The Narcissism of Empire: Loss, Rage and Revenge in Thomas De Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Isak Dinesen (review)

In The Narcissism of Empire, Diane Simmons looks to a set of canonical authors on imperialism to see how their childhood problems, rages and frustrations, feelings of abandonment, and desires for revenge manifest themselves in their literary production. Instead of seeing these materials as a way the authors work out these issues—as a writing cure that parallels psychoanalysis's talking cure—Simmons views their work as indicative of and instrumental in the development of the sense of "near-magical superiority" (1) that characterized the British during the nineteenth century.

The Narcissism of Empire argues that "narcissistic fantasy" "helped shape the understanding of the imperial role, so that finally empire was seen . . . as the glamorous, heroic and self-defining mission of a superior people" (2). But the very syntax of this sentence points to one of the book's central confusions: who exactly was doing the seeing here? Simmons veers between a biographical conception of narcissism based on the writings of Thomas de Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Isak Dinesen and the idea that these writers helped create a cultural climate that encouraged a narcissistic understanding of Britains and Briton's place in the world. With the former, she often overstates her case, simplistically describing the transference of a child's rage onto the "native" in a variety of colonial locations, locations that she treats as roughly synonymous. With the latter, she presents little evidence about how the Victorians received these writers. Instead, she assumes their widespread influence, primarily based on their current reputations. Writing on Kipling, for instance, she states that "when the reality and the fantasy of British supremacy was challenged by the Boer War, Kipling retreated into grandiose dreams, taking, his immense popularity indicates, a good many of the shaken British public with him (98).

Taking a psychological approach to literature should not absolve Simmons of the need to know contemporary literary criticism, yet the gaps are apparent. Her reading of De Quincey and China makes no reference to Cannon Schmitt, while she argues for Doyle's demonizing of the alien without taking Laura Otis's work into account. A consideration of historical work by scholars like Linda Colley and Catherine Hall on empires impact at home would also have benefited her argument. Her reliance on relational theories of narcissism means that she is prone to discounting the insights of those who read her chosen writers according to Freudian, Lacanian, or other psychoanalytic frames that foreground the psychosexual. Exploring recent critical debates about mourning and melancholia might also have strengthened Simmons's discussion of themes of loss and revenge.

Simmons begins her study with a theoretical chapter that succinctly summarizes the work of Heinz Kohut, W. D. Fairbairn, and D. W. Winnicott. This chapter goes on to discuss Victorian upper-middle-class childrearing practices. Her main point here is that the Victorians, especially in imperial settings, abdicated their responsibilities to servants and boarding schools, a practice which had a profound effect on the writers she surveys. Readers might have expected to see references to Elizabeth Buettner's Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (2004), which includes a section on Kipling's family; Vyvyen Brendon's Children of the Raj (2005); or Ann Laura Stoler's research based on interviews with nannies in colonial Indonesia alongside the older secondary sources she uses to support her claims, such as Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's 1972 The Rise and Fall of the English Nanny. And Simmons misses the opportunity to juxtapose Kipling with female writers, such as Flora Annie Steel and Maud Diver, and their perspectives on Anglo-Indian childhood. As a result, the book is less convincing than it ought to be when Simmons says that...