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The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire. - book reviews
Criticism, Wntr, 1997 by John R. Reed
Lane covers a diverse group, writing on Rudyard Kipling, A. E. W. Mason, Ryder Haggard, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, Siegfried Sassoon, and Saki. He is unevenly successful in these treatments, sometimes because his subject matter is not particularly fecund (as with Firbank and Saki), sometimes because his evidence is unconvincing (as with Conrad and Sassoon). Although he protests that Firbank and Saki have been underrated, Lane is unable to demonstrate that their works, aside from the particular light he trains upon them, are substantial works of art. His speculations about Sassoon's homoerotic interests are not supported by adequate evidence. See the next paragraph for my objections to his reading of Conrad's Victory. On the whole, though, Lane's approach is sensible and rewarding. His description of how Kipling asserts the need, in colonial settings, to restrain all sexual desire, a need that makes of women a dangerous negative force, is persuasive, as is his similar argument concerning distrust of the female and the displacement of homosocial eroticism in Mason's The Four Feathers and Haggard's Nada the Lily.
One difficulty with this study is that it tends to drift away from its British colonial focus. Nada the Lily, for example, is about Zulus. Conrad's Victory has a wandering, expatriate Swede as its protagonist, who does not serve British colonial interests. And James, Wilde, and Beerbohm are only tangentially associated with colonialism. But generally Lane adheres to his central argument, which seems to work best--with the important exception of Kipling--when it deals with texts by known homosexual authors. Perhaps "outing" the hidden homosexuality in a text is easier with biographical assistance. Lane's one spectacular misreading, in my view, is his chapter on Conrad, where he tries to inflate the business friendship between Morrison and Heyst to a homoerotic association linked to Heyst's relationship with his father, and where he claims that Schomberg's competition with Heyst masks a homoerotic desire. These readings, it seems to me, fly in the face of what the text delivers.
Both of these books are working a broad field that is currently fashionable, but both approach this field with coherent theoretical tools and with a clear-mindedness that acknowledges the limitations of their projects. Both include important insights with broad applications, and both extend the boundaries of the territories they explore. They demonstrate that careful scholarship, not jargon or imitative theoretical schemes, makes fashionable subjects important subjects.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Wayne State University Press
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