Recovering the serious antics of Stevie Smith's novels

But Smith reveals that these memories, which arise, significantly, when Celia is no longer in India, are illusory. Celia begins the novel as an Orientalist, since India is hardly a real place for Celia, but a construction. India for Celia is the Orient of romantic Orientalism, as described by Edward Said: "The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences" (1). Contrasting her dream of childhood in India with an adult world of conflict, Celia cannot help being depressed. The old loyalties are severely strained. Caz criticizes his former childhood friend Raji for being a "London party-pet" (Holiday 85), untrue to his motherland, even though Raji has been beaten for his convictions. Caz, who professes anti-imperial statements, is supposed to leave the holiday at Uncle Heber's for a post in India. But as Celia herself reveals, her blissful childhood is an illusion; she remembers both violence and discord, as the image of the panther tearing open the throat of a prey reveals (82). That image is linked with the face of the adult Caz, showing the reader, if not Celia, that childhood and adulthood are both post-lapsarian. The image also suggests the real, if repressed, violence of colonialism. The India of Celia's childhood, as she herself shows us, is not the place of romance that she believes it to be.

But there is hope for Caz and Celia, partly because they come from a revolutionary lineage. Caz may be the son of Celia's father, who had an affair with Aunt Eva, Caz's mother and the wife of one of the governors of India. Despite the fact that they fall into the incestuous trap that Celia and Caz avoid, their affair marks a preliminary blow at both patriarchy and the empire. Eva's affair strikes out at Edmund as Edmund, her "cold and learned husband" (28), but also at Edmund as a functionary of the empire, Edmund the colonial governor, since she refuses to be completely under his domination. Ultimately, though, their affair is misguided, since they merely channel their desire into a desire for each other, thus allowing their rebellion to be diffused through incest.

A radical break with the past was too difficult for Eva's generation, but Caz and Celia may be different. Both Smith and Woolf place their hope in generational change, the world's radicals and outsiders slowly evolving, through intellectual affinity, an increasingly radical group of subversives.(4) Although Caz is supposedly leaving for a post in India at the end of the novel, he is having a hard time packing: we see his clothes strewn about and he goes for a walk with Celia, never to return to packing within the confines of the novel. And Celia may not go back to coding for the Ministry, which appears to be a British intelligence agency. She vaguely tells Tiny that she "suppose[s]" (170) she will go back to the Ministry, but gives him no positive reassurance.

And yet Celia and Caz have made no definite decision to rebel against the imperial motherland at the end of the book. They may indeed return to their own lives. Part of our doubt is created by the fact that Celia and Caz seem to have nowhere else to go. It is clear that Uncle Heber's way, the way of Christianity, which dovetails with his isolationist farm life, will not do for Celia and Caz. They, in fact, laugh at Heber's way of life and declare themselves a different generation. According to Celia, Christianity involves another version of society's cat-and-mouse game: