Open Research Online Masculinity, Madness and Empire in Kipling’s ‘Thrown Away’ and ‘The Madness of Private Ortheris’

Institutional records suggest that the grounds for anxiety about insanity in late-nineteenth-century India were many and varied. Amongst other causes, one might have been rendered insane by sunstroke, fever, head injury, strong drink, and inherited tendency, the loss of money, grief, jealousy, anger, sexual excess, excessive joy, or (perhaps disturbingly) excessive study. 1 With such a panoply of anxieties to explore, it is scarcely surprising that Rudyard Kipling’s Indian fiction abounds with characters who experience madness of various kinds and degrees. This paper focuses on two short stories collected in Kipling’s 1888 volume Plain Tales from the Hills : ‘Thrown Away’ and ‘The Madness of Private Ortheris’. These two stories offer particular insight into madness, its relationship to masculinity, and its consequences for the social order of British India. As Jonathan Saha has pointed out, madness in a colonial context was doubly significant. Since insanity ‘could strike anyone, rulers and the ruled, men and women . . . madness threatened to undermine the colonial racial boundary and disrupt the established norms of masculinity and femininity’. 2 Both ‘Thrown Away’ and ‘The Madness of Private Ortheris’ explore or expose a psychological crisis that takes the form of a deviation from gender norms and is resolved by an enforced return to those norms. Reading the stories alongside asylum records, this paper contextualizes their representation of gender and madness and argues that the fiction offers a glimpse of what might fill important gaps in the archival record.

to which government employees were returned if deemed insane, frequently lack both detail and context. 6 The Bombay Presidency asylum report of 1892 acknowledges that no cause was recorded for almost half the asylum population. 7 Kipling's fiction engages with details absent from official records and, in 'Thrown Away' and 'The Madness of Private Ortheris', he exposes the mechanisms by which those details were repressed. In doing so, the stories establish a specifically masculine vision of vulnerability, in which imperial gender roles are as debilitating as sunstroke, fever, grief et al.
As Jonathan Saha has pointed out, madness in colonial contexts carried a weight of significance extending far beyond the unfortunate experience of an individual. Since insanity 'could strike anyone, rulers and the ruled, men and women . . . madness threatened to undermine the colonial racial boundary and disrupt the established norms of masculinity and femininity' . 8 The converse was also true: for Mark Micale, the failure to perform gender correctly might undermine 'the family, the capitalist marketplace, middle-class authority, and the nation's all-important imperial project' . 9 The proper performance of military masculinity is a particular concern of 'Thrown Away' and 'The Madness of Private Ortheris' . Superficially at least, both texts explore (or expose) a deviation from class-inflected masculine norms followed by an imposed return to those norms. Bradley Deane has suggested that when Kipling approached 'grandly abstract' notions of empire and imperialism in verse, he frequently reimagined them in 'the more personal and immediately compelling terms of manliness': manliness and empire stand for one another in a synecdochic relation. 10 Rudyard Kipling introduced his readers to a diversity of damaged imperial agents (as well as damaged colonial subjects) in both prose and verse, variously locating the causes of anxiety and breakdown in the experience of cultural dislocation ('Thrown Away', 1888), the destabilizing power dynamics inherent in imperial society ('The Madness of Private Ortheris', 1888), the intoxicating influence of imperialist ideology itself ('The Man Who Would be King ', 1888), and anxieties about aesthetics, reportage and the rise of the New Woman (The Light That Failed, 1891).
Despite this wealth of source material and an emerging body of work on male experiences of madness in the nineteenth century, the role of empire in fictional representations of madness have attracted little critical attention. 11 Existing scholarship on Kipling's short fiction tends to approach madness and masculinity in other ways. Patrick Brantlinger identifies anxieties about 'individual regression or going native' and aligns them with a wider 'imperial Gothic' mode. 12 Anjali Arondekar argues that, within Kipling's fiction, 'the incoherencies of colonial rule' are made manifest in the 'paradoxical fullness of defeated masculinity' . 13 6 These archives are held in the India Office Records at the British Library. For Kaori Nagai, Kipling's male colonizers are 'supported by, and . . . defined against, the marginal "feminine" presence' . In Nagai's reading, those marginalized women either sustain or threaten men and masculinity. 14 This article foregrounds the ways in which 'Thrown Away' and 'The Madness of Private Ortheris' dramatize different forms of masculinity and different forms (or different functions) of madness. Read alongside data from asylum records, these stories reveal the mechanisms by which key identity formations -whiteness, Britishness and masculinity -were locked into a cycle of destabilization and reassertion.
Those asylum records open a new aspect on the context within which Kipling's fiction should be read. The Annual Administration and Progress Report[s] on the Lunatic Asylums in the Bombay Presidency from the 1870s to the 1890s record traces of the contact between white Europeans and the asylum system in India. The Bombay Presidency was an administrative district covering a large portion of what is now north-west India and southern Pakistan. It was through the Bombay Presidency that many of the white Europeans unfortunate enough to be deemed to be insane were transferred on their way out of India; they were housed at the Colaba Lunatic Asylum in Bombay while awaiting transit back to Britain. 15 The archival sources point to an additional reason for analysing the literature of masculinity and madness in this period. The documents record only those, usually exceptional, moments in individuals' lives when they came into contact with the asylum system. 16 They do not tell the whole story, and the little that they do tell is imperfect. The annual reports carry mostly statistical data; case histories recorded elsewhere (in the India Office Asylum records, for example) often feature little more than the briefest details of individuals' stories and, with rare exceptions, the voice of the sufferer is excluded. Where a patient's condition remains unchanged, there is often no substantive information after the brief description of the individual's condition on admission.
Added to these limitations, the reader must remain conscious that there was a vested interest in concealing stories of mental illness. At a cultural level, they reflected negatively on the health of the empire and called into question assumptions about racial and cultural superiority. At an individual level, such stories were seen as embarrassing. As Catherine Coleborne notes, social stigma must have had an effect on the frequency with which insanity is mentioned in family letters, diaries and other private sources. 17 The researcher's difficulties do not end there: diagnostic (and other) categories were applied idiosyncratically across time and place, while statistical records are not always available. Where records are available, it is well to be aware that rates of diagnosis do not give a full picture of the actual prevalence of particular symptoms and conditions. 18 For Waltraud Ernst, repatriating sufferers 'was the ultimate means of making invisible those who failed to live up to contemporary standards 14 Kaori Nagai, 'Kipling and Gender' , in The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling, ed. by Howard J. Booth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 66-79 (pp. [66][67]. 15 Most of the Europeans coming into contact with the Presidency's asylum system in this way were British soldiers, who would arrive via the army's main depot at Deolali. The boredom endured by troops waiting there for months without employment before being allocated places on transports returning to Britain reportedly resulted in considerable psychological strain and the development of pronounced eccentricities. The trace of their experience is preserved in language: in the speech of British soldiers in India, Deolali was corrupted to 'doolally' . Richard Holmes, Sahib: the British Soldier in India,   of rational behaviour' . 19 It is reasonable to surmise that many potential patients were simply returned home at the first opportunity, leaving no documentary trace. In the context of such a fragmentary historical record, the literary sources -so very rich, by contrast, in their depictions of madness and context -are of increased importance. Literature offers insights into the ways in which madness was constructed and understood, both reflecting and challenging medical and cultural assumptions. 20 It is also essential to remember that literary sources are not neutral. Along with the asylums, Kipling's stories are a part of the disciplinary apparatus. Indeed, as Ernst argues, given the relatively small numbers of Europeans who ever entered a mental institution in India, cultural ideas about madness and treatment were likely more significant than any direct effects of the institutions themselves. 21

OF M A DNE SS, M EN A ND E M PIR E
Before examining the fiction, it is essential to set out a little information about masculinity and mental health in the Victorian context. It is also necessary to offer some justification for the focus on imperial masculinity. Scholars have complicated and challenged Elaine Showalter's seminal argument that 'madness, even when experienced by men, is metaphorically and symbolically represented as feminine: a female malady' . 22 As Valerie Pedlar has pointed out, the argument that more women than men were confined in psychiatric institutions in Britain is only true in relation to public asylums: 'Men still predominated in private madhouses, asylums for the criminally insane, military hospitals and idiot schools' . 23 Mark Micale points to studies in France and Belgium indicating a higher rate of male than female hysteria. 24 The case appears even clearer in India: in the asylums of the Bombay Presidency from 1870 to the mid-1890s men were in the overwhelming majority. Figures for residents of all races for 1872-1873 give totals of 620 men and 122 women, rising to 676 men and 134 women in 1873-1874; equivalent figures for 1878 show 681 men and 148 women; and the data for 1891 shows 786 male residents and just 175 female residents, though the numbers varied through the year. 25 The discrepancy in numbers for the European asylum population is similar, with fewer than 10 women in each year of records sampled (where relative numbers are given) of a European asylum population which varied from the low fifties to around 100 (Europeans comprised around 10% of the total population in the 1870s, reducing to around 5% in the early 1890s). Demographic reasons largely account for this difference: the 1881 Census of India records that men made up 77,188 of a total British-born population of 89,798. 27 Nonetheless, it is reasonable to say that the experience of madness in the imperial context was predominantly a male experience.
