[In the following essay, Knoepflmacher links aspects of Kipling's life and his treatment of feminine power in short fiction, particularly through the story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.”]

My first child and daughter was born in three foot of snow on the night of December 29th 1892. Her Mother's birthday being the 31st and mine the 30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things, and she throve in her trunk-tray in the sunshine on the little plank verandah.

—Kipling, Something of Myself

Whether addressed to adults or children, Kipling's writings are preoccupied with female power—a power he persistently associates with a mother or a mother surrogate. The bluster and bravado of the barracks on which Kipling had built his early reputation owe much to a male assertiveness through which the young writer handled his uneasy relation to the feminine. That relation, however, underwent a significant change as soon as Kipling began to confront his childhood both in stories written for an adult audience such as the intensely emotional “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” and in the tales for children he began to compose during “the early days of his married life in Vermont, that halcyon time when Josephine was the summit of his delight—a young baby that was his own” (Wilson 128). Effie, his Best Beloved, reconciled Kipling to those two other beings he had once loved best, the mother by whom he had felt betrayed and the little boy whose sense of omnipotence had been severely bruised by that maternal betrayal.

Even in those fictions Kipling published prior to his becoming a family man, the emphasis on male bonding all too often conceals a boy's ambivalent perception of a matriarch's power. This ambivalence did not go unnoticed by some of Kipling's shrewder contemporaries. In a famous 1904 cartoon by Max Beerbohm, a hirsute Rudyard Kipling locks arms with “Britannia, 'is gurl,” while tooting a tiny bugle. They have exchanged headgear. She is wearing his bowler, while he has donned her helmet. The caricature's target seems fairly obvious. As in Beerbohm's 1912 story entitled “P.C., X, 36,” an excessive male assertiveness is mercilessly undercut. The strident imperialist; the ventriloquist able to give voice to the codes of masculinity bonding soldiers, seamen, and schoolboys; the misogynist who has a gruff speaker proclaim that a woman is only a woman but that a good cigar is a Smoke—these and other Kipling stereotypes are ostensibly being deflated.

And yet, as always, Beerbohm astutely catches something subtler. The Kipling narrator in “P.C., X, 36” becomes deeply hurt when the police constable whose masculinity he so admires brusquely tells him that it is time for him to be in bed since “Yer Ma'll be lookin' out for yer” (A Christmas Garland 11). The cartoon likewise treats Kipling as a mama's boy. The stately Britannia is twice as tall as the little reveler who has appropriated her helmet. This raucous bugler may regard the Pre-Raphaelite, Burne-Jones beauty who towers over him as “'is gurl.” Yet it is obvious that the grown woman who glances away from him with such a vacant and superior expression has been quite reluctantly drawn into the frenzied game of a child-man. And, as the interlocked arms strongly suggest, his power—or, rather, his pretense of power—depends on this grave matriarch's might.

Beerbohm's refusal to be taken in by such masculine posturings is even more strongly expressed in his sardonic “Kipling's Entire,” a 1903 review of the dramatization by “George Fleming” (a female playwright called Julia Constance Fletcher) of The Light That Failed (1890), Kipling's first and last novel written for adults. As uninterested in Fletcher's play as in a decade of major children's books by Kipling, Beerbohm prefers to go back to the novel itself in order to expose the adolescent fantasies of an author he deems to be “permanently and joyously obsessed” with soldiers (246). Kipling's notions “of manhood, manliness, man” strike Beerbohm as being curiously “feminine,” more feminine, in fact, than those of the woman who converted the novel into a play. Male writers who are secure in their masculine identity, Beerbohm suggests, can take the “virility” of their heroes for granted. But only “effeminate men” are overly eager in trying to avoid “a sudden soprano note in the bass” they try to sound (246). Reversing Henry James's dictum that George Sand may have impersonated a man but was “not a gentleman,” Beerbohm contends that it might conversely be said “that Mr. Kipling, as revealed to us in his fiction, is no lady,” though he is “not the less essentially feminine for that” (247).¹

The cynical—and often downright misogynist—fictions the young Kipling wrote for adult readers differ markedly in their orientation toward female nurturance and female power from his stories for—and about—children. That difference can already be glimpsed if one contrasts two of the “adult” productions written in 1888, “The Man Who Would Be King” and “The Story of the Gadsbys,” to “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” also written in 1888 and the tale in which Kipling at last confronted the childhood trauma of parental desertion. All three fictions dramatize the damage inflicted by female figures on a male's aspirations toward power.

