternally
burnt.” The capital city is figured by this shift of perspective as a “cir-
cumscribed mound,” at once evocative of a burial mound (bringing
to mind Conrad’s sepulchral city) and of an archaeological site, sub-
ject to future excavations and anthropological study.12
The impression of the smallness or strangeness of the nation is
reinforced by a series of images that figure England or London as
increasingly diminutive. The narrator remarks, “Not only did it
[England] appear to them to be an island, and a very small island,
but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned” (32),
echoing an observation Woolf made in her journal when she visited
Greece in 1906: “Out here . . . The Times loses its stately propor-
tions: it is the private sheet of a small colony of islanders, whose
noise is effectually shut up in their prison” (Passionate Apprentice
345). Elsewhere, the capital is figured ingloriously as a stranded
ship—“They had left London sitting on its mud” (27). The deflat-
ing of a grandiose image of an imperial nation is one of the major
manifestations of cultural critique in The Voyage Out, often enacted
through dramatic shifts of perspective such as these. Just as England
appears distorted and greatly diminished from the vantage point of
the South American shore, the English appear, in turn, unrecogniz-
able: it is unclear “whether they were really live creatures or only
lumps of rigging” (87). The pompous classicist Mr. Pepper (who has
been meditating on their destination, Santa Marina, as a lost colonial

opportunity) comes in for particular ridicule as he is “mistaken for a
cormorant, and then, as unjustly, transformed into a cow” (87), his
“mutability,” according to Elizabeth Lambert, undercutting “both
his authority as a man of facts and the glory of civilization’s artifacts”
(11). By showing the strangeness of Englishness when viewed from
another vantage, the novel acknowledges that the appearance and
value of other cultures is a function in part of perspective—the mul-
titude of cultures within the empire providing a multitude of van-
tage points from which to observe and be observed. Foreshadowing
a major motif for Woolf and for modernism in general, the some-
times jarring shifts of perspective here can be linked to the emerg-
ing concept of cultural relativism, given the novel’s conspicuous
move to decenter its English characters, juxtaposing them with
South American others.
Not only does the novel estrange English characters and customs
in a reverse ethnographic move that transforms the everyday into the
bizarre, but it also throws the mechanisms for self-nativizing into
relief, through repeated scenes of self-consciously depicted cultural
observation. One such scene takes place one night when Rachel and
Helen, staying at a local villa, become voyeurs of their compatriots at
the hotel. Crouching in the bushes, these two women view a tableau
of Englishness illuminated before them: “Each window revealed a
different section of the life of the hotel. They drew into one of the
broad columns of shadow which separated the windows and gazed
in.” They observe the kitchen staff at work (“white cooks were dip-
ping their arms into cauldrons, while the waiters made their meal
voraciously off broken meats”) and ladies and gentlemen, who have
evidently dined well, talking soporifically, reading magazines, play-
ing cards, and one “thin woman . . . flourishing up and down the
piano” (100). The rhetorical impression of the invisible observer
that characterizes ethnographic description is realized dramatically,
as Rachel and Helen, concealed in darkness, look on unseen, until
they are discovered and flee. (This scene of autoethnographic
voyeurism foreshadows the later one, where the English tourists voy-
age up the Amazon to see the natives “as they live.”)
As ordinary customs and appearances are defamiliarized, Rachel is
increasingly bewildered by the conventions of her own society: “She
could not explain to herself why suddenly, as her aunt spoke, the
whole system in which they lived had appeared before her eyes as
something quite unfamiliar and inexplicable, and themselves as

chairs or umbrellas dropped about here and there without any
reason” (36). Pried from its ordinary context like an object in a
museum, or like the deliberately incongruous juxtapositions in a sur-
realist painting, Rachel’s culture loses its coherence. The English
class structure, seen through this estranging lens, makes it seem as if
Rachel has fallen down the rabbit hole: “Out here it seemed as
though the people of England must be shaped in the body like the
kings and queens and knights and pawns of the chessboard, so
strange were their differences, so marked and so implicitly believed
in” (99). Repeatedly, the protagonist is astonished by the peculiarity
of everyday customs of the upper class, such as the appearance of her
aunt with a message: “The utter absurdity of a woman coming into
a room with a piece of paper in her hand amazed Rachel” (124).
For the critic Andrea Lewis, following Gayatri Spivak’s lead from
“Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” The Voyage
Out serves “to empower a definition of bourgeois feminine individ-
ualism occurring at the margins of empire” (115). Lewis reads
Rachel’s identity as consolidated “by the erasure of colonized cul-
ture . . . [and] . . . by the ability to set oneself apart from that
silenced culture” (118). This reading ignores the significantly differ-
ent imperial dynamic displayed in Woolf’s text than in, for example,
Jane Eyre, where, Spivak argues, the heroine’s identity is fortified
through the immolation of a colonial other. Instead of being
“empowered” by her voyage out, Rachel is stranded in a kind of lim-
inal, no-person’s zone. Rather than shoring up the protagonist’s
identity, the quasicolonial encounter erodes an already nebulous
sense of self. Helen regrets that there is “nothing to take hold of in
girls—nothing hard, permanent, satisfying” (20), and Rachel’s dis-
placement further attenuates this seemingly diffuse character. She is
increasingly unable to get her bearings, until sitting in the villa in
Santa Marina, she is “overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the
fact that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the
middle of the world. . . . Her dissolution became so complete she
could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still” (125).
This odd figuring (in an English novel) of a South American port
town as “the middle of the world” contributes to the decentering of
the imperial self. A brief vision “of her own personality, of herself as
a real everlasting thing . . . unmergeable” may seem to stabilize, cen-
ter, and concretize the self, but the text emphasizes instead how that
vision “flashes” through Rachel’s mind, its very transience serving to

highlight her general state of dislocation and diffusion (84). Rachel’s
insubstantial character can be read partly as an indictment of a patri-
archal society that has failed to educate the heroine, partly as a means
of raising ontological issues that reflect simultaneous transforma-
tions in society and the individual, and partly as an aesthetic end in
itself, reflecting Woolf’s first endeavor to redefine “character” in
modern fiction. Crucially, the text achieves all of these narrative and
political objectives by bringing anthropology “home,” by applying
techniques designed for the far-flung subjects of Empire to English
culture and character.
With characters as well as English culture voyaging beyond con-
ventional boundaries in this novel, Woolf embarks on the project of
reformulating fictional character, as later elaborated in her famous
quarrel with Arnold Bennet. Many of the attributes of the Woolfian
subject developed more fully in her later writings—fluidity of per-
spective, a sense of dislocation, the perceived dissolution of the
boundaries of the self, the multiplicity and discontinuity of differ-
ent “selves”—can be linked here to the novel’s ethnographic per-
spective.
The potential within ethnography for unsettling fixed identities is
suggested in an extreme form by Malinowski’s Trobriand field diary.
In its moody pages (which may be read as a tool for catharsis in the
field), Malinowski writes of the impossibility of maintaining a “uni-
fied personality” (296), which anthropologist Anthony Forge sug-
gests is the “dilemma of every anthropologist in the field—that of
retaining his/her identity while being as much as possible involved
in the affairs of the local society” (xxvi). The self that emerges from
the diary’s pages has been described as “mercurial,” “polyphonic,”
and “protean.”13 The diary registers a radical sense of alienation and
self-questioning, with Malinowski even wondering whether or not
he has succumbed to “tropical madness” (69). The English tourists’
sense of being “cut off” from the familiar is less acute than
Malinowski’s, but the experience nonetheless destabilizes unified
identities in the novel, threatening the protagonist with psychic dis-
integration.
The defamiliarization of English identities and English culture in
The Voyage Out culminates in the main characters’ expedition to the
remote Amazonian village. The trip is proposed as an antidote to
the banal routines of the English tourists abroad—like Rachel and
Helen’s exploration of the streets of Santa Marina, a means of poten-

tially revitalizing a lifeless and trivial society. Yet the impact of the
scene relies on frustrating these expectations. “Stepping cautiously,
they observed the women, who were squatting on the ground in tri-
angular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting straw or kneading
something in bowls. But when they had looked for a moment undis-
covered, they were seen, and Mr. Flushing, advancing into the cen-
tre of the clearing, was engaged in talk with a lean majestic man,
whose bones and hollows at once made the shapes of the
Englishman’s body appear ugly and unnatural” (284). The English
control the terms of the encounter for little more than a sentence:
they observe, wielding what is meant to be an unobtrusive gaze,
voyeurs in the jungle, until they are discovered in a reversal that sets
the tone for the whole encounter. In contrast to their South
American foils, the English are represented as “ugly and unnatural”
and as “treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these
soft instinctive people” (285). This is not the romantic primitivism
of Jane Harrison or D. H. Lawrence, however—the scene does not
idealize these ultimately inscrutable strangers, but rather, under-
scores the ambivalence of an encounter where the observers
acknowledge their vulnerability to observation.
For their part, the villagers are depicted as impervious to the
interruption of their daily lives by the English interlopers: “But soon
the life of the village took no notice of them; they had become
absorbed into it. The women’s hands became busy again with the
straw; their eyes dropped. If they moved, it was to fetch something
from the hut, or to catch a straying child, or to cross the space with
a jar balanced on their heads; if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh
unintelligible cry.” The otherwise omniscient narrator pauses on the
threshold of this different culture, observing surfaces but refusing to
speculate about meanings, dwelling instead on the “unintelligibility”
of the language to the English auditors and on actions whose very
simplicity seems to deny the need for interpretation. Suggesting a
critique of anthropology’s presumptions, The Voyage Out retreats
from the possibility of knowing another culture and focuses on the
move to nativize the English.
Woolf obliquely invokes “the native’s point of view” in The
Voyage Out by depicting the English as objects of the native’s gaze,14
only to retreat from the possibility of attaining any meaningful
insight into this other culture. From the perspective enforced by the
passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, it is the English who

are incomprehensible, viewed by the unfamiliar tribe with “the gaze
of those removed from each other far, far beyond the plunge of
speech” (284)—a formulation that emphasizes the vast distance
between cultures, a distance unbridgeable by language. The passage
goes on to underscore the unease of being subjected to an inquisitive
gaze: “As they sauntered about, the stare followed them, passing
over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously, not without hos-
tility, like the crawl of a winter fly. As she [one of the native women]
drew apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her
baby, the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they
moved uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than
stand there looking at her any longer” (284–85). The English expe-
rience the gaze viscerally, as a fly crawling over their flesh, which in
turn is anatomized (as the fly traverses legs, bodies, heads)—the par-
asitical gaze traversing their bodies as though they were corpses. The
passage conveys the dehumanization that potentially goes with
being nativized. Juxtaposed with the native woman’s somewhat hos-
tile gaze is the image of her breast-feeding, an image at once poten-
tially sacred (evocative of an exotic Madonna) and semipornographic,
one that conventionally would invite voyeuristic consumption in
ethnographic writings.15 The syntax subtly realigns the power
dynamic of this encounter, however: the gaze that the native woman
wields forms the main clause’s subject, such that she is identified as
the actor, while the would-be voyeurs are the objects of her gaze. In
this way, the sentence structure further dislocates the English
tourists, representing them as uncomfortably aware of competing
wills, desires, and points of view.
Describing the phenomenon of culture shock, Wagner suggests
that “the local ‘culture’ first manifests itself to the anthropologist
through his own inadequacy; against the backdrop of his new sur-
roundings it is he who has become ‘visible’” (7). Terrence’s remark
perfectly characterizes the English response in this instance: “it
makes one feel insignificant, doesn’t it?” (285). The characters feel
vulnerable because although they sought out this experience, they
have not controlled the terms of the exchange; they are sized up and
seem to come up short. In this way their subject positions as English
travelers no longer appear stable or unassailable. Rachel repeats her
abiding question about the permanence of identity: “Are we on the
deck of a steamer on a river in South America? Am I Rachel, are you

Terrence?” (289).
On the whole, the encounter leaves the English tourists unsettled:
“Peaceful, and even beautiful at first, the sight of the woman who
had given up looking at them made them feel very cold and melan-
choly” (285). St. John is depicted walking “slowly down to the river,
absorbed in his own thoughts, which were bitter and unhappy, for he
felt himself alone” (285). Shaken by the seemingly tame, uneventful
encounter, Helen blames the Flushings for having compelled them
to have “ventured too far and exposed themselves” (286). Her
thoughts wander from the vulnerability of the “flesh of men and
women, which breaks so easily” to envisioning a boat in London
capsized at midday: “It was morbid, she knew, to imagine such
things; nevertheless she sought out the figures of the others between
the trees, and whenever she saw them she kept her eyes fixed on
them, so that she might be able to protect them from disaster”
(286). England has been depicted as a stretch of mud, a tiny island
in which people are “imprisoned,” and in this figure it shrinks even
further, as the nation allegorically becomes a precarious craft that
tips over, imperiling all of its passengers.
As the novel charts the progressive fragmentation and eventual
dissolution of its heroine through an encounter with cultural others,
it exposes the fragility of personal and national identities, identities
that perhaps cohere primarily through anxious reiteration.16 Within
the novel’s frame, the ethnographic encounter is represented as dis-
turbing, even fatal, as it is immediately after the expedition that
Rachel contracts a tropical disease and dies, such that the novel func-
tions as a kind of antiadvertisement for ethnographic tourism. In this
sense, The Voyage Out may be read at once as debunking Harrison’s
romantic idea that the “primitive” can revitalize English culture and
participating in potentially racist thinking that links cultural others
with the idea of contamination. Stepping outside the novel’s frame,
Woolf may be thought of as using the ethnographic encounter to
help refashion character. Woolf describes hers as an age in which
“character is dissipated into shreds,”17 and her fiction self-con-
sciously represents that dissipation, as, throughout her career, she
foregrounds the raveling and unraveling of character. In The Voyage
Out, the tool for reshaping character in this way is the ethnographic
perspective that turns an estranging eye on English customs and
characters.
Along with nativizing character, the novel’s ethnographic per-

spective reveals customs to be arbitrary and local, rather than uni-
versal. Yet though the novel deflates imperial nationality, it also
recuperates the value of local cultures—in the new, plural, modern
sense. When they have returned from their expedition, and the
tourists resume their provisional routines, Rachel briefly experiences
clarity before receding into a new existential fog, this time induced
by tropical fever: “She felt herself amazingly secure as she sat in her
arm-chair, and able to review not only the night of the dance, but
the entire past . . . as if she had been turning in a fog for a long time,
and could now see exactly where she had turned” (314). With this
new clarity, Rachel reflects that after all “things formed themselves
into a pattern . . . and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning.
When she looked back she could see that a meaning of some kind
was apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit of the
Dalloways . . . and in the life of her father” (314).
In the novel’s last pages, everyday details of English life that have
appeared incoherent and strange when decontextualized resolve
themselves into a familiar pattern for St. John Hirst. He is comforted
in his grief over Rachel’s death by noticing that “the movements and
the voices [of the English circle] seemed to draw together from dif-
ferent parts of the room, and to combine themselves into a pattern
before his eyes”—a pattern that Hirst is “content to sit silently
watching . . . build itself up” (374). The novel closes with a descrip-
tion of the displaced English tourists, which resonates with the
description of the Amazonian natives. As St. John falls asleep,
“across his eyes passed a procession of objects, black and indistinct,
the figures of people picking up their books, their cards, their balls of
wool, their work-baskets, and passing him one after another on their
way to bed” (375). It is in this procession of familiar artifacts, and in
the pattern of local, customary activities, that the novel anchors
meaning in a text that has been concerned with defamiliarizing
national and personal identities.
PATTERNS OF E NGLISHNESS
Interestingly, pattern—the word Rachel and Hirst use to describe

the shape of their culture coming into focus—is the same word the
U.S. anthropologist most famous for popularizing the idea of cul-
tural relativism, Ruth Benedict, will use in her 1934 Patterns of
Culture to describe the variable forms that different, but, she will
insist, “equally valid” cultures take (278). Benedict read The Waves
while writing Patterns of Culture, and one is tempted to imagine that
Woolf’s innovative way of imagining the interrelations between
characters in that novel (which Woolf described in her diary as a
“mosaic” of voices [3:298]) influenced Benedict’s way of visualizing
the integration of cultures into specific configurations.18 In seizing
on pattern to describe the emerging meaning of the everyday lives,
artifacts, and customs of her English characters, Woolf anticipates
(and perhaps helps to generate) the anthropological sense of the
term that Benedict will turn into “a household word.”19
Patterns of Culture is a study of three contrasting cultures that
illustrate Benedict’s famous statement that culture is “personality
writ large”—the “Apollonian” Zuñi of New Mexico, the “treacher-
ous” Dobu of Melanesia, and the “megalomaniacal” Kwakiutl of the
Pacific Northwest. Along with these, the reader can infer a fourth:
“our own,” its foibles reflected in what Geertz describes as the fun
house mirrors of the other three (115). Setting out to undermine
ethnocentricity and foster an appreciation of cultural diversity,
Benedict also aims to “nativize” the West, an objective that, she
states, “can most economically be arrived at by [the] detour” of
studying others (56). Critics have justifiably found the goals of pro-
moting tolerance and illustrating diversity at odds with Benedict’s
reductive typological approach and her apparent willingness to dis-
tort or caricature other cultures in order to critique her own. (This is
a contradiction that also marks Woolf’s text, which exposes the
foibles of the English in part by caricaturing South Americans as
“soft instinctive people” [296].20) What I want to explore is the con-
gruence between Woolf’s and Benedict’s elaboration of the shifting
concept of culture.
The idea of cultures, plural—as complex, integrated, geographi-
cally bounded wholes—was under construction in this period.21
Although the humanistic, Arnoldian model of “capital C” Culture
and the increasingly relativist Boasian-Malinowskian model of
“small c” cultures seem almost diametrically opposed, recent studies
have suggested that the literary and anthropological senses of the
concept emerged in tandem and were interconnected in significant
and complex ways.22 In Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept,
Marc Manganaro identifies Benedict as a major early-twentieth-cen-
tury “architect” of the culture concept, and I want to suggest that
her way of conceptualizing culture may illuminate Woolf’s way of

conceiving of Englishness in The Voyage Out.
Benedict describes the process of ascertaining the culture’s
dominant shape as gradual, punctuated by sudden moments of clar-
ity, where “hundreds of details fall into over-all patterns” (The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword 12)—a formulation that evokes the
way that quotidian English life suddenly appears to have a discern-
able shape for both Rachel and Hirst in Woolf’s novel. Woolf’s char-
acters become auto-ethnographic, glimpsing the shapes of their
lives from afar, as previously unexamined details of English life (eat-
ing, dancing, mating rituals) coalesce into a pattern, much as in
Benedict’s moment of anthropological inspiration. Indeed, The
Voyage Out may be read as an imaginative ethnography of English
culture, a tour through English customs (tea-taking, English
dances, drawing-room concerts), rites of passage (coming of age and
courtship), institutions (marriage, empire), and so on. To describe
the novel in these terms is to invoke a lineage that might include the
novels of Austen or the anglophilic Henry James,23 but Woolf’s rep-
resentation of English customs and manners departs significantly
from the tradition of the novel of manners in its heightened ethno-
graphic self-consciousness: Woolf’s first novel is filled with scenes
that throw into relief not only English culture but also the self-
nativizing device that renders it visible.
If Woolf’s first novel registers the emergent idea of cultural plu-
ralism, it does not do so in a utopian mode. Patterns of Culture pro-
vides a possible explanation. Benedict observes that until recently,
cushioned by imperial successes, the West has been deluded into
regarding its own customs and mores as universal and absolute (6),
and the erosion of this belief has sent shock waves through society:
[t]he sophisticated modern temper has made of social relativity, even

in the small area it has recognized, a doctrine of despair. It has pointed
out its incongruity with the orthodox dreams of permanence and ide-
ality and with the individual’s illusions of autonomy. It has argued
that if human existence must give up these, the nutshell of existence is
empty. . . . It rouses pessimism because it throws old formulas into
confusion, not because it contains anything intrinsically difficult. As
soon as the new opinion is embraced as customary belief, it will be
another trusted bulwark of the good life. We shall arrive then at a
more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new
bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life
which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials for exis-
tence. (278)
In The Voyage Out, the trope of the diminished nation, the impres-
sion of mechanistic courtship and religion, and finally, the English
response to the encounter with a different culture—the sense of self-
exposure, insignificance, and vulnerability—all partake of the pes-
simism Benedict describes.24 The novel represents a world in which
“old formulas” have been thrown “into confusion.”
In place of the grandiose image of empire that prevailed in the
popular press, The Voyage Out presents a much-scaled-back image of
the English as just another culture “hovering off the edge of Europe,
with their own language, their own peculiar customs, their rituals,
their myths,”25 reflecting the new cultural relativism that Benedict
would help to popularize after the war. What D. H. Lawrence would
call the “old stable ego”26 might be viewed as a kind of casualty of
the new relativistic outlook in this book, given that the main charac-
ter, deprived of an elusive (and perhaps illusive) solid ground of cul-
ture, metaphysically deteriorates and then dies. But in the last pages,
the narrative that has been verging toward bleakness shifts to a more
hopeful tenor. Moreover, in Woolf ’s subsequent writings, similar
experimentation with character is not shadowed by the same sense
of loss, perhaps because elastic, fluid modern subjectivities come to
be regarded not as part of what Benedict calls “the doctrine of
despair” surrounding cultural relativity but instead as a realm of new
possibilities.
N OT T ETHERED TO A S INGLE M IND
A text that revels in the artistically generative potential inherent in

adopting the native’s point of view is Woolf’s 1930 essay “Street
Haunting: A London Adventure,” in which the narrating writer-
observer celebrates the liberation from restrictive identity afforded
by the anonymity of London streets, where “one can put on
briefly . . . the bodies and minds of others”—of a street singer, a
dwarf, or a society woman—“penetrating” each “far enough to give
oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind”
(Collected Essays 4:165). Rather than recoiling from destabilizing
encounters as in The Voyage Out, this essay courts such encounters.
Nonetheless, exuberant identity hopping emerges as a more likely

methodology for novelists than for social scientists, since the practice
is predicated on “illusion.”27 “Street Haunting” is an illuminating
companion piece to The Voyage Out because it likewise employs and
interrogates the self-nativizing device, and at the same time suggests
a powerful connection between the ethnographer’s and the fiction
writer’s respective “fieldwork” methods.
Even as the essay hints at the fictiveness of vicariously inhabiting
other identities, it replicates the participant-observation approach to
modern fieldwork, which in James Clifford’s description, entails a
“continuous tacking between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of events” or,
in hermeneutic terms, “a dialectic of experience and interpretation”
(Predicament 34). The street haunter is subsumed by the power of
observation, transfigured into an “enormous eye,” suggestive at
once of a fantasy of undetected voyeurism (the body is left behind;
only spectral vision remains) and a comment on the potential mon-
strosity of an ethnographic gaze. The eye alternates between “glid-
ing” and “delving,” between skimming and plunging into another’s
experience, presuming to penetrate an alternate reality. The repre-
sentatives of alterity in this essay, rather than “primitives” in an
Amazonian jungle, include indigent and disabled Londoners and a
wealthy woman of Mayfair, delineating a model of national culture
riven by class and physical ability. Unlike Woolf’s first novel, this
essay is less interested in the contours of English culture per se than
in the internal divisions that divide this geographical space. The fan-
ciful inhabitation of different selves and perspectives suggests an
exhilarating intracultural relativism, but not one that escapes the
problematic power dynamics of ethnographic observation.
Cued by the question, “What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?”
(Collected Essays 4:157), the narrator of “Street Haunting” seam-
lessly passes into this person’s consciousness, relating her thoughts
and emotions, a technique perfected in Woolf’s fiction of the 1920s.
The writer-observer then pulls back from this close-identification
with an urban other, assuming a distanced vantage point from which
the young woman and a band of disabled and indigent pedestrians
appear as “human spectacle,” grotesques whose lives become unfath-
omable (159). This move is reminiscent of the central ethnographic
encounter of The Voyage Out, where the narrator adopts and then
rescinds the native’s point of view, ultimately insisting on the opacity
of the foreign culture. In both cases, Woolf’s tacking back achieves a
different sort of distance than that of the participant-observer who
extricates him- or herself from native life to produce an authoritative,

theoretically informed ethnographic monograph. The distancing
move in “Street Haunting,” as in The Voyage Out, renders the scene
from another limited vantage point—one that is clearly prejudicial
(the “dwarf” becomes a grotesque, and the Amazonian natives
become stereotypically “instinctive” people), yet one that stakes no
claim of objectivity.
Woolf scholars have debated the significance of the oscillating
perspective in “Street Haunting.” The essay concludes with a seem-
ingly cozy return to old identities: “it is comforting to feel the old
possessions, the old prejudices fold us round; and the self, which has
been blown about at many street corners . . . sheltered and enclosed”
(166). Susan Squier argues that “Street Haunting” ultimately enacts
a politically conservative “retreat” into a safe house of economic and
physical privilege, away from “the multiple selves it explores and
temporarily affirms,” and that this retreat cuts short the potential for
social criticism that an outsider’s perspective may have offered
(50).28 But I have to agree with Pamela Caughie’s response that the
resumption of stable identities is not the main point here; rather than
positing a choice between fixed subject positions, the essay “explores
the relations between [these positions]” (123). The conclusion
doesn’t undo the destabilizing effects of the rest of the essay, which
emphasizes the departure from “the straight lines of personality”
and shows the limitations of fixed perspectives.
The mutable consciousness returns home with resources for writ-
ing, much as the ethnographer returns to transmute the inchoate
record of fieldwork into a professional monograph. The oscillations
of the self-nativizing consciousness that assumes and relinquishes
different points of view help to generate a fluid model of identity
characteristic of Woolf’s novels. To recall Harrison’s words, selves
are no longer “envisaged as solid bodies in space mutually exclu-
sive”—they are relative and provisional, a premise integral both to
new fieldwork methods and to Woolf’s technique. Adopting the
other’s point of view is disconcerting to the English tourists in The
Voyage Out and celebrated in “Street Haunting,” but in both texts,
it functions as a fertile creative strategy. Using ethnographic tools in
these texts, Woolf carves out new aesthetic terrain, participating in
the shift to more relativist models of personal and cultural identity
and installing herself as a “major architect” of an innovative model of
character.
4
C H A P T E R 4
E. M. F O R S T E R ’ S A P A S S A G E T O I N D I A
A N D T H E L I M I TAT I O N S O F
E T H N O G R A PH I C R A P P O RT A N D
U N D E R S TA N D I N G
[Syed Ross Masood] woke me up out of my suburban and aca-

demic life, showed me new horizons and a new civilization and
helped me towards the understanding of a continent. Until I met
him, India was a vague jumble of rajahs, sahibs, babus and ele-
phants, and I was not interested in such a jumble: who could be?
He made everything real and exciting as soon as he began to talk.
—E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy
W hereas E. M. Forster considered himself a “tourist” in Italy, he

professed a more intimate knowledge of Indian cultures, based on
two extended visits to the subcontinent, in 1912–13 and in
1921–22, and on the close rapport he cultivated with two men: the
Oxford-educated Muslim Syed Ross Masood, to whom A Passage to
India (1924) is dedicated, and the Hindu Maharajah of the native
state of Dewas Senior, Sir Tukoji Rao Puar III, whom Forster served
as private secretary during his second trip. By his own account, these
cross-cultural friendships provided the novelist with a port of entry
into a world that at first seemed a “jumble of rajahs, sahibs, babus
and elephants”: Masood opened “new horizons” of understanding,
while the Maharajah showed him “a side of India unknown to most
foreigners” (Two Cheers 292, 297). Having journeyed into the
bewildering continent with native guides and lived among Indians as
participant and observer, Forster came to represent himself, like the

modern fieldworker, as an outsider capable of interpreting India
from within. He called Passage “the best documented of my work
because I did get to know a little about the country from the inside”
(qtd. in Das xviii), and when he published his Indian letters and
travel journals nearly three decades later in The Hill of Devi (1953),
he similarly positioned himself as an honorary cultural insider,
acquainted with the “inner workings” of the now “vanishing” way of
life of Dewas (3).
Forster’s research and writing about India thus resonates power-
fully with the premises and methodologies of the new, contempora-
neous participant-observer approach to ethnographic fieldwork.
Like its founding father, Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands,
Forster eschewed other outsiders, largely avoiding Anglo-Indians
(i.e., the English) in India.1 Forster, too, lived “among the natives,”
participating in their customs and ceremonies in a concerted endeavor
to experience Moslem and Hindu cultures “from the inside.” At the
heart of the new methodology was the ideal of ethnographic rapport:
the close, sympathetic relationship an ethnographer supposedly
developed with native informants, entailing, as James Clifford explains,
“acceptance and empathy” at the minimum “but usually implying
something akin to friendship” (Predicament 34). More than social
politesse, ethnographic rapport was seen as the indispensable means
by which an ethnographer would come to know another culture, by
imaginatively adopting “the native’s point of view.” Admittedly,
there are important distinctions between the novelist’s cultivation of
friendships with Indians and the ethnographer’s quest for rapport
with informants. For Forster, friendship is an end in itself—preced-
ing his curiosity about Indian culture—not a means to a professional
objective. Yet in stressing its role in his growing “understanding of a
continent,” Forster implicitly subscribes to a founding assumption
of modern ethnographic fieldwork.
A Passage to India’s concern with the challenges of ethnographic
rapport is unmistakable in its dramatization of attempts to achieve
connections across the chasm of cultural difference. Adela Quested’s
desire to see “the real India,” Mrs. Moore’s visit to the mosque, and
Cyril Fielding’s faltering friendship with Dr. Aziz—all represent dif-
ferent, overlapping modes of endeavoring to bridge the gulf
between the English and Indians, while structures of domination
inherent in both colonial relationships and tourism undermine such
E. M. F O R S T E R ’ S A P A S S A G E TO INDIA 121
connections. The newcomers’ mission to “see India,” the impetus of

the plot, invokes at once the language of modern sightseeing and the
“observation” half of the participant-observer formula. Forster’s
writings thus reveal the conjunction between discourses of tourism
and ethnography (as do D. H. Lawrence’s writings, discussed in
Chapter 5). Passage is of its historical moment in positing close rap-
port as the best vehicle for attaining ethnographic understanding,
but its verdict on the central question—Is it possible for an Indian
and an Englishman to be friends?—casts doubt on the ethnographic
project, especially when carried out in a colonial context. With its
concluding lines (“not yet, . . . not there”), Passage suggests that the
political climate forecloses the possibility of real cross-cultural
friendship.
Given this negative note, many critics read Passage, as Frederick
Crews does, as ultimately showing the impossibility of “a genuine
rapport between East and West” and refusing “all bids for ‘passage’
through the national barriers it defines” (145).2 The plot may be
read as a parable about the colonial limitations of ethnographic rap-
port, suggesting that power disparities mitigate against the sympa-
thetic connection required for understanding another culture.
Seeming to reinforce a theme of failed cross-cultural connection is
the novel’s pervasive trope of India as a site of mystery that thwarts
Western understanding. Rehearsing Orientalist stereotypes, as Sara
Suleri and Harish Trivedi have shown, the rhetoric of India-as-
enigma suggests that even without the warping effect of the Raj,
India and Indians might defy the “sympathetic” overtures of
Westerners insofar as they are compelled by a will to exoticize the
East.3 On the level of narration, however, the novel enacts the very
passage between cultures that eludes its characters, through the
mediating consciousness of the semiomniscient narrator. Yet, as crit-
ics have noted, the narrative voice is inconsistent.4 I argue that it per-
forms an ethnographic function, illuminating realms of cultural
difference for the Western reader, while also undercutting this objec-
tive, by destabilizing omniscience. By correlating narrative inconsis-
tencies with Forster’s ambivalence about the ethnographic project,
my reading corrects a blind spot in the criticism, which neglects this
crucial counterimpulse toward ethnographic elucidation.
Passage can be read as the product of an endeavor, albeit a fraught
one, to sympathetically identify with the other. Though recent schol-
arship has justifiably found its representation of India problematic,
many of Forster’s contemporaries—both English and Indian—con-

sidered the novel a momentous cross-cultural achievement.5 One
seasoned English reviewer professed that he had “never known so
accurate, so penetrating, so sympathetic an account” of Indians and
Anglo Indians alike (Gardner 258). The Indian critic Bhupal Singh
hailed Passage as “an oasis in the desert of Anglo-Indian fiction . . .
refreshing in its candour, sincerity, fairness, and art” (293). Writing
retrospectively in 1969, K. Natwar-Singh named Forster the first
English novelist to write about Indians “as human beings and not
merely caricatures or doubtful and shifty natives,” commending, in
terms that resonate with the ethos of ethnographic fieldwork, his
“emotional intimacy and rapport . . . with a people so different from
his own.”6
More than any other novelist in this study, Forster makes a sus-
tained attempt to adopt “the native’s point of view,” moving well
beyond the village scene of Woolf’s The Voyage Out to radically
decenter an English perspective. As a contemporary Anglo-Indian
reviewer said of “Mr. Forster’s own ‘passage to India,’” the novel
shifts “the center of the universe” to the fictitious Indian city of
Chandrapore (qtd. in Gardner 247). As in the fieldwork training
that by World War I was obligatory for the modern anthropologist,
Forster is understood to have penetrated the cultural unknowns of
the stereotypically enigmatic East, and returned to write about it.
The narrator of Passage does not merely adopt a quasiindigenous
perspective, however; rather, we witness the more dynamic move-
ment of an ethnographic account, in which the participant-observer
engages in what Clifford calls “a dialectic of experience and inter-
pretation,” now identifying with the other, now expounding on cul-
tural practices from a stance clearly marked as outside.7 In terms that
epitomize this often tense balancing act, an Indian reviewer credits
Forster with being “a sympathizer who has retained his detachment”
(Athenaeum 1928; qtd. in Gardner 290). It is in this specific sense
that the narrative voice of Passage (and not just its subject matter)
may be considered ethnographic. Yet this ethnographic inclination is
also disrupted by a narrator whose equivocal relationship to the
ethnographic project mirrors Forster’s own.
“O NLY C ONNECT ”
The new emphasis on ethnographic rapport finds its counterpart in

