The Ruling Passion

BOOK REVIEWS Readers, scholarly and general alike, deserve more from a book costing $35.95 than is provided here. The book is not only overpriced, it is overpraised in the blurbs on the back-cover, one of which was written by the author's dissertation adviser, another by a colleague. Did Peter Lang submit the study to a Forster expert for independent appraisal? It hardly seems likely. Did it even receive the conscientious attention of a copy-editor? The answer to this question is no. Jane Austen, Rose Macaulay, June Perry Levine, Oliver Stallybrass, George H. Thomson are all misspelled, some repeatedly, in the text or the Selected Bibliography . Forster is stated to be the author of a hitherto unknown work entitled Pharos and Pharisees on page 87 and Pharos and Pharasees on page 99; the former title reappears in the index. Baedeker is misspelled a dozen times in the text. The Caffè Garibaldi appears as the Caffee Garibaldi, Epsom as Epson, Oniton as Uniton. Stewart Ansell appears as Stuart Ansell. Mrs. Munt becomes Mrs. Hunt (or Aunt Juley Hunt). Herr Forstmeister appears as Herr Forstmeistr. No doubt a careful copy-editor could find other errors—in the spelling of some publishers' names and the dates of publication of certain studies—and he or she would do well to double-check citations, especially given the author's reliance on American editions of Forster 's novels rather than on the Abinger edition. Such checking would reveal that Margaret Schlegel did not excoriate Henry Wilcox with "These, man, are you" (117), but with "These men are you." A conscientious copy-editor might also raise stylistic questions, query a sentence fragment here, correct a failure of agreement there, pick up on the misspelling of "augur" (79) and "fiancé" (80), and place the apostrophe correctly in "the Herritons' house" (111). Corrections of tnis kind would have resulted in a study less likely to irritate knowledgeable readers of Forster or to mislead newcomers to his fiction, but only a comprehensive reconsideration of the book's formalist procedures, together with a willingness to meet standard scholarly obligations, would have produced a work worthy of being named an American University Study. Alistair M. Duckworth University of Florida, Gainesville The Ruling Passion Christopher Lane. The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. xiii + 326 pp. Cloth $49.95 Paper $16.95 497 ELT 39:4 1996 ONE OF Christopher Lane's strong points is his ability to say exactly what he means through titles. The Ruling Passion as a title can be interpreted in two ways: on one hand, it refers to the passion of the British to rule, i.e. civilize the heathens; on the other hand, this passion is the masculine desire which rules the men who imperialized or colonized. Drawing on both interpretations, Lane's study examines imperial/colonial masculine desire in its non-sexual, homophiliac state and active homo/sexual state. The British Colonial Allegory of his title is defined by Lane as the socio-political substructures of soldiers, natives , and others who were united by this masculine desire. Yet the Paradox of Homosexual Desire deconstructs this same allegory because "representational and political mobility of homosexual drives"—masculinity and homophiliac desire—should have united but instead destroyed the allegory "by invoking suspicion, antagonism, and betrayal." This breakdown of the book's title into components is compulsory to a better understanding of the overall work, a task of which Lane must have been aware because he expends himself clarifying and specifying points. For instance, his titled and subtitled chapters such as the first, "The Incursions of Purity: Kipling's Legislators and the Anxiety of Psychic Demand," are often self-explanatory. Also helpful are the minimum two or three quotes from various texts introducing each subchapter . Despite these aids, Lane's introduction is still convoluted, requiring a second reading. He begins with a socio-political examination of homosexuality in its colonial contexts, leading the reader to believe this is a new literary theory in the making. Considering Duke University Press published the book, Michael Moon is a commentator on the jacket, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is referred...