In “The Man Who Would Be King,” Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan agree not to look at “any Woman black, white, or brown” (56); and, indeed, and Dravot heeded his companion's injunction to “leave the women alone,” he would have retained his kingship and have continued to be worshiped as “God or Devil” (83, 88). Instead, by choosing a wife, “a Queen to breed a King's son for the King” (84), Dravot precipitates his downfall. Bitten in the neck by the young woman who, “white as death,” causes his hand to be “red with blood” (89), Dravot is crucified by the natives who lose faith in his omnipotence. The male bond that existed between him and Peachy is reduced to the “dried, withered head,” still bearded and crowned, but eyeless, defaced, and “battered,” that the crazed Carnehan carries in his horsehair bag (96).

The symbiotic relation between two males is similarly broken in “The Story of the Gadsbys.” But whereas the marriage between Dravot and the “strapping wench” whose bite proves so deadly is never consummated, the longer work sets out to document its misogynist epigraph, “That a young man married is a young man marred!” (“Gadsby” [“The Story of the Gadsbys”] 220). Mothers are now targeted as destroyers. The novella begins by mocking “Poor Dear Mamma,” the matron who soon engineers Captain Gadsby's marriage to her daughter Minnie, and it ends by mocking Minnie herself, in her own role as a domineering young mother. The infant boy she calls the “Butcha” becomes her instrument in her campaign to get Gadsby to break his bonds to the regiment and his lingering attachment to his brother-soldier, Captain Mafflin. The gruff soldier who had pleaded with Gadsby “to send the Wife Home … and come to Kashmir with me” (278) is as soundly defeated as Peachy Carnehan was in “The Man Who Would Be King.” “Mrs. G.” delivers her coup de grace when she encourages her baby to smash Captain Mafflin's watch. The male camaraderie which Beerbohm ridicules in his attack on Kipling's soldiers, “with their self-conscious blurtings of oaths and slang, their cheap cynicism about the female sex” (“Kipling's Entire” 247), is again in evidence. But it is the female who carries the day when Mrs. G. tells her baby that the dial and hands of Mafflin's broken watch have been “werry, werry feeble” (Gadsby [The Story of the Gadsbys] 283)—too feeble, clearly, to withstand her temporal power. Domesticity has triumphed over what Beerbohm derisively calls “manlydom” (which, for him, is something more artificial and contrived than mere “manliness”).

Having portrayed the young woman who refuses to “breed” a son for Dravot and the young mother whose baby son helps her to assert her superiority over adult males, Kipling was at last ready to adopt, in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” the point of view of a boy in the most personal of his tales of male disempowerment. Significantly enough, Punch, the story's boy protagonist, and the adult narrator who supervises his disenchantment are far more complex than their counterparts in “The Man Who Would Be King” or “The Story of the Gadsbys.” And equally significant is the rich ambivalence that now marks Kipling's portrait of the “real, live, lovely Mamma” who returns to rescue the boy Punch, just as Alice Kipling returned to rescue her Ruddy in actual life.

“Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” the story which critic-biographers from Edmund Wilson in 1941 to Angus Wilson in 1977 have rightly regarded as a turning point in Kipling's career as a writer, prepared him both for The Light That Failed (1890) and the children's stories he began to write in 1893. The tale's immense emotional force and its correspondence with Rudyard's and his sister Trix's accounts of their childhood deprivations certainly bear out Angus Wilson's contention that it remains unique among Kipling's fictions in its “closeness to biographical fact,” or, as Wilson wisely qualifies his statement, “to biographical fact as he still remembered it as he came to write Something of Myself at the end of his life” (18). Still, Wilson misses, I think, the importance for Kipling's artistic development of the role played by the mother, whose absence leads Punch to hone his skills as a “little liar” (“Baa Baa, Black Sheep” 360). At the story's end, both Punch and his “Mother, dear” assume that their earlier symbiosis can be resumed “as if she had never gone” (368). Yet, as the narrator suggests in no uncertain terms, they are mistaken. Though not as severely ruptured, the bond between mother and son can no more remain intact than that which existed between Peachy and Dravot or between Mafflin and Gadsby. Integral yet displaced, adored yet resented, the mother cannot be fully reunited with one whose child's wits survived and developed without her supervision. Nor, as Kipling began to understand at this point in his career, could male bonding fully serve him as an emotionally satisfying replacement for that lost primal fusion. Instead, as his stories for children would show, the mother's power had to be adopted and incorporated by the grown-up male writer who learned how to reactivate his surviving child's wits.