Forster’s abiding faith in the ability of personal relationships to
bridge gulfs between people—whether economic, sexual, racial, or
cultural. This belief is memorably conveyed by the denouement of
Howards End, which fulfills the directive of its famed epigraph,
“Only Connect.”8 Though this faith in robust personal relations is
strenuously tested in Passage, given that cross-cultural friendships
fail, the novel nonetheless celebrates the attempt to make such con-
nections. Forster’s philosophy of the primacy of friendship was culti-
vated by his membership in Cambridge University’s elite intellectual
coterie, the Apostles, and by his involvement in the Bloomsbury
Group. During Forster’s years at Cambridge (1897–1901), the
Apostles were presided over by G. E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica
(1903) became a kind of bible for Bloomsbury; Moore interpreted
friendship, together with the appreciation of beauty and the pursuit
of knowledge, as among the highest aims in life (Johnstone 33).
Accordingly, Forster declares in a 1946 essay, “my books emphasise
the importance of personal relationships and the private life, for I
believe in them” (Two Cheers 55).
Syed Ross Masood, who provided Forster’s first window onto
Indian culture, likewise exalted friendship above other social ties and
obligations. Forster quickly fell in love with Masood after being
introduced to him in 1906 as his prospective Latin tutor, and
though the relationship remained Platonic, intense feelings seem to
have been mutual. The intensity of Masood’s feelings does not seem
to have been unusual: Forster’s biographer, P. N. Furbank, relates
that Masood spoke of all his close male friends in passionate, effusive
terms, addressing them, as he did Forster, as “dearest” or “darling”
and making such professions as “the flame of their love must burn
forever” (146). They remained close friends until Masood’s death in
1937, when Forster wrote that among Masood’s “many English
friends,” he was “the oldest and most intimate” (Two Cheers 292).
As early as 1910, Forster promised that he would one day visit
Masood in India and, in preparation, began reading historical, reli-
gious, and ethnographic studies about India, taking horseback rid-
ing lessons from Leonard Woolf, and learning Urdu. Having
awakened Forster’s interest in “a new civilization,” Masood now
urged his English friend to write a book about India. In a letter

dated December 20, 1910, he writes, “I do not wish to flatter you in
any way but the fact is that you are about the only Englishman in
whom I have come across true sentiment & that, too, real sentiment
even from the oriental point of view. So you know what it is that
makes me love you so much, it is the fact that in you I see an orien-
tal with an oriental view of life on most things” (qtd. in Furbank 194,
italics in original). Masood thus credits the novelist with possessing
the capacity Malinowski regarded as indispensable to ethnographic
fieldwork, the ability to provisionally go native, or “grasp the native’s
point of view.” Masood posits sympathetic feeling at once as an “ori-
ental” quality and as the quality that uniquely qualifies Forster to
understand the other. Masood’s words are echoed by Aziz in
Passage, when he tells Mrs. Moore that because of her uncommon
“sympathy,” she is “an Oriental” (21). Again there is some slippage
between the ethnographic conceit that Mrs. Moore’s rare sympathy
enables her to identify with Aziz and the cultural stereotype that
Masood and Forster propagate here, that “Orientals” (and women)
have a greater capacity for deep feeling, which in itself makes one a
member of this group. Either way, both Mrs. Moore and her author
are envisioned as exceptional in their ability to adopt an Indian point
of view, a propensity that aligns them with the self-characterization
of the modern fieldworker.
Masood urges Forster to continue cultivating the faculty of
empathic identification: “I say Go on Go on improving your imagi-
nation & with it your power of physically feeling the difficulties of
another” (qtd. in Furbank 194). Masood posits imagination as
important for understanding another culture and, in asking his
English friend to write a book on India, invites Forster to serve as
a mediating, ethnographic consciousness—a kind of tour guide to
the East.9
But Masood’s judgment of Forster is distinctly qualified (“an ori-
ental view . . . on most things”). Masood considers Forster to approx-
imate an insider’s perspective, while remaining partially outside
Indian culture. In Argonauts, Malinowski similarly qualifies the
extent of his immersion in native culture: “I began to take part, in a
way, in the village life” (7, italics mine). It is the very combination of
“insideness” and “outsideness,” as Buzard puts it, that authorizes an
ethnographer to represent another culture. The new methodology
of participant observation assumed that the outsider was more
qualified to explicate the culture than the native was, for the latter
lacked the distance necessary for a clarifying perspective: “The
natives obey the forces and commands of the tribal code, but they
do not comprehend them” (Malinowski, Argonauts 11). Like the
reviewer who considered Forster “a sympathizer who has retained
his detachment,” Masood characterizes Forster’s perspective as
simultaneously sympathetic and distanced; like a native’s but still an
Englishman’s.
In inviting an Englishman to represent Indian life, Masood
echoes the modern ethnographic assumption that sensitive outsiders
have a unique vision on other cultures, one that might elude insid-
ers. In a 1914 essay called “The Indian Mind,” Forster questions the
ability of a native enmeshed in his or her own traditions to explicate
their meaning for a Westerner, anticipating Malinowski: “The Indian
who attempts to interpret his country to the Westerner is apt to
become part of the mystery he offers to solve. He is too often full of
vague platitudes, of illustrations that explain nothing, of arguments
that lead nowhere, and such interpretation as he gives is uncon-
scious. He leaves us with the sense of a mind infinitely remote from
ours—a mind patriotic and sensitive—and it may be powerful, but
with little idea of logic or facts; we retire baffled, and, indeed, exas-
perated” (Albergo Empedocle 207). Employing the rhetoric of
enigma that is also central to Passage, Forster stresses the futility of
Indian insiders trying to make the stereotypically mysterious culture
of the East intelligible to the Westerner. The native lacks the neces-
sary perspective to make sense of his culture for an outsider; he can’t
see the cultural forest for the trees. Forster cites A. S. Wadia as a
qualified exception to this rule, for in his estimation, this Indian
writer has some success in explicating his culture’s outlook for
Western readers. Forster postulates that what enables Wadia to make
India intelligible is the distance he has traveled away from India, in
assimilating Western ways, which paradoxically risks invalidating his
perspective: “No doubt he is out of sympathy with his native land; he
confesses to feeling an alien there, and no doubt this disqualifies
him as a guide to it” (207). Thus Forster concludes that the typi-
cal insider and the alienated native are problematic “guides” to
Indian cultures. In his nonfiction of the period, Forster subtly
positions himself as better suited for this job.10 By discrediting
indigenous voices, the novelist obliquely makes a bid for his own
ethnographic authority.
In a 1915 essay called “Indian Boom,” which traces a tradition of

English writing about India, Forster again invokes the figure of the
ethnographic guide. With a touch of imperialist nostalgia, he
admires early-nineteenth-century writings by Anglo-Indian officials
who deftly lead “stay-at-home” readers to appreciate the Indian sub-
continent that they have “sympathetically” made their home
(Albergo Empedocle 203). In contrast, he derides late-nineteenth-
century fiction wherein “Anglo-Indian ladies” serve as inept guides,
for their perspective is that of the tourist, viewing India from the ele-
vated vantage point of “an elephant’s back, high above the actuali-
ties of the bazaar” (204), ignorant of the religion, art, literature, or
architecture of the region. He goes on to celebrate the range of
interpretations offered by twentieth-century English writers, whom
he deems the most capable guides: for instance, Annie Besant “has
shown us that Hinduism has a meaning, even for the West,” while
others have “unlocked” the significance of the music, frescoes,
sculptures, and buildings of India for English readers (204). Soon to
add his own work to the “Indian boom,” Forster lauds the new
diversity of perspectives on the “culture, or rather cultures” of India
as he puts it, with a nod to the new cultural pluralism.
Forster’s account of the shift of the point of view of Anglo-Indian
writing—from the “elephant’s back” to the thick of the native
“bazaar”—parallels George Stocking’s characterization of the
period’s major shift within anthropological fieldwork. The new
method, Stocking relates, “involved a shift in the primary locus of
investigation, from the deck of the mission ship or the verandah of
the mission station to the teeming center of the village, and a corre-
sponding shift in the conception of the ethnographer’s role, from
that of inquirer to that of participant ‘in a way’ in village life”
(Ethnographer’s Magic 93). In accounts of his “fieldwork” in India,
Forster situates himself in the camp of the intrepid modern guide or
ethnographer, who leaves the “elephant’s back” to explore the
“teeming village.”
F ORSTER IN THE F IELD
Consisting of letters, travel journals, and essays on India, Forster’s

The Hill of Devi (together with his other “Indian Journals,” included
in the 1983 posthumous Abinger edition) provides a collage of the
writer’s initial impressions of India. Forster calls Hill a “record of a

vanished civilization”: “It so happens that my knowledge of Dewas
is extensive: I was more or less in touch with its inner workings over
a period of thirty years” (3–4). He offers no introduction to the
1912–13 letters, so that “the reader may share [his] bewilderment
and pleasure at plunging into an unknown world” (3). The reader is
invited, then, to vicariously travel with Forster, to see as he did “the
side of [Indian] life that is hidden from most English people” (10).
In Passage, Adela Quested feels trapped within a touristic mode of
seeing India— “tired of seeing picturesque figures pass before [her]
as a frieze” (26); in his essays and private writings, Forster portrays
himself peeking beyond this façade of superficial impressions that
stymies Adela’s vision. By repeatedly defining himself against the
rhetorical stooge of the unthinking tourist, Forster enacts a gesture
of self-distinction that pervades interwar literature and travel writ-
ing, one replayed in the Southwest writings of D. H. Lawrence, dis-
cussed in Chapter 5.11 At the same time, he aligns himself with
modern fieldworkers, who garnered authority by disavowing conti-
nuities between their own works and those of casual travelers.12
Forster presents himself in the pages of Hill as a participant-
observer, wearing indigenous dress, eating local foods, participating
in traditional Hindu and Muslim customs, rites, and festivals. His
letters home include such details as the description of sixteen dishes
served at a wedding banquet, together with a schematic drawing of
their placement on a plate (9); a report of a conversation with the
Maharajah about his religious beliefs (13–14); accounts of a birth
(an “extraordinary rite” that is “terrific and grotesque,” [46]), of a
marriage (“very charming,” 7–11), and of diverse religious cere-
monies in which Forster took part.
A characteristic journal entry from the 1912 trip conveys Forster’s
enthusiasm for immersing himself in native life. He relates that while
staying in Delhi with Dr. Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, one of Masood’s
friends, he was “treated with real intimacy”: taken to an opium den,
to a temple where natives “naked to the waist” sang hymns to
Krishna, and to watch a traditional dance, or “Nautch” (137). The
following passage describes the facility with which Forster felt he was
able to “‘lapse’ into an oriental” (his phrase) while watching the per-
formance: “[E]motion came to me through the harsh voice and
music, so that I enjoyed myself. The drum would thunder in on the
last note; this excited us, though its function is only to beat time, and
when the singer sank down in our midst, with her scarlet and golden
robes spread round us, and sang love-songs, I realized what a
Nautch must be to Indians” (137). Modeling the imaginative leap of
sympathetic identification, Forster puts himself in his Indian hosts’
shoes, trying to hear the music and see the dance from their per-
spective. Because the journal entry makes no mention of other
English guests (mentioning only “two sorts of Hindus” and “a
Parsi” in attendance), the collective pronouns further align Forster
with the Indian audience: the drum “excited us,” the singer “sank
down in our midst.” The final sentence signals a successful fusion of
his perspective with that of his native hosts, such that Forster pro-
fesses to achieve the main goal of modern fieldwork: realizing what
the dance “must be to Indians.”
Though Forster defends, at least retrospectively, the ethnographic
value of his private writings on India, his letters are frequently flip-
pant or comical, a tone not readily associated with a serious ethno-
graphic purpose. In the preface to Hill, Forster regrets what he now
regards as the inappropriately light tone of these letters: “I was writ-
ing to people of whom I was fond and whom I wanted to amuse,
with the result that I became too humorous and conciliatory, and
too prone to turn remote and rare matters into suburban jokes. In
editing I have had to cut out a good deal of ‘How I wish you were
all here!’ or ‘Aren’t Indians quaint!’ I did not really think the Indians
quaint, and my deepest wish was to be alone with them. ‘Amusing
letters home,’ . . . have their drawbacks. Aiming at freshness, they
may sacrifice dignity and depth” (3). Coupled with assertions of his
intimacy with Indians, then, is an irreverence that undercuts his pro-
fessed interest in the meaning of customs “remote and rare.” At
times, the humor is self-directed, drawing attention to Forster’s
amusement at himself partaking in foreign customs or rites. In one
of the earliest letters from Dewas, Forster describes with evident
delight the “funny scene” of being suited in Hindu dress for a wed-
ding banquet:
Let me describe myself. Shoes—I had to take them off when the
Palace was reached, so they don’t count. My legs were clad in
Jodpores made of white muslin. Hanging outside these was the
youthful Sirdar’s [courtier’s] white shirt, but it was concealed by a
waistcoat the colours of a Neapolitan ice—red, white and green, and
this was almost concealed by my chief garment—a magnificent coat of
claret-coloured silk, trimmed with gold. . . . Cocked rakishly over one

ear was a Maratha Turban of scarlet and gold—not to be confused
with the ordinary turban; it is a made-up affair, more like a cocked
hat. Nor was this all. I carried in my left hand a scarf of orange-
coloured silk with gold ends, and before the evening ended a mark
like a loaf of bread was stamped on my forehead in crimson, meaning
that I was of the sect of Siva. (Hill 8)
Participant observation resembles a dress-up game in this descrip-

tion; readers at home are invited to smirk with him at the spectacle
of Forster in cultural drag. Nonetheless, the detailed description
bespeaks a serious interest in native dress, one that is not under-
mined by the bemused self-dramatization.
At other times, though, Forster veers toward mocking or trivializ-
ing the Indian traditions he has traveled so far to appreciate. This is
the case in his account of the Festival of Dassera, celebrated near the
end of his term at Dewas. A 1921 letter begins with this quip about
the upcoming event: “we shall have to put up a cocoanut in the
office and worship it or eat it, I can not be sure which” (85). He
explains that the festival originated as “a military review held at the
end of the Rains, when war under old conditions again became pos-
sible” and has turned into “a general worship of implements, and of
the collective power of the State. I should enjoy it were the State not
in debt” (86). Forster’s disapproval of the state’s profligacy may
partly motivate the mocking tone of his description of the festival,
offered in a letter a few days later: “We are just through Dassera. I
had to act the priest twice. It was enjoyable. The first time I adored
a pen, an inkpot, a waste-paper basket and a piece of foolscap, under
the direction of my clerk, and administered both to them and him a
sacrament of cocoanut. The cocoanut kept bouncing up from the
office carpet and looking at me when I tried to crack it. . . . One has-
n’t to say anything, still less to feel. Just wave incense and sprinkle
water and dab with red powder anything you feel like” (86).
Participation in an indigenous ceremony—intended in an ethno-
graphic context to bring the fieldworker closer to the perspective of
the native—here becomes a hollow performance devoid of religious
meaning for the participant. “Act[ing] the priest,” Forster turns the
holy rites of Dassera into a farce, with the sacred object, the
cocoanut, comically “looking” at him as he haphazardly “wave[s]
incense,” “sprinkle[s] water,” and “dab[s]” random things with red

powder, mocking the supposed sanctity of these actions.
Such passages explain why C. D. Narasimhaiah deems Forster’s
representation of sacred rituals in Hill “bordering on sacrilege”
(“Western Writers” 10). Reacting to critics who have commended
Forster’s intimate knowledge of Indian traditions and beliefs,
Narasimhaiah objects, “One has only to turn to Forster’s Hill of
Devi to see how little he understood India” (9). Although
Narasimhaiah makes a valid point, his offhand dismissal of Forster’s
Indian writings fails to recognize their intermittent self-conscious-
ness and ambivalence, which illuminate the mystifications of the
emerging ideal of ethnographic rapport. Hill and the “Indian
Journals” do not just inadvertently reveal Forster’s limited under-
standing, they broadcast its limitations. More like a field journal than
a polished ethnographic monograph, these writings stress at turns
intimacy and incomprehension; close identification and the failure of
sympathy; the process, rather than the product, of ethnographic
understanding.
Thus while underscoring his unique position “inside” Indian cul-
ture, Forster also underscores the obstacles to rapport and under-
standing. In a 1921 letter, he relates an anecdote, which would be
incorporated into Passage, about a group of villagers who sight a
“small dead tree” that they insist is a fierce “snake” on the far bank
of a river; he concludes, “I call this adventure ‘typical’ because it is
even more difficult here than in England to get at the rights of a
matter. Everything that happens is said to be one thing and proves to
be another, and as it is further said in an unknown tongue I live in a
haze” (35). This episode encapsulates the theme of India as enigma,
thwarting or defying understanding, which figures centrally in
Passage. Though Forster seems to blame India and Indians for his
lack of comprehension—the villagers are unreliable; India is duplic-
itous—these lines also bespeak the bewilderment of initial stages of
ethnographic fieldwork. Recalling Mary Kingsley’s characteriza-
tion of her mental confusion confronting the “inextricable tangle”
of the African forest (discussed in Chapter 2), Forster draws atten-
tion to his mental haze in India, owing partly to ignorance of the
language.
In a letter to Malcom Darling, the Englishman who secured him
a post with the Maharajah, Forster records his first impressions of the
Native State: “It is indescribable and really unimaginable—really a
wonderful experience, for it is the fag end of a vanished civilization.

But my brain is as messy as its surroundings, and I cannot realize it
all” (41). Corresponding to Kingsley’s mental “rag bag” (Travels
73) and to Malinowski’s “kaleidoscope” of first impressions in the
field (Argonauts 3–4), Forster’s “messy brain” reveals the challenge
of confronting a culture that defies familiar categorization. The lines
acknowledge that the failure to “realize” the sense of India, to imag-
ine and describe, may lie as much with the bewildered observer, as
with his “messy surroundings.”
Another section of Hill that exemplifies the challenges of partici-
pant observation is a collection of letters describing Gokul Ashtami,
the eight-day Hindu festival honoring Krishna’s birth, which forms
the basis for the central episode of Part 3 of Passage. Again drawing
attention to the supposed ethnographic import of his personal writ-
ings—as well as the possibly inappropriate levity of his tone—Forster
calls these “the most important of my letters home, for they describe
(if too facetiously) rites in which an European can seldom have
shared” (60). By stressing their importance as an eyewitness account
of Hindu rites by an English participant, Forster frames these letters,
like the book as a whole, with an ethnographic idiom. Yet rather
than elucidating the festival’s indigenous meaning in ethnographic
fashion, he presents an impressionistic account of a participant-
observer by turns bewildered, repulsed, fascinated, and amused.
Forster seems to belittle the holy festival in describing the prepa-
rations: “I have already helped to choose the ‘Lord of the Universe’
some new clothes. He is fortunately only six inches high, but he had
to have eight suits”: “Religion approaches, to me in a very tangible
form, as I have been hit on the head by an iron bar belonging to a
sacred swing” (60–61). The overriding impression he conveys is that
the festival has offended his artistic sensibilities: “What troubles me
is that every detail, almost without exception, is fatuous and in bad
taste. The altar is a mess of little objects, stifled with rose leaves, the
walls are hung with deplorable oleographs, the chandeliers,
draperies—everything bad. Only one thing is beautiful—the expres-
sion on the faces of the people as they bow to the shrine, and he him-
self [the Maharajah] is, as always, successful in his odd role” (64). It
is not surprising, perhaps, that an artist’s response to a religious fes-
tival should be an aesthetic one, but to call the celebration “fatuous”
and the shrine’s décor “deplorable” may be considered culturally
insensitive (or even sacrilegious). In collecting his Dewas letters
some thirty years later for the book, Forster acknowledges the face-
tiousness of his tone. Even so, the ethnographic frame placed around
the description seems incongruous with the disparaging portrait of
the event. Rather than explaining indigenous meanings, the letters
foreground the response of the outside observer, disconnected and
uncomprehending. In this way, Hill registers the uneven process of
an outsider longing to connect, with a tone that uneasily blends
irreverence, sincerity, condescension, and admiration.
Whatever aesthetic reservations he may have, Forster presents
himself enthusiastically taking part in the procession on the final
day—smearing butter on his forehead, throwing red powder into the
air on cue, walking barefoot for four hours through the streets in his
dhoti (a garment resembling “a voluminous yet not entirely efficient
pair of bathing drawers,” 65). An Indore priest commends Forster
for his good-natured participation, commenting, “We have not met
an Englishman like you previously” (67). But unlike his experience
at the Nautch, participating in Gokul Ashtami exemplifies the failure
of sympathetic identification. In a poignant line that significantly
deflates the pretensions of participant observation, Forster exclaims,
“though I am dressed as a Hindu I shall never become one” (64).
What he stresses ultimately in his description of the festival is an
inability to connect with the native participants, a feeling of shame
“that the good people here should have felt [he] was so sympa-
thetic” when so much remained impenetrable and failed to spiritu-
ally move him (68).
As if to combat the letters’ pessimism about cross-cultural under-
standing, Forster affixes Malcom Darling’s ostensibly more authori-
tative 1909 account of Gokul Ashtami, together with an explanation
of its religious significance, based on research into its principal “lit-
erary” sources, the Bhagavad Purana and the Vishnu Parana. In
this way, Forster shapes these letters to fulfill an ethnographic func-
tion, explicating indigenous rites and beliefs. Despite this wishful
framing, the Gokul Ashtami letters reveal more about the challenges
of fieldwork than about the festival’s cultural significance.
By elaborating on the observer’s position in relation to the cul-
ture he observes, Hill and the “Indian Journals” may be read as an
example of what Patricia Rae, following James Clifford, has called
“modernist anthropology”: “a genre that ironizes the reactions of
the fieldworker in order to foreground the difficulty of attaining an
objective and genuinely sympathetic understanding of alien cultures”
(72). In his private writings about India, Forster ambivalently adopts

some of the strategies of the modern ethnographer, even as he fore-
grounds obstacles to rapport and understanding. These tensions also
characterize the novel that emerged out of these writings and the
fieldwork experience they describe.
“S YMPATHETIC S EEING ”
Setting the plot of A Passage to India in motion, the young English

tourist, Adela Quested, declares, “I want to see the real India” (24),
by which she means that she wants to transcend the limitations of
both the insulated life of Anglo-Indians in Chandrapore and the
exotic spectacle orchestrated for tourists like herself (22). When
Adela’s fiancé Ronny Heaslop half-jokingly inquires on her behalf,
“how’s one to see the real India?”, the seasoned principal of govern-
ment college, Cyril Fielding, mindful of the racial separatism of the
Anglo-Indian community, replies: “Try seeing Indians” (25)—an
objective that the novel suggests is fraught with problems. (The mul-
tivalence of the term seeing, expressing at once emotional engage-
ment and spectatorial distance, is a topic to which I will return.)
If Forster saw himself correcting a bias in Anglo-Indian fiction
that reduced Indians to caricatures, many Anglo-Indian reviewers
felt similarly misrepresented by Forster’s unflattering portrait of
them. One was E. A. Horne, who parodies Fielding’s advice to
Adela, suggesting “that next time [Forster] goes to India” he should
“[t]ry seeing Anglo-Indians”:
Forster went out to India to see, and to study, and to make friends
with Indians. He did not go out to see Anglo-Indians; most of what
he knows about them, their ways and their catchwords, and has put
into his book, he has picked up from the stale gossip of India, just as
the average Englishman who goes out to India picks up most of what
he knows about Indians from other Englishmen. It is . . . a thousand
pities that Mr. Forster did not see the real Anglo-India, for he would
have written an incomparably better and truer book.13
The indignant reviewer implies that Forster has reproduced in

reverse the reductive view of “the average Englishman who goes to
India,” and that this bias has marred Forster’s artistic vision and
compromised its ethnographic accuracy.14 Forster replies:
You say I don’t like them [Anglo-Indians] because I don’t really know
them. But how can I ever like them when I happen to like the Indians
and they don’t? They don’t (this part of my picture you do not chal-
lenge)—so what am I to do? Sympathy is finite—at least mine is, alas,
—so that as the rope is pulled into the right hand it slips out of the
left. If I saw more of Anglo-India at work (or shared its work, which is
the only sympathetic seeing) I should of course realize its difficulties and
loyalties better and write about it from within. Well and good, but
you forget the price to be paid: I should begin to write about Indians
from without. . . . You say that I am always prejudiced and frequently
preposterous. . . . But you haven’t seen that this lack of balance is
inherent in the Indian tangle, and that if I got the Club sympatheti-
cally true, Aziz’s shanty would ring false and no longer move you.
(qtd. in Furbank 130, emphases mine)
Forster’s justification for his unsympathetic representation of Anglo-

Indians speaks to the polarization of colonizer and colonized within
colonial India, such that to befriend one group is perforce to
estrange the other. Malinowski similarly describes the colonial situa-
tion as inherently antagonistic, with “deeply rooted personal inter-
ests at stake” on both sides creating “irreconcilable differences”
(qtd. in Kucklick 188). But while Forster implies that an objective
stance outside the “Indian tangle” is impossible, Malinowski locates
anthropology’s special authority in its propensity to be value neutral,
a stance drawn into question with the posthumous publication of the
fieldworker’s diary. In contrast, Forster owns his bias here—in sym-
pathy with Indians, he is indifferent to the concerns of his compatri-
ots. Yet the professional fieldworker and the novelist agree that to
write about another culture “from within,” he must distance himself
from other outsiders.
S EEING I NDIA /I NDIANS
The concept of “seeing India” houses contradictory meanings, con-

noting on the one hand sightseeing, with the implication of visiting
starred attractions along a well-beaten path, and on the other hand,
the colloquial sense of seeing someone, evoking intimacy and an
individualized relationship. It is the former construction Adela

rejects when she criticizes the dominant Anglo-Indian perspective
that regards India as a “picturesque frieze” (26), or an exotic object
to be admired from a distance. Buzard explains that the picturesque,
a major motif of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travel writ-
ing, is a mode of perception unconcerned with natives’ “welfare or
self-determination,” which transforms foreign landscapes and people
into quaint or aesthetically pleasing versions of alterity.15 With lan-
guage evocative of the picturesque, then, Adela muses that if she
marries Ronny, the “real India” will elude her, as she uncompre-
hendingly watches “the pageant of birds in the early morning,
brown bodies, white turbans, idols whose flesh was scarlet or blue”
(48). Subsumed by a pageant of colors, the bodies of natives are
divorced from the material and cultural conditions of their existence.
Like the Anglo-Indian writers who view India from the figurative
distance of an elephant’s back, the Anglo-Indians Adela encounters
hold themselves aloof, seeing India and Indians as part of a pictur-
esque scene, not as a place and a people with a living “spirit” (48).
Though she is wary of the objectifying gaze, Adela’s efforts to see
Indians as individuals and not as part of an exotic backdrop are
shown to be inadequate. Her efforts fail partly because she continues
to see India as a monolith and Aziz as a representative Indian who
can “unlock his country for her” (73). Repeatedly, Aziz is pressed
into being a guide to the Orient, even as the novel expresses the irre-
ducibility of multicultural India: it is a textual refrain that there are
“hundreds of Indias” (12, 150, 160). The text makes explicit the
error of Adela’s assumption: “In her ignorance, she regarded him as
‘India’, and never surmised that his outlook was limited and his
method inaccurate, and that no one is India” (76).
Aziz, with his penchant for hospitality, willingly adopts the role of
guide. On the expedition to the Marabar Caves, Aziz’s attempt to
cater to his guests’ expectations leads him to choreograph a pre-
dictable outing such as the English women had hoped to avoid,
complete with the ubiquitous elephant ride, “mischievous natives,”
and a poisonous snake (152–54). Adela and Mrs. Moore begin to
feel that the caves are a site “not quite worth visiting, and wished it
could have turned into some Mohammedan object, such as a
mosque, which their host would have appreciated and explained. His
ignorance became evident, and was really rather a drawback” (156).
Adela’s naïve belief that Aziz can “unlock” India for her is matched
by Aziz’s willingness to pretend that he can furnish a master key. The

novel suggests that both roles inhere in the touristic relationship, fal-
sifying intercourse and inhibiting intimacy.
At Aziz’s trial, Adela surveys “all the wreckage of her silly attempt
to see India” (244); however well-meaning, her attempt to forge a
meaningful connection with Indians blows up in her face, irreparably
injuring Aziz’s reputation and further damaging colonial relations.
Adela does not come out unscathed: she is lacerated with cactus nee-
dles from her reckless escape and, once she retracts the accusation
against Aziz, reduced to a pariah among Anglo-Indians. Buzard
interprets Adela’s “wounded body” as a metaphor for the potential
violence of tourism: “We may wound the body of foreign culture
even when we mean to admire or assist it,” and, as in Adela’s case,
“such injuries as we do to the foreign [may] recoil upon ourselves”
(Beaten Track 315). Darkly, the novel situates Adela’s approach to
“seeing India” on a continuum with the arrogant imperialism of the
Anglo-Indian majority. As Aziz reflects, “This pose of ‘seeing India’
which had seduced him to Miss Quested at Chandrapore was only a
form of ruling India; no sympathy lay behind it” (343). Although
Aziz overstates the case (Adela’s attitude is not totally devoid of sym-
pathy), the remark casts a significant shadow over the ethnographic,
as well as the touristic, enterprise. It suggests that even the “anti-
tourist” tourist who aims to connect with the local population may
ultimately see with imperial eyes.
The relationship between “seeing India” and “ruling India”—a
variant of the “colonial ethnographic-gaze” discussed in Chapter
1—is epitomized by the attitudes of the Collector and his wife.
Though ordinarily supporting a policy of social apartheid, Mr.
Turton puts Indians on display to “amuse” the English newcomers
at the ironically labeled “Bridge Party.” As if describing exotic flora
and fauna, he tells Adela and Mrs. Moore, “you can practically see
any kind [of Indian] you like” (26). In similarly dehumanizing lan-
guage, Mrs. Turton speaks of the native population as if describing
“the movements of migratory birds” (42). These characters’ gaze
objectifies and dehumanizes; the game of “seeing Indians” does
nothing to disrupt the Turtons’ attitudes of racial supremacy and
imperial righteousness. The Collector shows his true colors when
Aziz is falsely accused of assaulting Adela in the caves, which the
Collector takes as evidence of the foregone conclusion of the inher-
ent criminality, indeed inhumanity, of all Indians. Silently addressing
the Indian laborers and shopkeepers on the streets, Turton declares,

