From Metropolis to "Impossible Edges": Shaw's Imperial Abjects

Pardon him . . . : He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

—Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.

—Shaw, "Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra" (245)

In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock develops Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, applying it specifically to questions of imperialism and colonial- ism. According to Kristeva, social beings are constituted through a process of expelling whatever society considers impure. However, as McClintock notes,

these expelled elements can never be fully obliterated; they haunt the edges of the subject's identity with the threat of disruption or even dissolution. . . . The abject is everything that the subject seeks to expunge in order to become social; it is also a symptom of the failure of this ambition. . . . Defying sacrosanct borders, abjection testifies to society's precarious hold over the fluid and unkempt aspects of psyche and body. "We may call it a border," she [Kristeva] writes. "Abjection is above all ambiguity." . . . This is Kristeva's brilliant insight: the expelled abject haunts the subject as its inner constitutive boundary; that which is repudiated forms the self's inner limit. ²

Thus, the abject exists in a liminal region within the self, a region marked by the boundary between what is socially approved and what is transgressive. McClintock continues, extrapolating from the individual to (imperial) society's abjects:

Under imperialism . . . certain groups are expelled and obliged to inhabit the impossible edges of modernity. . . . Abject peoples are those whom industrial imperialism rejects but cannot do without: slaves, prostitutes, the colonized, domestic workers, the insane, the unemployed, and so on. Certain threshold zones become abject zones and are policed with vigor: the Arab Casbah, the Jewish ghetto, the Irish slum, the Victorian garret and kitchen, . . . and the bedroom. . . . [T]he abject returns to haunt modernity as its constitutive, inner repudiation: the rejected from which one does not part. ³

Like any society, turn-of-the-century England sought to expunge a variety of its elements, including people who challenged or seemed to fall outside established sexual mores and gender roles. "The gender crisis," Lyn Pykett writes, "was, in part, a social crisis which impinged directly on the ways in which people lived their lives . . . [and which] manifested itself most obviously and clamorously in the ongoing debates about women and the feminine." ⁴ The "gender crisis" brought both femininity and masculinity into question, including within its compass both "the New Woman . . . and the homosexual or decadent." ⁵ Angus McLaren writes that "new boundaries of normal male and female behavior were freshly established by doctors, sexologists, magistrates, and sex reformers between 1870 and 1930." ⁶ These new definitions emerged largely because "social transformations . . . appeared in the eyes of anxious observers to have undermined the explanatory powers of older notions of masculinity and femininity." ⁷ Symptomatic of these transformations was "the feeling . . . that many men harbored at the turn of the century, . . . that if there were a crisis in masculinity it was primarily due to the fact that women were unilaterally redefining themselves and thereby the relations of both sexes." ⁸ Within this context, sexual "deviants" (chiefly male) and feminists were among those whom British society sought to control. As professionals invented or discovered new categories of deviancy, they simultaneously maintained that (normative) categories of gender and sexuality were permanent and "natural" and sought to discipline those who fell outside them. ⁹

The doctrine of degeneration played an important role in defining a variety of social abjects, with "social planners . . . [drawing] deeply on social Darwinism and the idea of degeneration to figure the social crises erupting relentlessly in the cities and the colonies." ¹⁰ At a time when anthropologists...