Imperium of the soul: The political and aesthetic imagination of Edwardian imperialists by Norman Etherington (review)

Historians generally seem to take a dim view of literary critics and their lamentable tendency to make claims about the past on the basis of poetry or prose, so it is always of interest when the situation is reversed and a historian ventures onto the terrain of narrative interpretation. It is no doubt unfair, but for the price of admission I expect to be smitten, to feel the full force of the archive brought down upon me, to stagger away convinced of my methodological inadequacies and undue partisanship. Whatever else it is, Norman Etherington's Imperium of the soul: The political and aesthetic imagination of Edwardian imperialists is certainly staggering. The preface describes a work that has taken a whole career to write, beginning with the publication of an essay on H. Rider Haggard in this very journal back in 1978: "Other projects got in the way, notably nine other books between 1978 and 2008" (xiii). The subject of Etherington's enduring passion is the intersection between the art and politics of conservative writers and artists who took on imperial themes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It would be nice to have more insight into the book's Edwardian parameters, and the selection of case studies—one figure per chapter—feels a little ad hoc, but it nevertheless has an intriguingly interdisciplinary range and demonstrates a remarkable archival mastery, for it covers not only the fiction of Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan, and Joseph Conrad, but also the careers and works of Lawrence of Arabia, architect Herbert Baker, and composer Edward Elgar.

Etherington argues that all these figures identified and exploited parallels between the idea of empire's civilizing mission and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, in particular the fundamental concern of both with a struggle between civilized order and savage disorder: "my major theme: the invocation of the imperial vs savage metaphor in relation to the psyche" (xiii). This manifests itself as much in the concealed interiors of Baker's monumental commissions in South Africa, and in the related nature of ostensibly oppositional themes in Elgar's Symphony No. 1, as in Kipling's representations of "a whole universe of perverse and forbidden pleasures" in his fictions of India (38). Etherington's key to all imperial mythologies is a straightforward psychoanalytic model of unconscious desire and repression. Despite having carefully selected his case studies to fit this approach, he nevertheless struggles at times to articulate the relationship between the imperial and the psychological, and in this regard E. B. Tylor's anthropological theory of survivals, and its influence on the writers and theorizers of the imperial romance, feels like a missing link in the project. At a local level, its psychoanalytic claims often take a highly speculative tone, as in the "shapeless figure of Huneefa" in Kipling's Kim (1901), which is deemed "inchoate (a female breast?) and thus far less threatening" (63). Taken as a whole, moreover, Etherington's approach often feels dated and familiar, at times resembling an extended elaboration on Patrick Brantlinger's notion of the imperial gothic. This is perhaps not surprising given that the first chapter reprints in its entirety that original 1978 article on Haggard, and those forty-year-old insights underpin all the subsequent readings.

One of the most useful aspects of Imperium of the soul is the way it draws connections among its key figures, as each successive chapter unravels another knot in the Empire's tangled homosocial networks of artists and politicians. At the same time, although so much of this book focuses on works of literature, and Etherington is clearly enthralled by much of his subject matter, it is hard to avoid the sense that he more or less disdains the procedures and insights that literary criticism and theory have to offer. "I approach my subject matter primarily as a historian of...