“I know what you’re like at last; you shall pay for this, you shall
squeal” (184).
Like Turton, Ronny Heaslop and the district superintendent of
police, McBryde, will have nothing to do with Indians socially, yet
they presume to have intimate knowledge of them. These characters
function as antiethnographers, incurious about native customs and
beliefs except insofar as their limited awareness allows them to main-
tain imperial control; their version of “seeing India” amounts to a
kind of colonial hallucination whereby they project onto the canvas
of India a set of preconceived notions. The hollowness of Ronny’s
boast that he knows “all the types” (82) is revealed when he erro-
neously interprets Aziz’s missing collar stud—actually given to
Fielding as a token of friendship—as a sign of the race’s “fundamen-
tal slackness” (87). He affects the same knowingness when he
remarks that, though he has never been to the Marabar Caves, he
“know[s] all about them” (87). Likewise, McBryde, who boasts that
he knows Indians “as they really are” (187), forwards his preposter-
ous theory of “Oriental Pathology,” correlating criminality with cli-
matic zones. He bases his case for Aziz’s guilt on the assumption
that “the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer, but not
vice versa” (184, 243). The novel shines an ironic light on the absurd
theory by presenting the reverse situation. The posture of knowing
Indians compensates for anxiety about vulnerabilities in colonial
authority: Ronny suspects that “whether the native swaggers or
cringes, there’s always something behind every remark he makes,
always something” (33), yet Ronny, like the other colonial adminis-
trators, is consistently shown to be a poor reader of the natives.
Such typological thinking links Adela’s more benign mode of
confronting alterity with the domineering attitudes of Turton,
Heaslop, and McBryde, though certainly with an important differ-
ence of degree. Contrasted with the touristic and imperialist modes
of relating to India in the novel is the elusive ideal Forster called sym-
pathetic seeing, which is associated with Mrs. Moore and Fielding.
N ATIVIZING M RS . M OORE
Like her author, Mrs. Moore is distinguished from other English guests
by a readiness to partake in indigenous customs and sympathetically
identify with a native point of view. She is constructed as a partici-

pant-observer, winning Aziz’s admiration in the mosque by respect-
ing the Moslem tradition of taking one’s shoes off in a holy place
and by showing a willingness to “criticize her countrywoman,” the
intensely racist Mrs. Callendar (21). On the train to the Marabar
caves, she again reveals her eagerness to make the sympathetic leap
deemed indispensable to modern fieldwork, telling Aziz, “We shall
all be Moslems together now, as you promised” (144).
With its intermittent mysticism, the novel signals that Mrs.
Moore is not just performing an interest in native culture but effec-
tively “crossing over,” so closely is she able to identify with a native
perspective. She feels instantaneously and intuitively that the animal
who caused the Nawab’s accident was a “ghost” (104), just as the
Nawab believes: he fears that a drunken man he accidentally struck
with his car years before continues to haunt the scene of his death.
Mrs. Moore’s pronouncement is presented to the reader as uncanny,
for Indians believe that “None of the English people knew of this . . .
it was a racial secret communicable more by blood than speech”
(106). With none of the uncertainty that characterized Forster’s
attempts to “pass” as an Indian, Mrs. Moore passes easily through
racial and cultural barriers. She also knows intuitively that Aziz is
innocent, and though she suggests she has reached this conclusion
by considering his character, the narrator hints that she seemed to
know “more than character but could not impart it” (228). Mrs.
Moore exhibits the sympathy associated with ethnographic fieldwork,
but, unable to “impart” what she knows, she lacks the “detachment”
that is also part of the equation of participant observation.
Moreover, the novel suggests that this extreme capacity for empa-
thy, this openness to foreign viewpoints and experiences, has its haz-
ards, as Mrs. Moore becomes unmoored in the climactic scene at the
caves, cast far adrift from her culture and a familiar sense of self. Her
breakdown at the caves can be read as culture shock: the radical
alienation produced when one is deprived of familiar cultural sup-
ports, which Roy Wagner terms a “loss of the self” (7). Mrs. Moore
is seized by terror as the cave’s echo—epitomizing all that is incom-
prehensible about the foreign culture—begins “in some indescrib-
able way to undermine her hold on life” (165). The confrontation
with the unknown effectively strips away her belief system, ren-
dering her religion irrelevant and pathetic (“poor little talkative
Christianity”), such that she doesn’t “want to communicate with

anyone, not even with God” (166).
It is tempting to read Mrs. Moore’s spiritual disintegration as a
cautionary tale about the perils of sympathy. This character has an
uncanny knack for identifying with the other; yet, if she achieves a
sympathetic connection with Indians (or even, in the mosque,
becomes one), she is a boundary crosser who doesn’t come back.
Forster recasts the threat of going native in the unlikely shape of an
English widow who, with less fanfare but no less certainty than
Conrad’s Kurtz, “turns her back on civilization.” Repudiating the
responsibilities of motherhood and Christianity, Mrs. Moore wishes
to “retire . . . into a cave of [her] own” (224, 228, 222). Her wish
bespeaks not only a primitivist urge to return to a more primal state
of existence, but also a misanthropic desire to turn away from all
human society. The Conradian echoes seem unmistakable when, like
Kurtz, having abdicated her culture and peered into an existential
abyss, Mrs. Moore is overcome with “horror” (166). Forster’s India
is no heart of darkness or land of infernal nightmares, however;
Indian culture may be represented as tenaciously enigmatic, but it is
not demonized in the text. Mrs. Moore’s passage therefore is not
represented, in Conrad’s terms, as a crossing over to the dark side
nor as an excess in sympathetic identification. Rather, her quest for
connection breaks down at the caves, as she loses “all interest, even
in Aziz” (166), descending into a mire of apathy and cynicism. Her
sense of horror is not born of too closely identifying with the other,
but of the failure of empathy.
Before she dies, though, Mrs. Moore’s interest in India is renewed,
as she wistfully watches the continent from the return ship to
England: “she longed to stop, though it was only Bombay, and dis-
entangle the hundred Indians that passed each other in its streets”
(233). It is significant that she never reaches her destination: low-
ered into the Indian Ocean, her body is symbolically incorporated
into “another India” (284). Her tenacious ghost holds on until
“somewhere about the Suez” (285)—the very canal of connection
lauded for its potential to unite the races by Walt Whitman’s poem,
which gives Forster’s novel its title. Fittingly, this liminal character
is consigned to a boundary zone between Europe and India; her
passage is incomplete, for personally, she founders; but her spirit
remains a link between the cultures.
Believing that she is on their side, the Indian characters convert

Mrs. Moore into a Hindu deity during the trial. Ronny is appalled
“to hear his mother travestied into Esmiss Esmoor, a Hindu god-
dess” (250) and, even after her death, frets that a “cult” has begun
to form around her: “she still gave trouble with ridiculous ‘tombs,’
mixing herself up with natives” (286). The posthumous “nativiza-
tion” of Mrs. Moore represents her final passage across the barriers
dividing English and Indian cultures. That the English woman has
been incorporated into the Indian world is further suggested by Mrs.
Moore’s vivid appearance to Godbole during the Hindu festival
honoring Krishna’s birth: “He was a Brahman, she Christian, but it
made no difference, it made no difference whether she was a trick of
memory or a telepathic appeal. It was his duty, as it was his desire, to
place himself in the position of the God and to love her, and to place
himself in her position and to say to the God, ‘Come, come, come,
come.’” (326). Despite the faint aura of “trouble” that clings to the
memory of Mrs. Moore, signaling the difficulties that still hound any
attempt at social intercourse with the English, Godbole affirms the
necessity of a reciprocal relationship between Brahmans and Christians,
mediated by divine love. From being dubbed an “Oriental” while
alive to being converted into a Hindu goddess after her death, Mrs.
Moore’s nativization may represent the most enduring and hopeful
image of connection between cultures the novel has to offer.
Yet Mrs. Moore’s apotheosis elides the fact that she was an inter-
mittent sympathizer, whose sympathy failed at a key moment, pre-
venting her from bearing witness to Aziz’s character at the trial.
Imperfectly embodying the ideal of ethnographic sympathy, Mrs.
Moore goes further than the other characters in identifying with the
other, but she confronts her own limitations at the cave. Through
Mrs. Moore, Forster explores the triumphs, as well as the thresholds,
of sympathetic seeing.
N OT Y ET . . . N OT T HERE
Fielding’s willingness to break the taboo against friendship with

Indians marks him as another sympathetic seer in the text. His rela-
tionship with Aziz is characterized by reciprocity and mutual good-
will: courtesies common among countrymen, such as an invitation
to tea and the offer of a needed collar stud, imply a rare openness
and generosity given the racial polarization of colonial society. A

sign of their growing intimacy is Aziz’s decision to show Fielding
the picture of his deceased wife, suspending the practice of purdah
on his friend’s account, the first Englishman he has paid this honor.
When Fielding acknowledges the implied compliment and ventures
an explanation for the custom—asking whether when all men behave
like brothers, “there will be no purdah”—Aziz replies, “It is because
you can say and feel such a remark as that that I show you the pho-
tograph” (126). Like Mrs. Moore, Fielding wins Aziz’s respect by
demonstrating his capacity to see the other’s point of view.
Forster intimates the challenges to such rapport by dwelling on
the cross-cultural misunderstandings that serve as stumbling blocks
to friendship. For instance, Fielding offends Aziz when he guffaws at
a reference to Postimpressionism: “The remark suggested that he, an
obscure Indian, had no right to have heard of Post Impressionism—
a privilege reserved for the Ruling Race.” However, Fielding “had
not meant that Indians are obscure, but that Post Impressionism is:
a gulf divided his remark from Mrs. Turton’s ‘Why, they speak
English,’ but to Aziz the two sounded alike” (70). The misunder-
standing centers on subtle differences in inflection in a foreign lan-
guage and culture, but the larger context for Aziz’s indignation is
that he is accustomed to the “the Ruling Race’s” condescension.
This misunderstanding is replayed on a larger scale after the trial,
when Aziz takes as fact the rumors that Fielding has been sexually
intimate with Adela: “Tangles like this still interrupted their inter-
course. A pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood,
and a whole conversation went awry” (305). The narrative suggests
that the fundamental inequalities of colonial relations breed mis-
trust, bungling communication and undermining rapport.
In an oft-quoted line from the essay “What I Believe” (1939),
testifying to his creed of personal relations, Forster writes, “if I had
to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I
hope I should have the guts to betray my country” (Two Cheers 68).
When Fielding is confronted with a related quandary, the novel cel-
ebrates his choice to side with Aziz and resist the closing ranks of the
Anglo-Indians in Chandrapore, as a heroic stance for friendship and
for justice. Yet it is not a decision without misgivings: at “the
moment when he was throwing in his lot with Indians, he [Fielding]
realized the profundity of the gulf that divided him from them”
(192). The trope of the cultural chasm reinforces the tenuousness of
cross-cultural rapport in a colonial context. Though the explana-

tion eludes Fielding, the narrator accounts for the behavior of
Aziz, who runs from the police, and Hamidullah, who is cowed by
the British authority, in the following way: “Fear is everywhere: the
British Raj rests on it; the respect and courtesy Fielding himself
enjoyed were unconscious acts of propitiation” (192). This expla-
nation suggests that an ideological rather than cultural barrier
blinds Fielding to understanding the Indians with whom he sides.
Paradoxically, the fear that Fielding construes as cowardliness and
that alienates him from the Indians is represented as unconsciously
sustaining the goodwill that cements his rapport with them. Under
these conditions, cross-cultural relationships suffer: propped up by
colonial domination, the natives’ “respect and courtesy” become
dubious tributes to the outsider, obstacles to real intimacy and
understanding.
Though the reader is made aware of the misunderstandings divid-
ing Fielding from Aziz, the Anglo-Indians perceive him as crossing
the invisible boundary between the English and Indians in
Chandrapore. McBryde considers Fielding to have gone native: “the
mainstay of the defence, . . . the one righteous Englishman in a
horde of tyrants. He receives deputations from the bazaar, and they
all chew betel nut and smear one another’s hands with scent. It is not
easy to enter into the mind of such a man” (218). For McBryde,
Indians comprise a threatening and unfathomable horde, which
engulfs the English teacher. Fielding’s Indianization works in con-
junction with that of Mrs. Moore; here, Forster rewrites colonial fic-
tion’s cliché of the threat of going native in a comic mode that
subverts the trope. The absurdity of the image of the free-thinking
Fielding chewing betel nut and receiving “deputations from the
bazaar” spotlights the paranoia and prejudice of Anglo-India and
puts the gap that divides Fielding from understanding his Indian
friends into perspective by juxtaposing it with McBryde’s immense
ignorance of the Indians he governs.
Ultimately, cross-cultural social alliances under the Raj are shown
to be provisional, shifting, and tenuous. That despite his loyalty to
Aziz, Fielding finds himself in the position of bailing Adela out after
the trial shows how inescapable the antagonism between the races
has become. Aziz’s suspicion that Fielding has slept with his
enemy is only a slight distortion of the circumstances, whereby the
Englishman returns to the fold of his own community, shifting his

allegiances and abandoning his friend.
Though Fielding’s friendship with Aziz runs much deeper than
Adela’s flirtation with seeing India, Fielding and Adela share an
emotional deficiency that bars deep cultural understanding: their
overly rational, pragmatic approach inhibits their capacity for sympa-
thetic seeing. Adela points to this limitation when she tells Fielding
that what happened in the cave will never be resolved: “It’s as if I ran
my finger along that polished wall in the dark, and cannot get fur-
ther. I am up against something, and so are you,” whereas “Mrs.
Moore—she did know” (292). Puzzling this distinction further,
they admit that they “had not the apparatus for judging” (293).
Despite his close rapport with Aziz, Fielding runs up against a wall
trying to understand India, whereas Mrs. Moore is credited with
having insight into cultural and existential mysteries and a near-mys-
tical ability to enter into others’ experience, yet cannot express what
she knows. All three characters fall short of the modern ethno-
graphic ideal of relating to others, which balances sympathy and
detachment.
T HE C OLONIAL L IMITS OF R APPORT
In the last section of the novel, Aziz rejects further overtures of

cross-cultural friendship, declaring that the window of opportunity
for such relationships has closed: “Clear out, all you Turtons and
Burtons. We wanted to know you ten years back—now it’s too late”
(360). The line echoes the sentiment of an article Forster published
in Nation & Athenaeum in 1922, in which he argues that colonial
reforms have come too late to salvage amicable relationships between
Anglo-Indians and Indians and, in turn, to salvage the Empire:
“though friendships between individuals will continue and courte-
sies between high officials increase, there is little hope now of spon-
taneous intercourse between the two races” (Prince’s Tale 246). In
decisive tones, Aziz proclaims that independence is now the precon-
dition for close rapport: only after India is united and “every blasted
Englishman [is driven] into the sea,” can the two nations meet in
friendship (361–62). However, the famous closing lines of the
novel —“No, not yet . . . No, not, not there”—indefinitely defer
the possibility of rapprochement and are much more ambiguous

about the conditions under which it might occur.
Forster has been taken to task for refusing to take India’s inde-
pendence struggle seriously in Passage: noting the “conspicuous”
absence of references to Gandhi’s Noncooperation Movement,
Harish Trivedi argues that “Forster deliberately depoliticized his
novel by pushing it ‘out of time’” (152). According to Edward Said,
Aziz’s repudiation of the British Empire is undercut by the novel’s
oblique suggestion that Indians are not ready for self-governance.16
If the novel is ultimately ambivalent about the dissolution of empire,
though, it is emphatic about the corroding effects of British domi-
nation on sympathy and rapport. By suggesting that the ideology of
aggressive imperialism undermines the sympathetic connection nec-
essary to understanding another culture, the novel levels an indirect
critique of anthropology in an imperial era.
Although colonialism was in Stocking’s words “the sine qua non
of ethnographic fieldwork” in this period, individual anthropologists
differed in their feelings about the way it impacted their work. While
W. H. Rivers found the “mollifying influences of the official and the
missionary” an aid to interacting peaceably with the natives, for
example, A. C. Haddon lamented lost opportunities for fieldwork
where the map was drenched with “the red paint of British aggres-
sion.”17 In the post–World War I period, Malinowski argued for
anthropology’s utility to colonial governments: conceiving of his
work as an intervention on behalf of natives, he also sought govern-
mental backing for the discipline by reasoning that “knowledge of a
people’s customs” would permit those who governed “to be in sym-
pathy with them and to guide them according to their ideas”
(Stocking, Colonial Situations 49). Conversely, Forster suggested
that lack of sympathy and ignorance of Indian customs contributed
significantly to the demise of the Raj, and thus implicitly embraced a
model of sympathetic governance in line with Malinowski’s think-
ing.18 Yet whereas Malinowksi believed that anthropologists could
rise above the inherent antagonisms of the colonial situation, Forster
depicts colonialism as inescapably warping all relationships in British
India. The Forsterian formula of overcoming cultural differences
through “good will plus culture and intelligence” to which Fielding
subscribes “is a creed ill-suited to Chandrapore” (Passage 65); the
novel takes the stance that “where there is officialism every human
relationship suffers” (235).
In suggesting that the power inequities and racism of colonialism

compromised cross-cultural rapport, Forster anticipates postcolonial
critiques of modern anthropology, which have scrutinized the disci-
pline’s entanglement with imperial ideologies. The posthumous
publication of Malinowski’s Trobriand field diaries (in 1967) dealt a
serious blow to the ideal of ethnographic rapport, suggesting that
the founding father of empathic fieldwork methods was fully impli-
cated in a colonial mind-set. Stocking outlines some of the colonial
dimensions of the relationship between ethnographer and native
informants expressed in the diary, relating that Malinowski expressed
“momentary exultations of petty lordship,” referred to the natives in
proprietary terms as “my boys,” and was occasionally “moved to
exercise the ultimate colonial prerogative of direct physical aggres-
sion”—once repressing the urge, but professing that he could “will-
ingly beat [a native] to death,” and another time, acting on it, by
punching a man in the jaw (Stocking, Maclay, Kubary, Malinowski
45; Malinowski, Diary 240). In such passages, the defender of close
anthropological rapport emerges as “a Turton or Burton,” in Aziz’s
punning phrase—reminiscent at once of Forster’s belligerent colo-
nial administrators and of the testosterone-filled self-depictions of
late Victorian explorers. Of course, it would be a mistake to read the
diary as providing access to the candid “truth” of the ethnographic
encounter, concealed behind the fictive mask of empathy: Stocking
argues that that the diary may have served an important cathartic
function by enabling Malinowski to be more empathic in the field.
Nonetheless, the diary represents the ethnographic relationship in
terms that resonate with Passage, as power laden, complex, and sub-
ject to a continual process of negotiation.
N ARRATIVE O SCILLATIONS
The narrative voice of A Passage to India announces its shifting per-

spective in Chapter 1 by presenting Chandrapore from conflicting
vantage points: the apparent monotony and dreariness that meets
the eye along the river is contrasted with the city’s appearance from
the civil station, where “Chandrapore appears to be a totally differ-
ent place. . . . It is a tropical pleasaunce washed by a noble river” (4).
These perspectival shifts, reminiscent of Woolf’s technique in The
Voyage Out, decenter the English point of view, which is furthered by
plunging the reader into the world of the Indian characters before
introducing their English counterparts. Though it was rare at this
time to adopt “the native’s point of view” in a sustained manner in
British colonial fiction, it had been attempted by Leonard Woolf in
The Village in the Jungle (1913), based on his experience as a colo-
nial administrator in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka); as John
Cunningham explains, Village “has elements of a Sinhalese folk tale,
almost no White presence,” and “is told entirely from the villager
angle.”19 Leonard Woolf was instrumental in getting Forster to fin-
ish his Indian novel (begun in 1913, put aside, and completely over-
hauled after Forster’s second trip),20 and a brief comparison of the
two books is instructive. Although the content of Village might be
considered “ethnographic” insofar as it provides a window onto
another culture, the earlier novel is unconcerned with the issues of
cross-cultural rapport and understanding that consume Forster’s
novel; moreover, the narrative perspectives contrast starkly: whereas
Leonard Woolf guides the reader through a Sinhalese world,
Forster’s narrator oscillates between being inside and outside of the
Indian cultures described; much as in his personal writings about
India, Forster’s self-positioning wavers between that of a knowing
participant and of an uncomprehending observer. Forster’s self-con-
scious narrative fluctuation alternately approximates and prob-
lematizes the ethnographic voice, whereas Leonard Woolf’s more
conventional realist mode aspires to narrative transparency, seeming
to provide a clear window onto an ethnographic world.
At turns Forster’s narrative replicates the oscillations of an ethno-
graphic voice—identifying sympathetically with “the natives” and
then pulling back to explain the meaning of cultural practices—and
dramatizes the breakdown of ethnographic understanding, enact-
ing the shifting relationship to India Forster himself experienced.
It is this dual nature of the narrative voice I am interested in
exploring here.
In a confident ethnographic mode that builds up what Clifford
Geertz calls a “thick description” of everyday Indian life, the narra-
tor describes such traditions as the smoking of the hookah, eating
pan, and practicing purdah. Though the novel dramatizes the failure
of cross-cultural rapport, the omniscient narrator’s mobile con-
sciousness passes readily into the heads of Indian and English char-
acters, belying the supposed immensity of the gulf between them.
The narrator illuminates cultural practices, such as the legend behind
the Shrine of the Head and the Body in the Native State of Mau, that
remain obscure to key characters. Outsiders in Mau, the “Aziz fam-
ily [does] not grasp” the local significance of the procession to the
shrine that the narrator freely elaborates (334). Thus the narrator,
who readily penetrates Aziz’s mind, is also privy to “insider” knowl-
edge of Hindu traditions. In this way, the narrator mediates between
Moslem, Hindu, and English perspectives, penetrating barriers that
divide characters from one another.
In one respect, Forster follows in a tradition, recently traced by
Buzard, of nineteenth-century realist fiction that anticipates anthro-
pology by “endowing the intrinsic narrative feature of a discourse-
space/story-space distinction with a new connotative force, making
it stand for that unstable relationship between insideness and outsi-
deness that brings a culture into view” (Disorienting Fiction 39).21
In Buzard’s rich discussion, the omniscient narrator provides the
mobile perspective of the participant-observer by weaving between
the two narrative domains, sympathetically identifying with charac-
ters to the point of joining their sphere, and pulling back to
mediate between them and to present a panoramic perspective
unavailable to individual characters through an ethnographic wide-
angle lens. Yet the omniscience of Forster’s narrator is more tenu-
ous than that of George Eliot’s Middlemarch who, for Buzard,
epitomizes the ethnographic function of the Victorian narrator—a
point to which I will return.
It is in this mediating, ethnographic capacity that the narrator
expounds on the supposed psychological anomalies of the “Oriental
character.” In doing so, the narrator sounds like the discredited
McBryde or Heaslop, oddly reinscribing stereotypes the novel man-
ifestly rejects. With an air of a cultural authority, the narrator offers
the following explanation for Aziz’s vague distrust of Fielding:
“Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental
malady, that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he
trusts and mistrusts at the same time in a way the Westerner cannot
comprehend. It is his demon, as the Westerner’s is hypocrisy. Aziz
was seized by it” (311). Like the ethnographic voice that oscillates
between a stance inside and outside an unknown culture, the narra-
tor moves fluidly across the boundary between East and West, a pur-
veyor of ostensible cultural truths the average “Westerner cannot
comprehend.” The narrator’s authority to generalize on “the Oriental
mind” derives from his presumed ability to enter into Indian minds;
yet placing these minds under the microscope requires a distance

associated with the dialectic of experience and interpretation that
Clifford associates with the ethnographic voice. The psychological
typecasting of the Orient and the Occident recalls the “Personality
and Culture” school of ethnography with which Ruth Benedict was
associated. This approach read different cultures in terms of domi-
nant personality traits—a mode of conceptualization that is as much
in tension with Benedict’s extreme relativism in Patterns of Culture
as it is with Forster’s wariness of cultural stereotypes elsewhere in
Passage.22
As Paul Armstrong points out, no group in the novel escapes
stereotyping, and though some “prejudices the reader must demys-
tify and discard,” others seem inevitable or necessary: Passage
“invokes the ideal of non-reified, reciprocal knowledge of other
people and cultures only to suggest that interpretation invariably
requires distancing, objectifying prejudgments” (367). Armstrong
reasons, “Without at least partially accepting categorical state-
ments . . . , the non-Indian reader can know nothing of the com-
plexities of Indian life—but the novel’s depiction of the will-to-power
implicit in the tourist’s desire to know the ‘real India’ should
make the reader suspect even benevolent generalizations” (374).
McBryde’s xenophobic “theory of Orientalist pathology” illustrates
the violence that can inhere in generalizations, and yet, however
compromised the mode of expression, the narrator also resorts
to reductive formulations in endeavoring to make difference
intelligible.
Forster implicitly defends the validity of national stereotypes in a
1913 paper delivered to a group of Cambridge’s Indian undergrad-
uates, whom he identified as “co-students” of “the English charac-
ter.”23 Turning an unflattering ethnographic lens onto his own
culture, Forster justifies the view of the English as smug, intolerant,
repressed, and hypocritical. Such rough formulas provide at least a
foothold in trying to understand others. In Argonauts, Malinowski
likewise suggests that categorical thinking is indispensable to ethno-
graphic knowledge: “As sociologists, we are not interested in what A
or B may feel qua individuals, in the accidental course of their own
personal experiences—we are interested only in what they feel and
think qua members of a given community. Now in this capacity, their
mental states receive a certain stamp, become stereotyped by the
institutions in which they live” (23). Co-opting the generalizing
mode of ethnographic discourse, Forster’s narrator makes use of eth-

nic stereotypes, even as the novel underscores their potentially per-
nicious effects.
In tension with the certitude with which the narrator describes
Oriental character and customs is the pervasive trope of India-as-
enigma, epitomized by the Marabar Caves, which defy all efforts to
unravel their mystery (for “Nothing, nothing attaches to them,”
137). Defined through a series of negations, the caves remain stub-
bornly alien and unfathomable, functioning as an inscrutable symbol
of otherness, or, in John McClure’s phrase, “the nemesis of all
efforts at comprehensive rationalization” (21). The rhetoric of
India-as-unfathomable forms a significant countercurrent to the nar-
rative’s ethnographic voice that presumes to demystify cultural prac-
tices for uninitiated readers.
This conceit is illustrated by the seemingly unplaced narrative
voice that declares that “Nothing in India is identifiable, the mere
asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something
else” (91). Sara Suleri is eloquent on the rhetoric of enigma, assert-
ing that, “inscribed as a mystery,” Forster’s India is an “empty” site:
a locus of “unreadability” that suggests anxious fissures in the façade
of imperial control and understanding (107–9). Yet in reading this
“act of representing India as a mode of recolonization,” Suleri fails
to acknowledge what Benita Parry calls “the text’s heterogeneous
modes and its complex dialogic structure” (134). Parry suggests that
rather than simply shoring up the colonial imagination, the novel’s
emphasis on the unknowability of India may serve a subversive func-
tion: “Against the grain of a discourse where ‘knowing’ India was a
way of ruling India, Forster’s India is a geographical space abun-
dantly occupied by histories and cultures distinct from the Western
narrative of the world and meanings this endorses” (135). Parry’s
reading suggests that not knowing India may sever seeing from rul-
ing, signaling narrative humility and respect for cultural difference.
Parry, in turn, does not acknowledge that in another of its heteroge-
neous modes, the text conceives of a mode of “knowing India”
divorced from ruling India. This is the mode I’ve termed sympathetic
seeing—enacted by the partially omniscient (“all-seeing”) narrator,
whose province potentially literalizes the ethnographic objective of
sympathetically adopting “the native’s point of view.” Ultimately,
the ideal of a nondomineering mode of sympathetic seeing is only
intermittently attained by the narrator, as it is by Forster.
The narrator thus adopts contradictory orientations toward India:

sympathetically identifying with native characters, then reproducing
colonial stereotypes the novel otherwise seems to reject; demystify-
ing and remystifying cultural differences, whether to unconsciously
justify domination (Suleri) or to undercut discourses that link ruling
and knowing (Parry); functioning as a knowing tour guide, inter-
preting obscure customs and manners, then as a bewildered traveler,
in want of guidance. These unresolved narrative tensions register
Forster’s ambivalent experience grappling with understanding India.
The usually omniscient narrator that mediates between cultures,
providing the very canal of connection that eludes the main charac-
ters, is on occasion impeded, as if a curtain were drawn between the
narrating consciousness and that of the Indian characters. A case in
point is the song spontaneously performed by Professor Godbole at
the end of Fielding’s tea. It is described from the point of view of an
uncomprehending outsider: “At times there seemed rhythm, at
times there was the illusion of a Western melody. But the ear, baffled
repeatedly, soon lost any clue, and wandered in a maze of noises,
none harsh or unpleasant, none intelligible. It was the song of an
unknown bird. Only the servants understood it” (84). Godbole
steps in to explain the meaning of the lyrics—they issue from a milk-
maid who entreats Lord Krishna to come to her, but he never
comes—a meaning that ostensibly eludes the narrating voice, here
closely associated with the uncomprehending English characters.
The narrator who comfortably inhabits Aziz’s consciousness joins
the English characters as an outsider before the inscrutably alien
melody and lyrics of the Hindu’s song.
In a letter from the 1921 trip to his aunt, Forster writes, “The
Hindu character is almost incomprehensible to us. The more I know
the less I understand. With the Mohammedans it is different.” As
this remark suggests, on the one hand, the attitude of incomprehen-
sion mirrors Forster’s own frequent experience in Dewas. On the
other hand, it is by contrivance that the narrator presumes not to
know a meaning that the novelist readily supplies, through the voice
of one of his characters. While writing Passage, Forster expressed
some impatience with the tradition of limited omniscience, accord-
ing to which a novelist pretends to have access to some of his char-
acters’ minds and not others, complaining, “The studied ignorance
of the novelists grows wearisome.”24 Because Forster nonetheless
adopts the posture of studied ignorance in Passage, we must ask,
to what end? Peter Morey interprets the narrative distancing of

Godbole in this scene as sign of Forster’s wariness of “the efficacy
and ethics of an Englishman claiming to speak for India”: by offer-
ing the reader “an impressionistic description” of Godbole’s song
rather than inscribing the lyrics themselves, Forster refuses to “ape
the easily assumed quasi-Eastern poetic tongue” (63, 66). However
unsatisfactory to the novelist at the level of craft, limited omnis-
cience conveys the idea of limited understanding that Parry and
Morey associate with the respectful acknowledgment of cultural
difference.
The narrative thus alternately “affirms and questions the possibil-
ity of knowing other minds,” as Armstrong observes (375). This
tension is nowhere more apparent than when the narrator medi-
ates between English and Indian characters who misunderstand
one another, as when Aziz misinterprets Fielding’s remark about
Postimpressionism. Armstrong teases out this paradox: “The narra-
tor moves freely among the minds of different characters with appar-
ent faith in their intersubjective accessibility, but the effect for the
reader is to stress the mutual opacity of worlds which only we and
the narrator seem able to connect” (375). Armstrong neglects to
notice that it is not only the characters that are trapped in separate
realities; the narrator, too, is represented confronting the limitations
of understanding. Shuttling back and forth between the inside and
outside of another culture, the narrative voice replicates the dynamic
movement not of a polished ethnographic monograph, but of a
field diary, or of Forster’s own Indian journals and letters home.
Alternating between the secure tones of an ethnographic tour guide
and the bafflement of a bewildered stranger, the narrative voice
reproduces Forster’s ambivalent experience as a student of Indian
cultures.
Like Malinowski’s field diary—though more self-consciously—
Forster’s novel dramatizes the failure of ethnographic sympathy and
understanding. Moreover, it does so not only at the level of theme
but also by periodically undercutting the knowing stance of the par-
ticipant-observer at the level of narration. Malinowski’s Diary
emphasizes the inability to connect with ethnographic others, con-
stituting a significant counterdiscourse to that of the empathic field-
worker mythologized by Argonauts. Even after an extended period
in the Trobriand Islands, the promoter of sympathy and rapport sig-
nals his alienation with a remark that could have been taken out of
Forster’s novel: “I realized the gulf between me and the human

beings around me” (Malinowski, Diary 273). The perception that
sympathy may be an unrealizable ideal links the Diary to Forster’s
Indian writings, despite the myriad of differences that divide these
authors, their “fieldwork” situations, and these texts.
Most salient among the distinctions are the apparent differences
in these writers’ relationships with the “natives” they studied, inso-
far as these can be inferred. It must be said that in comparing the
Diary to Forster’s Indian writings we are not comparing apples with
apples: whereas Malinowski’s posthumously published field diary
was intended for “an audience of one” (Geertz, Works and Lives 78),
Hill of Devi is an expurgated collection of letters and journal entries
compiled by the author himself. Moreover, some of the selections
may have been written with an eye to publication, given that Forster
was already an established writer who may have imagined that these
“field notes” for his Indian novel would one day enter the public
domain. With this caveat in mind, one can observe that Forster’s pri-
vate writings display nothing like the contempt for indigenous oth-
ers that threads its way through Malinowski’s diary.25 The fieldwork
situations were also incomparable, as the gap between Malinowski
and the preindustrial Trobriand islanders was seemingly much
greater than that between Forster and his Oxford-educated Muslim
and Hindu companions. These considerable differences aside,
though, from across a growing disciplinary divide, both texts under-
score the obstacles to achieving sympathetic understanding.
Malinowski was theoretically committed to a policy of “full dis-
closure” that would reveal the observers’ biases, but Argonauts
clearly falls far short of this objective by sublimating the unsavory,
power-laden actualities of the field encounter into an idealized por-
trait of ethnographic rapport (Rae 74). Passage brings front and cen-
ter these concerns elided from Malinowski’s public writings,
thematizing the breakdown of rapport and the corrosive effects of
colonialism on cross-cultural relationships. Forster’s novel combines
the ideal of sympathetic rapport elaborated in Argonauts with the
skepticism about this project expressed in Malinowski’s Diary. The
narrative voice mobilizes participant-observers’ confident tones,
only to disrupt the knowing stance with the sense of alienation and
incomprehension articulated in these field accounts.
Analyzing Forster’s manuscript revisions of Passage, David Medalie
writes of the “deepening inscrutability” of the narrative voice:
“Although the general tendency in the revisions is to convert dia-

logue into narrative comment, this is, for the most part, not to clar-
ify, but rather to subvert the ‘knowingness’ associated with
authorial interpolation” (177). The unknowing stance situates the
narrator outside of Indian culture, but this “outside” is not to be
confused with the participant-observer’s wide-angle perspective.
Instead, this is the uncomprehending observer’s outside, the opaque
wall that demarcates a space of impenetrable otherness. This narra-
tive oscillation puts a modernist stamp on the “self-interrupting
style” of Victorian realism (Buzard, Disorienting Fiction 34) by
interweaving the “knowing” undulations of participant observation
with the uncomprehending perspective of a narrator-observer as
blinkered as the characters. Hence the inside/outside dynamic of an
ethnographic narrative is uneasily yolked to an outside we might
call touristic.
Illustrative of this tension is the description of Gokul Ashtami,
narrated from a perspective that is difficult to place. The Hindus in
attendance are identified as “the toiling ryot, whom some call the
real India”—a descriptor that parrots the reductive view of an essen-
tial India that the novel has consistently rejected (318). While in his
letters Forster is troubled by the Hindu festival’s apparent lack of
aesthetic harmony, that judgment is now displaced, a move that dis-
tances and disowns Forster’s own experience as an observer. As if
describing a view the narrative voice does not fully countenance, the
narrator relates that the natives “did not one thing which the non-
Hindu would feel dramatically correct . . . ” (319). The narrator at
first resists identification with the uninitiated outsiders by delineat-
ing a category, the non-Hindu, not necessarily inclusive of the nar-
rator, and by representing the response to the festival in hypothetical
terms. The implication of the qualification is that the festival would
be “dramatically correct” to a Hindu, such that the impression of
aesthetic failure derives from the outsiders’ ignorance of indigenous
meanings and sensibilities. The ambiguity in perspective is cancelled
in the next breath, when the narrator joins the implied reader in
incomprehension: “this approaching triumph of India was a muddle
(as we call it)” (319). Unlike the ethnographic voice that explicates
cultural unknowns, this narrative voice offers no guidance. On the
whole, the description of the Hindu festival closely resembles
Forster’s field notes, but it is framed in such a way as to foreground
the limitations of the observing perspective. The result is that the
narrative point of view is notoriously difficult to pin down in the

