Abstract
Alice Perrin published short stories about life in the British Raj from the end of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth. Among these feature many tales in which actual or possible supernatural phenomena occur. In what follows I will read Perrin’s stories as attempting to articulate a positive model of colonial femininity in which the Anglo-Indian wife is central to the success of the imperial project, but as being haunted by a recognition of the difficulties of marriage and the very real temptations of infidelity. I explore a group of stories that attempt to reconcile the perceived tension between imperial duty and individual desire. Many of these stories involve a kind of hybrid Anglo-Indian supernaturalism, in which the conventions of the Victorian ghost story as well as phenomena explored by psychical researchers are imported to a colonial context where they commingle with Indian beliefs in phenomena such as spirit transmigration and reincarnation. The focus of this chapter is as such on a writer and a set of texts that I argue are not easily assimilated into accounts of the subversive tendencies of either the ghost story or the short story more generally. While there are elements within Perrin’s tales that indeed foreground the fault lines of imperialist ideology, these arise in the context of her broader promotion of the colonial cause and of imperial marriage. Within this context, a particular kind of deployment of the supernatural emerges which is appropriately characterised as conservative, in the sense that it is offered in the service of maintaining rather than transforming the status quo.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of how ‘the supernatural is part of the natural’ in traditional Indian belief systems, and what this means for “ghost stories” in Indian fiction, see Tabish Khair (2018, 271).
- 2.
- 3.
Prior to it becoming commonplace in the mid-nineteenth century for British wives to accompany their husbands to India, it was not uncommon for British soldiers in the East India Company to have families with Indian women. These “Eurasians” were frequently not accepted by either the Indian population or the Anglo-Indians, and so tended to form separate communities, based around urban areas.
- 4.
The one exception is ‘The White Tiger’, which concerns native Indian hunters.
- 5.
For example, Parry states that Arnold in ‘The Summoning of Arnold’ ‘commits suicide by inhaling chloroform’ (74), but while this is the conclusion of Arnold’s doctor, the narrative emphasises that chloroform is nowhere found and that its smell results from the supernatural visitation of Arnold’s wife, who has died during surgery in England and come to fetch her husband. Similarly, the biscobra in the story of the same name, is precisely not ‘a snake’ (75) but a harmless lizard which the Anglo-Indian wife had no need to fear. These errors matter, since they flatten out the stories’ meanings, placing emphasis entirely on Indian ‘horrors’ (74) and obscuring Perrin’s attention to how her British characters contribute to their tragedies. Parry gives more sustained consideration to ‘The Fakir’s Island’ (Perrin 2011f), but her discussion occludes those aspects of the text that would complicate her (partially persuasive) analysis of it as a prejudiced construction of Indian religion as horribly enthralling spectacle—for example, the tone of condemnation with which Perrin depicts the British characters’ arrogant behaviour at the Indian festival.
- 6.
For her full discussion of this story see Edmundson Makala (2013a).
- 7.
See also Luckhurst on how stories about supernatural or supernormal occurrences ‘abounded’ in Britain’s colonies, reflecting the limits of European confidence in Enlightenment in those areas of the globe where it seemed to Westerners that they had left modernity behind (2004, 200).
- 8.
See Procida (2014, 6, 21, 29 and 57), Sainsbury (1996, 169) and Nayar (2012). Where Procida and Sainsbury discuss the blurring of private/public spheres, Nayar instead appeals to Denise Riley’s concept of the ‘social sphere’—‘a feminized space that is an extension of the domestic into the public, but often works in antagonism to and in competition with the masculine public space’ (125).
- 9.
Nayar develops his notion of ‘political domesticity’ from work on the role of the domestic in imperialist discourse by Alison Blunt and by Rosemary Marangoly George. He sees Perrin as promoting this cultural ideal in her novels through the negative example of the ‘“disorderly Memsahib”’ (a term taken from Indrani Sen), who fails to negotiate the domestic and social spheres as she ought, thereby ‘implicitly signal[ing]’ the qualities of the “true” Memsahib’ (126). Nayar’s analysis and my own agree in reading Perrin as articulating the centrality of the good memsahib to the effective running of the Raj, but Nayar does not consider Perrin’s short stories and how these complicate or problematise imperial marriage, even or perhaps especially in the case of the “true” memsahib.
- 10.
As Procida observes, the mythologisation of European marriage therefore functioned ideologically to support the political disenfranchisement of Indians: that Indian men were considered not able to manage their domestic lives and marital relationships with the justice and egalitarianism characteristic of British homes was taken as further evidence of their inability to govern themselves, and the need, therefore, for continued British rule (30).
- 11.
Perrin’s frequent pairing of young women with much older husbands reflects the historical reality of the Raj. While wives might have considered themselves a boon to husbands, colonial officialdom often thought otherwise, deeming that a family placed an additional emotional and financial stress upon young men struggling to establish themselves. Soldiers and civil servants were often therefore advised not to marry until they had achieved seniority in their careers. See MacMillan (2007, 133) and Procida (2014, 31).
- 12.
The story therefore presents an example of the mode of the pure fantastic, as Tzvetan Todorov understands it (1973).
- 13.
Edmundson is here quoting John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester University Press, 2003, 7). Edmundson explores Caulfield as another ‘avid hunter and adventurer (normally viewed as the quintessential Englishman) [who] goes from hero to villain’ (153).
- 14.
For another example of Perrin’s evocation of horror through bodily mutilation see ‘Justice’, discussed elsewhere in this chapter. Emphasis on an impure mixing of human and animal occurs in ‘The Biscobra’ (2011a), where an Indian servant believes that the soul of his master’s infant child has migrated to the body of a particularly feared and loathed reptile. Perrin’s use of horror is different from that of Edith Nesbit, who focuses upon fear of death and corpses (see Chap. 3), and Eleanor Scott, who emphasises states of terror and malevolent agents such as demons (see Chap. 5), but all these writers make significant use of horror, a genre more typically associated with male supernatural writers.
- 15.
Edmundson points out that the story also shows how Orchard may in fact be unsuited to ‘his role as colonial administrator’ since he fails to adapt theoretical knowledge to the realities of Indian life and to listen to those who do understand it (2018, 162). Edmundson does not seem to read the story as also offering some critique of Mary, however.
- 16.
As Edmundson Makala notes, the ending subverts the expectation that readers would likely have formed in the context of a collection whose stories usually end in ‘the tragic and macabre’ (2011, 23).
- 17.
Young women such as Meg who sailed to India in the hope of meeting eligible bachelors were popularly known as the “fishing fleet” (see MacMillan 2007, 127).
- 18.
For an excellent discussion of these narratives, see Roye (2013).
- 19.
My thanks to Emma Liggins for bringing my attention to this story in the context of Perrin’s work.
- 20.
Indeed Margaret D. Stetz considers the story’s Indian backdrop a ‘cardboard setting’, ‘seemingly lifted from Syrett’s reading of Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and having nothing to do with her own experience.’ Stetz deems this setting ‘The only thing that spoils this otherwise haunting story’ (2015).
- 21.
As Stetz (2015) observes, ‘Sensing that this is the “Heart’s Desire” of the woman he adores, her husband finds a way to kill himself that will neither look like suicide nor result in blame being laid upon her’.
- 22.
See also Edmundson Makala (2013b, 93 and passim).
- 23.
See Krueger (2014) on the symbolic significance and gendering of social spaces.
- 24.
For more on Drewery’s account of liminality and women’s short fiction, see Chap. 1.
- 25.
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Margree, V. (2019). The Good Memsahib? Marriage, Infidelity and Empire in Alice Perrin’s Anglo-Indian Tales. In: British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27142-8_4
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