Rather than representing madness as 'symbolically . . . feminine', Kipling's fiction presents a nuanced vision of madness as the product of incomplete or inadequately formed masculinity. The main character in 'Thrown Away' is called 'The Boy' throughout: he has no name beyond this indicator of undeveloped manliness. Ortheris is likewise presented as having childlike qualities. 28 In doing this, Kipling reproduces contemporary orthodoxies about character formation. As John Tosh has observed, in the 1880s and 1890s 'There was a striking convergence in the language of empire and the language of manliness: both made much of struggle, duty, action, will, and "character"' . 29 Neatly encapsulating this cultural paradigm, former Viceroy Lord Curzon reflected in 1907 that at 'the Frontier . . . character is moulded . . . in the furnace of responsibility and on the anvil of self-reliance' . 30 The potential origin of psychological breakdown is clearly legible in the violence of Curzon's metaphors. This logic is anticipated by the epigram to 'Thrown Away', which includes the following lines: Some -there are losses in every trade -Will break their hearts ere bitted and made Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard, And die dumb-mad in the breaking yard. 31 The metaphor is equine rather than industrial but Kipling expresses precisely the same sentiment as Curzon. The process by which imperial manliness is constructed is fraught with risk for the individual under formation, who must accept the discomfort of being 'bitted and made' .
John Kucich has convincingly delineated the ways in which masochism was inherent in the imperial masculine ideal. 32 That masochism is apparent from Kipling's description in 'Egypt of the Magicians' (1913) of an administrator travelling out to take up a posting in the Sudan: There was a man in our company-a young Englishman-who had just been granted his heart's desire in the shape of some raw district south of everything southerly in the Sudan, where, on two-thirds of a member of Parliament's wage, under conditions of life that would horrify a self-respecting operative, he will see perhaps some dozen white men in a year, and will certainly pick up two sorts of fever. He had been moved to work very hard for this billet by the representations of a friend in the same service, who said it was a 'rather decent sort of service, '  report for duty, and fall to. If he is lucky, he may get a district where the people are so virtuous that they do not know how to wear any clothes at all, and so ignorant that they have never yet come across strong drink. 33 Curzon's thoughts on frontier masculinity echo through this passage. If this was the type of self-sacrificing masculinity prized among imperial Britons, it is not hard to see how mental health might become cause for concern. Rawness, harshness, geographical and cultural isolation and a high probability of dangerous physical illness are not conditions of 'decent . . . service' so much as pressures that will test the subject's resilience to its limits. This is precisely the form of dutiful masculinity Kipling would later identify with the imperial ethic in his poem 'The White Man's Burden', the very first stanza of which exhorts readers to 'bind your sons to exile | To serve your captives' need' . Kucich characterizes the sentiment of the poem as 'masochistic jingoism' . 34 No leap of imagination is required to understand how the equation of masculine, imperial virtue with sickness, exile, cultural alienation and social isolation might prove unhealthy. The unfortunate Oswald Alfred Hayne, a 27-year-old assistant engineer was admitted to the India Office asylum in London in 1872, following 10 years' service in India. His case notes record that 'he had been secluded from society' and had grown 'morose, melancholy and eccentric' . We read that 'rather than meet a European, he would start off in the middle of the night to some part of the district where he would be unobserved except by natives, and that when by himself was very filthy in his habits, did not change his clothes, would go about without a shirt, shoes, or stockings' . Before admission, Haynes 'would neither eat nor sleep [and] was very anxious about his work' . 35 Happily, Haynes was discharged as 'cured' in 1873. Yet, in the context of experiences like Haynes's, Kipling's celebration of isolated, austere working conditions seems misplaced. In a phrase that seems applicable to Haynes, Waltraud Ernst has described Britons as succumbing to 'the threat of a "debilitating and maddening life in an alien land"' . 36 In this context, as Valerie Pedlar has pointed out, alienation and the alien are loaded concepts: It is significant in this context that, from the middle of the nineteenth century the word 'alienist' began to appear as a term for the psychiatrist or 'mad-doctor' . Insane persons were understood to be alienated from society and from their own rational selves. 37 Britain's identity as an imperial nation -and the identities of individual Britons in the empire -incorporated alienation and the alien in potentially destabilizing ways. As 'colonials', white Britons working and living overseas were marked out both as emissaries of Britishness and yet also as not quite British, as somehow Other or alien. 38  intersection of class and sexuality with imperialism (1995), Catherine Hall has disentangled some of the politically and personally inflected ways in which Britons imagined their relationships to empire (2002), while Mrinalini Sinha (1995) and Bradley Deane have explored the relationship between race and masculinity in late-Victorian imperialism (2014). 39 Imperialism highlighted significant fractures and incoherencies within national and individual identities. The notion of a simple and stable binary between colonizer and colonized was threatened by white European experiences of madness and by the intersection of imperial identity with various tropes of difference, including gender, race and class.