Gokul Ashtami section.26
In a recent study of Forster’s narrative voice, Bette London has
called omniscience “the novel’s battleground”—for she reads the
novel as staging a “power struggle between competing voices:
between, in its broadest reach, English and Indian discourse” (64).
London argues that narrative “identification with the Other” inter-
rupts the controlling voice of omniscience, intimating sympathy
with an anticolonial perspective and making it difficult to discern a
consistent point of view (93). What I have been calling the oscilla-
tion of the narrative voice, London characterizes as “a narrative gone
mad—a shifting, slippery, unplaceable voice that seems to take its
timbre from whatever voice it happens to be near. The resulting
disturbances to the novel’s surface articulate what might be called
narrative hysteria: the breakdown or fragmentation of the narrative
voice” (87).
I have argued that the narrative voice’s incoherence manifests
Forster’s own uncertainty about the ethnographic project. London
maintains that ultimately the narrative “retreats from the embrace of
otherness” (102), wrestling control back from its Indian characters.
According to London, “[o]mniscience provides the vantage from
which the narrative speaks, and, in particular, the superior position
on which its irony depends. It offers the narrative a place outside the
characters from which to pass judgment and an authoritative base for
its claims. Yet it is its very pretense to stand outside its domain—lit-
erally above the characters and plot—that implicates the narrative
in what it critiques: the colonialist stance” (105). The narrator
becomes, in London’s judgment, a God lording over the characters,
as the British Raj lords its authority over the Indians in Passage. In
her final estimation, “the novel’s display of heterogeneous utter-
ances merely conceals, for the moment, the monolithic edifice it
presents, in which soliloquies of power displace the dialogic mode
on the novel’s representational stage” (64–65). Yet in concluding
that the narrative heterogeneity is merely a ruse, and that omnis-
cience unproblematically prevails, London doesn’t recognize the full
force of her own argument, which has demonstrated that the narra-
tive voice is profoundly unstable.
Far from being monolithic, the narrator’s omniscience is dis-
rupted by shifting identification with different points of view. It is
this heterogeneity that Morey has in mind when he echoes London’s
description of the narrative voice of Passage as “dialogical,” using

Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for a literary form that incorporates diver-
gent and sometimes contradictory discourses in continual negotia-
tion with one another (Fictions of India 62). The colonial politics of
Passage have been as difficult to pin down as its aesthetic effects
because the narrative tensions I have been discussing are not
resolved. As an ethnographic project, the novel is also contradictory.
Forster intervenes in Anglo-Indian fiction in a manner analogous
to that of the modern anthropological fieldworker—both reject the
arm’s length portrayals of their predecessors, whether Anglo-Indians
cocooned in their clubs or armchair anthropologists enshrined in
their libraries, and advocate cultural immersion as the best means
of attaining deep understanding. Sympathetically identifying with
its native characters, Passage self-consciously demystifies Indian
lives, emulating the participant-observer’s oscillating perspective.
Yet Forster disrupts the epistemological certainties of ethnogra-
phy, revealing the limitations of rapport and understanding in a
colonial context.
While the novel implicitly indicts the Raj’s abuses, exalting inter-
cultural friendship, some critics have felt that its emphasis on the per-
sonal deflects attention away from the more serious issue of an
independence struggle that was in full swing in 1924, which the
novel relegates to an offstage concern. Forster has been accused of
“sublimating the brutal realities of the conflict between independ-
ence and the Raj to the tame Bloomsburian pieties of ‘personal
relationship’” (A Passage to India 3). Writing in 1939, Forster
acknowledges that his philosophy of personal relations might seem
inadequate “in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecu-
tion” and yet nevertheless maintains that the personal virtues of
“tolerance, good temper, and sympathy” were the best hope for
effecting progressive social and political change at home and abroad
(Two Cheers 67). Forster’s point resonates with Malinowski’s con-
cluding remarks in Argonauts, where he underscores the urgency of
studying other cultures, in the wake of the devastating global con-
flict of World War I: “Nor has civilized humanity ever needed such
tolerance more than now, when prejudice, ill will and vindictiveness
are dividing each European nation from another, when all the ideals,
cherished and proclaimed as the highest achievements of civilization,
science and religion, have been thrown to the winds. The Science of
Man, in its most refined and deepest version should lead us to such
knowledge and to tolerance and generosity, based on the under-

standing of other men’s point of view” (518). Like anthropologists
of the day, Forster stressed the political importance of cross-cultural
understanding. Thematically and discursively, Forster’s Indian writ-
ings suggest that the goal of sympathetically identifying with and
understanding others is elusive. Even as he peered beyond the façade
that greeted the average English tourist, Forster expressed uncer-
tainties about attaining a sympathetic connection with or deep under-
standing of Indian cultures. Nonetheless, he encouraged others to
assay the passage. Writing in 1926, several years after completing his
own Passage to India, Forster captures this sentiment with a note of
urgency: “nations must understand one another, and quickly; and
without the interposition of their governments, for the shrinkage of
the globe is throwing them into one another’s arms.”27
4
C H A P T E R 5
“WHEN THE I N D I A N WA S IN V O G U E ”:
D. H. L AW R E N C E , A L D O U S H U X L E Y , A N D
ETHNOLOGICAL TOURISM IN THE SOUTHWEST
The southwest is the great playground of the White American. The

desert isn’t good for anything else. But it does make a fine
national playground. And the Indian, with his long hair and his
bits of pottery and blankets and clumsy home-made trinkets, he’s a
wonderful live toy to play with.
—D. H. Lawrence, “Just Back from the
Snake-Dance—Tired Out”
“I had the same idea as you,” the Director was saying. “Wanted to
have a look at the savages. Got a permit for New Mexico and went
there for my summer holiday.”
—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Let’s go to New Mexico in autumn. Let’s be amused.

—Lawrence to Huxley, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence
I n her 1934 classic Patterns of Culture, anthropologist Ruth

Benedict asserts that no one has better described “the form and
spirit of Pueblo dances” than D. H. Lawrence (93). Although recent
studies have shown that Lawrence’s representations of indigenous
people alternately idealize and denigrate their subject, contemporary
scholars, somewhat surprisingly, continue to praise Lawrence for his
“extraordinary effort to get inside Indian culture” (Kinkead-Weekes
27) and for his “true engagement with the primitive” (Storch
50–51).1 This chapter suggests that we should read Lawrence not
for potential insight into Indian cultures but, rather, for his illumi-
nation of the practice of cultural observation, which takes him into
terrain traversed by ethnologists and tourists alike.
As made clear in his 1929 essay “New Mexico,” the indigenous
people of the Southwest were remarkable to Lawrence insofar as
they preserved their “tribal integrity” amidst the rush of moderniza-
tion (Phoenix 144). Threatening to overwhelm this tribal integrity
was the already extensive commercialization of the region, epito-
mized for Lawrence by the figure of “the Indian who sells you bas-
kets on Albuquerque station or who slinks around Taos plaza”
(144)—a stereotype of the Indians tourists would frequently encounter
in these popular venues for sightseeing and buying souvenirs.
Avoiding modernized Indians to commune with “a remnant of the
most deeply religious race still living,” Lawrence emulates the pro-
tocol of professional anthropologists like Benedict, who conducted
fieldwork among the Pueblo Indians.
This construction of threatened authenticity relies on a notion of
cultural purity that has been challenged in recent years by James
Clifford and others. Yet even within its historical and ideological
context, what makes this claim of discovering an unaltered indige-
nous culture dubious is the picture Lawrence himself paints of the
region: choked with thousands of tourists crowding its plazas and
pueblos, the Southwest emerges in Lawrence’s derisive description
as the trendy, “picturesque reservation and playground of the east-
ern states” (Phoenix 141), and Southwest Indians as “wonderful live
toy[s] to play with” (Letters 609). In essays like “The Hopi Snake
Dance”—in which three thousand tourists amusedly regard a native
ceremony as if it were a “circus performance” (Mornings 138)—
Lawrence elaborates the process by which tribal customs and cere-
monies are converted into an ethnological spectacle. With the figure
of “the Indian who sells you baskets on Albuquerque Station,”
Lawrence suggests that the star attractions of the region, its
“befeathered and bedaubed darling[s]” (Mornings 101), sometimes
participate in their own commodification. It is hard to imagine the
ideal of unchanged tribal life coexisting with the aggressive commer-
cialization of native culture Lawrence describes. In his essays and
novella, St. Mawr (1925), Lawrence vividly depicts Southwest reser-
vations and pueblos of the interwar period as a kind of ethnological
“WHEN THE I N D I A N WA S IN VOGUE” 159
theme park. Adapting Langston Hughes’s phrase, one could say that
in the 1920s and 1930s, the Indian was in vogue.2
Aldous Huxley joined Lawrence in his satirical treatment of
Southwest tourism (but not in his primitivist zeal for “untainted”
native cultures). His depiction of the Southwest and its inhabitants is
indebted to Lawrence’s essays and letters, the latter of which he had
just finished editing for a posthumous collection when he began
writing Brave New World (1932).3 In 1928, Lawrence invited
Huxley to Taos, his flippant tone gently mocking the exotic image of
the state already known as “The Land of Enchantment,” a slogan
befitting an amusement park’s fantasy zone: “Let’s go to New
Mexico in autumn. Let’s be amused” (Letters 718). The trip fell
through, but Huxley seized on this location as a setting for his
famous dystopia, mining realistic details from Lawrence’s writings
and from formal ethnographic sources. Although scholars have over-
looked this context, Brave New World is a novel about tourism,
echoing Lawrence by representing a New Mexican “Savage
Reservation” as the destination for a pair of English tourists, and,
conversely, charting the trajectory of “John the Savage” from the
reservation to London, where he is exhibited as an ethnological
curiosity, evocative of the “human showcases” of world’s fairs that
were widespread until the mid-1920s (Greenhalgh 82). Eventually
John wearies of his status as celebrity savage and flees the New
World, only to become the ultimate tourist spectacle in the novel’s
climactic scene.
Critics who have considered the relationship between these two
authors have tended to focus on Huxley’s rejection of the
Lawrencian primitive—a reading I don’t dispute.4 What has not
been adequately appreciated is the shared context for these writings:
namely, the interwar mania for Southwest Indians. This chapter
argues that Lawrence and Huxley collaborated in satirizing what I
will call ethnological tourism: tourism that emulates modern anthro-
pology’s goal of observing, firsthand, cultures imagined to exist out-
side the influence of modernity.5 In satirizing the way that tourism
transforms the reservations and pueblos of the Southwest into eth-
nological spectacle, Lawrence and Huxley go beyond the modern
trope of antitourism: they explore the potentially destructive effects
of cultural spectatorship on indigenous cultures and thus implicitly
critique modern ethnography’s modes of observation and represen-
tation. Coming at the vogue of the Indian from two very different
perspectives—Lawrence as a primitivist longing to reconnect with

lost origins, Huxley as a satirist wishing to expose primitivism as a
utopian fantasy—these writers nonetheless provide a similar critique
of the way tourism and ethnography potentially disrupt local tradi-
tions, objectifying indigenous people and commodifying their cul-
ture. In this way, they are prescient observers of issues that continue
to confront indigenous groups, many of whom rely on tourist rev-
enue for their livelihood, as well as ethnographers, who are increas-
ingly self-conscious about their positioning vis-à-vis the cultures they
observe. This chapter reveals that the writings of Lawrence and
Huxley emerged in complex negotiation with contemporary ethno-
graphic texts and with a fledgling tourism industry that regarded
Southwest Indians as the region’s principal tourist attraction. For
though Lawrence in particular tried to put up a cordon sanitaire
between himself and other tourists and to disentangle the native cul-
tures he admired from their commercial manifestations, in this
period, literary, ethnographic, and touristic discourses are inextricably
intertwined. The next section begins to demonstrate this intercon-
nectedness by interrogating the exhibition practices of certain ethno-
graphic texts, of advertisements circulating in popular magazines, and
of the affiliated Santa Fe Railway and Fred Harvey Company—the
force behind much Southwest tourism in the period, including the
Southwest ethnological exhibitions of the 1915 world’s fairs.
“S O WE ’ VE SAVED THE PUEBLOS FOR F RED H ARVEY ” 6
A 1928 ad in Travel magazine for “Harveycar Motor Cruises” in

New Mexico depicts a Native American couple standing before a
quiet pueblo, edged by vacant desert and hills, with the ironic cap-
tion, “Is this really the New World?” (see Figure 5.1). The ad appeals
to and helps construct tourists’ fantasies of the quasiethnological dis-
covery of a people who, according to the ad copy, continue to live as
in pre-Columbian times; tourists visiting the Southwest are invited
to step back in history via the familiar trope of spatial anachronism.7
The citizens of Huxley’s Brave New World are meant to ask the same
question (“Is this really the New World?”), albeit with a different
inflection, when they visit the New Mexican reservation—con-
structed as an exotic, archaic outpost of savagery that is a mere
rocket ride away from London.
Figure 5.1 Advertisement for Harveycar Motor Cruises. Credit: Travel 50
(February 1927): 48.
In the contemporaneous Patterns of Culture, Benedict co-opts

advertisers’ language by characterizing the Pueblo Indians as “one of
the most widely known primitive peoples in Western civilization, . . .
in easy reach of any transcontinental traveler” (57), beckoning
tourists to come see these famed Indians for themselves. Reading
Benedict together with Lawrence’s Southwest essays—which are
teeming with tourists he is trying to avoid—reminds us of the mys-
tification modern ethnographic writing entails, as Benedict effaces
from her text the numerous travelers alongside whom she conducted
her fieldwork.
It was the Atchison Topeka Santa Fe Railway, together with the
affiliated Fred Harvey Company, that brought Southwest Indians
within (in Benedict’s phrase) “easy reach” of ordinary travelers.8
Indeed, the Fred Harvey publicity machine was likely behind
Lawrence’s figure of “the Indian who sells you baskets on
Albuquerque station,” insofar as Fred Harvey aggressively employed
Native American artisans to market products on railway platforms.
In 1901, Fred Harvey opened its Indian Department to coordinate
efforts in marketing Indians’ images and artifacts, distilling what was
represented as a comprehensive “Southwest experience” in the
hotel-restaurant-museum complexes, known as Harvey Houses,
which Lawrence visited (Luhan, Lorenzo 234). The Harvey Company
was “the major source for southwest ethnological materials” for
tourists, collectors, and museums, including the Smithsonian and
the Field Museum of Natural History (Weigle and Babcock 67), sell-
ing “enough Indian curios to put a touch of Navajo or Hopi in every
U.S. home” in the words of one contemporary (Hartwell 31).
Herman Schweitzer, the head of the Indian Department and the
principal “Harvey anthropologist,” explained to collector William
Randolph Hearst in 1905 that the main objective in promoting “the
Indians of the Southwest and their products” was “to furnish an
attraction for the Santa Fe.” Thus Fred Harvey made ethnological
tourism big business (qtd. in Weigle and Babcock 67, 92).
Lawrence and his protagonists repeatedly profess a desire to leave
behind commercial venues, such as the platforms of the Santa Fe
Railroad and the populated plazas of Taos, to seek a more intimate
cross-cultural encounter.9 His essays and novella, St. Mawr, chart
the cultural observer’s movement beyond the façade of the Harvey
Southwest and the establishment of a fleeting connection with
what is represented as genuine native culture. In following this tra-

jectory, Lawrence’s writings emulate the emerging goals of ethno-
logical fieldwork, even as they denounce the mystifications of
ethnographic texts.
A careful observer of native customs and copious reader of
anthropology,10 Lawrence criticized professional fieldworkers, like
Adolf Bandelier, whose account of prepueblo life, The Delight
Makers (1890), romanticized Indians: “White people always, or
nearly always, write sentimentally about the Indian. Even a man like
Adolf Bandelier. He was not a sentimental man. On the contrary. Yet
the sentimentality creeps in, when he writes about the thing he
knows best, the Indian. . . . You’ve got to debunk the Indian”
(Mornings 102–3). Lawrence sets himself up as correcting such eth-
nological “bunk,” making a bid for himself as a more reliable cul-
tural observer than the professionals. In his Southwest essays,
Lawrence mirrors modern ethnographies by explicating rituals and
beliefs for the reader as an eyewitness “authority” and adopting the
native’s point of view. Though Lawrence would insist that he was
“no ethnologist” (Phoenix 95), the implication that his writing is not
meant to be taken seriously is belied by forays into thick cultural
description.11
“The Hopi Snake Dance” (1924) illustrates Lawrence’s ethno-
logical pretensions. It was Mabel Dodge Luhan—the famous salon-
niere who promoted the region as energetically as the Fred Harvey
Company did, luring hundreds of artists and ethnological tourists to
Taos—who arranged for her husband, the Tiwa Pueblo leader Tony
Luhan, to accompany Lawrence to Arizona to view the Hopi snake
and antelope ceremony. With thousands of spectators in atten-
dance, this ceremony was so popular and tourists so disruptive that
outsiders were eventually prohibited from viewing it (Dilworth
72). In his essay, Lawrence occasionally includes himself among the
clamoring crowd, as when he describes being chastened by the
snake priests’ solemnity, which “conquers, for a few seconds, our
white-faced flippancy” (Mornings 151, italics mine). For the most
part, though, he distances himself from the tourists he stigmatizes—
“spectators . . . packed thick . . . greedy with curiosity,” regarding
the “sacred religious ceremonial” as a “circus-performance” (145)—
fashioning himself as a more culturally sensitive, informed observer,
who looks beyond crude entertainment to appreciate the ceremony’s
indigenous meaning. Emulating ethnographic texts that seem to issue
from an invisible observer, Lawrence enters into imaginative union

with the Hopis: “[The chant] reveals how deep, how deep the men
are in the mystery they are practicing, how sunk deep below our
world, to the world of snakes, and dark ways in the earth, where are
the roots of corn, and where the little rivers of unchannelled, uncre-
ated life-passion run like dark, trickling lightening, to the roots of
the corn and to the feet and loins of men, from the earth’s innermost
dark sun. They are calling in the deep, almost silent snake-language,
to the snakes and rays of dark emission from the earth’s inward
‘Sun’” (159). Like a modern anthropologist, Lawrence presumes to
have esoteric knowledge of the ceremony, purporting to understand
the “deep, almost silent snake-language” of the priests.
While much of the essay works to correct the crowd’s supposed
ignorance by demonstrating the Snake Dance’s spiritual significance,
Lawrence worries that it is not merely tourists who regard the cere-
mony as a theatrical performance. He is on his guard against Indians
who seem to be masquerading for the tourists: “The only dancers
who showed signs of being wrought-up were the two young snake-
catchers, and one of these, particularly, seemed in a state of actor-like
uplift, rather ostentatious. But the old priests had that immersed,
religious intentness which is like a spell, something from another
world” (160). The passage betrays anxiety about the ceremony’s
desacrilization, even as it works to ratify its legitimacy: in contrast
with the snake-catchers who make a show of performing are the
dignified priests, whose very obliviousness to the crowd seems to
vouch for their genuine “religious intentness.” At stake for
Lawrence is the question of whether a ceremony can retain its tradi-
tional meaning—and therefore its authenticity—when it becomes an
object of touristic consumption, a question scholars of tourism and
anthropology continue to debate today, which I return to at the
end of the chapter.
Emily Post’s contemporaneous travel narrative, By Motor to the
Golden Gate (1916), considers the possibility that Indians self-con-
sciously perform their culture for nonnative audiences. Traveling by
car instead of train, Post claims she is privy to a “behind the scenes”
look at the staged interactions between tourists and Indians at Fred
Harvey hotels and the railway stations of the Santa Fe: “The hotel
people, curio-sellers and Indians are the actors, the travelers on the
incoming trains are the audience” (160). She describes the scene on
the platform at Albuquerque Station, referring to another popular
forum for display, “the picture postcard”: “You have always on pic-
ture postcards seen it filled with Indians. There is not one in sight.
Wait though until ten minutes before the California limited is due.
Out of nowhere appear dozens of vividly costumed Navajos and
Hopis their blankets and long braids woven with red cloth, their
headbands and beads and silver ornaments fill the platform with
color like a flower display. . . . Although you walk up and down
between their forming lines watching them arrange their display of
baskets and pottery, they are silent until the first passenger alights”
(162). The passage suggests the reasons that Lawrence regarded the
figure of “the Indian on the platform” as a cultural poser: the empty
platform is a stage; the arrival of the train is the actors’ cue; the inter-
action with tourists seems well rehearsed. Wearing what Post
describes as “costumes,” the Navajos and Hopis seem to perform a
version of their own culture, served up for touristic consumption.
Although Post emphasizes the theatricality of this encounter, she
does not imply (as Lawrence does) that being backstage gives
greater insight into a culture that remains inherently obscure to
her. Serious understanding would entail close observation of the
Indians’ daily lives and more candid interactions than are available
to “the average, ignorant tourist,” a classification she applies to
herself (179).
Though she is skeptical of seeing past the tourist façade, Post goes
to a Navajo hogan, where visitors can see natives “as they really live”
(170). She expresses uneasiness about the violation of privacy that
this visit implies: “Personally I feel rather embarrassed on being told
to look in upon a group of swarthy figures who contemplate the
intrusion of their privacy in solemn silence” (185). Post acknowl-
edges the power of her own gaze to disrupt and to transgress—qual-
ities that Lawrence can only identify in others’ gazes. Moreover,
she belies Lawrence’s assumption that other tourists are unwittingly
duped by the theatrics of a Southwest arranged for their viewing
pleasure. Sharing none of Lawrence’s anxiety about the apparent
inauthenticity of some of the Indians he encounters, Post accepts the
performance of cultural identities for curious outsiders as an inevitable
feature of the touristic exchange.
When Lawrence rebukes tourists for regarding the “sacred reli-
gious ceremonial,” the Hopi Snake Dance, as if it were a sensational
show, he criticizes them for misreading the dance in the very way that
contemporary ads and ethnological display practices encouraged. In
Figure 5.2 Cover of Indian Detour brochure, 1929. Credit: New Mexico
Guide Book Collection. Call # ACC 332, box 2, folder 13. Courtesy of the
Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, New Mexico History Museum, Santa
Fe, NM.
Figure 5.3 Cover of Indian Detour brochure, 1930. Credit: Indian

Detours through New Mexico and Arizona. Front cover of brochure.
Rand McNally, 1930. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research,
University Libraries, the University of New Mexico.
1926 Fred Harvey inaugurated Harveycar Indian Detours, automo-

bile tours designed to take tourists “off the beaten track” and to
introduce them to “real” Pueblo Indian home life and native cere-
monies like the “weird Hopi Snake Dance,” explicated by purport-
edly expert guides (“Harveycar Motor Cruises” 37). Harveycar Indian
Detours targeted ethnological tourists, like Lawrence, eager to get
beyond the commercial façade of Harvey’s other Southwest, the one
that greeted them on the platform at Albuquerque station. Epitomizing
Dean MacCannell’s idea of the guided tour’s “staged authenticity”
(The Tourist 98), Harveycar didn’t conceal the staging of the Indian
Detours: the Couriers were white women costumed in stereotypical
native garb and jewelry, and the drivers were cowboys, following
what was already a cinematic cliché of the Old West.
Above all, Harveycars promised to choreograph meetings with
Indians, who were thus construed as sights to be seen or as artisans
producing crafts exclusively for touristic consumption. This impres-
sion is conveyed by Detour ads depicting Indians with baskets, blan-
kets, or pots, objects that seem metonymically interchangeable with
the Indians themselves, inviting the tourist to visually consume artif-
icer as well as artifact (see Figures 5.2 and 5.3). A lone carload of
detourists romantically reenact the discovery of indigenous Americans
in these images, in a conquest that is commercial rather than mili-
tary. Meanwhile, Indians stand amicably by in the posture of dutiful
servants, as if waiting to be animated by the touristic exchange. The
iconography and rhetoric of these ads encourages tourists to regard
living people as though they were objects in a museum, as exempli-
fied by a 1928 brochure for Harveycar Indian Detours that invites
the tourist to visit “Indian pueblos where one may ‘catch archaeol-
ogy live’” (“Harveycar Motor Cruises” 5).
Echoing the Harvey ads’ format, which encapsulates Southwest
tourism as a placid encounter with aborigines who court observa-
tion, is the cover of February 1926 Motor Camper & Tourist (Figure
5.4), where an Anglo-American couple are depicted car camping
next to a Native American couple who proffer their wares. The cap-
tion “Camping with the Original Americans” seems at first to serve
as an invitation to the reader of the magazine to do just that. Yet the
cozy preposition with belies the oppositional logic of the image,
which depicts more of a cross-cultural staring contest than a slumber
party. The impression that the tourists, rather than the “Original
Americans,” are on display is conveyed not only by their orientation
Figure 5.4 “Camping with the Original Americans.” Credit: Motor

Camper & Tourist 2, no. 9 (February 1926). Hugo Gernsback Papers,
Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY. Reprinted by Permission of Poptronix Inc.
(facing the reader rather than turned away), but also by the illusion
that the poles supporting the tent’s awning demarcate an exhibit
space. In inverted fashion, the scene evokes the world’s fairs’ practice
of exhibiting colonized peoples in “natural habitats” for the edifica-
tion and pleasure of paying visitors.
Vacationing in the Southwest and visiting ethnological displays at
world’s fairs were not unrelated phenomena: the elaborate Painted
Desert Exhibition at the Panama-California Expo in San Diego was
sponsored and organized by the Santa Fe Railway and Fred Harvey
and functioned as a virtual vacation spot and as an ingenuous, and
highly effective, advertisement for travel to the Southwest.12
Consisting of ten acres of painstakingly simulated Southwest land-
scape, with imported sandstone, cactus, and sagebrush, as well as
plaster and cement made to resemble clay, the Painted Desert was
built and inhabited by three hundred Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo

Indians. Despite the exhibit’s obvious stagecraft, one reporter called
it an “open reservation,” reinforcing the implied link between the
“real” and the virtual Southwest (Kropp 40).
Ambiguity about whether fairgoers were to interpret ethnic oth-
ers as sideshow curiosities or objects of scientific interest was intro-
duced by the spatial logic of the fairgrounds: although the grounds
were conventionally divided into an amusement zone (“the
Midway” or “Joy Zone”) and a zone for education, science, and
technology, ethnological exhibits might be placed at either end, and
often appeared at both ends, blurring the distinction between these
categories. Some scientists regarded fairs as an opportunity for pop-
ularizing ethnological findings; even Franz Boas, who would later
distance himself from American museum anthropology on the
grounds that the general public was incapable of entering “into the
modes of thought of other nations,” initially embraced the possibil-
ity that ethnological exhibits could function as pedagogical tools
(qtd. in Hinsley, Exhibiting Cultures 363). However, the drive to
entertain overruled the exhibits’ pedagogical function. At the
Panama-California Expo, museum organizers doubly cued specta-
tors to read the Hopi Snake Dance as performed for their entertain-
ment, by the placement of the performance in the amusement zone
and by its billing as “dramatically sensational.”13
Curtis Hinsley argues that the overriding message of ethnological
display was that ethnicity could be consumed, that other cultures,
arrayed as so many commodities, were there to be economically col-
onized and exploited. Like the Harvey ads’ Indians who seem inter-
changeable with their merchandise, the displays transformed living
individuals into storefront mannequins: the “observer does not stop
to learn; rather, he or she strolls, window-shopping in the depart-
ment store of exotic cultures” (Hinsley, “The World as Marketplace”
365). Hinsley links this visual consumption of cultures to tourism:
“public curiosity about other peoples, mediated by the terms of the
marketplace, produced an early form of touristic consumption”
(363). Touring the ethnological exhibits and concession stands at
world’s fairs was not unlike touring the reservations and pueblos of
the Southwest: in the Panama-Pacific Expo’s Joy Zone, fairgoers
were transported in little cars to sites associated with a replica of
“The Grand Canyon of Arizona,” including a simulated Indian vil-
lage; on the way they could stop and purchase a Navajo blanket at a
concession stand. In New Mexico or Arizona, conveyed in Harveycars,

tourists could likewise watch Indians perform ceremonial dances,
buy handcrafted artifacts, and glimpse some of the quotidian strange-
ness of Indians constructed as exotic others. Here we have a kind of
hall of mirrors of staged encounters: the Expo exhibit restages the
Harvey Southwest experience, which, as we have seen, is already
staged. In effect, the human showcases of world’s fairs, Indian
Detours and Harvey Houses, and myriad advertisements and ethno-
graphic texts, were mutually supporting apparatuses for the display
of native people: together they promote and normalize the ethno-
logical tourist’s gaze.
In his essay “Indians and an Englishman,” Lawrence seems to
describe a world’s fair’s amusement zone when he represents himself
as a “bewildered straggler out of the far-flung British Empire,”
stumbling “like a bumpkin in a circus ring, with the horse-lady leap-
ing over my head, the Apache war-whooping in my ear, the Mexican
staggering under crosses and bumping me as he goes by, the artist
whirling colours across my dazzled vision, the highbrows solemnly
disclaiming at me from all the cross-roads” (Phoenix 92–93). The
trope of theatricality—signaled by the language of audiences, circus
rings, and what he calls “a masquerade of earnestness” (93)—points
to the contrivance of a site where cultural others perform their oth-
erness or are perceived as performing it by uncomprehending
observers, for whom ordinary customs and dress become the stuff of
exotic entertainment.
The essay moves from what is described, then, as the circus of the
Southwest to a secluded forest setting where Lawrence “discovers” a
tribal elder preaching in a forest clearing. Though he is informed
that only Apaches are admitted into the circle, Lawrence boasts that
he lurks for hours on the periphery, wrapped in a Navajo blanket that
simultaneously affords him the thrill of an “Indian disguise” and the
voyeuristic pleasure of feeling “as good as invisible” (98). Rather
than openly gawking at native rituals, Lawrence represents himself
peering through a “leaf screen” (97)—an idiom of stealth that
figures in professional anthropology as well, as evidenced by
Malinowski’s aggressive characterization of the fieldworker as “an
active huntsman” who must outfox “his quarry . . . and follow it up
to its most inaccessible lairs” (Argonauts 8). From this vantage,
Lawrence describes a tribal elder as though he were a museum arti-
fact, calling him “an old, mask-like virile figure,” “a piece of living
red earth,” and “a figure of deep pathos” destined to perish. Like the
Harveycar ads, Lawrence’s text seems to beckon his readers to

“catch archaeology live”—to come and stare at exotic Indians before
their way of life vanishes. Despite the essay’s attempt to conjure a
portrait of a more intimate and purportedly authentic encounter with
Indians, the Englishman of the essay’s title emerges as a trespasser
and a spy—more furtive than other spectators but equally riveted by
the spectacle of difference.
S PURIOUS I NDIANS
In the novella St. Mawr, the American expatriate, Lou Witt stands in
for Lawrence as an alienated modern individual on a spiritual quest
that takes her to the Southwest. Lou and her mother Rachel despise
the leisure class to which they marginally belong, with its superficial
pursuit of vacuous amusements (“so bright and cheerful and sport-
ing and brimming with libido” [113]). This includes Lou’s
bohemian husband Rico, who in her view is as superficial (and as
insufficiently male) as the rest of the beau monde, which is in a state
of “incipient decay” (94). Like Lawrence, Lou seeks a source of
vitality to replenish the “rattling nullity” of her existence (87). It is
the titular horse, St. Mawr, the “virgin” desert of the Southwest, and
the novella’s aboriginal characters that embody the vital, primal (and
phallic) antidote to the moribund modern condition (78).
En route to America, all the fashionable tourist destinations
repulse Lou and her mother: “that post-war Monte Carlo, the
Riviera” is characterized as “still more depressing even than Paris”;
similarly, Texas, with its “Cowboys right out of Zane Grey,” disap-
points (126, 131). Even the characters’ arrival in New Mexico—a
site imagined as a pocket of resistance to globalization—is sur-
rounded by a sense of anticlimax: “They found the fiesta over in
Santa Fe: Indians, Mexicans, artists had finished their great effort to
amuse and attract the tourists. Welcome, Mr. Tourist, said a great
board on one side of the high road. And on the other side, a little
nearer to the town: Thank You, Mr. Tourist” (132). Their postfiesta
arrival conveys the impression of belatedness that also characterizes
Lawrence’s essays, the sense that the attempt to escape modern life
may be doomed, as these travelers follow the well-trod footsteps of
those who have come before them. Looking to escape the superfi-
ciality of everyday life, Lou and Rachel encounter a Southwest
where, in James Buzard’s apt description from another context, “all
experience is predictable and repetitive, all cultures and objects mere

