Sadomasochism and the Magical Group: Kipling's Middle-Class Imperialism

There we met with famous men
    Set in office o'er us;
And they beat on us with rods—
Faithfully with many rods—
Daily beat us on with rods,
    For the love they bore us.

from "A School Song," Prelude to Stalky & Co. (1899)

Recent Kipling criticism always begins by addressing his political multivalence.¹ The most redemptive leftist readings have tried to valorize this multivalence as a form of cultural hybridity, casting Kipling as an avatar of Homi Bhabha.² More commonly, readers inscribe such multivalence within the inevitable contradictions of colonial experience, weighting Kipling's competing loyalties to British imperialism and to resisting colonial subjects in a great variety of ways.³ However the balance is adjusted, though, the debate about Kipling's politics has been almost exclusively conducted in terms of race.⁴ It has entirely neglected the realm of social class, where another kind of multivalence has been abandoned to diehard rehabilitators of Kipling's reputation. Christopher Hitchens, for example, in a recent Atlantic Monthly essay, lauds Kipling's "fruitful contradictions" (103) as the source of his transcendence of class divisions: "[H]is entire success as a bard derived from the ability to shift between Low and High Church, so to speak. He was a hit with the troops and the gallery...[b]ut he was also...the chosen poet of the royal family and the Times" (96). Andrew Rutherford used the phenomenon of Kipling's supposed cross-class appeal to similar effect in his "General Introduction" to the 1987 Oxford World's Classics editions—the first modern editions to appear after the lapse of copyright. Rutherford warned readers to suspend their biases against Kipling's jingoism, and not to dismiss him "contemptuously" or "hysterically": "Here, after all, we have the last English author to appeal to readers of all social classes and all cultural groups, from lowbrow to highbrow, and the last poet to command a mass audience" (vii-viii).

Praise for Kipling's fluid relationship to class boundaries is usually meant to deflect attention from his less politically palatable tendencies. But those who simply ignore this aspect of his work miss a significant part of his ideological impact. Over forty years ago, Noel Annan famously proposed that Kipling's primary cultural importance lay not in his attitudes toward imperialism, but in his innovations as a sociologist. Annan regarded Kipling as "the sole analogue in England to those continental sociologists—Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto—who revolutionized the study of society at the beginning of this century" (323-24). He claimed that, like the new continental sociologists, Kipling "saw society as a nexus of groups," and believed that "the patterns of behaviour which these groups unwittingly established, rather than men's wills or anything so vague as a class, cultural or national tradition, primarily determined men's actions" (326).

The thesis of this essay is that Kipling did, indeed, locate social determination within a "nexus of groups"; but that he organized such groups around a sadomasochistic psychological and cultural logic rather than around the more benign, informal modes of social order and control Annan claimed to find in his work. I will also argue—pace Hitchens and Rutherford—that Kipling's sadomasochistic groups underwrote a remarkably unilateral class politics, which accommodated contradictory attitudes toward imperialism within an integrated psycho-social vision of middle-class authority. Rather than eroding social hierarchy, Kipling's multivalent imperialism absolutely depended upon it. If it has been difficult for critics to recognize the class politics underlying Kipling's writings about empire, his manipulation of the socially mobile characteristics of sadomasochistic groups has played an important role in camouflaging those politics.

Readers have long been aware of Kipling's overt sadomasochistic preoccupations: the bullyings, beatings, and cruelty that pervade his work. For several generations, it was around his enthusiastic treatment of brutality—more so than his jingoism—that critical debate pivoted.⁵ But our recent concentration on...