Those intersecting identities contributed to a potent cocktail of anxieties. Indeed, the type of manliness that exalted immersion in an alien culture may be convincingly interpreted as a flight from the manifold uncertainties of late-Victorian culture. John Tosh identifies imperial rivalry from other great powers as a factor motivating the promotion of 'a harsher definition of masculinity at home' while simultaneously pressures on masculinity in Britain -from the emergence of the New Woman to less obviously masculine kinds of work, via the pseudoscientific spectre of degeneration -encouraged men to turn to imperial service and imperial culture in the search for 'unqualified masculinity' . 40 Richard Hogg puts it more simply: 'On the frontiers of the British Empire, men could exercise the courage, self-reliance and physical prowess there was little opportunity to act out at home' . 41 For the young men entering imperial service in this period, 'marriage was a necessarily distant prospect' . 42 This flight from the domestic has implications for the development of masculinity. Kipling dramatizes these implications in 'The Madness of Private Ortheris', whose crisis involves notable anxiety about gender roles. Ortheris laments that 'If I 'ad a stayed ot 'Ome, I might a married that gal and kep' a little shorp in the ' Ammersmith 'Igh' . For Ortheris, imperial service entailed the abandonment of domestic aspirations. This abandonment did not wholly free him to enjoy a life unfettered masculinity: Ortheris remains 'the Widder's property', a soldier of Queen. This is a vision of manliness detached from the domestic authority of the Victorian paterfamilias and threatened by female authority.
The response came in the form of strenuous efforts to frame a vision of masculinity within a homosocial context. Curzon's frontier masculinity fits neatly within this context. Popular culture was enlisted in the process too: as Bradley Deane observes, women were commonly pushed to the margins in late-Victorian adventure fiction. 43 Nagai observes exactly this marginalization of the feminine in Kipling's fiction. 44 Masculinity was defined in relation to the behaviour of other men and not -or not only -in relation to femininity and domesticity. This produced an ideal that placed exorbitant demands upon the subject: each successful performance of manliness by an individual raised the stakes for everyone else. In this context, manliness was no longer something achievable but something an individual must continually strive towards. Texts of the period also implied that suffering or failure was an essential part of being a man. Kipling's 1910 poem 'If ' is an excellent example of this tendency, with its version of masculinity conditional on the ability to 'meet with triumph and Disaster | And treat those two imposters just the same' . 45 For these reasons, this late-nineteenth-century masculine ideal might be termed a hypermasculinity and understood to signify gender values which can only be satisfied at the level of myth (or at catastrophic personal cost to any individual seeking to achieve this mythic status). John Kucich's notion of imperial masochism offers one perspective on this hypermasculinity, arguing that 'mythologized victimization and death' became 'foundational events in the teleology of empire' . 46 If this vision of imperial masculinity was, as Hogg suggests, imagined as a refuge from the pressures of metropolitan culture, it seems to have been a dubious sanctuary.