‘touristy’ self-parodies” (4). Lawrence’s disapprobation of the stag-
ing of local culture for the benefit of tourists is here writ large in a
comic mode. Just as in his essays, in St. Mawr, Lawrence implies that
one must look past the façade presented to the average tourist, past
the veneer of modernization in order to glimpse the elusive, endan-
gered essence of indigenous culture.
In depicting modern civilization as moribund and alienating, and
indigenous cultures of the Southwest as vital, Lawrence replicates a
distinction that had been made by the anthropologist Edward Sapir
in 1919, in Dial magazine (where Lawrence published several of the
essays I have been discussing)—that between “genuine” and “spuri-
ous” cultures. For Sapir, modern civilization has become spurious,
insofar as it is plagued by devitalized traditions; its individuals are cut
from their spiritual roots and from an integrated society; and exis-
tence has become overly mechanized and sterile. In contrast,
American Indians enjoy what Sapir terms genuine culture, which is
“inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory” and “free of
spiritual discords, of the dry rot of social habit” (Sapir 90). Lawrence
operates within this framework up to a point, but in dwelling on the
transformation of native culture into ethnological spectacle, he pres-
ents the threat of a world where modernization is turning all cultures
into spurious ones.14
Lawrence maps the genuine/spurious distinction onto Southwest
Indians, which must in turn be sorted into the “fake” and the “real”:
the Indian selling wares on the platform versus the tribal elder
preaching in the kiva. The “Indian who sells you baskets” is pre-
sented as spurious: “he may be even less religious than a New York
sneak-thief. He may have broken with his tribe, or his tribe itself may
have collapsed finally from its old religious integrity, and ceased,
really to exist. Then he is only fit for rapid absorption into white civ-
ilization, which must make the best of him” (Phoenix 144). The
equation of assimilated Indian and “New York sneak-thief” implies
either that the Indian has robbed himself of his religious heritage or,
by association, that he robs the tourist by selling goods that are inau-
thentic. Underlying either characterization is anxiety about duplici-
tous identity—by performing an identity that is no longer properly
his, the Indian on the platform misleads less-circumspect observers.
In contrast, for Lawrence, as for Sapir, are genuine Indians whose
culture is “harmonious” and “self-satisfactory”—though increas-

ingly encroached on by railroads, hotels, and souvenir shops.
In St. Mawr, the character Geronimo Trujillo, or Phoenix, chal-
lenges the distinction between genuine and spurious Indians. It is
Mrs. Witt who patronizingly renames the Mexican-Indian groom
“Phoenix,” making the man interchangeable with a place and repro-
ducing the colonial dynamic of naming that would have been com-
mon in the Southern antebellum plantation society of Witt’s
ancestors. Like the aboriginal Welshman, Morgan Lewis, Phoenix is
described as barbarically potent and animalistic (St. Mawr 25, 38);
aligned with St. Mawr, and so with the primal, natural world, he sits
“on a horse as if he grew there” (20). Yet this character’s hybridity
troubles identity categories: son of a Mexican father and an Indian
mother, he is also a shell-shocked World War I veteran, and one who
has cast his lot with Europe’s American expatriates. Even before the
war, historical circumstances alienated him from his indigenous past;
he was educated in “one of the Indian Schools,” such as Carlisle,
which implemented the U.S. government’s then-recent policy of
assimilation. Phoenix’s modern pedigree thus renders him poten-
tially spurious according to Lawrence’s (and Lou’s) schema; his edu-
cation, travel, and fraternization with other expatriates, threaten to
“absorb” him “into white civilization” (Phoenix 144). His given
name, Geronimo, invokes the famous Chiricahua Apache prisoner of
war who performed at the 1904 St. Louis Expo and in Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West show. Geronimo’s celebrity status as a “show Indian” and
his participation in the ethnographically confused Wild West extrav-
aganza, classify him among the Indians on the platform of the Santa
Fe, whom Lawrence regards as disingenuously performing native
identity for paying tourists.
Still, beyond the “curious film of civilization” (Phoenix 141), the
narrative hints that Phoenix retains a glimmer of genuine Indianness,
his eyes signifying an unchanged essence of indigenous identity:
though “he might pass as a sunburnt citizen of any nation, . . . when
you knew him, and looked right into his eyes, you saw that unfor-
gettable glint of the Indian” (St. Mawr 7). Thus fetishized, Phoenix
becomes a symbol of Indian identity being submerged or extin-
guished by encroachment of the Santa Fe Railway, Fred Harvey, and
other manifestations of tourism and modernization.
As in his other Southwest and Mexican fiction, Lawrence bridges
what he regards as the “two ends of humanity”—“our own thin end,
and the last dark strand from the previous, pre-white era”—with a
sexual union, in which a white woman prostrates herself before an
“aboriginal phallic male”15: Lou is “inclined to humble herself
before the furtive assertiveness of this underground, ‘knowing’ sav-
age” (Phoenix) who she at first imagines is superior to her spiritually
vapid husband, Rico (136). Significantly, however, she vacillates,
doubting this character’s status as a genuine Indian: “In his root-
lessness, his drifting, his real meaninglessness, was he different from
Rico? And his childish, spellbound absorption in the motor-car, or in
the moving pictures, or in an ice-cream soda—was it very different
from Rico?” (136–37). Phoenix’s interest in cars, movies, or ice-
cream sodas threatens cultural and racial categories— according to
this reasoning, such tastes threaten to displace native ones, such that
Phoenix risks losing his real Indian credentials.16
Behind this characterization of Phoenix looms Tony Luhan, the
Pueblo Indian at the hub of Mabel Dodge’s salon, who guided many
of Lawrence’s Southwest expeditions. Some were reputedly disap-
pointed that Tony seemed so “modern”: “knocking on his door in
the hopes of receiving the age-old wisdom of the Indians, they were
more likely to get an earful about the automobile he loved to drive”
(Rudnick 47). Mabel Dodge was partly responsible for these frus-
trated expectations, for she represented her husband as “seer and
sage,” and implied that in marrying him, she had effectively gone
native: “When I left the white people’s world I really left it—it was
not a mental attitude or superficial sensational gesture” (qtd. in S.
Smith 195). At the same time, she regretted having seduced Tony
away from his “pattern of life,” fearing that she had made him a
“spoiled Indian” (qtd. in ibid. 207). The word spoiled simultane-
ously infantalizes Tony and evokes a discourse of cultural ruination,
where assimilation signals the destruction of traditional societies.
Privately the former Greenwich Village socialite worried that by
meeting her halfway in her traditions, Tony had left his own, giving
up the “otherness” (her word, qtd. in ibid. 207) that had initially
attracted her.
Tony Luhan does not figure prominently in Lawrence’s Southwest
writings, perhaps because, with his expensive boots and Cadillac, the
Tiwa tribal leader appeared “inauthentic” to Lawrence. Like
Phoenix’s namesake Geronimo, Luhan was reputed to have been a
show Indian, performing in a Wild West show on Coney Island
(Rudnick 192). As glimpsed in private correspondence, Lawrence’s
attitude toward Tony Luhan is complicated by the writer’s increas-

ingly vexed relationship with his hostess, whom he perceived as
domineering. Mabel speculated that Lawrence’s coolness toward
Tony stemmed from the writer’s “ambivalent feelings about misce-
genation” (195). This is born out in a vitriolic remark in a letter,
where Lawrence wishes that Mabel would stop “dragging that fat
Indian around”; the miner’s son recasts racism as class prejudice,
demanding, “Why don’t people know their place? I hate having ser-
vants around me” (qtd. in Merrild 28). Such a comment obviously
undermines the persona of empathic observer Lawrence labors to
develop elsewhere. In his fiction, Lawrence is usually more inter-
ested in putting Mabel in her place than putting Tony in his. The
repeated encounters he stages between white women and indige-
nous men—“The Princess,” “The Woman Who Rode Away,” and
The Plumed Serpent—respectively result in the rape, ritual sacrifice,
and psychic annihilation of the female protagonist.17 St. Mawr is
unusual in this subset of Lawrence’s fiction, in that the relationship
is foiled, and the heroine (Lawrence in drag) goes unpunished.
Instead of gender, Lawrence polices racial and cultural boundaries
by having Lou determine that Phoenix may be too “rootless,”
“childish,” and “meaningless” to serve as a suitable mate. Exacting
revenge on the uppity, modernized Indian rather than on the cock-
sure woman, Lawrence has his heroine proclaim that Phoenix is fun-
damentally suited to “service” rather than love: he is “a man whose
psychic limitations left him incapable of anything but service, and
whose strong flow of natural life, at the same time, made him need
to serve” (137). Lawrence relegates Phoenix to the job for which he
implies Tony was best suited, that of chauffer. When Mrs. Witt
inquires whether Lou has romantic designs on Phoenix, her daugh-
ter retorts, “Phoenix is a servant: he’s really placed, as far as I can
see” (156). By relocating Phoenix to Arizona, the primitivist agenda
of the narrative returns him to his place.
By becoming Americanized or cosmopolitan, Phoenix, Tony, and
the Indian on the platform transgress the boundaries of what
Lawrence or Mabel Dodge Luhan recognize as Indianness. Whereas
Lawrence imagines that he can pass between worlds, temporarily
entering into Indian culture and then pulling back to describe it—he
implies that Luhan and other Indians jeopardize their identity by
crossing over into mainstream American life. Writing her from
England, Lawrence scolds Mabel Dodge for taking Tony too far
from the pueblo because it “saps his vitality,” commenting that “it
would be cruel to bring Tony to Europe”; in another letter, he
wonders paternalistically “how Tony will stand New York” (Lorenzo
278–79, 311). If Lawrence’s quest for a genuine alternative to
spurious modernity requires Indians to stay put, Phoenix func-
tions as an unresolved challenge to such essentialist racial and cul-
tural categories.
By eschewing the commercial side of the tourist-Indian exchange
and by distancing himself from other ethnological tourists as well as
“modernized Indians,” Lawrence cast himself as a critical bystander,
one who played no part in the process of transforming native cul-
tures into tourist attractions. Not all writers in Taos so comfort-
ably exempted themselves from the phenomenon. As Alice Corbin
Henderson wryly noted of the region’s increasing commercialism,
the Taos Art Colony seemed to have “saved the pueblos for Fred
Harvey” (qtd. in Jacobs 149). In a 1924 “Fiesta edition” of the
regional little magazine, Laughing Horse, the American writer, Witter
Bynner, implicates himself in the lamentable modernization of
Santa Fe:
We are all doing it. We cannot help ourselves. We are attracting peo-
ple here. We are advertising. We are boosting. . . . [O]ur archaeolo-
gists, artists and merchants are busily summoning Indians to Santa Fe
and to Gallup for a theatrical presentation of the dances and cere-
monies which have hitherto been a communal and at their best a spir-
itual exercise. . . . To ‘attract and amuse the tourists,’ to make a show
of our town, are we cutting down and withering its beauty? Are we
killing and embalming the best qualities of Santa Fe, in order that a
long line may come and look? (n.p.)
In this analysis, artists and archaeologists join the company of mer-

chants as boosters for the region. Read as ambivalent advertise-
ments, Lawrence’s Southwest writings take on an ironic dimension;
his raillery against tourists in essays such as “New Mexico,” which
first appeared in the travel magazine Survey Graphic in 1931, is off-
set by exalted descriptions of the landscape and people that might
persuade readers to take their own “Indian Detours,” following the
cue of Harvey ads that share the magazine’s pages.
Huxley’s writings, in contrast, function as a kind of antiadvertise-
ment for ethnological tourism. In Brave New World, Huxley is less
concerned with chasing after the elusive essence of a vanishing cul-

ture than in pointing to the misguided motives that inform such a
quest. The writers are joined in their project of debunking ethno-
logical tourists, but rather than setting himself or his protagonists up
as sensitive observers of indigenous cultures, Huxley redirects the
ethnological gaze onto his own culture.
T HE PAST AS A C OMPENSATORY U TOPIA
Huxley had little patience with contemporaries who sought alterna-

tives to civilized life in what he regarded as fanciful perceptions of
primitive societies. In a 1931 essay, he pokes fun at ethnological
tourists, remarking that of late “the few remaining primitive peoples
of the earth have achieved a prodigious popularity among those with
wishes to fulfill” (Music 129). Though Lawrence shared this cri-
tique—exhorting writers to “debunk” idealized conceptions of
Indians—Huxley saw Lawrence as part of the problem, proclaiming
that “the past has become a compensatory Utopia. . . . With every
advance of industrial civilization the savage past will be more and
more appreciated, and the cult of D. H. Lawrence’s Dark God may
be expected to spread through an ever-widening circle of worship-
pers” (128, 131). In contrast to Lawrence, Huxley envisioned
primitive societies in largely Hobbesian terms and declared unam-
biguously that it was futile to try to go back to what both writers
imagined was a prior evolutionary stage. In his travel narrative,
Beyond the Mexique Bay, published two years after Brave New World,
Huxley puts it very baldly: “try as I may, I cannot very much like
primitive people” (104). The two writers come at the vogue of the
Indian, then, from very different angles: Lawrence, seeking to pene-
trate the touristy façade to connect with ancient traditions, and
Huxley, rejecting the idea of establishing such a connection as mere
wish-fulfillment.
While debunking the construction of the Southwest as a primitive
utopia, Brave New World simultaneously debunks a competing model
of ideal society endorsed by world’s fairs, which seemed to provide
“a map to future perfection” in the shape of a world made safer, eas-
ier, more efficient, and more enjoyable by technology and science
(Rydell, All the World’s a Fair 219). Conjoining these two visions
was not unique: at the 1915 Panama-California Expo, organizers
situated a model farm, complete with modern farm equipment, a

fruit-bearing orchard, and electricity, alongside the Painted Desert
exhibit displaying Southwest Indians. The juxtaposition was
intended, in the words of one of the fair organizers, to provide
“a sermon” on progress: to reinforce the impression of Native
Americans as “the vanished although romantic past and Anglo-
America as the triumphant future” (Kropp 38). The structure of
Huxley’s Brave New World reproduces the logic of the Panama-
California Expo, by juxtaposing the Savage Reservation and the
Fordian New World. Rather than an idealized, pastoral representa-
tion of “vanishing America,” however, the Savage Reservation is
defined by its harshness, dirt, and “barbaric” customs; a vacation
there superficially reinforces the desirability of the New World with
its hygiene, efficiency, and emphasis on pleasure. If, as with the
Panama-Pacific Expo, the ideological message is that Indians are
quaint, but that progress and conquest are inevitable and good, the
shallow character Lenina gets the message: “progress is lovely, isn’t
it?” (77). Huxley ironizes this response, subverting the rosy narra-
tive of progress and cheery futurism of the world’s fairs, by mak-
ing the hygienic, efficient, hypertechnological New World a
nightmare society.
When John the Savage visits Eton on his tour of the New World,
he learns that the reservation where he was raised is regarded as “a
place which, owing to unfavourable climatic or geological condi-
tions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been worth the
expense of civilizing” (124). Given the harsh conditions of the envi-
ronment and the “civilized” characters’ derogatory view of the
natives’ way of life (the warden tells Lenina and Bernard that the
Indians are “absolute savages” who “still preserve their repulsive
habits and customs” [79]), the idea of taking a holiday on a New
Mexican “Savage Reservation” is made to seem ludicrous in Brave
New World. By representing the reservation as a popular tourist des-
tination, Huxley mocks the contemporary craze for travel to the
Southwest: Lenina eagerly accepts Bernard’s invitation to New
Mexico, explaining that she “always wanted to see a savage reserva-
tion,” and the director of hatcheries and conditioning tells Bernard,
“I had the same idea as you. . . . Wanted to have a look at the sav-
ages. Got a permit for New Mexico and went there for my summer
holiday” (33, 96).
Surrounded by a straight fence representing “the geometrical

symbol of triumphant human purpose,” the reservation is con-
structed as a prison or zoo (80). That the “triumphant purpose” of
the fence is forcible containment is made clear by the pilot’s sinister
pronouncement, “There is no escape from a Savage Reservation,” a
warning he means to mute by adding that the savages are “perfectly
tame. . . . They’ve got enough experience of gas bombs to know
that they mustn’t play any tricks” (78, 81). The Savage Reservation
serves to ideologically shore up the power of the state, much as
Greenhalgh has argued ethnological exhibitions functioned at
world’s fairs: by revealing “the apparently degenerate state the con-
quered peoples lived in,” conquest is made to seem not just accept-
able, but necessary (84).
The fence serves not only to contain its inhabitants, but also to
frame them, aesthetically: following Lawrence, Huxley highlights
the exploitative dynamics of confining indigenous people to reserva-
tions and then exposing them to the inquisitive gaze of the domi-
nant society. As in the world’s fair’s Joy Zone or in Harvey’s
Southwest, on Huxley’s Savage Reservation, native life is viewed as
entertainment: “Everything they do is funny,” the pilot remarks
pointing at “a sullen young savage” whose oppressed demeanor
belies this statement (81). Huxley’s characters regard the quotidian
life of the savages as a tableau for their observation: sighting an
“almost naked Indian” climbing down a ladder, Lenina grips
Bernard’s arm and urges him, “Look” (84)—the single word high-
lights the ethnological tourist’s principal activity. Whereas Lawrence’s
tourists thrill to exotic otherness, Huxley’s character recoils from the
man’s wrinkled face and toothless mouth, an antiimage of New
World youthfulness.
While both writers satirize those who regard native life as tourist
spectacle, Huxley does not share Lawrence’s faith that, behind the
tourist façade, there lurks a genuine culture worth reclaiming. For
Lawrence, “fencing in” indigenous cultures is a metaphor for civi-
lization’s unfortunate repression of its instinctual side: “‘Till now, in
sheer terror of ourselves, we have turned our backs on the jungle,
fenced it in with an enormous entanglement of barbed wire and
declared it did not exist. . . . Yet unless we proceed to connect our-
selves up with our own primeval sources, we shall degenerate”
(Phoenix 757). In theory, if not in practice, Lawrence believed that
tearing down the fence to connect with indigenous cultures was the
last hope for a decadent civilization. In Beyond the Mexique Bay,

Huxley explicitly rejects Lawrence’s primitivism: “When man
became an intellectual and spiritual being, he paid for his new privi-
leges with a treasure of intuitions, of emotional spontaneity, of sen-
suality still innocent of all self-consciousness. Lawrence [mistakenly]
thought that we should abandon the new privileges in return for
the old treasure” (Beyond the Mexique Bay 261). In essays such as
“Indians and an Englishman,” Lawrence hardly seems ready to
abandon the privileges of his position as an Englishman; his fantasy
of connection with Indians relies on an implied distance between
Indians and Englishmen that he carefully enforces. Still, for Lawrence,
a rapprochement between “civilized” and “primitive” life is at least
desirable, whereas for Huxley, giving up (or fencing in) “primeval
sources” is the price of civilization.
Moreover, from Huxley’s antiprimitivist and sometimes xeno-
phobic and racist standpoint, there’s no compelling reason to
reconnect with “primal origins.” Huxley’s attitude about racial and
cultural others is evident in Brave New World, with its prolific
Kenyan ovaries and low-status (Epsilon) Senegalese that perpetu-
ate stereotypes about Africans. A member of the British Eugenic
society, Huxley was not particularly interested in transcending cul-
tural barriers; his political attitude during this period has been
described as “elitist” and “provincial,” despite extensive world travel
(Holmes 191).
Huxley invokes and then subverts the Lawrencian idea of con-
necting with a primitive past ostensibly embodied in Indian cultures,
by showing the convergence of the traditions of the New World and
those of the Savage Reservation—hence in Huxley’s economy,
showing that “the civilized” behave like “savages.” At the reserva-
tion’s summer festival, Lenina at first “abandon[s] herself” to the
primal beat of the drums (86), which reminds her of the orgiastic
chanting of the New World’s Solidarity Service, a ceremony
described in similar terms (65). Attraction becomes repulsion when
a “ghastly troop” of Indians emerges “[h]ideously masked or painted
out of all semblance of humanity,” flinging snakes into the middle of
the square, while the dancers circle “snakily, with a soft undulating
movement” (87). Although many details of this scene (and of that of
the Solidarity Service) resemble Lawrence’s representation of the
Hopi Snake Dance, Huxley debunks Lawrencian primitivism by
blending the relatively pacifist details of Lawrence’s description with

a rendition of a seemingly violent flagellation ritual.18
The Hopi Snake Dance merges with a Zuni initiation ritual when
a man in a coyote mask begins to flagellate an eighteen-year-old boy.
The scene is conjured graphically from Lenina’s horrified perspec-
tive: “The coyote-man raised his whip; there was a long moment of
expectancy, then a swift movement, the whistle of the lash and its
loud flat-sounding impact on the flesh. The boy’s body quivered;
but he made no sound. . . . The coyote struck again, again; and at
every blow at first a gasp, and then a deep groan went up from the
crowd. . . . The blood was streaming. . . . Suddenly Lenina covered
her face with her hands and began to sob. ‘Oh, stop them, stop
them!’ she implored. But the whip fell and fell inexorably” (88). The
sanguinary description of the whipping derives, in part, from the lan-
guage of contemporary ethnographic accounts. In the 1929–30
Smithsonian Annual Report of the U.S. American Ethnology Bureau,
Ruth Bunzel stresses the “severity” of the two-step initiation into
the Zuni katcina cult: “At the first ceremony they are severely
whipped by the katcina priests to inspire them with awe for these
creatures. There is a second more severe thrashing at the second cer-
emony” (518). In the same publication, Leslie White describes the
priests “brandishing” whips in a “menacing” manner, as another
participant exclaims, “Look at the blood, how it’s running down!”
(73). Although these ethnographers record the intensity of the
thrashing, they emphasize the practice’s cultural purpose. Bunzel
explains, “The katcinas whip to install awe for the supernatural, but
also to remove sickness and contamination. The whipping of katci-
nas is a blessing. It is administered with the formula, ‘May you be
blessed with seeds’” (518). If Huxley reproduces these accounts’
more violent imagery, he also echoes the ethnographic impulse to
offer cultural justification: John the Savage explains that he wants to
participate in the ritual “for the sake of the pueblo—to make the rain
come and the corn grow” (89).
Despite the pretense of openness to the ceremony’s indigenous
meaning in this scene, the novel is far from pushing the reader to the
conclusion that the primitive society offers a viable alternative to the
New World. In his 1946 foreword to Brave New World, Huxley rep-
resents the Savage’s self-flagellation in the novel’s final pages as a
“retreat from sanity” (xiv)—an irrational cultural practice indicating
recidivism to a prior evolutionary state. In imbuing the scene with
gothic overtones and turning flagellation into a narrative motif,

Huxley sensationalizes the ceremony, rather than demystifying it as
Lawrence does the Snake Dance. Seen in this light, the specter of
the whipping ceremony contributes to Huxley’s debunking of
Lawrence and his followers’ supposedly sentimental view of “sav-
ages.” While the reservation houses “old world” values of mother-
hood, monogamy, and reverence for tradition, it is also a locus of
squalor, what is represented as superstition, and sanguinary customs.
Queer is Lenina’s word for it, the same word Huxley uses in the
1946 foreword, where he regrets having offered the Savage “only
two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in
an Indian village, a life more human in some respects, but in others
hardly less queer and abnormal” (xiv). If the New World and the
reservation are equally queer it is because they are equally untenable
for Huxley: civilization has run amuck, in part, because it has degen-
erated into a state of savagery. 19 This obviously puts Huxley in a
very different camp from Lawrence, who thinks the way forward for
civilization is through a detour to the “savage” past.
Like Lawrence, Huxley was fascinated by contemporary ethno-
graphies, though he was less interested finally in the cultures they
represented than in the mode of looking at the world that they
suggested. In 1929 and 1930 Huxley read Margaret Mead and
Bronislaw Malinowski respectively, both of whose texts figure signif-
icantly in Brave New World. With irony, he characterizes Mead’s
Coming of Age in Samoa as “an account of savages more puritanical
than New England Calvinists in the seventeenth century” and jokes
that Malinowski’s Sexual Life of Savages has inspired him “to write a
companion treatise on the Sexual Life of Gentleman and Ladies,”
adding, “There’d be much odder customs to record than among
those extraordinarily rational Trobrianders” (Letters Huxley 343,
314). This insistence on the superior reason and stricter morality of
“Neolithic savages” (326) should be read in the voice of a satirist,
whose real agenda is to point up the foibles of his own culture rather
than to seriously investigate the beliefs of others. In Beyond the
Mexique Bay, Huxley reiterates the idea of turning an ethnographic
eye back on his own culture: having spent numerous days (and
pages) observing the curious customs of Central Americans, he con-
templates the humiliation of having a party of Mexicans look “on in
observant silence while I went through the curious old custom, say,
of taking tea in Bloomsbury” (144). Huxley recognizes that the
cultural voyeur’s binoculars may be turned around, such that

English cultural practices become a spectacle for foreign eyes.
In Brave New World, Huxley writes his mock ethnography of
modern society, with a particular focus on modern sex lives. The
Controller Mustapha Mond contrasts the “appalling dangers of [old
fashioned] family life,” encompassing misery, sadism, and chastity,
with the relative ease of the social structures and sexual practices of
the New World. In defending New World sexuality, he cites as
model societies both “the savages of Samoa,” whose children played
“promiscuously among the hibiscus blossoms,” and the Trobriand
islanders, among whom fatherhood was supposedly unknown (28).
The analogy between Samoan and Trobriand “savages” and the
characters of the New World is reinforced by the description of “civ-
ilized” children, “naked in the warm June sunshine,” sexually frol-
icking next to blooming shrubs and murmuring bees, and, a few
pages later, “naked children furtive in the undergrowth” (21, 31).
These passages echo Mead’s description of “lusty” Samoans engaged
in casual romantic “trysts” among palm fronds and hibiscus blos-
soms, in Coming of Age in Samoa (12–13). The tie between the
“savages” studied by Mead and Malinowski and the people of the
New World is also reinforced by references to climate: in the New
World, embryos are “hatched” in a “tropical” environment, and
soma offers an escape to what sounds like the “tropical paradise” of
modern ads: “the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly
world of a soma-holiday” (7, 60). In Brave New World, England has
gone tropical and, paradoxically, given the reign of science and tech-
nology, England has gone native.
While the playful analogy turns the English into ethnographic
others, enacting Huxley’s fantasy of writing a mock ethnography of
curious English customs, the point is not finally that all cultures are
relative, or that we are “one family of man” with negligible differences
among us. Instead, conceived in an increasingly outmoded evolu-
tionary framework, the formulation is meant to broadcast an atti-
tude of irony concerning the New World’s dismissal of traditional
“family values,” the abrogation of monogamy and of fatherhood
marking the pathetic descent of the citizens of the New World into
primitive irresponsibility. Gesturing to the children of the New
World naked in the undergrowth and concluding his discourse on
the cultures of Samoa and the Trobriand Islands, the Controller
declares triumphantly, “Extremes . . . meet. For the good reason
that they were made to meet” (28). Huxley adopts this idea of wed-
ding the two worlds of primitive and civilized societies from
Lawrence—for whom such a union is a fantasy, while for Huxley, it
is a misguided quest. Extremes meet most dramatically in the char-
acterization of John the Savage, born ignominiously to a New World
mother and raised on the reservation.
J OHN THE S AVAGE GOES TO L ONDON
Replaying and in some senses ironically reversing a long tradition of

native display in England, John the Savage is brought back to
London where he is exhibited as the civilized-man-brought-up-in-
savagery. Proposing to bring John back to London, Bernard tells
Mustapha Mond, “I ventured to think . . . that your fordship might
find the matter of sufficient scientific interest” (108). As in the
human showcases of the world’s fairs and of Harvey’s Southwest, the
aims of entertainment overwhelm those of science. John’s mother
Linda, in self-imposed exile for having committed the obscenity of
natural childbirth, is exhibited in a parody of native display that
draws attention to its dehumanizing effects: “There was a gasp, a
murmur of astonishment and horror, a young woman screamed. . . .
Bloated, sagging, and among those firm youthful bodies, those
undistorted faces, a strange and terrifying monster of middle-aged-
ness, Linda advanced into the room” (115). While Linda is displayed
as a grotesque, John becomes a star, like Geronimo, who purport-
edly cashed in on his stardom by selling autographed photographs of
himself to tourists. Though in a reversal, John “tours” the New
World, visiting its institutions and inquiring about its customs, he
soon becomes a traveling tourist site, drawing droves of unwanted
observers wherever he goes.
When John becomes fed up with being the object of both popu-
lar and scientific interest (“I’m damned if I’ll go on being experi-
mented with,” 186), he flees to a lighthouse in Surrey, where he
briefly returns to the ways of the reservation, enjoying the simple
pleasure of making bows and arrows to kill rabbits, for instance.
John seems to have traded what Sapir would label London’s spuri-
ous culture for a way of life potentially more genuine: his retreat to
nature, prayer, and handcrafts gestures toward a way of life that is
integrated and meaningful—an antidote, though an ineffectual one,
to the hyperspecialization of the New World. Although Huxley

explicitly rejects the idea of returning to primitive origins, he allows
that it may be possible “to introduce a salutary element of primi-
tivism into our civilized and industrialized way of life”; specifically,
to emulate the “wholeness” of primitive societies while retaining
“the material and intellectual advantages resulting from specializa-
tion” (214, 217). Huxley’s travel writings and his send-up of Mead’s
Samoans in Brave New World suggest that he wished to divorce this
facet of primitivism from primitive cultures, which he regarded
according to well-worn primitivist clichés as unhygienic, childlike,
superstitious, incapable of individuality, and so forth. It is significant
that John does not return to the reservation itself: it is the idea of a
harmonious, integrated existence, not Indian society, that Huxley’s
protagonist fleetingly, and futilely, attempts to recuperate.
Without any social framework to sustain him, John’s attempt to
salvage the salutary elements of reservation life fails, and he becomes
the ultimate media event. Tourists arrive en masse, wielding cameras
like the spectators ridiculed in Lawrence’s Southwest essays; insa-
tiable voyeurs, they pursue John like game as he retreats “in the pos-
ture of an animal at bay” (195). Huxley’s violent metaphor of the
hunt is sustained in the characterization of the reporter, Darwin
Bonaparte—whose name fuses the persona of naturalist with that of
conqueror. The “Feely Corporation’s most expert big game photog-
rapher,” he successfully “tracks” John, hiding in an oak tree to get
clandestine footage of the savage’s rituals of atonement. Like
Lawrence behind the leaf-screen, Bonaparte becomes a warped ver-
sion of the ethnologist, looting cultural secrets. John’s appropriated
image is turned into a spectacle for mass consumption when the
footage is used to create a sensational, comic all-sensory film (or
“feely”) called The Savage of Surrey (194). The commodification of
John’s decontextualized image burlesques the impulse to mass-pro-
duce and sell images of indigenous people, for example in picture
post cards, Westerns, or the merchandise of the Harvey Company.
Much as Lenina and Bernard are encouraged to regard Indians on
the reservation as inhuman, these tourists view John the Savage as an
animal in a zoo, “staring, laughing, clicking their cameras, throwing
(as to an ape) pea-nuts . . . ” (195). Huxley pushes the “greedy
curiosity” of the thousands of spectators who long to see “live rat-
tlesnakes” in Lawrence’s essays up a few notches, turning his sight-
seers into a blood-thirsty mob who cry in unison to see “the whipping
stunt”—a desacralized ritual turned into a tourist event. The tourists

are shown to be the “real savages,” according to a prejudicial per-
spective that considers primitive cultures to be driven by instinct and
mindless collectivity rather than intellect and individuality, when
they descend into their own rituals, which echo those of the Indian
tribe: “Then suddenly somebody started singing ‘Orgy-porgy’ and,
in a moment, they had all caught up the refrain and, singing, had
begun to dance. Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating
one another in six-eighth time. Orgy porgy” (198). The frenzied
crowd helps goad the Savage into flagellating Lenina to death, then
taking his own life.
Although the novel joins Lawrence in savaging ethnological
tourists, it rejects Lawrencian primitivism. “The whipping stunt”—
shorn of its cultural associations—signifies a descent into irrational-
ity and barbarism, qualities that bleed back into the original cultural
practice, such that the customs of the reservation seem deserving of
their name (savage). In this sense, the novel is antimodern and
antiprimitive, at once satirizing the Kodak-wielding ethnological
tourists of Huxley’s and Lawrence’s day by literalizing cultural
voyeurism’s symbolic violence and counteracting romantic stereo-
types of primitive cultures with equally (and probably more damn-
ing) stereotypes of savagery.
C ONCLUSION
However much the image of the modern fieldworker’s lone discov-

ery of a pristine culture suggests that ethnology and tourism are anti-
thetical, the texts I’ve discussed in this chapter suggest that in the
1920s and 1930s Southwest, these domains were linked in signifi-
cant discursive and institutional ways. The Southwest pueblos were
not only a popular tourist destination in this period but also “the
most-visited venue” for ethnographic research in America (Stocking,
“Ethnographic Sensibility” 220). Whether directly employed by the
Harvey Company or some other institutional or academic entity,
ethnographers were inadvertent boosters for the region, encourag-
ing tourists to observe the local people, whose daily lives were
deemed as engrossing as their colorful ceremonies. In Southwest
ethnographies, as in Harvey ads and ethnological exhibits, Indians
are depicted as sights to be seen, like the famed landscape of Taos or
the Painted Desert. In Huxley’s depiction of John the Savage as an
object of both scientific and popular scrutiny, and in Lawrence’s

melding of the personae of tour guide and ethnologist, the lines
between ethnology and tourism blur.
Huxley and Lawrence cooperate in debunking ethnological tourists
and, to an extent, ethnologists, but whereas Lawrence installs himself
and his protagonists as sensitive observers of indigenous cultures
rather than entertainment-seeking tourists, Huxley insists that the
motives of such a quest are misguided—that “primitive” life is not a
utopian state to be recovered. While both writers were attuned to the
dynamics of cultural observation, from our later historical vantage
point, it is easy to see the limitations of their perspectives. Lawrence
could perceive that other tourists, brandishing cameras, might be
galling to the Indians they observed, but in endeavoring to differenti-
ate his clandestine looking from the less discrete observers, he impos-
sibly wished away the similarities of his own position and that of the
tourists he satirized. Huxley makes no apology for sharing in the
modern predilection for observing others, a relationship he charac-
terizes as a “squint through the binoculars and then good-bye”
(Beyond the Mexique Bay 142). If Huxley labored less strenuously to
differentiate himself from the binocular-wielding tourists that he
and Lawrence mocked, perhaps this is because he had less at stake,
not seeking intimate knowledge of the indigenous cultures he
encountered.
Although their motives for criticizing ethnological tourism dif-
fered, Lawrence and Huxley shared the premise, common to their
time, that indigenous cultures were vanishing before their eyes.
Under the potentially intrusive gaze of outsiders, is the destruction
of local cultures inevitable? Must they be turned by the tourist indus-
try into marketable simulacra of themselves? In a 1996 study of the
Wild West shows, the historian L. G. Moses counters the impression
that commercializing Indian cultures in the Wild West heyday led to
the erosion of traditions: given the prevailing governmental policy
of assimilation, he maintains, “the performances actually helped to
preserve traditional native culture, even while acquiescing in its trans-
formation into a popularization—even parody—of itself” (Kasson
164). Discussing Bali, Michel Picard has productively shifted the
terms of the debate. He does not ask, does tourism help destroy or
preserve Balinese culture, but what impact does it have on that cul-
ture, and can tourism continue in a sustainable way? Picard con-
cludes that the Balinese have been “active subjects who [creatively]
construct representations of their culture to attract tourists,” such
that tourism in Bali has become part of Balinese culture, participat-

ing in “an ongoing process of cultural invention” (46–47).
Similarly, Southwest Indians seem to have self-consciously tai-
lored their identity in the context of tourism, as suggested by the
response of a group of Pueblo Indians to a 1976 court case that ulti-
mately hinged on the question of cultural identity. As Deirdre Evans-
Pritchard explains, Indians selling their wares along the portal of the
Museum of New Mexico’s Palace of Governors in Santa Fe Plaza
continue to draw hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, who
regard the Indian craftspeople and merchants, as in Lawrence’s day,
as “a world-famous landmark” (287). The court case ensued when
the museum evicted white artists Paul and Sarah Livingston from the
portal, and they in turn sued the museum for discriminating against
them on the basis of race (and lost, on the basis that the museum, as
a preserver of culture, had the right to discriminate on a cultural,
rather than racial, basis). To bolster the museum’s case, Pueblo
Indians collected tourists’ signatures to vouch for their unique right
to sell wares in the plaza, in a battle that they represented as one to
“retain their identity” (289). What is interesting about this case is
that the basis for authentic Indian identity cited in this case was one
forged in the context of touristic encounters. “The Indian who sells
you baskets” whom Lawrence derided as a figure of the commercial-
ization of indigenous culture has become, this case suggests, a new
standard for what Dean MacCannell would call a “reconstructed”
ethnic identity. In this way, the portal case suggests that cultural
identities may be more responsive, adaptable, and resilient than
Huxley or Lawrence would lead us to believe.
CONCLUSION
T he distance from Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and

