Pleasures and Pains of "Going Native" in Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Four Short Stories.

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze the myth of “going native” in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and four short stories, namely Miss Youghal’s ‘Sais’, Beyond the Pale, To Be Filed for Reference and The Man Who Would Be King. In the nineteenth century the expression “to go native” referred to colonizers who adopted the customs and the values of the colonized, but the phrase was sometimes used pejoratively to imply that the process of “going native” led to a physical and mental degeneration. In Kim and these four short stories by Kipling, the colonizers who “go native” in India do so for different reasons and with different outcomes. The five works I have selected are meant to illustrate the multiple facets of the myth of “going native” according to Kipling. This dissertation begins by assessing the ways in which India and the divide between East and West are represented in Kim and these short stories. It then proceeds to analyze the different aspects of the myth of “going native”, including both positive and negative interpretations of the same. Lastly, this dissertation ends with a comparison between these works by Kipling and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which also depicts a character who “goes native”. While Kipling’s early stories (Miss Youghal’s ‘Sais’, Beyond the Pale, To Be Filed for Reference and The Man Who Would Be King), like Heart of Darkness, focus on the negative or ambivalent aspects of “going native”, Kim contains an unexpectedly positive representation of this fantasy, which suggests an optimistic re-interpretation of the myth by Kipling.