'THROWN AWAY ' A ND 'THE M A DNE SS OF PR IVATE ORTHER IS'
Among those individuals on whom the burden of empire weighed heavily (if in less grandiose fashion than Kipling's poem implies) are the main characters in Kipling's stories 'Thrown Away' and 'The Madness of Private Ortheris' . The Boy, around whose suicide 'Thrown Away' revolves, is raised 'under what parents call "the sheltered life system"' . 47 Pampered and externally disciplined as he is, The Boy is utterly unable to cope with independent life as an army officer in India. Kipling informs readers within the first two pages of the story that 'the [sheltered life] theory killed him dead' . 48 The Boy's experience is shaped by a vision of masculinity to which he feels himself bound by considerations of class and family yet to which he finds himself absolutely unable to adhere. Perhaps for these very reasons, members of the officer corps were more prone to mental illness than enlisted men. 49 As Mark Micale argues, nineteenth-century ideals of masculinity 'served to ensure the authority of husbands and fathers within the patriarchal domestic economy' . 50 The formula presumes a domestic context as a foil to masculinity, however. Exclusion from this domestic context forces The Boy to measure his conduct instead against the exorbitant demands of hypermasculinity. Private Ortheris, whose madness is the subject of the other story, also suffers the consequences of failing to live up to the requirements of a different class-inflected pattern of manliness and ends the story temporarily emasculated and disgraced in the eyes of his friends but otherwise unharmed.
In 'Thrown Away', (hyper)masculinity is based on stoicism, a knowing cynicism and a sense of the relative proportion of all things -including one's own life. Kipling's narrator sets out the order of things in these terms: Now India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriouslythe mid-day sun always excepted. Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as surely as too much assorted vice or too much drink. Flirtation does not matter, because every one is being transferred, and either you or she leaves the Station and never return. Good work does not matter, because a man is judged by his worst output, and 45 Kipling, 'If ' , in Rewards and Fairies (New York, NY: Doubleday, Page and Son, 1910), pp. 181-82. 46 Kucich, Imperial Masochism, p. 4. 47 Kipling, 'Thrown Away' , pp. 15-26. 48 Kipling, 'Thrown Away' , p. 16. another man takes all the credit of his best as a rule. Bad work does not matter, because other men do worse, and incompetents hang on longer in India than anywhere else. Amusements do not matter, because you must repeat them as soon as you have accomplished them once, and most amusements only mean trying to win another person's money. Sickness does not matter, because it's all in a day's work, and if you die, another man takes your place and your office in the eight hours between death and burial. 51 Beneath the narrator's heavy irony, a harsh disregard for the individual is discernible. Personal matters are inconsequential and are not to be taken seriously in any circumstances. Naturally, The Boy takes everything seriously. He loses money at cards and on horses, he gets into difficulty with women, he quarrels with his fellow officers and he drinks to excess. His progress towards disaster is as predictable as it is inexorable, as the narrator makes clear. It is both striking and significant that Kipling's list of the things that a fellow ought not to take too seriously tallies closely with the causes of insanity listed by medical staff in the Bombay Presidency. It is equally significant that the narrator's ironic tone calls those risk factors into question even as he lists them.
The Bombay Presidency's asylum records for the year 1892 (published 1893) are broadly representative of the picture in the late nineteenth century. The summary of 'alleged causes' given in the Surgeon General's annual report for 1892 provides a good sense of contemporary ideas about the origin of mental illness in the colonial context: Of the known causes 440 are attributed to physical and 85 to moral causes. Of the former, the use of intoxicating drugs and abuse of spirits are alleged as the causes in 219 cases, previous attack in 35, epilepsy in 31, fever in 30, destitution in 22, masturbation in 12, syphilis in 7, injury to head, pthisis [i.e. complications from tuberculosis] and child-birth in 5 each, sun-stroke in 4, sexual excess, old age, climate and paralysis in 3 each and uterine disorder in 2. The disease was hereditary in 30 and congenital in 21 cases. Of the moral causes, grief contributes the largest number -52. Religion is the alleged cause in 10 cases, anger in 8, fear in 6, jealousy and loss of money in 3 each and anxiety, study and excessive joy in 1 each. 52 The narrator of 'Thrown Away' would have imperial men take the possibility of sunstroke seriously while lightly brushing off all the other possible causes of insanity listed here. His attitude might not be unreasonable: it is noteworthy that reports from the late 1870s onwards refer to the 'alleged' causes of insanity, indicating official scepticism. Indeed in 474 cases (out of 999), no cause was listed at all. The vagueness surrounding causation was a long-standing concern for medical officers. In the report for 1879, Surgeon-General W. G. Hunter lamented that 'from data so imperfect the difficulties in drawing exact or anything like scientific conclusions will, I beg to submit, be apparent to Government' . 