She (1887) to Lawrence’s St. Mawr (1925) and Huxley’s Brave New
World (1932) is that from the “Scramble for Africa”— the last major
era of European exploration and conquest—to an era of full-blown
tourism and imperial decline. This timespan also witnessed the trans-
formation of anthropology from a learned amateur’s pursuit into a
profession and an academic discipline—from, that is, the era of arm-
chair anthropologists, reliant on “men-on-the-spot” like Stanley and
Burton, to that of the professional fieldworker, who combined these
roles. In some ways, in traveling from Haggard to Lawrence, we
seem to have come full circle: both are romantic primitivists, who
remain nonetheless convinced of their own racial and even cultural
superiority; both undertake an ethnographic salvage mission, posi-
tioning themselves as authorities on the cultures they have observed
firsthand. At the same time, these writers reflect the historical shift in
ethnographic practice I have traced: Haggard’s protagonists emulate
the swaggering explorers of the “dark continent,” who intersperse
ethnographic observations with narratives of adventure, while
Lawrence and his protagonists mimic the empathic modern field-
worker, who disavows affiliation with this earlier tradition. More
profoundly, Haggard’s writing is remote from Lawrence’s, and that
of other writers in this study, in that it is relatively uncritical of the
ethnographic project and undaunted in its ability to comprehend
ethnographic others. An observer of observers, like the other ethno-
graphic modernists I’ve discussed, Lawrence (sometimes unwit-
tingly) brings self-consciousness to the contact zone.
If Lawrence’s view of “primitive” life has some affinity with
Haggard’s (important differences aside), Huxley’s Hobbesian per-
spective most strongly resonates with Wells’s—a lineage that is
perhaps not surprising, given that Wells studied with Aldous
Huxley’s grandfather, T. H. Huxley. Though Brave New World
started as a parody of Wells’s Men Like Gods, there is considerable
overlap in these writers’ outlooks.1 Both satirize cross-cultural
encounters to in order to critique contemporary practices of ethno-

graphic observation. We have seen that Wells’s skepticism about
the scientific rigor of fieldwork propels his send-up of an ethno-
graphic encounter in Island of Dr. Moreau, and that Huxley’s
satire of ethnological tourism, at once borrowing from and debunk-
ing Lawrence, finds expression in Brave New World. Unlike Haggard
and Lawrence, Wells and Huxley are relatively disinterested in
ethnographic others, except, within an evolutionary framework, as a
distorted and distant mirror of “civilized” selves. This lack of inter-
est in the particularities of indigenous cultures is evident in Wells’s
artistic choices: working within the realm of scientific romance frees
Wells from the expectation of fidelity to real people or places, allow-
ing him to shift the emphasis of Island from the “strange culture’s”
customs to the observer’s experience. Though Huxley aims for a
“reality effect” by incorporating facets of Pueblo life from Lawrence’s
Southwest essays and formal ethnographic sources, his interest in
satirizing the cult of the primitive, rather than in documenting par-
ticular cultural practices, is also clear. It can be seen in the way he
freely mixes ethnographic details to create a composite portrait of
“primitive life”; in his parodic allusions to the most influential
ethnographies of his day; and in his mocking depiction of a vacation
to a “Savage Reservation.”
Conrad and Woolf are also more interested in putting the English
under a microscope than in depicting the Congolese or South
Americans with any particularity. Although Forster and his protago-
nists try to connect with Hindus and Moslems, they remain wary of
the possibility of doing so. Insofar as Conrad, Woolf, and to a lesser
extent, Forster, insist on the opacity of other cultures, they question
a founding assumption of ethnographic work. Thus the ethno-
graphic modernists discussed in this study vary considerably in their
investments in knowing other cultures and in the creative uses to
which they put ethnographic texts and ideas. While some emulated
the ethnographic reportage of “men-on-the-spot” or the voice of
the modern fieldworker, others seized on ethnographic scenarios to
throw their home culture into relief.
Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” essay incites writers to creative revolu-
tion by advocating a wider range of methods, drawn from disciplines
as disparate as psychology and physics, as writers are urged to “record
the atoms as they fall upon the mind.” I have argued that ethno-
graphic methods contributed another crucial impetus for modernist
CONCLUSION 191
innovation. Woolf herself adapts anthropology’s self-nativizing per-

spective to help produce the multiperspectival novel and the frag-
mented, discontinuous self. The bewilderment inherent in
Conrad’s impressionist style echoes Kingsley’s field experience.
Forster emulates and interrupts the oscillating perspectives of partic-
ipant-observation, reproducing in narrative form his own ambiva-
lence in “the field.”
While academic ethnography was instituting the persona of the
confident, authoritative fieldworker—a unified “I” who transformed
a myriad of impressions into the linear, coherent ethnographic
monograph—modernist fiction explored the unraveling of that
observer. Though professional and amateur ethnographers also reg-
istered the unsettling dislocations of cross-cultural encounters and
expressed uncertainty about the possibility of composing meaning-
ful, authoritative accounts based on the murky interactions of field-
work, these doubts were not incorporated into the anthropological
canon. The periodic fear and uncertainty articulated by Burton and
Stanley does not throw the ethnographic project into question
or undermine imperial identities. Instead, these explorer-ethnogra-
phers present fieldwork as fraught with real perils they heroically
overcome. This physical swagger is transmuted into the intellectual
swagger of modern anthropology. As the professional fieldworker
continued to swagger—intellectually if not physically—the “vulner-
able observer”2 (diversely elaborated by literary modernists) was
pushed to the margins of the new discipline.
Kingsley’s Travels conveys the disorientation of fieldwork, which
resonates with much of the fiction I’ve discussed. Yet her self-reflec-
tive (one is tempted to say “protomodernist”) mode has become a
footnote to formal histories of anthropology such as Stocking’s,
while Malinowski’s polished monograph and public image of the
composed, compassionate fieldworker largely established his disci-
pline’s norms in the period following World War I. Moreover,
although the imagery, subjectivity, and mood of Travels in West
Africa resemble elements of modernist fiction, Kingsley doesn’t
express the same epistemological uncertainty captured by Conrad,
Woolf, or Lawrence. The “dissolving self” that she describes
becomes a formula for understanding the “other”—a project in
which she resolutely believes. Harrison’s similar questioning of the
boundaries of self, rather than being integrated into major works
such as Ancient Art and Ritual, is confined to the philosophical
musings of a minor essay.3 Thus neither Kingsley’s observations

about the disorienting effects of fieldwork nor Harrison’s musings
about the instability of identity get incorporated into the dominant
disciplinary history. Nor do Malinowski’s ambivalent reflections
about fieldwork, which he pours into a private diary, interfere with
the careful image of self-control and scientific certainty presented in
his published monographs.
The impression of the vulnerability and fallibility of cultural
observers—which was thus banished to the margins of modern
anthropology—has been reincorporated into contemporary ethno-
graphies such as Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer. In this text,
Behar compares anthropology to a voyage “through a dark tunnel”:
Loss, mourning, the longing for memory, the desire to enter into the
world around you and having no idea how to do it, the fear of observ-
ing too coldly or too distractedly or too raggedly, the rage of cow-
ardice, the insight that is always arriving late, as defiant hindsight, a
sense of the utter uselessness of writing anything and yet the burning
desire to write something, are the stopping places along the way. At
the end of the voyage, if you are lucky, you catch a glimpse of a light-
house, and you are grateful. Life, after all, is bountiful. (3)
Behar’s imagery—of the tunnel, the voyage, and the lighthouse—

is strongly evocative of that of Woolf’s novels. What Behar empha-
sizes is that the voyage toward understanding another culture is also
a voyage toward personal understanding. In this sense, in its empha-
sis on the correspondence between psychological and geographical
journeys, modernist fiction anticipates ideas elaborated later by
anthropologists. Yet whereas this study’s novelists are skeptical about
the possibility of attaining insight into other cultures, it seems that
contemporary ethnographers heed the cautions of modern fiction,
yet continue to make the journey.
NOTES
I NTRODUCTION
1. The title alludes to George Stocking’s edited collection, Observers
Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, which is part of the
University of Wisconsin Press’s excellent History of Anthropology series.
2. A variety of sources have shaped my understanding of the history of the
discipline of anthropology. The most important among these have been
George Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951
and “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology
from Tylor to Malinowski”; James Clifford, The Predicament of
Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art; James
Urry, Before Social Anthropology: Essays on the History of British
Anthropology; Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The
Modern British School; and Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The
Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945.
3. See Fabian, Time and the Other.
4. Malinowski makes this remark in the introduction to a volume pub-
lished by the founders of Mass Observation, a loose research organiza-
tion of the 1930s and 1940s dedicated to “studying the beliefs and
behaviors of British Islanders” (First Year’s Work [1937–38] by Mass
Observation 8). In an apt phrase, Malinowski calls this movement a
“homecoming of anthropology” anticipated by his own work. See
Chapter 3 for more discussion of this attitude as manifest in ethno-
graphic and literary texts in the period.
5. In “Fieldwork in Common Places,” Mary Louise Pratt argues that
these narratives of exploration serve as disavowed predecessors to pro-
fessional ethnographies.
6. Anglo-American Modernism, 639. Susan Stanford Friedman (in
Mappings and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter) counters that in
“confin[ing] Woolf to the domestic” these critics “ignore entirely the
multiple ways in which the local is for Woolf complicit with the national
and international” (118). In Chapter 3 of British Fiction and Cross-
Cultural Encounters, I argue that Woolf situates Englishness in a global
context by regarding English customs and manners through the
estranging, relativizing lens of the new ethnography.
194 NOTES
7. The phrase is Edward Ardener’s. In his essay, “Social Anthropology and

the Decline of Modernism,” Ardener designates the period 1920–75
“modernist” for British Social Anthropology, a movement he interprets
as analogous to other modernisms (that of psychology, economics,
physics, linguistics, art, and architecture). These dates are slightly “out
of sync” with the generally agreed upon period for Anglo-American lit-
erary modernism (even when construed most broadly as stretching
from the 1890s to World War II). Similarly, George Marcus and
Michael Fischer imply that the disciplines are out of phase by label-
ing the self-reflexive, multivocal “experimental anthropology” of the
1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as “modernist” in order to suggest a parallel
with the “late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary move-
ment in reaction to realism” (69).
8. The features of “ethnographic modernism” that I am elaborating here
overlap with Gregory Castle’s labeling of the Celtic Revival as “anthro-
pological modernism” (12), though he argues for a more restricted
applicability of the category, as discussed in the following text. I use the
term ethnographic rather than anthropological to highlight the central-
ity of the methodologies of fieldwork and the figure of the fieldworker
in the works I discuss. Another related expression appears (but is not
developed) in Nancy Bentley’s The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne,
James, Wharton, where Bentley signals the counterintuitive move of sit-
uating the urbane writers of her study within the stream of ethno-
graphic writing, by referencing the seemingly opposed “subgenres of
quasi-ethnographic fiction [that] were in place and flourishing [in the
period], from the ‘imperial gothic’ of exotic adventure novels to the
highbrow primitivism of writers like Joseph Conrad” (68). The present
study deems these “subgenres” worthy of detailed examination, in light
of the discourse of ethnography, which helped produce them.
9. Since the publication of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986),
there has been general acknowledgment within the field of anthropol-
ogy that the classic genre associated with fieldwork, the ethnography,
is a text—that the experience of fieldwork is mediated by language
that shapes or constructs that experience. Stressing their textuality,
Clifford characterizes ethnographic narratives as “partial construc-
tions” (Predicament 97). There is a considerable body of scholarship
critiquing anthropology’s collusion with imperialist discourse. See
especially Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter
(1973); Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s
Interlocutors” (1989); Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The Language of Nativism:
Anthropology as a Scientific Conversation of Man with Man,” in
NOTES 195
Woman Native Other (1989); and Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth:
The Remaking of Social Analysis (1993).
10. See Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars and Robert Scholes, The
Rise and Fall of English for two accounts of the “identity crisis” that
English departments have faced in recent years. The disciplinary self-
consciousness of anthropology is reflected by the titles of Clifford’s The
Predicament of Culture and John W. Griffith’s Joseph Conrad and the
Anthropological Dilemma (emphasis mine).
11. I am drawing on Bakhtin’s idea (from The Dialogical Imagination) of
heteroglossia, which stipulates that the novel is a self-conscious form,
comprised of multiple “languages” including “extra-artistic” ones that
are moral, philosophical, or ethnographic; the novel absorbs these
forms and interacts with them in ways that are “both peaceful and hos-
tile”—or, in my terms, in ways that mirror and critique the conventions
of these extra-fictional genres (269). In contrast to the heteroglossia of
novels, Clifford has posited the “monologic” form of the modern
anthropological monograph (Predicament 34), much as Donna
Haraway has drawn attention to the way that scientific writing seems to
emanate from an impossibly omniscient perspective and to conjure the
illusion of total objectivity instead of conceding its limited perspective
(“Situated Knowledges”). Contemporary ethnographies such as Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen are arguably
more self-consciously dialogical.
12. F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt also endeavor to “salvage” Conrad from asso-
ciation with popular literary forms (see Leavis 180 and Watt 44). On
the whole, however, Conrad scholarship is a notable exception to the
tendency to treat canonical modernism in isolation from popular fic-
tion, as I discuss in Chapter 2. For studies that situate Conrad in the
context of popular romance, see John Marx, Andrea White, Benita
Parry (Conrad and Imperialism), David Adams, and Michael Moses.
13. Robert Ackerman argues that this school began with the Cambridge
Ritualists in the 1920s and leads to the work of Northrop Frye, a latter-
day myth critic. According to Ackerman, myth criticism “sought to dis-
cover mythic or ritual patterns underlying literary works” (vii). John
Vickery, in Myth and Literature, describes this shift as one from rheto-
ric to myth (from New Criticism to Myth Criticism). As Manganaro
points out in his introduction to Modernist Anthropology, since the
watershed work Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, eds.), studies
informed by discourse analysis shift the emphasis back to rhetoric, fore-
grounding the textuality of ethnographies (22).
14. Admittedly, the social circumstances of these Anglo-Irish writers dif-
fered from those of deracinated modernists like Conrad and Lawrence,
insofar as Ireland became a key sight of ethnographic activity in the
196 NOTES
1890s: Celtic writers depicted folkways at home rather than “voyaging

out” to observe other cultures. Such sharp distinctions between
“insider” and “outsider” are mitigated, however, by the complex posi-
tioning of Celtic Revivalists who, as bourgeois Protestants, were often
culturally and economically distanced from the culture they wanted to
preserve.
15. Also of note, Jed Esty has recently (2004) described the “anthropolog-
ical turn” of literary writings of the 1930s, meaning the tendency in late
modernism to transfer the perspective of anthropology from far-flung
colonies to the English home front, which Esty considers a “spike” in
the auto-ethnographic discourse Buzard investigates (10). Although
Esty’s study of the later fiction of Eliot, Woolf, and Forster corrobo-
rates my point that much of modernism can be considered “ethno-
graphic,” it does not consider anthropological or ethnographic texts in
any detail; thus it does not make this point, as my study aims to, in a
nuanced and specific way.
16. For example, Cuddy-Keane defines one conceptual model, “critical
globalization,” as that which uses “knowledge of other regions or
countries to disrupt habitual perceptions and practices, and to prompt
a self-reflexive repositioning of the self in the global sphere . . . not
through an encounter with the foreign, but through the imagined
adoption of the other’s point of view” (546). My work on Woolf,
Forster, and Lawrence reveals that “adopting the other’s point of view”
is a central technique of the modern fieldworker, which modern novel-
ists retooled to literary ends.
17. Malinowski makes this claim in his 1926 entry for “Anthropology” in
the 13th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (qtd. in Ardener
53–54). To justify the significance of 1910 for disciplinary history,
Malinowski refers to the works of a few colleagues published by that
year: C. G. Seligman, The Melanesians of British New Guinea; Levy-
Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Societies Inferieures; W. H. Rivers
earlier work on the 1898–99 Torres Straits Expedition. (Despite
Malinowski’s election of “1910” as the start date for the new move-
ment, historians such as Adam Kuper customarily date the movement
from 1922, the year of Argonauts. James Urry and Stocking have made
a case for the more gradual emergence of the norms of modern anthro-
pology as happening throughout the twentieth century’s first couple of
decades.) With regard to Woolf, I am referring to the oft-quoted line
from “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: “On or about December 1910,
human character changed.” Many critics have noted that 1910 was the
year of the Post-Impressionist Art Exhibition, organized by Roger Fry,
which shocked London out of its artistic complacency with many icon-
oclastic works by Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, and others. It is worth
N OTES 197
noting that many of these artists gleaned inspiration and subject matter
from the so-called primitive—in the form of African masks or South Sea
islanders, for example. In a playful idiom, Gauguin’s paintings sug-
gested to Woolf (then Stephen) the liberating possibility of “going
native.” She and her sister Vanessa enjoyed scandalizing more conser-
vative socialites by attending a costume party during this period dressed
as South Sea Islanders—that is, “practically naked” (Leaska 150). This
anecdote suggests that for Woolf, one of the relationships that was
reconfigured in the modern period was that between metropolitan
observers and ethnographic others.
18. James Urry points out that though Malinowski does not acknowledge
it here, he borrows the phrase “survey work” from Rivers, who in 1913
differentiates between the “survey work and superficial knowledge” of
the preceding generation of data-gatherers and the more complete
immersion in an exotic culture that Rivers terms “intensive work,”
which prefigures Malinowski’s method (qtd. in Urry 28). James Urry
stresses that Malinowski’s method is not novel; rather, his contribution
to the field lies in his standardization of existing methods of research
and writing and in his personal influence on a generation of anthropol-
ogists (35).
19. Argonauts’s affiliation with the adventure genre is signaled by the
monograph’s working title: Kula: A Tale of Native Enterprise and
Adventure in Eastern New Guinea.
20. Malinowski makes the declaration in a letter to B. Seligman (June 21,
1918) from the Trobriand field, cited in Man and Culture: An
Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski, Raymond Firth, ed.
C HAPTER 1
1. She has captivated such readers as Carl Jung, C. S. Lewis, and Henry
Miller. See Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in
1925; Miller, The Books in My Life; Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays
in Literature. (Each devotes a chapter to Haggard.)
2. Similarly, Gerald Monsman demonstrates that Haggard’s King Solomon’s
Mines is “indebted to [then] current anthropological thinking” (281)—
and, in particular, the idea of “survivals” (primitive customs or beliefs
that persist within a more “advanced” society) associated with E. B.
Tylor—but, like Street, he misses the more obvious connection to the
writings of explorer-ethnographers like Stanley and Burton. See also
Shawn Malley, who conceives of She as an “archaeological adventure”:
“Scientific archaeology and anthropology emerged from the common
desire to find cultural origins and to forge continuity with the past by
198 N OTES
studying traces of its legacies to the present. This is the central pursuit
of the protagonists in She” (278).
3. Haggard would have encountered the ideas and discourse of late
Victorian anthropology through Lang, who lauded King Solomon’s
Mines (1885) and later collaborated with Haggard on another romance,
The World’s Desire (1890).
4. In an unpublished paper on the anthropological dimensions of the hor-
ror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Leif Sorensen uses Roland Barthes’s term
reality effect to describe Lovecraft’s strategy of citing real and imaginary
sources side by side to create the impression of “legitimating” details in
the text.
5. I adopt the term fashioned (in relation to ethnographic identity) from
James Clifford’s discussion of “Ethnographic Self Fashioning” in
Predicament of Culture (92–113). Clifford shows that the fashioning of
the identity of the observer and the culture she or he observes are recip-
rocal—“the fashioned wholes of a self and of a culture seem to be
mutually reinforcing allegories of identity” (104)—an idea that informs
this chapter and that I complicate in Chapter 3. Clifford in turn adapts
the term from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From
More to Shakespeare. While acknowledging that there have always been
“selves” (implying “a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of
address to the world, a structure of bounded desires”), Greenblatt
argues for “an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of
human identity as a manipulable, artful process” in the Renaissance (2).
One of the conditions for self-fashioning that Greenblatt identifies is
the discovery or invention of a “threatening Other” that must be
attacked or destroyed to yield a consolidated “self.” The concept is use-
ful here because the late Victorian ethnographies that I consider display
a heightened sense of self-consciousness about tailoring identities
according to the exigencies of fieldwork. This self-consciousness sur-
rounding the construction of “selves” ceases to be empowering (as it is
for these explorer ethnographers) for characters in the modernist
ethnographic fiction that I consider.
6. On the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of race, see Nancy Stepan,
The Idea of Race in Science.
7. This is Hannah Arendt’s phrase (from The Origins of Totalitarianism
30–31).
8. Haggard’s first major work was political: Cetywayo and His White
Neighbours; or, Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal and the
Transvaal (1882). In this work, he expresses the view that the British
retrocession of the Transvaal represented a “desertion of the colonials
by the imperial government” (Katz 11).
NOTES 199
9. Many years after Livingstone’s death, Stanley wrote in his journal:

“Somehow these dreams perpetually haunt me. I seem to see through
the dim, misty, warm, hazy atmosphere of Africa always the aged face of
Livingstone, urging me on in his own kind, fatherly way” (qtd. in Hall
225). For an account of Stanley’s falsifications of his own life history,
see McLynn, 33–37.
10. As one example of the popular prejudice leveled at Stanley, consider an
anonymous piece of hate mail he received after arriving in England:
“You detestable Welsh Yankee—what right had you to put your finger
in our English pie” (qtd. in Hall 211).
11. Qtd. in Hall 221.
12. Although Stanley was enthralled by Queen Victoria, “this lady to
whom in my heart of hearts next to God I worshipped,” she regarded
him unflatteringly after their first meeting as “a determined ugly little
man—with a strong American twang” (qtd. in Hall 219–20).
13. Stanley called his servant Kalulu; his African name was Ndugu M’Hali.
14. Stanley’s pugilistic approach to colonization was decried in his own day
by the Society for the Protection of Aborigines and other humanitari-
ans. The full exposé of the savagery of Europeans in the Congo culmi-
nated in E. D. Morel’s scathing critique in 1903 of the practices of
forced labor, torture, and genocide endorsed by Leopold for the pur-
pose of commandeering natural resources under the façade of philan-
thropy. Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghosts: A Story of Greed,
Terror, and Heroism argues that the atrocities committed by Stanley
and others in the Congo were of holocaust proportions.
15. Richard’s father Joseph Burton “claimed to be closely allied with if not
actually a member of the British aristocracy” (Brodie 27).
16. Burton dressed up his ethnographic accounts of “primitive” sexual
practices by writing in Latin and evaded Mrs. Grundy by circulating
such papers privately or, in the case of First Footsteps, relegating this
material to an appendix. Despite these precautions, the publisher omit-
ted the appendix to First Footsteps, containing a Latin description of the
“peculiar customs” of clitoridectomy and infibulation practiced in
Somaliland. Burton’s biographer Fawn Brodie fortuitously came across
an unexpurgated first edition of First Footsteps (reprinted by Gordon
Waterfield in the 1966 Praeger edition).
17. Anticipating Malinowski’s formula of seeing with native eyes, Burton
describes his experience “passing” as a dervish in order to gain entrance
into the forbidden Moslem cities of Mecca and Medina: “Thoroughly
tired of ‘progress’ and of ‘civilization,’ curious to see with my eyes what
others are content to ‘hear with their ears,’ namely Moslem inner life in
a really Mohammedan country; and longing, if truth be told, to set foot
in that mysterious spot which no vacation tourist has yet described,
200 NOTES
measured, sketched, and photographed, I resolved to resume my old

character of Persian wanderer, a ‘Darwaysh’ [dervish], and to make the
attempt” (Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca 1:2). Burton’s attempt
to get “off the beaten track” and pass as a native prefigures E. M.
Forster’s experiences detailed in The Hill of Devi, as discussed in
Chapter 4. Daniel Bivona also makes a connection between Burton and
Forster (Desire and Contradiction 41).
18. Because his private letters and diaries were destroyed in a posthumous
fire that his wife Isabel deliberately ignited, presumably to save herself
(and his memory) from involvement in any scandal, these lines are nec-
essarily mediated by her quoting them in her biography The Life of
Captain Sir Richard F. Burton. On Burton’s failure to transcend his
inescapable outsider status, see Said, Orientalism 195.
19. Born August Henry Lane Fox, he adopted the name Pitt Rivers to
honor his benefactor, a cousin (Henry Pitt, Baron Rivers), from whom
he inherited a fortune and large estate. Pitt Rivers (1827–1900) was a
lieutenant-general in the English army, noted for his contributions to
the museum display of archaeological and ethnological collections.
20. “President’s Address” (1876). Journal of the Anthropological Institute
5:468–88.
21. “The rapid extermination of savages at the present time, and the rapid-
ity with which they are being reduced to the standard of European
manners, renders it of urgent importance [to fill in the record of
‘human development’] as soon as possible,” wrote the authors of the
1874 Notes and Queries, which included such notables as E. B. Tylor,
John Beddoe, and John Lubbock (iv–v).
22. In Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire, Felix
Driver notes that Stanley likewise repudiated armchair theorists’ pre-
sumed monopoly on producing geographical knowledge about Africa,
promoting himself as an authority on the subject, with empirical evi-
dence he had gathered. Marshalling the language of empirical author-
ity, Stanley defended Livingstone’s increasingly discredited theories
about African River systems by proclaiming that “this was not a ques-
tion of theory . . . but of fact” (qtd. 128).
23. In King Solomon’s Mines, Quartermain apologizes for not devoting
more narrative space to ethnological matters: “I should have liked to
dwell upon at length . . . the curious legends which I collected about
the chain armor that saved us from destruction in the great battle of
Loo. . . . I should have liked to go into the differences, some of which
are to my mind very suggestive, between the Zulu and Kukuana
dialects. . . . I have scarcely touched on the domestic and family cus-
toms of the Kukuanas, many of which are exceedingly quaint, or on
their proficiency in the art of smelting and welding metals” (11).
NOTES 201
24. Pratt, Writing Culture 35. Pointing to the symbiotic relationship

between adventure and explorer ethnography, Haggard has his narrator
Quartermain note in an addendum to Allan Quartermain that his
description of native life is informed by Joseph Thomson’s Through
Masai Land (284). This is a rare case of Haggard overtly acknowledg-
ing his sources. Norman Etherington perceives echoes between the
“geographical and zoological details” of Chapter 5 of She and those of
David Livingstone’s African journals (The Annotated She 216, n. 4).
Although I cannot definitively establish which “explorer ethnogra-
phies” Haggard read, my aim throughout the chapter is to demonstrate
a clear resonance in form and content between adventure romance and
Victorian narratives of African exploration.
25. It is interesting to note that the division between the learned editor of
Allan Quartermain and the relatively uneducated “man of action,”
Quartermain, is much sharper than that between the editor and narra-
tor of She. While Quartermain explicates customs and beliefs of the Zu-
Vendi, the editor intervenes at times to “correct” the narrator’s
misstatements, as when he notes that “Mr Quartermain does not seem
to have been aware that it is common for animal-worshipping people to
annually sacrifice the beasts they adore. See Herodotus, ii, 42. –Editor”
(148). This division of labor, where the observer is relegated to data-
gatherer and the scholar at home is the ultimate arbiter of cultural
meanings, resembles the conventional divide in Victorian anthropol-
ogy, which Haggard challenges in She.
26. Although the seeming tolerance of remarks like this lead critics such as
Bivona to conclude that Haggard’s “outlook on the primitive” is
unusually “relativistic” for his time, insofar as it grants “some value to
‘savage’ ways of life” (Desire and Contradiction 37), Wendy Katz has
traced the deep-seated racial prejudice and unquestioned attitudes of
supremacy that run through Haggard’s writing. See also Mawuena
Logan, Narrating Africa 145–53.
27. Both statements are quoted by Katz. Katz further notes that Haggard
defended his speed in writing: “such work should be written rapidly
and, if possible, not rewritten, since wine of this character loses its bou-
quet when it is passed from glass to glass.” He expresses the bottom
line for adventure writers thus: “the story . . . should consist of action,
action, action from the first page to the last” (Days 2:92, 94).
28. Beginning perhaps with Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Mask
(1952), a variety of scholars have used the metaphor of the “mask” to
discuss the fracturing of identities in a colonial context. While Fanon
addresses the alienation that is produced when European cultural forms
are imposed on black subjects in Martinique, Gail Ching-Liang Low—
reversing Fanon’s terms in the title of her book, White Skins/Black
202 NOTES
Masks: Representation and Colonialism—considers white British writ-

ers’ persistent fascination with, and projection of illicit fantasies onto,
the bodies of black indigenous others. I might have titled this section
“White Skins, White Masks,” and added a link to this chain, for I am
suggesting that the identities that these amateur ethnographers assume
have a performative dimension.
29. Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” (1936), in Collected Essays.
30. Similarly, Bivona argues that in Burton’s work of the 1850s, “Anglo-
Saxon superiority is stressed, but the foundation for it is beginning
to be undermined by a kind of qualified sympathy” (Desire and
Contradiction 38).
31. A variety of critics have commented on the curious vanishing of the sci-
entific observer—who wields what Donna Haraway calls “the gaze that
mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked
category claim the power to see, and not be seen, to represent while
escaping representation” (188–99). Like the “imperial gaze” that E.
Ann Kaplan describes, the “colonial ethnographic gaze” (as I term it)
“reflects the assumption that the white Western subject is central,
much as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject”; it
“refuses to acknowledge its power and privilege: it unconsciously
represses knowledge of power and hierarchies and its need to domi-
nate, to control” (79).
32. Although typology was practiced as enthusiastically in the British isles
as in the colonies during this period, its application to nonwhite peoples
is accompanied by greater rhetorical violence, as individual bodies, once
collapsed into a singular type, are further dissected into parts, denying
the humanity of those represented. On the application of racial typol-
ogy to peoples of the British Empire, see Perry Curtis’s study of repre-
sentations of the Irish. See also Mary Cowling.
33. As Patrick Brantlinger notes, “Africa grew ‘dark’ as Victorian mission-
aries, explorers, and scientists flooded it with light.”
34. This book went through eight editions between 1855 and 1893 in
response to the boom of exploration during this period (according to
Middleton’s introduction [Art of Travel 6]). I am quoting from the
1872 edition, reprinted by David and Charles, 1971. A copy of this
book with Burton’s marginalia comprises part of his immense library
(see Jutzi 98).
35. This book describes the period in which Stanley was in the employ of
King Leopold II in the Congo, and for that reason it is probably his
bloodiest travel narrative.
36. See Hochschild esp. 67–69 and 164–66.
37. Burton shared this perspective as cofounder, with James Hunt, of the
Anthropological Society, which in 1862 split off from the Ethnological
NOTES 203
Society. Hunt argued that blacks were so inferior as to constitute a

separate species from whites. See Stocking, Victorian Anthropology
245–62.
38. See Morton Cohen 109. Haggard wrote about the Lovedu queen in
“The Death of Majajie” in African Review (1896), though he denies
that his knowledge of the Lovedu had any direct influence on She.
39. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, these definitions were
common from about 1850 on. Low identifies a phenomenon she calls
“the colonial uncanny,” which she traces through Rudyard Kipling’s
short stories of this period (113–55) and which is applicable to
Haggard’s She.
40. Freud, Standard Edition, 17:224–25. Julia Kristeva interprets Freud’s
concept of the uncanny in this way in Strangers to Ourselves, when she
writes of the “foreigner within” (191).
41. Haggard’s construction of his hero as apelike anticipates the “savage
within” trope that will be discussed in Chapter 2.
42. See Rosaldo’s “Utter Savages of Scientific Value” for a relevant discus-
sion of another group of “savages” (the Negritos of the Philippines)
who were regarded by white colonizers at once as “the enemy” and as
objects of scientific scrutiny during roughly this same period.
43. This attitude toward aborigines is echoed by James Fennimore Cooper
in Last of the Mohicans.
44. Wendy Katz makes a compelling case for this in Rider Haggard and the
Fiction of Empire. Some of Haggard’s biographers and critics have
argued that Haggard’s racism and sense of cultural supremacy are mit-
igated by his admiration for, and identification with, the other. See
Bivona (Desire and Contradiction 37), Ellis (2–3), and Morton Cohen
(229).
45. The “savage within civilized man” trope is evident in the concept of
“survivals”—ancient customs that prevail in modern times—espoused
by Tylor and others. In Primitive Culture, for example, although Tylor
celebrates the progressive shedding of illusions that stage theory (or
cultural evolution) envisions, at the same time, he points to the endur-
ing superstitions that riddle modern societies, and through the com-
parative method normalizes “primitive” customs and makes English
customs seem strange, as in this example: “The turn of mind which in
a Gold-coast negro would manifest itself in a museum of monstrous
and most potent fetishes, might impel an Englishman to collect scarce
postage-stamps or queer walking-sticks” (2:133). For a worthwhile
analysis of the potentially socially subversive effects of the comparative
method in James Frazer’s work, see Beer, “Speaking for the Others:
Relativism and Authority in Victorian Anthropological Literature.”
204 NOTES
46. See The Annotated She 335, n. 100. As recently as 1984, other readers
have defended Haggard of these charges, insisting on the ethnographic
value of the author’s description of African people: “Haggard’s
‘bloody’ Zulu books are of great value to historians,” writes Hartwig
Vogelsberger, “as they throw an interesting light on the extraordinary
history and character of this people” (126).
47. The quote is from Paul Ricoeur’s History and Truth (277).
C HAPTER 2
1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 37; H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
44; Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 102.
2. Travels in West Africa went into five editions and paid for Kingsley’s
next trip to Africa; West African Studies sold 1,200 copies in its first
week (Thiesmeyer 157).
3. “To case a complex matter in simplifying biographical terms, in 1896
there was no British Boas,” Stocking explains. “The period of Boas’
anthropological ascent in the United States was the period of Tylor’s
anthropological decline in Great Britain—but there was no single fig-
ure who emerged from Tylor’s shadow” (After Tylor 125).
4. Edward Garnett, ed., Letters from Conrad, xiii (qtd. in Watt 43). In
Conrad and Imperialism, Benita Parry argues that ideologically subver-
sive elements of Conrad’s fiction weren’t “legible” to contemporary
readers, who placed Conrad in the tradition of adventure stories and
romances, and who remained unquestioning of their racial and cultural
superiority. “Although Conrad was cool about Kipling, disliked
Buchan, and thought Haggard’s tales horrible, his own fictions with
their racial stereotypes, ingratiating generalities on alien customs and
the native mind, and their tendency to attach moral valuations to cul-
tural particularities, do have affinities with writings he despised” (2).
5. Qtd. in Hilson and Timms 107. By formulating his feelings about
“Outpost” in this way, Conrad at once disparages his own tale for lack-
ing substance and acknowledges the part he is playing as a writer in the
metaphorical “ransacking” of Africa, which he will later condemn as the
“vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured human conscience.”
6. Letter from Conrad to Garnett of August 14, 1896. Jean-Aubry, Life
and Letters, I: 193.
7. Ford Madox Ford originally dubbed Conrad’s style “impressionist.”
See Watt 249–50.
8. “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” in A Bloomsbury Group Reader, ed. S.
P. Rosenbaum.
9. Qtd. in Hammond 6.
NOTES 205
10. See Mariana Torgovnick, Martin Green, Brian Street, and Leo Henkin
for a discussion of these popular traditions, which continued to thrive
alongside more “serious” art that emerged from ethnographic encoun-
ters between Europeans and “primitive” people. Simultaneously, in the
early twentieth century, as James Clifford has shown, objects formerly
considered as “cultural artifacts” (e.g., African masks) came to be
regarded as “authentic art.” See Predicament of Culture, 224–26.
11. Qtd. in Anderson 106.
12. The Times, May 31, 1983: 11 (qtd. in Birkett 217).
13. See especially Stevenson 138–42; Blunt 90–108; Early “Unescorted in
Africa,” 70–72; Mills 154–68; and Pearce 86–94.
14. December 5, 1895 (qtd. in Birkett 198).
15. Qtd. in Frank 256.
16. For example, in her West African Studies, Kingsley argues that Britain
should abolish the crown colony system of governing West Africa and
institute instead a council of merchants; by drawing on the knowledge
of anthropologists and using existing African structures, Britain could
maximize free trade, which for Kingsley, was a sort of utopian solution
to problems in the colonies. These views put her into conflict with
Joseph Chamberlain. (See Stevenson 142.)
17. Qtd. in Stevenson 94.
18. Qtd. in Early, “Unescorted” 72.
19. Letter to Alice Stopford Green, March 27, 1897; qtd. in Birkett 173.
20. A very remarkable traveler and writer (qtd. in Thiesmeyer 155). The
interest and admiration was reciprocal: Kingsley wrote in a letter to
Macmillan, probably in December 1898, “But the man is Conrad, there
is nothing like us sailormen for literature”—a phrase that wishes away
gender distinctions, positioning Kingsley as one of the club of male
adventurers (qtd. in Gwynn 148).
21. Parry 13. In a similar vein, Geoffrey Galt Harpham links the ambiva-
lence about imperialism expressed in Heart of Darkness to Conrad’s
belonging to a subjugated nation, Poland, and then joining a conquer-
ing, imperial one, Great Britain.
22. Clifford’s remark was made in the Empire Review (289); Conrad’s
reply, qtd. in Hamner 25. Nonetheless, Florence Clemens, an anthro-
pologist who did fieldwork in Malay in the 1930s, claims that Conrad
was a careful observer who supplemented firsthand observation by
reading ethnographies, such as Alfred Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago
(Hamner 25). In addition to reading Hugh Clifford, Mary Kingsley,
and a wide range of explorers (Stanley, Burton, Sir James Brooke, and
Mungo Park), like Wells, Conrad was “enthralled by Darwin” (quoted
in Curle). In 1913 he received Malinoswki’s The Family among the
206 N OTES
Australian Aborigines, although it is not clear whether or not he read it

(Tutein 65).
23. Qtd. in Najder 240.
24. Qtd. in Birkett 173.
25. Qtd. in Early, “Spectacle” 222. Karen Lawrence makes this observation
in Penelope’s Voyages (141), and Stocking refers to her as “at once racial-
ist and relativist” and a “proto-functionalist” (After Tylor 373).
26. A similar assumption underlies W. T. Stead’s lament that Kingsley’s
death was premature, given her supposed insight into “the African
mind”: “What a pity it is that Miss Mary Kingsley died before the Pan-
African Conference was held! It is one more count of the indictment of
Humanity against this hateful South African War [the Boer war], that it
should have cost us the life of the only Paleface who could make the
Black Man intelligible to Europe!” (131).
27. Qtd. in Alice Stopford Green 7.
28. See Woman Native Other esp. 47–76.
29. Stocking, Observers Observed 77.
30. Zoologist Chalmers Mitchell, who wrote a review of The Island of Dr.
Moreau for the Saturday Review the year it was first published, com-
mented on Wells’s powers of scientific observation in this book: “here
is an author with the emotions of an artist and the intellectual imagina-
tion of a scientific investigator” (April 11, 1896; reproduced in Patrick
Parrinder, H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage). Jill Milling expresses a
similar view in a 1986 article, when she compares the narrative strategy
of The Island of Dr. Moreau to the “scientific method, as the scientist
explores the unknown within the context of what is known” (106).
31. Pall Mall Gazette, 60 (April 11, 1895), 4.
32. E. H. Man conducted fieldwork in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands,
where he was assistant superintendent for twelve years. Stocking sug-
gests that his work reflects an admixture of “straightforward descrip-
tion”—following closely the new fieldwork guidelines in Notes and
Queries on Anthropology for the Use of Travellers and Residents in
Uncivilized Lands (drawn up by the Anthropological Institute in 1874)—
and biased material informed “not [by] Tylorian evolutionary theory,
but [by] traditional Christian belief” (Victorian Anthropology 259).
33. See the first edition (1874) of Notes and Queries.
34. In 1912 the anthropologist W. H. Rivers would specifically caution
against asking leading questions when interviewing native informants,
insisting that such interviews should be conducted in the native lan-
guage because “language is our only key to the correct and complete
understanding of the life and thought of a people” (Notes and Queries,
4th ed., 186).
NOTES 207
35. In the original manuscript, the island was identified as one of the
Galapagos Islands, Noble Isle, and so linked overtly to the evolutionary
theory to which Wells responds with Moreau (Stover’s introduction to
the critical edition of The Island of Doctor Moreau 16).
36. “The Limits of Individual Plasticity,” 89–90.
37. Heart of Darkness 37. Part of the second sentence—“It could only be
obtained by conquest . . . wondering and secretly appalled”—appears in
the manuscript but not in the final draft published by Blackwoods
(according to a footnote in the Norton edition 37).
38. In “Geography and Some Explorers,” Conrad is at once laudatory and
condemnatory of the “great tradition” of exploration; it is a swan song
and an embarrassed lament. Retrospectively, he condemns the Scramble
for Africa and, specifically, Stanley’s role in setting up stations civilatrise
for King Leopold of Belgium, calling them: “the unholy recollection of
a prosaic newspaper ‘stunt’ and the vilest scramble for loot that ever dis-
figured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration”
(Last Essays 17).
39. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man” 89.
40. On Marlow and the Victorian work ethic, also see Watt 148–51.
41. My wording here deliberately echoes that of Mary Douglas’s discussion
of purity rituals cited in Chapter 1: “Our pollution behaviour is the
reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or con-
tradict cherished classifications” (36).
42. See Watt 145 and Griffith 30.
43. Clifford compliments Conrad’s craft (crediting him with “a sureness of
touch and a magical power of conveying to his readers the very atmos-
phere of the Malayan environments which was to me so familiar”) but
expresses frustration that his “knowledge of the people, about whom
he wrote with such extraordinary skill, was superficial and inaccurate in
an infuriating degree” (“Concerning Conrad” 287).
44. From a letter to Richard Curle (April 24, 1922) in Curle, Conrad to a
Friend 112–14.
C HAPTER 3
1. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author 107, 113. Geertz coins
this phrase to describe Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, which he
argues should be read as a satire of American culture rather than as a
source of knowledge about the cultures with which it is overtly con-
cerned: the Dobu, Kwakiutl, and Zuni.
2. I am thinking of James Clifford’s definition of ethnographic quoted in
my introduction: “a characteristic attitude of participant observation
208 NOTES
among the artifacts of a defamiliarized cultural reality” (Predicament

121). Two late works illustrate this point. In Three Guineas (1938),
Woolf famously urges women to form a “Society of Outsiders”—a
group enabled by their very exclusion from major institutions and
material advancement to stand outside of English society and critically
observe its prevailing customs, institutions, and ceremonies. With its
self-nativizing impulse, Woolf’s exhortation sounds like a formula for
modern anthropological practice as well as feminist consciousness rais-
ing. The perspective of Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), is
equally “ethnographic”: English history is regarded through an
estranging lens in a country pageant that prompts a critical examination
of what it means to be English. On the latter text in relation to anthro-
pological discourse, see Esty.
3. My subtitle is meant to connect Malinwoski’s idea that anthropology
should serve to illuminate “ourselves” with the end of Woolf’s novel
Between the Acts, where the actors in a country pageant turn makeshift
mirrors on the audience, who respond in bewilderment and embarrass-
ment: “What’s the notion? Anything that’s bright enough to reflect,
presumably, ourselves?/ Ourselves! Ourselves!/ Out they leapt, jerked,
skipped. Flashing, dazzling, dancing, jumping. . . . Ourselves? But
that’s cruel. To snap us as we are, before we’ve had time to assume. . . .
And only, too, in parts. . . . That’s what’s so distorting and upsetting
and utterly unfair./ Mopping, mowing, whisking, frisking, the looking-
glasses darted, flashed, exposed” (183–84). In this novel, characters are
forced to look at their national history, together with their quotidian
lives, as strange performances.
4. See Malinwoski’s concluding essay in First Year’s Work (103). Mass-
Observation was a popular movement in England from 1937 to 1949,
concerned with letting ordinary, untrained observers conduct an
“anthropology of ourselves.” See Buzard’s essay on this topic as well.
5. Stocking, Observer Observed 85. The field manual is the “General
Account of the Method” in the 1912 edition of the Royal
Anthropological Institute’s Notes and Queries on Anthropology, and its
principal author was W. H. Rivers, the most prominent practitioner of
the new methods prior to Malinowski. Rivers participated in the impor-
tant Torres Straits Expedition of 1898–99, organized out of
Cambridge University. It is likely that the Cambridge-educated
Bloomsbury group would have been familiar with the work of Rivers,
as their social circle overlapped substantially with his.
6. See, e.g., Clifford, Works and Lives; Geertz, “From the Native’s Point
of View;” and Trinh’s chapter from Woman Native Other, “The
Language of Nativism,” in which she speaks of the patronizing and
dehumanizing effects of nativizing discourse.
NOTES 209
7. See Jane Marcus, Martha Carpentier, and Madeline Moore.

8. Woolf’s novel was completed by 1913, the year Ancient Art and
Ritual was published. The Voyage Out has a complicated textual history,
but the bulk of the manuscript material that exists was composed
between 1908–13.
9. Fry first heard Harrison lecture in the 1890s (Peacock 61) and may
have attended her lecture at Cambridge in 1909. Moreover, in 1912
one of Fry’s sisters was privy to a private reading of portions of
Harrison’s manuscript of Ancient Art and Ritual, with which she was
favorably impressed (Ackerman 153).
10. See John Vickery, “Literary Criticism and Myth, Anglo-American
Critics” (1980), for a discussion of myth criticism, which had its heyday
from World War II through the 1960s.
11. Joseph McLaughlin suggested this phrase to me when he read a draft of
this chapter.
12. The figure brings to mind the passage in Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa
has a vision of some curious person sifting through the ruins of London
in the distant future, tapping into the idea that today’s civilization will
yield tomorrow’s archaeological digs.
13. Clifford considers the diary a “polyphonic” text, one that reveals a
“mercurial” fieldworker-writer who seems to try on “different voices,
personae” (Predicament 297). Raymond Firth, in his 1989 introduc-
tion to the diary, refers to Malinowski’s “protean character” (xxi).
14. To an extent, the new method was put into practice by Leonard Woolf,
who returned from Ceylon in 1911, where, anticipating one of the con-
ventions of modern anthropology, he stressed that he was a lone inter-
loper in an alien culture: the district was “pure Sinhalese, no planters,
no Europeans at all” (Diaries in Ceylon lxxvii). During his extended
stay, Leonard learned the language and studied the customs of the
Sinhalese and Tamils of Ceylon, and out of this experience shaped his
first novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913), in which he adopts the van-
tage point of the indigenous people of the region—an unusual move
for a colonial novel of the day. While revising her first novel, Virginia
read drafts of Leonard’s novel; each would dedicate his/her novel to
the other.
15. See Hansen, Needham, and Nichols, “Pornography, Ethnography, and
the Discourses of Power” and Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive, where she
discusses the pornographic dimensions of Malinowski’s The Sexual Life
of Savages. See also Mark Wollaeger, who has persuasively illustrated
that this scene owes something to the simulacrum of re-created “native
villages” on display in imperial exhibitions in European and American
cities at this time and to the vogue of circulating semipornographic,
exotic, colonial postcards.
210 NOTES
16. I am suggesting that, as Butler argues for gender identities in Gender

Trouble, national identities might endure largely through the mecha-
nism of repeated performance. Adapting Victor Turner’s terms, Butler
interprets gender as a “ritual social drama,” wherein mundane acts are
codified and legitimated through repetition (140). Analogously, what
Benedict Anderson refers to as “the imagined communities” of nations
may be conceived as maintaining themselves through a process of con-
stant reinvention. In The Voyage Out, Woolf potentially dramatizes this
idea by showing the process of cultural invention faltering, as English
routines are taken out of context, interrupted, and metaphorically put
under a microscope.
17. She wrote this in her diary after writing Jacob’s Room (2:248). The
problem of character is brought to the fore in “Mr. Bennet and Mrs.
Brown” and in “Modern Fiction” and explored in such novels as Jacob’s
Room (1922) and Orlando (1928), which revel in the uncertainty of
identity.
18. Judith Modell argues that the typological approach of Benedict’s work
resembles the “six sharp examples” that Woolf uses in The Waves “to
convey complex social and personal interactions” (28). In a 1932 letter,
Benedict inquires of Margaret Mead, “Did you like The Waves? And did
you keep thinking how you’d set down everybody you knew in a simi-
lar fashion? I did. I suppose I’m disappointed that she didn’t include
any violent temperaments, and I want my group more varied. . . . Mrs.
Woolf’s types are circumscribed; she never does anything that isn’t
essentially mild.” Nevertheless, Benedict concludes, “This way of set-
ting people down seemed very exciting to me” (An Anthropologist at
Work 318).
19. This is Modell’s phrase (27). Rachel’s description of chaos resolving
into coherent meaning echoes Woolf’s description of the process of
composing The Voyage Out, as described in a letter to Lytton Strachey
in 1916: “What I wanted to do was to give the feeling of a vast tumult
of life, as various and disorderly as possible, which should be cut short
for a moment by the death, and go on again—and the whole was to have
a sort of pattern and be somehow controlled. The difficulty was to keep
any sort of coherence” (Letters: Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey 75).
20. See Geertz, Works and Lives, and cf. Hegeman 96–103.
21. In After Tylor, Stocking points out that E. B. Tylor’s founding defini-
tion of culture bears resemblance to the modern usage of “small c” cul-
ture: “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by
man as a member of society” (Primitive Culture). However, as
Stocking observes, Tylor was constrained by his belief in evolutionism
NOTES 211
and the superiority of the English, so that his definition does not
acknowledge a plurality of cultures.
22. See Susan Hegeman’s Patterns for America and Marc Manganaro’s
Culture, 1922.
23. In Ethnography of Manners, Nancy Bentley suggests that Henry James’s
novels of manners and Malinowski’s ethnographies engage in the paral-
lel enterprise of “refashioning an earlier, more provincial genre of man-
ners, . . . a new way of seeing and writing about social life” (1).
24. The sense that formal religion is stultifying is conveyed by Rachel’s sud-
den realization that the expatriate churchgoers mindlessly cling “to
faith with the assiduity of a limpet” (229); the expedition to the native
village is arranged almost as an alternative to this sterile experience. The
mechanism surrounding courtship is evident in the description of
Terrence’s proposal to Rachel during the expedition to the native vil-
lage: “They walked on in silence as people walking in their sleep”
(272); languidly, Rachel muses to herself “I suppose this is happiness,”
then echoes her thought out loud, and Terrence hollowly repeats, “this
is happiness” (283). These characters seem to follow a cultural script,
moving as if on a conveyor belt from their initial encounter toward that
central cultural institution of marriage.
25. This is Stuart Hall’s characterization of what he calls “new style global-
ization,” in contrast to that of the Victorian era, when, he argues, the
English mistook their own limited perspective for “sight itself”
(21–22). Although this division of globalization into old and new styles
may be overly schematic (Buzard makes a good case for Victorian nov-
els exhibiting the kind of cultural self-consciousness Hall associates
with the twentieth century), it is a helpful way of thinking about a gen-
eral shift in attitude that Woolf and Benedict record. Woolf shows the
“old style” ethnocentrism persevering in the character of Richard
Dalloway, and the emergence of “new style” globalization in the pat-
tern of ordinary customs that Rachel and St. John Hirst each self-con-
sciously observe in the last pages of The Voyage Out.
26. Qtd. in Langbaum 72.
27. The critique of ethnographic methodology that Woolf’s essay provoca-
tively suggests has subsequently been made from within the discipline.
Refuting Malinowski’s near-mystical model of “anthropological under-
standing,” Clifford Geertz asserts, “The ethnographer does not,
and . . . largely cannot, perceive what his informants perceive” (“From
the Native’s Point of View” 27). Instead of presuming to “think like a
native,” Geertz favors the hermeneutic approach of interpreting a cul-
ture’s symbolic forms.
28. Squier uses the terms insider and outsider in their colloquial sense to
mean, respectively, hegemonic versus marginal (the latter use typified
212 N OTES
by the phrase outsider art). The ethnographic sense of these terms is

effectively reversed because the “outside” perspective is aligned with
the self-authorizing voice of the ethnographer. For Squier, then, the
dwarf is an outsider; in my discussion, the dwarf is an insider.
C HAPTER 4
1. Though this term has a confusing history of evolving, competing defi-
nitions, I use Anglo-Indian in the historical sense employed by Forster
to refer to the English in India.
2. Similarly Edward Said argues that in the novel, the East “is brought
tantalizingly close to the West, but only for a brief moment. We are left
at the end with a sense of the pathetic difference separating ‘us’ from an
Orient destined to bear its foreignness as a mark of its permanent
estrangement from the West” (Orientalism 224).
3. See Suleri, “The Geography of A Passage to India” 170–71; and
Trivedi, Colonial Transactions 154.
4. For critics who have identified an ambivalence or self-contradictory
duality in the narrative voice of Passage, see Tony Davies and Nigel
Wood (16–17), Paul Armstrong (375), Benita Parry (134), and Peter
Morey (62), whose arguments are discussed in the “Narrative
Oscillations” section of this chapter. Bette London likewise points to
the seeming inconsistencies of the narrative voice by characterizing
Passage as staging “a power struggle between competing voices,”
though she ultimately finds this semblance of heterogeneity an illusive
cover for a narrative that reinscribes the monolithic authority of British
imperialism (64–65), as discussed later in this chapter.
5. In E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, Philip Gardner asserts that the
response to the novel was overwhelmingly favorable in England and
India, noting that the exception was the indignation felt by Anglo-
Indian readers who felt maligned by the novel’s unflattering portrait of
them (21). Critical responses after Indian Independence (in 1947) are
somewhat less favorable; the main Indian detractor being Nirad
Chauduri (1954), who considers Aziz and his friends “toadies” and
considers Godbole “a clown” (22). M. K. Naik agrees that Forster’s
representation of Godbole is an artistic failure (in Shahane, Focus on
Forster 67). In contrast, G. K. Das (1977) and Adwaita P. Ganguly
(1990) praise Forster’s representation of Indians and Indian traditions,
especially Hinduism (both reviews appear in Gardner’s collection).
6. Qtd. in Bloom 50, 45, italics in original. Playwright Santh Rama Rau
commends the book’s “courage to talk and think from inside of the
Indian mind” (E. M. Forster: A Tribute 56). On Forster’s ninetieth
NOTES 213
birthday, Mulk Raj Anand credits Forster with being “perhaps the only
Englishman of this century who came near enough to understanding
Indian people” (qtd. in Herz 31). See also Shahane.
7. Clifford also describes participant observation as “a continuous tacking
between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of events” (Predicament 34). The
acrobatics of the ethnographic consciousness is one discussed in
Chapter 3, in relation to Woolf’s “Street Haunting” essay (see pages
169–71).
8. Howards End fulfills the mandate of the epigraph by “connecting” the
Wilcoxes’ world of business, the Schlegels’ world of culture, and the
world of the economic lower-middle classes represented by Leonard
Bast, in the reconfigured family that inhabits the titular country house
at the novel’s end.
9. One contemporary reviewer interpreted the narrative voice according
to the trope of the tour guide: “This novel gives us opportunity to
make excursions into characteristic Indian scenes, accompanied by a
skillful guide who refrains from making obvious comments” (qtd. in
Gardner 282). This trope pervades Forster’s writings on India as well,
as discussed later in this chapter.
10. Forster published numerous essays on India in the interim between his
two trips (1913 and 1921) in periodicals including Nation & Athenaeum,
Spectator, London Mercury, and Atlantic Monthly.
11. On the antitourist trope in modern travel writing and fiction, see
Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways
to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918; Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling
Between the Wars; and MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the
Leisure Class.
12. See Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture 27–50.
13. Gardner 250. The review is entitled “An Anglo-Indian View” and was
published in the New Statesman (August 1924).
14. Horne ignores or is ignorant of the fact that during his first trip, Forster
“spent almost as much time among Anglo-Indians as with Indians”
(Stallybrass xi): In his essay “Three Countries,” Forster writes, “I had
English friends in the civil service and I could pass from one camp to
another with results that were interesting but painful. The English had
been trained in a fine tradition of paternal government. Times were
changing and they found it difficult to change. Some of them accepted
the new situation with a good grace, most of them with a bad one, and
the manners of their womanfolk could be ghastly. Looking back on that
first visit of mine to India, I realize that mixed up with the pleasure and
fun was much pain. The sense of racial tension, of incompatibility, never
left me. It was not a tourist’s outing, and the impression it left was
deep” (Hill 297).
214 NOTES
15. Buzard, The Beaten Track 203–4 (see also 186–216).

16. Said writes that “even such a remarkable novel as A Passage to India . . .
founders on the undodgeable facts of Indian nationalism” (Culture
and Imperialism 202–3). See also Parry, “The Politics of Representation
in A Passage to India.”
17. Qtd. in Stocking, Colonial Situations 10–11.
18. Lamenting a history of English condescension and belligerence in
India, Forster writes, “never in history did ill-breeding contribute so
much toward the dissolution of an Empire” (“Reflections on India I:
Too Late,” Prince’s Tale 246). The deliberate simplification and partial
hyperbole here derive from the journalistic style, but they should not
detract from the earnestness with which Forster defended civility, sym-
pathy, and a “well developed heart” throughout his life and career. The
remark is echoed in the novel when Mrs. Moore reflects on her son’s
imperious attitude toward Indians, “One touch of regret—not the
canny substitute but true regret from the heart—would have made him
a different man and the British Empire a different institution” (53).
19. Qtd. in Frederic Spotts, Letters of Leonard Woolf 197, n. 2.
20. See Furbank, 2:106–7.
21. Manganaro also finds the narratological distinction between story and
discourse a useful one for mapping the narrative tensions in the ethno-
graphic voice. He argues that in Argonauts, Malinowski effectively
anticipates the distinction made by narratologists between story (the
“what”) and discourse (the “way it is told”) by drawing attention to
the two facets of his monograph: some chapters relate “the narrative of
the Kula expedition,” while others articulate the methods of obtaining
these “results” (Culture 82–83). Uniquely, Manganaro identifies “dis-
cursive reflexiveness” in Malinowski’s writing, such that Argonauts not
only oscillates “between narrative modes but [is] in fact about those very
modes” (104).
22. See Chapter 3.
23. The paper, entitled “Notes on the English Character,” was later
published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1926 and collected in Abinger
Harvest, cited here.
24. In a letter to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (dated May 8, 1922),
Forster expressed his frustration with the novelist’s parlor trick of lim-
ited omniscience: “If you can pretend to get inside one character, why
not pretend it about all the characters? I see why. The illusion of life
may vanish, and the creator degenerate into the showman. Yet some
change of the sort must be made. The studied ignorance of the novel-
ists grows wearisome” (qtd. in Furbank 106).
25. In a characteristic reflection, Malinowski writes, “What is terrible is that
I am unable to free myself completely from the atmosphere created by
NOTES 215
foreign bodies: their presence takes away from the scientific value and
personal pleasure of my walk” (Diary 163). Such remarks have led
some critics to conclude that Malinowski’s espousal of sympathy and
close rapport in the field are disingenuous (see Hsu, Cultural Problem
521), but George Stocking argues that although Malinowski’s actual
experience in the field is ultimately inaccessible, it’s reasonable to
“assume that [his relationship to Trobriand islanders] shared the inher-
ent ambiguity and asymmetry of almost all ethnographic relationships”
(Ethnographer’s Magic 103). The only comparable remark that I am
aware of in Forster’s writing is a letter sent to Malcom Darling from
Egypt, in which he abashedly writes, “I came inclined to be pleased and
quite free from racial prejudice, but in 10 months I’ve acquired an
instinctive dislike of the Arab voice, the Arab figure, the Arab way of
looking or walking or pump shitting [sic] or eating or laughing or any-
thing—exactly the emotion that I censured in the Anglo-Indian toward
the natives” (qtd. in Furbank 29). Furbank points out that Forster
knew few Egyptians personally at this point. It is an atypical remark in
Forster’s personal writings, which generally stress the same values he
publicly embraced, those of tolerance, sympathy, and intellectual
curiosity of other cultures.
26. Frederick Crews calls Hinduism the novel’s “most engaging fable”
(154), whereas London reads the Hindu festival as an interlude of con-
trived exoticism (79).
27. Abinger Harvest 13, emphasis in original.
C HAPTER 5
1. For example, in “Lawrence in Doubt: A Theory of the ‘Other’ and Its
Collapse,” Howard Booth argues that from 1917 to 1925 Lawrence
oscillated between affirming and repudiating American Indians as a
source of renewal for moribund civilization, embracing primitive cul-
tures theoretically, but rejecting them in practice, in racist and some-
times imperialist terms. Mariana Torgovnick points out that Lawrence’s
definition of “the primitive” “furnishes no consistent political or
anthropological thematic” but lapses into primitivist caricature in rep-
resenting groups he credits, at least theoretically, with complexity and
nuance (Gone Primitive 142).
2. I am referring to Langston Hughes’s “When the Negro was in Vogue.”
In this well-known retrospective essay about the Harlem Renaissance,
Hughes contemplates what it was like to be in the spotlight as white
customers poured into places like the Cotton Club and Jungle Alley in
Harlem, and “strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and
216 NOTES
stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in a zoo” (152).