The first thing to be noted about “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” is that the figure of Punch and Judy's Mamma is far more prominent than that of their father. She not only returns at the end of the story to take charge of her deserted children, but also acts as an interpreter-writer whose decisiveness and self-assurance counterpoint the implied author's ironic mode of indirection and understatement. Her final letter to the husband she addresses as “dear boy” exudes confidence, energy, and wit: although she looks forward to her mate's own return to the “home” country, she assures him that she has, in effect, already taken full charge. The family's future life “under one roof” again seems certain to the mother. The repair of the broken unit, she is convinced, will merely crown her ongoing efforts: “I shall win Punch to me before long.” The mother thus feels perfectly “content.” If her children will again come to know her, their former trust in her can be recaptured. She is sure that the “small deceptions” and “falsehood” that Punch adopted as his prime defense against betrayal and estrangement can soon fade away (367).

Yet if the mother's confidence still needs to be tested by Punch—only to be subverted by the narrator in the story's concluding paragraph—it is also true that the primacy she chooses to adopt seems rather belated. From the very start of “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” father and mother alike have, after all, been replaced by surrogates. And, what is more, the roles played by these surrogates have markedly differed for each parent. The father's two substitutes, the two Indian manservants and Uncle Harry, are associated with storytelling, as the father himself is. Later in the story, he complements Uncle Harry's nostalgic ballad about the battle of Navarino by sending his boy a gift “of ‘Grimm's Fairy Tales’ and a Hans Christian Andersen” (341). In actual life, little Rudyard was regaled with quite different fare: not just “Papa” but both parents are credited in Something of Myself with sending him “priceless volumes” which included a “bound copy of Aunt Judy's Magazine of the early 'seventies, in which appeared Mrs. Ewing's Six to Sixteen.” The story of a girl transplanted from India to Yorkshire had, according to Kipling, a greater impact on his imagination than any other children's book: “I owe more in circuitous ways to that tale than I can tell. I knew it, as I know it still, almost by heart” (7).

The men in the story blend with each other: Meeta, the big Surti boy, acts as a substitute for a Papa who has not “come in” the nursery, as expected, to talk to Punch (324); later, just as the absent father will only send his child a parcel of books, so can the dying Uncle Harry at best pass on the battle song that Punch soon know “through all its seventeen verses” (349). As mere transmitters of the tales of others, the male figures seem more passive than the women who shape Punch's character. The young mother who reappears to reclaim her children is the rival of the withered “Antirosa” (as Punch first thinks he is to call her). Yet beneath their opposition lie disturbing analogues. Both women, after all, clearly prefer little Judy over the difficult and obdurate boy whom his biological mother still “cannot quite understand” in her letter to her husband (367). And, as the story's opening makes clear, the child's Indian ayah proves to be more maternal than either Mamma or Aunty Rosa. In The Jungle Books the love that both Mother Wolf and Messua display for one who is not their own offspring helps to enhance the uniqueness of Mowgli. Similarly, in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” the ayah's mother-love for Punch only reinforces his early sense of supremacy.

The ayah wants Punch to go to sleep, like the dozing Judy. But the boy refuses to be lulled without the compensation of a soothing fiction:

“No,” said Punch. “Punch-baba wants the story about the Ranee that turned into a tiger. Meeta must tell it, and the hamal shall hide behind the door and make tiger-noises at the proper time.”

[324]

The little sahib has his way. Male voices are required to impersonate the ranee who will become a fierce tiger. Meeta tells an oft-told tale; when the hamal makes “the tiger-noises in twenty different keys” the reassurance seems complete (324). The voice of the metamorphosed ranee appears to reconcile the opposites Kipling's fictions will try to tame: human and animal; male and female; adult and child; the power briefly wielded by an imperious little master who does not yet understand his limits and the games devised for him by complacent, because loving, subordinates. Like Bagheera in The Jungle Books or like Queen Balkis in the Just So Stories [Just So Stories for Little Children], these subordinates manage to teach one who would be king how best to exercise the imagination that must compensate him for his later loss of power.