53 Read in this context, the flippancy of Kipling's narrator seems like a worldly extension of medical discourse. It is reasonable to infer that within such a discourse at least some cases of insanity (especially those linked to excess, or listed as 'moral' cases) were interpreted as failures to properly perform masculinity. 51 Kipling, 'Thrown Away' , pp. 16-17. 52 Turnbull, Annual Report 1892 That distinction between moral and physical insanity emphasized in the Surgeon-General's report requires some explanation. The category of moral insanity was established in James Cowles Prichard's 1835 Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. According to Prichard, 'moral insanity' describes a form of mental illness in which reason is not disordered but in which the sufferer's behaviour was not tolerable within their community. 54 The condition might be apparent 'in a want of self-government, . . . an unusual expression of strong feelings, in thoughtless and extravagant conduct' . 55 As Valerie Pedlar points out, the idea of moral insanity 'opens up for medical inspection a range of behaviour that would previously have been subject to official or unofficial moral judgement' . 56 By the later nineteenth century, Prichard's taxonomy of insanity was obsolete, superseded by the theories of men like George Beard and Henry Maudsley. Nonetheless, the notion of moral insanity seems to have been strangely persistent, perhaps because it offered a ready justification for the management of social behaviour, or because it implied a link between sanity and good moral conduct.
As long as medical records struggled to define causes of insanity with confidence, space for such a link remained in public discourse. In 'Thrown Away', the link between improper social conduct and psychological crisis is clear. The Boy lacks the experience and training to be able to dismiss his troubles in the stoical fashion the narrator describes. Consequently, he begins to display symptoms of insanity. His joy and anger are excessive, he loses money, grows jealous and grieves for the glittering career he believes he has thrown away. Crisis is precipitated by a thoughtless remark from a woman 'that made him flush to the roots of his hair' . 57 Thus reminded of his departure from the standards of conduct acceptable in the bourgeois domestic context, The Boy withdraws from company for several days, requests leave to go shooting, and shoots himself. This is moral insanity in action. Kipling's narrative reinforces the link between a failure to properly perform masculinity (a failure signalled by the way the character is referred to only as The Boy) and the onset of psychological crisis.
In 'The Madness of Private Ortheris' events proceed differently. As a working-class man, Ortheris is alienated from the middle-class ideology of empire and its attendant conception of manliness. Richard Hogg has convincingly argued that the self-policing and self-sacrificing vision of imperial masculinity was problematic for working-class men, whose gender identity was grounded not in reflection and notional virtue but in '"property in skill", fraternal bonds, hard drinking, physical prowess and collective organisation' . 58 The apparently stable, masculine soldier enjoys an afternoon of suitably manly activity with the anonymous civilian narrator and Mulvaney, another soldier. Their afternoon's entertainment matches Hogg's account of working-class manliness neatly and is worth quoting at length: We shot all the forenoon, and killed two Pariah dogs, four green parrots, sitting, one kite by the burning-ghaut, one snake flying, one mud-turtle, and eight crows. Game was plentiful. Then we sat down to tiffin-'bull-mate an' bran-bread,' Mulvaney called it-by the side of the river, and took pot shots at the crocodiles in the intervals of cutting up the food with our only pocket-knife. Then we drank up all the beer, threw the bottles into the water and fired at them. After that we eased belts and stretched ourselves on the warm sand and smoked. We were too lazy to continue shooting. 59 The shared masculinity established by the practice of shooting skills, meat-eating, drinking and smoking is reinforced by the easy homosocial bonds apparent between the three men. Yet, paradoxically, it is this series of manly diversions which brings Ortheris to his crisis. After a period of reflection, he sighs deeply and asks 'Wot's the good of sodgerin'?' . 60 This is as near as Kipling's working-class soldier is permitted to come to existential angst. Ortheris's question is bound up with a distinctively imperial ennui. He laments that he has left the pleasures of London life: to serve the Widder beyond the seas, where there ain't no women and there ain't no liquor worth 'avin', and there ain't nothin' to see, nor do, nor say, nor feel, nor think. . . . There's the Widder sittin' at 'Ome with a gold crownd on 'er 'ead; an 'ere am Hi, Stanley Orth'ris, the Widder's property, a rottin' FOOL. 61 Masculinity and empire are seamlessly merged in the terms of his psychological crisis, which, significantly, recurs to the matriarchal figure of Queen Victoria, the Widow at Windsor. Ortheris finds himself confronted by two central problems of working-class imperial manliness. He is anchored in manliness by fraternal bonds, physical prowess, manly skills and alcohol and yet he is simultaneously confronted with the knowledge of his own subordinate status as a soldier of the queen. Not only this, but Ortheris' imperial service also prevents him from establishing himself in a traditional masculine role as the head of a household.