He makes the point that the “ordinary Negro” did not profit from the
Harlem “vogue”—a point applicable to the vogue of the Southwest
Indian.
3. Lawrence died in March 1930, and Huxley began collecting the let-
ters later that year and continued the project into 1931; they would
be published in September of 1932. Brave New World was written from
May–August of 1931. In addition to Lawrence’s writing, in a 1963
interview, Huxley relates, “I had no trouble finding my way around the
English part of Brave New World, but I had to do an enormous amount
of reading up on New Mexico, because I’d never been there. I read all
sorts of Smithsonian Reports on the place and then did the best I could
to imagine it” (“Interview with Aldous Huxley” 198). Firchow
observes that the “Smithsonian Reports” are the Annual Reports of the
U.S. American Ethnology Bureau to the secretary of the Smithsonian
Institute.
4. Lawrence and Huxley were close friends from 1926 until Lawrence’s
death in March 1930. In Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure, James
Meckier argues that during his “Lawrencian interlude,” Huxley based a
string of characters on his mentor, Lawrence, including Mark Rampion
in Point Counter Point (1928) and John the Savage in Brave New
World. Ultimately, Meckier argues, Huxley repudiates the Lawrencian
primitive and its worship of “phallic consciousness”; for Huxley, “intel-
lect and erudition would always take precedence over his emotions and
intuition” (122). Peter Firchow argues that Huxley suggests the impos-
sibility of Lawrence’s fantasy of renewing a moribund “civilization” by
tapping into “primitive” culture, through the self-immolation of the
character, John the Savage, who symbolically represents the union of
the two. See also David Bradshaw’s introduction to the 1984 Faber and
Faber edition of Brave New World.
5. Some explanation is required for my use of ethnological tourism rather
than cultural tourism or ethnic tourism, both commonly employed in
tourism studies. Cultural tourism construes culture in a broad sense,
embracing travel to the Lake District to buy Beatrix Potter parapherna-
lia and travel to Waikiki to watch staged performances of fire cere-
monies. (For elaboration of these terms, see Touring Cultures:
Transformations of Travel and Theory, eds. Chris Rojek and John Urry.)
I use ethnological rather than cultural to refer more narrowly to tourism
that seeks so-called premodern or traditional cultures as its main object,
following in the footsteps of modern ethnologists such as Ruth Bunzel
and Margaret Mead. Ethnic tourism— defined by Van den Berghe and
Keyes as that where “the prime attraction is the cultural exoticism of
the local population and its artifacts (clothing, architecture, theater,
NOTES 217
music, dance, plastic arts)”—is closer to the meaning I intend than is

cultural tourism (“Introduction: Tourism and Re-Created Ethnicity”).
I use ethnological rather than ethnic, however, to emphasize the poten-
tial bond between the ethnologist and the tourist, figures who often
work in the same settings and share some of the same objectives, most
notably aiming to see “natives as they really live.” A final note: Though
the terms ethnology, ethnography, and anthropology acquire different
connotations later in the twentieth century, I use ethnology to refer to
studies of cultures conducted in the field, as opposed to armchair theo-
rizing. This usage is consistent with professional nomenclature of the
day, as in the U.S. American Ethnology Bureau, and with Lawrence’s
and Huxley’s respective usages of the term.
6. Alice Corbin Henderson, qtd. Jacobs 149.
7. The term anachronistic space is Anne McClintock’s (40–42). See
Dilworth’s Imagining Indians in the Southwest (120–24) for an analysis
of the Columbian discovery motif in Fred Harvey advertisements.
8. The Los Angeles-Chicago line of the Atchison Topeka Santa Fe was
completed in 1887, and the Santa Fe (together with Fred Harvey)
began its advertising “blitz” around the turn of the century; tourism
tapered off during the Depression (Weigle and Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos
10). My discussion of the Atchison Topeka Santa Fe Railway and Fred
Harvey Company is greatly indebted to a stimulating, well-researched
collection of essays edited by Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock, called
The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe
Railway.
9. In “The Indian-Detour in Willa Cather’s Southwestern Novels,”
Caroline M. Woidat similarly situates Cather’s writing in relation to
tourist advertisements produced by the Santa Fe Railway and the Fred
Harvey Company, making a compelling case that Cather’s fiction
echoes the conceits of the tourist literature, even as Cather attempted
to distance herself and her characters from tourism per se (30). Whereas
Woidat focuses on the discovery motif in the ads and in Cather’s fiction,
I focus here on the intersection of ethnographic and touristic discourses
that collaborate in the transformation of indigenous cultures into
objects-to-be-observed.
10. Some of the many works Lawrence read include Tylor’s Primitive
Culture, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and
Ritual, Malinowski’s Sexual Life of Savages, Mead’s Coming of Age in
Samoa, Bandelier’s The Delight Makers, and Nuttall’s Fundamentals of
Old and New World Civilization.
11. The disclaimer may imply a critique of ethnographic practice, rather
than the false modesty of an amateur. Given his critique of Bandelier, “I
218 NOTES
am no ethnologist” may imply “I’m not one of that sentimentalizing

crowd” rather than “I am not a qualified observer.”
12. Twenty-one million visitors attended the concurrently running Panama-
California Expo in San Diego and Panama-Pacific in San Francisco. One
ad for the Santa Fe Railway ran “Plan now to go and visit the Grand
Canyon of Arizona on the way” (qtd. in Great Southwest 39); conjoin-
ing these destinations in this fashion makes the virtual fair locales such
as the Painted Desert functionally indistinguishable from real Southwest
locations such as the Grand Canyon. Not only did the virtual
Southwest serve as an advertisement for “real” travel to New Mexico
and Arizona, but world’s fairs more generally have been regarded as
providing “a seminal force behind the rise of mass tourism” (Rydell and
Gwin 1). Greenhalgh asserts that world’s fairs were the “largest gather-
ings of people—war or peace—of all time” (1).
13. Imagining Southwest Indians x. The St. Louis Fair of 1904 scheduled
performances of the Hopi Snake Dance in the Midway amusement
zone as well, while presenting a model government-run Indian school
in the education zone. In the wake of the 1887 Dawes Act, the St.
Louis Expo organizers used the structure of the fair to implicitly
endorse the official government policy of assimilation, while undermin-
ing the value and seriousness of traditional Hopi culture. See Kasson for
a history of governmental policy toward Native Americans.
14. Though this removes the concept from its cultural context, the fullest
elaboration of the “genuine” in St. Mawr is, oddly, in the horse. Against
the backdrop of a shallow, spiritually desiccated, emasculated society,
St. Mawr emerges as the last relic of vitality, a creature from a sacred,
primal era. When he is threatened with gelding, Lou exclaims of St.
Mawr, “I’ll preserve one last male thing in the museum of this world if
I can” (91). This is the rhetoric of the Vanishing American in eques-
trian form.
15. The phrase “two ends of humanity” quoted by Charles Rossman, in D.
H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration, 183. The phrase “aboriginal
phallic male” is applied to Phoenix, 135. In St. Mawr, not only does
Lou Witt fantasize about a union with Phoenix to regenerate her desic-
cated culture, but also her mother proposes to (and is rejected by) the
Welsh groom, Lewis, another “aboriginal” male in the novella. In The
Plumed Serpent, Lawrence simultaneously weds the races and deni-
grates a “cocksure” modern woman by having his “protagonist,” the
Irish woman Kate Leslie, marry a “pure [Mexican] Indian” Cipriano,
who ultimately remains inscrutable to her. By marrying him, she bows
down before the indigenous god Quetzalcoatl’s phallic mystery, to be
debased (feeling “condemned to go through these strange ordeals”)
and, ultimately, to be psychologically annihilated.
NOTES 219
16. The assumption that “real Indians” unswervingly follow traditional

customs, eschewing mainstream American professions, education, and
culture, is still being contested, as demonstrated by the American
Indian College Fund campaign in March 2001 to challenge the stereo-
type of the static, traditional Indian. This campaign features images of
American Indians engaged in study or in a range of respected profes-
sions (such as medicine or the law) with the caption “Have You Ever
Seen a Real Indian?” The campaign counteracts public ignorance about
Indian people, who are too often regarded as “extinct” or “museum
relics,” stereotypes that have their roots in the rhetoric of ethnological
salvage this essay explores.
17. Rudnick similarly reads these narratives as rewriting the Mabel-Tony
relationship, but she interprets The Plumed Serpent as “rewarding” the
heroine for “giving herself up to unconscious forces” (101), whereas I
interpret the novel as fundamentally misogynistic. Lawrence’s barely
veiled hostility toward Mabel is evident in his confession to Knud
Merrild of a violent fantasy of strangling her. Critics have agreed that
“The Woman Who Rode Away” enacts this fantasy through ritual
sacrifice.
18. In his 1946 preface, Huxley explains that the flagellation ritual is half
“fertility cult and half Penitente ferocity” (xiv), thus critics have under-
stood Huxley to blend Lawrence’s description of the Hopi Snake
Dance and ethnographic descriptions from “the Smithsonian reports”
with depictions of the flagellation rites of the Christian Penitents in
New Mexico (see Firchow).
19. In Beyond Mexique Bay, Huxley squarely repudiates Lawrence’s view,
writing, “The attempt to return to primitiveness is both impractical
and, I believe, wrong” (208).
C ONCLUSION
1. See David Bradshaw, The Hidden Huxley, who argues that the charac-
terization of Huxley “as the greatest Anti-Wellsian of them all”
(Anthony Burgess) overlooks important kinship in their ideas.
2. The phrase comes from Behar’s book of that title, The Vulnerable
Observer.
3. Alpha and Omega 44–45.
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INDEX
Figures are indicated by page numbers in italic type. The letter n fol-
lowing a page number indicates a note on that page.
“About Fiction” (Haggard), 34–35 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 155

Achebe, Chinua, 86, 92 Balfour, Henry, 79
adventure romance, 23–24, 34–36, Bandelier, Adolf: Delight Makers,
62–63, 64, 204n10; subver- 163, 217n11
sion of, 78, 82, 91–92 Basutu people, 46
Africa: British imaginary and, Behar, Ruth: Vulnerable Observer,
25–26; “Scramble for,” 23, 25 192
Allan Quartermain (Haggard), 26, Benedict, Ruth, 10–11, 114; on
33–34 Lawrence, 157; Patterns of
Almayer’s Folly (Conrad), 71 Culture, 99, 112–15, 148,
Ancient Art and Ritual (Harrison), 157; Woolf and, 210n18
99, 101–2 Bennett, Arnold, 17–18
Anderson, Linda, 66 Berlin Conference, 25
Anglo-Indians, 120, 212n1 Besant, Annie, 126
Ansari, Mukhtar Ahmad, 127–28 Between the Acts (Woolf), 207n2,
anthropology, 3, 6, 24, 26, 32, 61; 208n3
fiction and, 24; Haggard and, Beyond the Mexique Bay (Huxley),
34, 201n25l; Harrison and, 177–78, 180
64; Kingsley and, 64, 69; post- Bhabha, Homi, 86
modernism and, 10; self-con- Bivona, Daniel, 41
sciousness of, 100, 195n10; Bloomsbury Group, 123
Stanley and, 200n22. See also Boas, Franz, 168; School of, 3
ethnography; specific anthro- Brantlinger, Patrick, 24
pologists Brave New World (Huxley),
Argonauts of the Western Pacific 159–60, 177–87, 189–90;
(Malinowski), 2, 17–19, 98, John the Savage in, 159, 178,
124 181–82, 184–86, 187, 216n4;
Armstrong, Paul, 148, 151 Savage Reservation in,
Art of Travel (Galton), 41–42, 179–80, 190
202n34 British Culture, outsiders and,
Atchison Topeka Santa Fe Railway, 64–71
162, 217n8 Bunzel, Ruth, 181
246 INDEX
Burrow, John: Evolution and losing and, 95; culture, iden-

Society, 61 tity and, 84–85, 86–87;
Burton, Isabel, 39 ethnography and, 93–94; as
Burton, Joseph, 29, 199n15 exilic modernist, 70–71; going
Burton, Richard, 25–26; First native and, 90; on Haggard,
Footsteps in East Africa, 25, 62; Heart of Darkness, 59,
37–41; imperial perspective 70–71, 83–84, 87–91,
and, 38; Lake Regions of 205n21; impressionism of, 95;
Central Africa, 25–26, 33;
indeterminacy and, 89; on
marginality of, 29–32; morbid-
Kingsley, 70, 205n20; Nigger
ity and, 38; “passing” and, 30,
of the “Narcissus,” 87; “oppres-
199n17; “primitive” sexual
sive wonder” and, 88;
practices and, 30, 199n16;
Two Trips to Gorilla Land, 26 “Outpost of Progress,” 62–63,
Buzard, James, 4–5, 16, 100, 84–87, 204n5; participant-
124–25, 135, 136 observation methodology and,
By Motor to the Golden Gate (Post), 83, 90; popular literary forms
164–65 and, 62–63, 195n12, 204n4;
Bynner, Witter, 176 racism and, 92–93, 95;
Victorian work ethic and,
Cambridge School, 18 88–89; V. Woolf and, 190–91
Castle, Gregory: Modernism and Crews, Frederick, 121
the Celtic Revival, 15–16 Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 16–17,
Cather, Willa, 217n9
196n16
Celtic Revival, 14, 15, 16, 195n14
culture: concept of, 16, 113–14,
Clifford, Hugh, 71, 93–94,
210n21; purity of, 158–59;
205n22; In a Corner of Asia,
spurious, 171–73, 218n14
93; Studies in Brown
Humanity, 93 Culture, 1922 (Manganaro),
Clifford, James, 2–3, 7, 9, 116, 14–15, 113–14
120–22, 158; on Conrad, culture shock, 85, 110; Forster and,
207n43; on ethnography, 138
207n2; The Predicament of Cunningham, John, 146
Culture, 104
Darkest Africa, In (Stanley), 26
Cohen, Morton, 28
colonial gaze and swagger, 36–47, Dark God (Lawrence), 177
201n28; Burton and, 38, Darling, Malcolm, 130–31, 132
202n31 Delight Makers (Bandelier), 163
Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead), Demoor, Marysa, 23
182–83 Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term,
Conrad, Joseph, 13, 60–61; A (Malinowski), 9, 16, 108,
Almayer’s Folly, 71; bewilder- 151–52
ment and, 91–5, 191; control, Douglas, Mary, 48
INDEX 247
Early, Julie English, 68; “Spectacle of, and, 151–52; Festival of

of Science and Self,” 63–64 Dassera and, 129–30; Gokul
Eliot, George: Middlemarch, 61 Ashtami and, 131–32, 153–54;
Eliot, T. S., 8, 14, 15; “Ulysses, Howards End, 13, 123, 213n8;
Order, and Myth,” 1 India, initial impressions of,
Etherington, Norman, 34 126–33; “Indian Boom,” 126;
ethnography, 2, 6, 78, 101; Indian independence move-
“ethnographic modernism” ment and, 144; “Indian
and, 7–8, 12–17, 194n8, Journals,” 126–27, 130;
196n15; explorer, 3, 6, 23–57, “Indian Mind,” 125; on lim-
60; “fashioned” identity and, ited omniscience, 150,
26, 198n5; language and, 9, 214n21; Malinowski and,
79, 194n9, 206n34; mod- 151–52, 155–56; narrative
ernism and, 2–3, 12–13; par- oscillations of, 145–56; narra-
ticipant-observation tive voice and, 145–56;
methodology, 4–5, 18–22; “native’s point of view” and,
post-modernism and, 10–12; 122, 212n7; “Oriental mind”
self-consciousness and, 8–10; and, 147–48; participant-
tourism and, 6, 159; Victorian observation methodology and,
Studies and, 16–17; year 1910 120–21; personal relationships
and, 17, 196n17. See also and, 141–43, 155; rapport,
anthropology; under specific colonialism and, 143–45; real-
writers ist fiction and, 147; rhetoric of
Evans-Pritchard, Deirdre, 188 enigma and, 125–26, 149–50;
Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 21 “seeing India,” 134–37;
Evolution and Society (Burrow), 61 stereotyping and, 148–49;
Experiment in Autobiography sympathetic seeing and,
(Wells), 65 133–34, 149; Two Cheers for
explorer ethnography. See under Democracy, 119; “What I
ethnography Believe,” 141–42. See also
Hill of Devi; Passage to India
Fabian, Johannes, 38 Frazer, James, 24; The Golden
“Fieldwork in Common Places” Bough, 3–4, 61, 101
(Pratt), 193n5 Freud, Sigmund: on She, 23; on
First Footsteps in East Africa “uncanny,” 49
(Burton), 25 Fry, Roger, 101; Harrison and,
First Year’s Work (Malinowski), 97, 209n9
208n4 functionalism, 21, 61
Forge, Anthony, 108 Furbank, P. N., 123–25
Forster, E. M., 7–8; bewilderment
and, 130–31; cross-cultural Galsworthy, John, 17–18
misunderstandings and, 141; Galton, Francis, 29; Art of Travel,
ethnographic sympathy, failure 41–42, 202n34
248 INDEX
Geertz, Clifford, 9–10, 36, 98, 187; Indian Detours, 166–67,

113, 146, 207n1, 211n27 168, 170, 177
gender discrimination, 64–71 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 59,
Gentleman’s Magazine, 45 70–71, 83–84, 87–91, 205n21
globalization, 115, 211n25 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 176
Golden Bough (Frazer), 3–4, 61, Herbert, Christopher, 16, 75
101 heteroglossia, 195n11
Graphic, 26 Hill of Devi (Forster), 15, 120,
Green, Martin, 26 126–27; participant-observa-
Griffith, John, 83–84, 87–88 tion methodology and,
127–33
Haddon, Alfred Cort, 78, 144 Hinsley, Curtis, 169–70
Haggard, H. Rider, 31–32; “About Holden, H. A., 35
Fiction,” 34–35; Allan Holly, Ludwig Horace, 24, 32, 34,
Quartermain, 26, 33–34; 36–37, 47–49
“Early Christian Ceremony,” “Hopi Snake Dance” (Lawrence),
53–54; ethnography and, 28; 158, 163–64
Lang and, 198n3; morbidity Horne, E. A., 133–34, 213n14
and, 51–52, 55–56; Nada the Howards End (Forster), 13, 123,
Lily, 28; politics and, 28, 213n8
198n8; “primitive” peoples How I Found Livingstone (Stanley),
and, 34, 201n26; public iden- 26, 29, 42
tity of, 46–47; romantic primi- Hughes, Langston, 159, 215n2
tivism and, 189; social failure “Human Evolution, An Artificial
and, 27; South Africa and, 25; Process” (Wells), 78
use of “uncanny,” 49–50; vio- Huxley, Aldous, 20; Beyond the
lence and, 52–5, 203n46; Mexique Bay, 177–78, 180,
“Visit to Chief Secocoeni,” 183; flagellation ritual and,
45–47; writing style of, 35–36; 180–81, 219n18; Hobbesian
“Zulu War-Dance,” 51, 56. perspective of, 189–90;
See also King Solomon’s Lawrence and, 159–60,
Mines; She 187–88, 215n3, 216n4; the
Hall, Stuart, 100 past as compensatory utopia
Hammond, J. R., 63 and, 177–84; primitivism and,
Harrison, Jane Ellen, 101–2, 111, 180–82, 185–86, 219n19; as
117; Ancient Art and Ritual, satirist, 182–84; the Southwest
99, 101, 191–92; as armchair and, 159; Wells and, 189–90.
anthropologist, 102–3; bound- See also Brave New World
aries of self and, 191–92; Huxley, T. H., 78, 81, 189
Prolegomena to the Study of Huyssen, Andreas, 12
Greek Religion, 101; Woolf
and, 101, 208n8 imperialism: anthropology and, 9,
Harvey, Fred (Company), 160–63, 14, 26, 134, 144–45, 194n9;
161, 169–71, 174, 176–77, modernism and, 12–13;
INDEX 249
nostalgia and, 40; perspective observation methodology, 72,

of, 194n9; typology and, 38, 74–77; professional and gen-
202n32. See also colonial gaze der stereotypes and, 67–68;
and swagger; India, Raj and Travels in West Africa, 59, 60,
In a Corner of Asia (Clifford), 93 67, 71–77, 191; use of irony
In Darkest Africa (Stanley), 42–43, and parody, 60, 73; Victorian
202n35 work ethic and, 89
India, Raj and, 144, 214n18 Kuper, Adam, 4, 10, 20
“Indian Boom” (Forster), 126
“Indian Mind” (Forster), 125 Lake Regions of Central Africa
“Indians and an Englishman” (Burton), 25–26, 33
(Lawrence), 170–71 Lane Fox, Augustus (Pitt Rivers),
Island of Dr. Moreau (Wells), 32–33, 200n19
77–82, 190, 206n35, 260n30; Lang, Andrew, 23, 24, 28, 36, 54;
Prendick in, 79–82 Haggard and, 198n3
Laughing Horse, 176
James, Henry, 211n23 Lawrence, D. H., 7–8, 10; on
Jameson, Frederic, 61; Bandelier, 163, 217n11; bewil-
“Modernism and derment and, 170–71; cultural
Imperialism,” 12–13 observation and, 157–58,
Joyce, James, 15 162–63; Dark God, 177;
“Just Back from the Snake-Dance” engagement with “the primi-
(Lawrence), 157 tive” and, 157–58, 215n1;
Jutzi, Alan, 37 “Hopi Snake Dance,” 158,
163–64; Huxley, A. and,
Karl, Frederick, 70–71 159–60, 215n3, 216n4;
Karlin, Daniel, 47 “Indians and an Englishman,”
King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 170–71; “Just Back from the
25–26, 27–28, 54, 189, Snake-Dance,” 157; Letters of
197n2; ethnology and, D. H. Lawrence, 157;
200n23, 201n24 Mornings in Mexico, 15; “New
Kingsley, Mary, 60, 69; alternative Mexico,” 158, 177; Plumed
values of, 71–77; bewilder- Serpent, 175; “Princess,” 175;
ment and, 60–61, 72, 74, 191; romantic primitivism and, 189;
on colonialism, 68, 205n16; on Southwest tourism, 11,
on Conrad, 70, 205n20; con- 158, 163, 165, 171–72;
trol, surrendering and, 95; dis- “Taos,” 11; white women and
orientation of fieldwork and, indigenous men and, 175–76,
191–92; on Frazer, 69–70; 218n15; “Woman Who Rode
gender discrimination and, Away,” 175. See also St. Mawr
64–71; image of dissolving self Lawrence, Karen, 72
and, 73; as “lady traveler,” 72; Leavis, F. R., 62, 91
literary style of, 63–64; margin- Letters of D. H. Lawrence
ality and, 66–70; participant (Lawrence), 157
250 INDEX
Lewis, Andrea, 107 Middlemarch (Eliot), 61

literary studies, 9–10, 195n10; “Modern Fiction” (Woolf), 17–19,
fieldworkers and, 11–12, 190
195n11 modernism, 61–64; anthropologi-
Livingstone, David, 25, 44 cal writing and, 13–17; dates
London, Bette, 154 of, 6–7, 194n7; imperialism
Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 163, and, 12–13
174–76, 219n17 “Modernism and Imperialism”
Luhan, Tony, 163, 174–5, 219n17 (Jameson), 12–13
Modernist Anthropology
MacCannell, Dean, 166, 188 (Manganaro), 6–7
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 3–5, 9, Moore, G. E.: Principia Ethica,
15–16, 171, 191; Argonauts of 123
the Western Pacific, 2, 17–21, “Morals and Civilization”
98, 124; on colonialism, 134,
(Wells), 78
144; everyday life and, 19–20;
morbidity, explorer ethnography
First Year’s Work, 97, 208n4;
and, 50–51; Burton and, 38;
Mass Observation and, 193n4;
Stanley and, 41–45
Sexual Life of Savages, 182;
Morey, Peter, 151, 154–55
stereotyping and, 148–49;
Morgan, Lewis H., 78
subjective experience and, 18;
Mornings in Mexico (Lawrence), 15
“survey work” and, 18,
Moses, L. G., 187–88
197n18; sympathetic identifi-
Moses, Michael, 93
cation and, 4–5, 91, 151–52;
Motor Camper & Tourist, 169
Trobriand field diaries, 9, 16,
Mtesa, King, 36, 43–45
108, 145, 151–52, 209n13,
myth criticism, 13–14, 195n13
214n25; Victorian Realism
and, 20 Nada the Lily (Haggard), 28
Man, E. H., 79, 206n32 Narasimhaiah, C. D., 130
Manganaro, Marc, 6, 214n21; Nation & Athenaeum, 143
Culture, 1922, 14–15, Natwar-Singh, K., 122
113–14; Modernist “New Mexico” (Lawrence), 158,
Anthropology, 6–7 177
Marx, John, 62, 94 Nigger of the “Narcissus,” (Conrad),
Masood, Syed Ross, 119, 123–25 87
McClintock, Anne, 26 North, Michael, 100
McClure, John, 149 Notes and Queries on Anthropology,
Mead, Margaret: Coming of Age in 32, 50–51
Samoa, 182–83
Medalie, David, 152–53 Orientalism, 17, 26–27, 212n2
Men Like Gods (Wells), 189–90 Orwell, George, 37
men-on-the-spot, 32–36, 200n21 “Outpost of Progress” (Conrad),
methods and manifestoes, 17–21 62–63, 84–87
INDEX 251
Panama-California Expo, 167–69, Said, Edward, 17, 26–27, 37,

178, 217n12 213n16
Parry, Benita, 90, 149 Sapir, Edward, 172, 185
Passage to India (Forster), 13, 15; “savage within” trope, 49, 54,
ambivalence in, 121, 212n4; 203n41, 203n45
Aziz in, 135–37; Conrad and, Schweitzer, Herman, 162
139; Fielding, Aziz and, self-nativizing, 98, 100–103
140–43, 147; limited omnis- Sexual Life of Savages (Malinowski),
cience and, 150, 214n21; Mrs. 182
Moore, nativizing of, 137–40; She (Haggard), 23–57, 189;
authenticating devices in, 24;
participant-observation
quest motif in, 24; women
methodology and, 120–22;
and, 54–55
reception of, 121–22, 212n5.
Singh, Bhupal, 122
See also under Forster, E. M.
“Spectacle of Science and Self”
Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 99,
(English), 63–64
148, 157 Speke, John Hanning, 25
Picard, Michel, 188 Spencer, Walter Baldwin, 78
Plumed Serpent (Lawrence), 175 Spivak, Gayatri, 107
Post, Emily: By Motor to the Golden Squier, Susan, 117, 211n28
Gate, 164–65 Stanley, Henry, 25, 31–32; class
Pratt, Mary Louise, 8–9, 25, 38, anxiety of, 44–45; In Darkest
60; “Fieldwork in Common Africa, 26, 42–43, 202n35;
Places,” 193n5 How I Found Livingstone, 26,
Predicament of Culture (Clifford), 29, 42; Kalulu and, 29, 30,
104 199n13; origins of, 28–29,
Primitive Culture (Tylor), 61 199n9; racism and, 43,
“Princess” (Lawrence), 175 202n37; reputation of, 28–29,
Principia Ethica (Moore), 123 199n10, 199n12, 199n14;
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek self-aggrandizement and,
Religion (Harrison), 101 43–44; Through the Dark
Puar, Tukoji Rao, III, 119 Continent, 26, 40, 41–45; vio-
Punch, 29 lence and, 41–42
Pygmies (Quatrefages), 79 Stevenson, Catherine Barnes, 68
“Pygmy Philosophy” (Wells), 78 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 28
St. Louis Fair, 218n13
Quatrefages, Armand de, 78; St. Mawr (Lawrence), 11, 158–59,
Pygmies, 79 171–76; Geronimo Trujillo in,
173–74; Lou Witt in, 171–73,
Rae, Patricia, 132 175; Stocking, George, 3, 26,
Rivers, W. H., 3, 144, 208n5 78, 126, 144, 145, 191
romantic primitivism, 189 Strathern, Marilyn, 4, 5
Rosaldo, Renato, 40 Street, Brian, 24
252 INDEX
“Street Haunting” (Woolf), 19, 111–12; reflexive mode in,

99–100, 115–17 97–98; self-nativizing in,
Studies in Brown Humanity 105–12
(Clifford), 93 Vulnerable Observer (Behar), 192
Suleri, Sara, 121, 149
Wadia, A. S., 125
“Taos” (Lawrence), 1 Wagner, Roy, 85, 104, 138
Through the Dark Continent Wagogo people, 43
(Stanley), 26, 40, 41–45 Wagwana people, 43–44
Time Machine (Wells), 59 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 78–79
tourism, ethnological, 159, 216n5 Watt, Ian, 70
Travels in West Africa (Kingsley), Waves (Woolf), 113
59, 60, 67, 191 Wells, H. G., 17–18; bewilderment
Trinh, Minh-ha T., 71–77
and, 60–61; Bio-Optimism
Trivedi, Harish, 121
and, 77–78; control, losing
Trollope, Anthony, 16
and, 95; Experiment in
Two Cheers for Democracy (Forster),
Autobiography, 65; Hobbesian
119
perspective of, 189–90;
Two Trips to Gorilla Land (Burton),
26 “Human Evolution, An
Tylor, E. B., 3, 24, 26, 57, 204n3, Artificial Process,” 78; Huxley,
210n21; on Kingsley, 75; A. and, 189–90; literary style
Primitive Culture, 61 of, 63; marginality of, 65–66;
Men Like Gods, 189–90;
“Ulysses, Order, and Myth” “Morals and Civilization,” 78;
(Eliot), 1 participant-observation
“uncanny,” 203n39; Freud on, 49 methodology and, 81; “Pygmy
Urry, James, 69 Philosophy,” 78; on
Quatrefages, 79; Social
Village in the Jungle (L.Woolf),
Darwinism and, 81–82; Time
146, 209n14
Machine, 59. See also Island of
“Visit to Chief Secocoeni, A”
(Haggard), 45–47 Dr. Moreau
Visweswaran, Kamala, 10 Wells, Joseph, 65
Vogelsberger, Hartwig, 28, 54, Wells, Sarah, 65
203n46 “What I Believe” (Forster), 141–42
Voyage Out (Woolf), 97–117, White, Allon, 91–92
210n19; character in, 99; as White, Andrea, 62
ethnography of English cul- White, Leslie, 181–82
ture, 114–15; glory of Wollaeger, Mark, 87
Englishness in, 104–6; loss of “Woman Who Rode Away”
identity in, 108–11; patterns of (Lawrence), 175
Englishness and, 112–15; Woolf, Leonard: Village in the
refahioning character in, Jungle, 146, 209n14
INDEX 253
Woolf, Virginia, 13, 15; Between the view” and, 109–10; religion
Acts, 207n2, 208n3; Benedict and, 211n23; “Street
and, 210n18; character and, Haunting,” 19, 99–100,
210n17; Conrad and, 190–91; 115–17; Waves, 113; on Wells,
as “domesticated modernist,” 63. See also Voyage Out
6, 193n6; ethnography and,
99–100, 207n2; everyday life Yeats, 15
and, 19–20; Harrison and,
208n8; “Modern Fiction,” Zulu culture, 51–52
17–19, 190; “native’s point of “Zulu War-Dance” (Haggard), 51

Carey J. Snyder (Auth.) - British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters - Ethnographic Modernism From Wells To Woolf-Palgrave Macmillan US (2008)

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British Fiction and

First published in 2008 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the

ISBN 978-1-349-60285-8 ISBN 978-1-137-03947-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: March 2008

Transferred to Digital Printing in 2013

Introduction Ethnographic Observers Observed 1

1 Explorer Ethnography and Rider Haggard’s

2 Bewilderment as Style and Methodology in the Writings

3 Self-nativizing in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out 97

4 E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and the Limitations

5 “When the Indian Was in Vogue”:

Works Cited 221

T his book began as a conversation with the late Michael Sprinker

important forum for sharing work and ideas; additionally, he has

Psychology, . . . ethnology, and The Golden Bough have con-

questioning the very premise of ethnography through a pervasive

culture”— a “predicament” shared by twentieth-century literary

travelers—thus creating a division of labor between the stay-at-home

a “self-interrupting” style, whereby the narrator strategically dis-

equally concerned with narratives of exploration, travel writing, com-

movement” (vii). Manganaro observes that such labeling is a “con-

Although only a few of the novelists I examine actively situate

professional text to result from such an encounter is supposed to

as a neutral medium for conveying experience, “Questions [have]

self-questioning, and reflection. Lawrence’s Southwest writings belie

to disembodied objectivism.11 At a moment when ethnographers

E THNOGRAPHIC M ODERNISM IN THE F IELD

The assortment of writers considered in this study under the rubric

Jameson summarily brackets off from discussion what he terms “the

which provided literary writers with a collection of exotic stories

upon, transformed, resisted, and ignored” (6). The central literary

between a civilized observer and a primitive society, a conflict which

Orientalism in particular as the dominant mode of conceptualizing

O F M ETHODS AND M ANIFESTOES

In order to begin to illustrate some of the echoes and intersections

study is “difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predeces-

generation of anthropologists, including Edward Evans-Pritchard

EXPLORER ETHNOGRAPHY AND RIDER

Sigmund Freud called H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886–87) a “strange

In an early study (1975) on the influence of Victorian anthropol-

By explorer ethnography, I mean portraits of the customs and man-

Central Africa (1868), and Two Trips to Gorilla Land (1876);

(Ludwig Horace Holly, Allan Quartermain) and groups of Zulus,

While Haggard, Stanley, and Burton came from markedly dissimilar

In South Africa, Haggard learned the Zulu language and took

viewed as an American interloper of obscure and degraded Welsh

his book How I Found Livingstone became a bestseller; he was deco-

But if Burton was dismissive of upper-class British society, he also

The conditions of society in England are so complicated, and so arti-

Burton uses the same phrase employed by Squire Haggard to refer

In the late nineteenth century, the practice of anthropology was

“narration-description duality” of travel writing.24 While Haggard’s

French, English, and American literary establishment—categorically

Lang figures romance writers as heroic explorers; the value of their

T HE C OLONIAL G AZE AND S WAGGER

The explorer ethnographies of Burton and Stanley, like Haggard’s

Secocoeni—which provide a template for the scene in She where

with Arabic ones) is ultimately foredoomed by his inevitable identi-

to be performed (both “on the spot” and in the text). Burton