By orchestrating the storytelling in the nursery, little Punch can revel in the illusion of his total control. Yet the reader who glimpses more than the child is made uneasy, sensing that the tale being acted out may well carry some undisclosed bearing on Punch's future. Hints abound. When the ayah sighs “softly,” the narrator's voice intervenes only to explain that “the boy of the household was very dear to her heart” (324). When Punch wonders why Papa has not come, the ayah presents information that also remains half-glossed: “Punch-baba is going away. … In another week there will be no Punch-baba to pull my hair anymore” (324). Her self-pity seems to authenticate her love. But the little tyrant stays unshaken. He confidently assures her and Meeta that all of his retainers are bound to accompany him on a journey about which his parents have kept him uninformed. Lulled by the ayah's “interminable canticle,” Punch falls asleep at last, secure, unaware that the oneness that makes him feel so potent and self-sufficient is about to be terminated (325). The actual words chanted by the ayah are inconsequential. It is the sound of her canticle which matters. Yet out of this unintelligible, reassuring “genotext,” as Julia Kristeva would call it, Punch and the narrator, and Kipling behind them both, will have to carve out explanatory narratives, “phenotexts.”

The scene is set for the entrance of Punch and Judy's actual parents. The allotted week has elapsed, and Papa and Mamma bend over the cots in the nursery late at night before the day of departure, on which the children will finally be told that Meeta and the ayah cannot accompany them on the journey across the ocean. In a story like “Hansel and Gretel” (which Punch will presumably read at the house of the witchlike Aunty Rosa), the abandonment of children by their parents is justified by poverty and hunger. Here, too, economic considerations are raised. Papa uneasily refers to the “moderate” price of the lodgings where he and his wife will leave Punch and Judy; but his rationalizations cannot overcome his obvious misgivings about the impending act of desertion. We expect Mamma to give vent to emotions even more powerful than those that the ayah was compelled to mask in front of Punch. Her children are asleep; she senses her husband's agitation. At first glance, her pangs seem to resemble the ayah's: “‘The worst of it is that the children will grow up away from me,’ thought Mamma, but she did not say it aloud” (326). Is there a slight tinge of selfishness in her melancholy? Is she concerned about her own deprivation as much as that which her children might suffer away from home? She has already relied on a surrogate to do her mothering in the past; small wonder that Punch should soon view the new surrogate to whom the children will be entrusted as simply “a new white ayah” (331).

Perhaps even more noteworthy is the mother's silence. Her reservation cannot be heard by her husband. Only the narrator is privy to it. And indeed, unexpectedly, a wary narratorial “I” emerges out of nowhere to link the ayah (whom Punch himself had earlier heard sighing “softly”) to a mother who now may—or just as possibly may not—be crying “softly” to herself: “[Both parents] were standing over the cots in the nursery late at night, and I think that Mamma was crying softly” (326; emphasis added). The very “obliqueness” that Elliot Gilbert regards as the hallmark of Kipling's art of survival begins to shape this tale of a boy's psychological survival. Henry James, who welcomed the young Kipling as a fellow craftsman, might well have appreciated the artful placing of that conditional “I think.”

But if the depth of the mother's sadness is only slightly undermined by the tentativeness of the narrator's “I think,” her preference of Judy over Punch reverses the ayah's own priorities, as we soon discover: “After Papa had gone away, she knelt down by Judy's cot” (326). Just as she had screened her silent thoughts from her husband so does the mother wait for him to leave the nursery before signifying her preference for “my Ju.” Her action links the two excluded males, son and father, anticipating the later links between them and between Punch and Uncle Harry. But the mother's private ritual is observed by another witness besides the narrator, the ayah, and that observer's point of view is now appropriated by the narrator himself:

The ayah saw her and put up a prayer that the Memsahib might never find the love of her children taken away from her and given to a stranger.

[326]

There is no threat, obviously, that Punch will give his love to a tormentor like Aunty Rosa. Still, the ayah's fear that a stranger might disrupt the bonds that bind a mother to her child is nonetheless justified. For Punch, having learned to distrust and fear the hated Aunty Rosa, cannot but help identify this maternal replacement with the returning parent who wants to reclaim him as her own “darling boy” (364). She may be highly seductive, “young, frivolously young, and beautiful, with delicately flushed cheeks, eyes that shone like stars, and a voice that needed no appeal of outstretched arms to draw little ones to her” (364). But six years have elapsed, and Punch is no longer little. Only his smaller sister responds instinctively to those outstretched arms: “Judy ran straight to her, but Black Sheep hesitated” (364).

Judy's identification with her mother has remained intact, for the little girl was allowed “straight” access to Aunty Rosa's “heart” (336). But “the extra boy about the house” could only count on Uncle Harry for identification and support (336). Kipling deliberately places the children's joint mourning for their lost mother at the end of the first section of his story in direct apposition to the lonely Punch's horror on hearing the piercing scream “Uncle Harry is dead!” at the end of the second segment (335, 350). Renamed “Black Sheep” by Aunty Rosa, told “that he ought to be beaten by a man” (363) for sins her whippings cannot correct, Punch is at last given a reprieve by still another male figure, a visiting doctor from India who detects his near-blindness. In Something of Myself, significantly enough, there is the added diagnosis of some “sort of nervous break-down” (17); what is more, the diagnostician is an emissary from Rudyard's “beloved Aunt” Georgiana Burne-Jones, a kindly feminine presence who is never introduced in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” even though she is credited in the autobiography as having provided, “for a month each year,” a refuge from “the Woman” that became the “paradise which I verily believe saved me” (11).

Upon his mother's return, Punch remains understandably wary about the “beautiful woman” who treats him—the spurned miscreant and devil-child—“as though he were a small God” (“Baa Baa, Black Sheep” 366). In the last of the Jungle Book stories, “The Spring Running,” Messua sinks to her feet before the naked adolescent who stands at the threshold of her cottage: “It is a godling of the woods! Ahai!” The narrator confirms her sense of awe: the “strong, tall, and beautiful” male, he assures us, “might easily have been mistaken for some wild god of a jungle legend” (316). In Kipling's single “adult” Mowgli story, “In the Rukh,” written before the Jungle Book tales for children began to appear,² Mowgli seems even more overtly identified with a deity like Krishna; the German Muller (presumably named after Max Muller, the authority on comparative religion) awkwardly cites Swinburne to convey his own awe at finding a reincarnated divinity in a rain forest that “is older dan der gods” (216). But in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” Punch cannot tap the sense of omnipotence that he has lost in India upon his separation from the worshipful ayah. Muller regards Mowgli as the product of a throwback, “an anachronism, for he is before der Iron Age, and der Stone Age” (216). To regain the primitive symbiosis that strikes the displaced Punch as being just as anachronistic, the twelve-year-old tries to infantilize himself. He regresses into an earlier mode of behavior by soiling himself, as a small child would.

Punch's defiant act of regression allows him to test his mother's tolerance. If his Mother is indeed the “sister, comforter, and friend” she professes to be, she ought not to be angry at his reversion, but will instead herself revert to the language of his Indian childhood by lightheartedly calling him a “little pagal.” He strides through the ditch, deliberately “mires himself to the knees,” and shouts: “Mother, dear, … I'm just as dirty as I can pos-sib-ly be!” As Punch proudly confirms to his little sister, Mamma has passed his test:

“Then change your clothes as quickly as you pos-sib-ly can!” Mother's clear voice rings out from the house. “And don't be a little pagal!”

“There! 'Told you so,” says Punch. “It's all different now, and we are just as much mother's as if she had never gone.”

[368]

Yet if Punch is as much Mother's as ever, how much is that “much”? The satisfied perspective of an adolescent who wants to reassume his place as a child is immediately corrected by an adult narrator who insists on the permanence of marks that no boyish bravado can erase.

The narrator's qualification of Punch's point of view introduces a sobering perspective similar to that which Kipling was to adopt, two years later, in The Light That Failed:

Not altogether, O Punch, for when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge; though it may turn darkened eyes for a while to the light, and teach Faith where no Faith was.

[368]

In The Light That Failed, where this note of bitterness is extended, childhood merely becomes a prolegomenon for the later crippling of a failed artist and soldier. The blinded Dick Heldar cannot survive in an adult world where he must forsake his artistic ambitions and act out, instead, a suicidal fantasy. The myopic Punch, however, is at least given the opportunity to survive. And, what is more, he may even have a chance to become someone like Kipling. The overconfident child-voice and the narrator's more guarded utterance in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” would, after all, eventually be blended in those stories for children that came to rely on a subtle traffic between wishfulness and disenchantment.

“Baa Baa, Black Sheep” thus led Kipling to both The Light That Failed and his subsequent fictions for children. In dramatizing the damage caused by a warfare between masculine and feminine elements, Kipling's novel ostensibly returns to the quasi-adolescent bonds between the soldier-brothers of the earlier stories. Destroyed by the combined efforts of Maisie, Bessie, and the Red-Haired Girl, the maimed Heldar, prematurely gray and with the tired “face of an old man” (329), must gratefully expire in the arms of his male friend Torpenhow. But in charting Dick Heldar's thwarted movement from childhood attachments to adult relationships, the novel continues to pursue the close examination of a boy's psychology first begun in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” and later expanded in the Mowgli stories and Kim.

In The Light That Failed Kipling accentuates the negative aspects of a boy's development. Indeed, Dick's repeatedly unsuccessful confrontations with female power make him a far more pathetic figure than Punch, whose name is that of the long-nosed puppet noted for his sadistic wife-beating and aggressive “breaches of decorum” (Cruikshank 24). Although Kipling's Punch is himself beaten as severely as his puppet namesake, he also retains the pulcinello's angry energy. His aggressiveness and resourcefulness contrast with the passivity of his little sister Judy (who, though seemingly exempt from the anger directed at those who prefer her to Punch—Mother and Aunty Rosa—nonetheless bears the name of the traditional victim of the Punch and Judy shows). By way of contrast, the very beginning of The Light That Failed stresses Dick's subordination to the imperious little girl who nearly blinds him by shooting a pistol in his face. The fearless fellow orphan who is Dick's “companion in bondage” (4) to Mrs. Jennett (the Aunty Rosa figure now “incorrectly supposed to stand in place of a mother” [2] to both children) is by far the sturdier of the two. Whereas Dick deflects his need for nurturance on Maisie, she transfers her own need for a mother to the male goat she has endowed with the maternal name “Amomma.” The goat easily survives swallowing “two loaded pin-fire cartridges” (7), but Dick cannot as easily digest female aggression, either as a boy or as a man.

The Light That Failed might well have been entitled “The Growth That Failed.” For Dick Heldar remains an arrested adolescent, incapable of growing beyond the level at which Kipling will leave future boy heroes such as Mowgli or Kim, incapable even of Punch's tenuous reconciliation with the “sister, comforter, and friend” he needs to find in his mother. Yet despite its negativity and self-pity, the novel Kipling chose to dedicate to his mother also seems to display his understanding that creativity—his own as much as that of his artist hero—requires a reinstatement of powers first activated in a child's relation to its primary parent. In his important revaluation of the “thematics and poetics” of The Light That Failed, Robert Caserio shows how the novel subordinates a boyish ambition to “master the world” to an acceptance of the vulnerability and failure deeply feared by the male who wants to cling to his desire for domination (212, 208). Caserio thus considers Maisie's female friend, the nameless Impressionist who destroys her hurtful sketch of Dick “both to save him pain and to surrender her own defensive aggression,” not just as Heldar's antagonist, but rather also as an artist figure who anticipates a role Kipling himself now knows he must adopt (208).

The hint of a possible synthesis between a childish desire for omnipotence and an adult acceptance of limits was already anticipated in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” itself, where the chanting ayah indulged Punch's wishful belief in his power while trying to prepare him for his impending loss and alienation. Even the returning mother is, paradoxically enough, allowed to provide a bridge between innocence and experience. Her resolute voice provides an alternative to the final utterances of both Punch and the narrator by combining the cheerful faith of the one with the realism of the other. In mimicking the boy's speech with her own “pos-sib-ly,” the mother turns into a game what could potentially have been construed as a defiance to her authority. But by also demanding an immediate change of clothes, she can at the same time insist on his need to submit to her superior awareness.

A similar combination of playfulness with authority would soon animate Kipling's stories for children, especially the Just So Stories he first told to tiny Effie. There, Kipling's joyous, even raucous, participation in children's games remains inseparable from a parental/authorial stance that gently affirms its superior knowledge. As the creator of stories that use repetition to satisfy the child's hunger to have them “told just so,” Kipling resembles the mother who fulfills Punch's boastful “'Told you so” to Judy. The preamble to his first trio of “Just So Stories” in 1897 suggests that Kipling had come to treat the child's participation in bedtime stories with the same mixture of respect and authority as the ayah who had deferred to Punch's need in his own suspended condition between contrary states: “You could alter and change [afternoon stories] as much as you pleased; but in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them,—the whale tale, the camel tale, and the rhinoceros tale” (“The ‘Just-So’ Stories” 89).

Just as Meeta's tale about the ranee who became a tiger appeals to a much younger Punch because of its familiarity, so does the mother's last speech in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” reconfirm and revalidate an older child's memories. Her willing reversion to a word like pagal helps, in fact, to reintroduce the lost Indian household world of Meeta and the ayah that the aged Kipling still gratefully remembered in the opening pages of Something of Myself. At the same time, however, the mother demands an adaptation to the changed circumstances brought about by the separation her child has undergone. Mere regression is not possible for its own sake. New clothes are required to replace those soiled in the muddy ditch—clothes appropriate for Punch's older self. Limits and regulations must be observed, lest a too anarchic Punch—or a Mowgli or Beetle or defiant Elephant's Child—be seduced into thinking that he can behave like the Bandar-log or a Wild Thing. Despite his suppressed anger at the mother for the damage done by her desertion, Kipling prefers to accentuate the positive. He thus endows her, albeit tentatively, with the restorative powers he will himself adopt as a parent and writer.³ His art must be placed in service of the Queen.

The insights gained in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” and The Light That Failed were therefore best carried out in works in which child protagonists, whether boys like Mowgli and Kim or girls like Taffy, who is credited with inventing the alphabet in the Just So Stories, are simultaneously treated as highly resourceful and yet highly vulnerable. Mowgli can act out a child reader's boldest fantasies of imperial domination; at the same time, however, this confident master planner, who can enlist the might of Hathi and the cool intelligence of Kaa in coordinating strategic maneuvers that would do credit to a Napoleon, must come to accept that a man-cub has no place in the elementary world of the jungle. Conversely, Taffimai or Taffy, the little daughter and “Best Beloved” of a primitive Neolithic man, is at once an abject failure (since her first pictograph communicates a message totally contrary to the one she had wanted to convey) and a budding genius whose “great invention” will someday be perfected as an art called “writing” (The Jungle Books and Just So Stories 384).

It seems hardly arbitrary that Mowgli, abandoned by his actual woodcutter parents (as Hansel and Gretel were in the Grimm fairy tale), should be compensated for that severance by a proliferation of parental surrogates and by two adopted mothers, Raksha (the Demon) and the wealthy Messua, all of whom jealously vie over the boy. Nor is it arbitrary that Taffy's first letter, though misread by its recipient, should demand that her mother replace the broken weapon that her father is so assiduously trying to repair. From Kipling's first published children's story, “The Potted Princess,” which appeared in St. Nicholas magazine in January 1893, less than a month after the birth of his own Best Beloved, Josephine, to Rewards and Fairies (1910), the writer who never forgot his boyhood deprivations also made sure to remember—and inscribe—the continuing feminine attachments on which his creativity depended.

It seems significant that only a few weeks after the birth of his “first child and daughter,” Kipling should have published in St. Nicholas magazine an Indian children's story which is immediately presented as “the true tale that was told to Punch and Judy, his sister, by their nurse, in the city of Bombay,” as they wait “for their mother to come back from her evening drive” (“The Potted Princess” 164). The mother's absence of six painful years in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” has been compressed into a short evening drive. And yet Kipling's first story for children is in many ways a sequel to the earlier story about the child he had once been. When, at the end of “The Potted Princess,” Mamma returns, the children try to repeat the ayah's story for her benefit, while she is hurriedly changing her clothes to dress for dinner.

But Punch and Judy are not as skilled storytellers as the ayah. Even without a knowledge of the plot of “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” an adult reader of “The Potted Princess” can detect meanings that neither the child auditors in the tale nor the child readers of St. Nicholas magazine could fathom. The ayah's story is clearly intended as a compensatory fiction. It is designed to offset Punch's exaggerated sense both of his vulnerability and of his importance. When the ayah tries to soothe an angry pink crane by chanting a Hindustani song about another, thorn-pricked crane whose “life went away tullaka-katullaka—drop by drop,” Punch chases the bird, pricks himself, and promptly acquires “two tiny pink scratches” he grandiosely identifies with his own waning life blood: “‘Ohoo!’ said Punch, looking at both his fat little legs together, ‘Perhaps I shall die!’” (164, 165). The boy's intimations of mortality are short-lived, but his pain has caused Judy to cry. To soothe her and to give the boy a stricter sense of limitations, the ayah immediately plunges into a tale never before heard by the children: “And the Rajah had a daughter …” (165).