Patrick Brantlinger has suggested that imperialism had a 'religious quality' in this period. 62 In this context, Ortheris's doubts are an admission of apostasy, shocking to his faithful companions. They interpret the crisis differently, seeking to explain their friend's outburst as a temporary madness in terms which resonate with those used in Indian asylum reports, with their preference for a somatic interpretation of insanity. Mulvaney suggests that 'tis more than likely you've got trouble with your inside with the beer. I feel that way mesilf whin my liver gets rusty' . 63 The narrator concurs, feeling that it might all be the consequence of drunkenness. Drinking was certainly a problem among the British population in India: abuse of intoxicants is consistently among the leading causes of insanity noted in the Annual Administration and Progress Reports of the Bombay Presidency's asylums. Nor was this a problem restricted to any one region of the British Empire. In his work on colonial New Zealand, Miles Fairburn has provided a persuasive analysis of the links between loneliness, alcohol abuse and psychological strain. 64 Fairburn identifies specific causes of heavy drinking, including the lack of alternative entertainments and recreational spaces, dislocation from family life, and a high ratio of males to females. These causes are as relevant to Ortheris and The Boy in India as they were to the subjects of Fairburn's study in New Zealand.
In any case, drink is apparently not the problem with Ortheris but merely the trigger for an acute episode (just as drink was surely as much symptom as cause of the difficulties faced by asylum inmates of the period). In the end his companions find themselves unable to explain the episode in a satisfactory fashion: 60 Kipling, 'The Madness of Private Ortheris' , p. 287. 61 Kipling, 'The Madness of Private Ortheris' , p. 291. 62 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 229. 63 Kipling, 'The Madness of Private Ortheris' , p. 287. 'I've bruk his head,' said Mulvaney earnestly, 'time an' agin. I've nearly kilt him wid the belt, an' yet I can't knock them fits out av his soft head. No! An' he's not soft, for he's reasonable an' likely by natur' . Fwhat is ut? Is ut his breedin' which is nothin', or is edukashin which he niver got? You that think ye know things, answer me that. ' 65 The narrator has no answer. The problem seems insoluble to both men because Ortheris's masculinity is unimpeachable and no physical cause of his fit is apparent. As a brave soldier, it is apparently unthinkable that he might be susceptible to insanity. The figures provided in the asylum records, however, demonstrate that this assumption is unsound. For example, of 100 English patients admitted to Colaba asylum in 1874-1875, 91 were soldiers in the British Army. 66 In 1878, of 84 Europeans admitted, 66 were soldiers. 67 In 1879, the Surgeon-General noted that, of all occupations, 'Soldiers (European) furnished the largest number, 74' of patients admitted during the year. 68 In 1892 (by which time afflicted Europeans were increasingly shipped directly out of India without necessarily featuring in the records of Indian asylums) of 39 Europeans at Colaba, 27 were soldiers. 69 While the figures reflect the numbers of men engaged in different occupations, any notion that military masculinity was a prophylactic against insanity is plainly questionable. 70 Medical practitioners of the period had a clear grasp of this fact, with work in the Empire frequently identified as 'a danger to mental health' . 71 Rather, as both the fiction and the asylum reports indicate, active engagement in imperialism was a risk factor. 72 In both Kipling's stories, the response to psychological crisis is at least implicitly disciplinary. Private Ortheris is frightened after the narrator uses his class privilege to convince him into an attempt at desertion and belatedly comes to his senses. Mulvaney explains in blunt terms that he has disgraced himself, his company and his friends. This apparent emasculation is sufficient to coerce Ortheris back into the manly economy of his regiment. In 'Thrown Away' The Boy shoots himself and even after death is subject to the enforcement of masculine values. His body is discovered at a remote location by an anonymous Major and the narrator. They read his final letters, in which: