What Happens in "Mary Postgate"?

40 WHAT HAPPENS IN "MARY POSTGATE"? By Norman Page (University of Nottingham) J. I. Kipling's short story "Mary Postgate" has elicited mixed superlatives. M. Stewart has described it as Kiphng's most famous, or notorious, . . . [story] of the First World War"; W. W. Robson noted that it has been "more attacked than anything else Kiphng wrote"; and J. M. S. Tompkins commented that "the force and horror of the last lines are extreme. . . . Kiphng wrote nothing else like this." Stanley Baldwin's son Oliver, who was Kipling's second cousin, went so far as to call it "the wickedest story ever wntten."1 Like Lady Chatterley's Lover and Lolita, it excited among its earlier readers a response that was to a large extent moral rather than literary, and its timing rendered this reaction hardly surprising. Begun (according to Mrs. Kipling's diary) early in March 1915,2 soon after the start of German air-raids on English towns, it was pubhshed in the Century Magazine and in Nash's Magazine in September of the same year, and reprinted in Kipling's wartime collection A Diversity of Creatures (1917), where it is placed prominently at the end of the volume. (John Kiphng, the writer's only son, it is relevant to note, was reported missing on 2 November 1915 and was later presumed dead.) But moral indignation, or even moral enthusiasm, does not make for exegetical clearheadedness; and there are good grounds for believing that, nearly seventy years after the story's first appearance, Kipling's intentions are still not fully and generally appreciated. A brief summary of the story may be useful. Miss Mary Postgate is a lady's companion, middle-aged, prim, "colourless," possessed of "no imagination" (at least by her own account, which we are not obliged to take at face value), and "never shocked": confronted by the more painful or distasteful aspects of life, she adopts the motto that '"one mustn't let one's mind dwell on these things.'" She becomes devoted to her employer's orphaned nephew, Wynn, a thoroughly unattractive boy who treats her as 'his butt and slave." When war breaks out he joins up and is killed in a flying accident. During his lifetime it is Mary who has discharged the quasi-maternal duties on behalf of her indolent ana self-centred employer; and now it is Mary who grieves more deeply—though she cannot cry, but only feels '"angry with the Germans.'" It also falls to her to dispose of the young man's clothes and possessions by burning them at the bottom of the garden. She goes to the village to buy paraffin, and there witnesses the violent death of a child, Edna Gerritt—a death that she beheves is caused by a bomb dropped by a German aeroplane, though there are grounds for believing that the collapse or a stable was m fact responsible. Back in the garden, with the fire now ablaze, she finds a German aviator, seriously hurt by his fall through the trees, sitting at the foot of an oak. As she supervises the fire she witnesses with intense satisfaction the man's dying agonies, firmly declining to summon aid. Then she goes indoors to take a hot bath and to have tea. Early objections to the story such as Oliver Baldwin's were of course based on what was seen as the savagery of the hatred expressed towards the German enemy; in other words, the story was seen as conveying the author's own feelings and attitudes, and Mary's ghastly relish at the German's death-throes was believed to be shared by Kiphng. Those who have defended the story, like C. A. 41 Bodelsen and Bonamy Dobrée, have done so on the sensible grounds that the emotions of a protagonist cannot simply be assumed to be those of the author: as Dobrée says, Kipling "is not suggesting . . . that this is how people should behave; he is merely telling us 'this is what happens.'"3 On this reading, the objective is neither self-expression nor propaganda but psychological realism, and the story is a case-study of abnormal behaviour. I...