The writer who had so recently acquired a daughter has the ayah tell a story that is deliberately antifantastic. Although the tale is set in a magical era when sorcerers could turn “men into tigers and elephants” (165), the princess whom a prince must release turns out to have been shut up in a “grain-jar” that proves to be utterly ordinary. As the narrative unfolds, Punch becomes its sole auditor, since Judy, waiting for her mother, has lost interest in the story. Just as the ayah tricks Punch into assuming that the jar will have “to be opened by magic,” so do the rajah's sorcerers in the story trick all the princess's suitors but one into believing that, to offset some powerful spell, they will have to consult “the magicians in their fathers' courts, and holy men in caves” (166). By engaging in “magic charm-work which cannot last,” these suitors become “all wearied out”; but the one prince of “low birth” whose father “married the daughter of a potter” and who has always remained “the son of his mother” requires no such elaborate schooling (167, 166). Instructed by “his mother, the Ranee,” this commonsensical young man succeeds where all others have failed:

‘At the very last, … the Potter-Prince came into the plain alone, without even one little talking beast or wise bird, and all the people made jokes at him. But he walked to the grain-jar and cried, ‘A pot is a pot, and I am the son of a potter!’ and he put his two hands upon the grain-jar's cover and he lifted it up, and the Princess came out! Then the people said, ‘This is very great magic indeed’; and they began to chase the holy men and the talking beasts up and down, meaning to kill them. But the Rajah's magicians said: ‘This is no magic at all, for we did not put any charm upon the jar. It was a common grain-jar; and it is a common grain-jar such as they buy in the bazar; and a child might have lifted the cover one year ago, or on any day since that day. …’”

[168]

When the ayah ends her tale as abruptly as she had plunged into it, Punch seems taken aback by the anticlimactic rebuff of his expectations. He wants to cling to the magical thinking of the child. The potter-prince who lifted the jar's lid is insufficiently heroic to suit the boy:

There was a long silence at the end of the tale.

“But the charms were very strong,” said Punch, doubtfully.

“They were only words, and how could they touch the pot? Could words turn you into a tiger, Punch baba?”

“No. I am Punch.”

“Even so,” said the ayah. “If the pot had been charmed, a charm would have opened it. But it was a common, bazar pot. What did it know of charms? It opened to a hand on the cover.”

“Oh!” said Punch; and then he began to laugh, and Judy followed his example. “Now I quite understand. I will tell it to mamma.”

[169]

Yet Punch's incomplete mastery of the ayah's cautionary tale becomes evident when he tries to relay her narrative to his mother. As Punch, with Judy's assistance, tries to re-create the tale, the children only succeed in befuddling their listener: “as they began in the middle and put the beginning first, and then began at the end and put the middle last, she became a little confused” (169). Eager to dramatize what he has been unable to present verbally, Punch reaches for an “eau-de-cologne bottle that he was strictly forbidden to touch,” and, in his excitement, spills its contents “down the front of his dress, shouting, ‘A pot is a pot, and I am the son of a potter!’” (169). Once again, it would seem, the boy who tries to impress his mother will be forced to change his clothes.

The Punch of “The Potted Princess” is the same naive pagal of the opening of “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.” But Kipling has by now changed his own clothes. By having the ayah show Punch that a story about female imprisonment has a considerable bearing on the identity of a boy still wearing a “dress” like his sister Judy, Kipling can bypass his earlier emphasis on “manlydom” and recover a femininity he now sees as crucial to his creativity. The potter-prince's mother, the low-born ranee who is nothing but the ayah's self-personation, has prepared her boy for a task that hardly proves to be epic. There is no need for male acts of prowess or male incantations or charms; instead, what is called for is the kind of realism that had become the mark of the literature for girls which Kipling found in the much-prized “bound copy of Aunt Judy's Magazine” he saved until the end of his life and in the women writers he evokes so fondly in Something About Myself as having had such an impact on his young mind: Mrs. Ewing's “history of real people and real things” that he knew “almost by heart,” “Mrs. Gatty's Parables of Nature which I imitated,” as well as “those good spirits” whose works he avidly devoured but whom he never was “lucky enough” to meet personally, Jean Ingelow and Christina Rossetti (7, 33, 22).

In the ayah's story, a mother's son releases and gains for himself the femininity his stereotypical male rivals were unable to free. And Punch, who comes to recognize, however vaguely, that pleasure and value may reside in stories that limit attainment to “common” skills, has himself been released from an excessive self-projection as an all-powerful male. Just as the son of John Lockwood Kipling, the designer who worked in a Staffordshire pottery when he first met Alice Lockwood in the hamlet of Rudyard, may well have aggrandized himself as a boy by fantasizing that he was the child of more exalted parents, so would the fictional Punch clearly have preferred to be the recipient of a “strong magic” that might have encouraged him “to go out and kill giants and dragons, and cut off their heads” (“The Potted Princess” 166). Yet he is willing to see himself as an ordinary potter-prince in a story which shows him that the ordinary can, under proper circumstances, prove extraordinary in its own right. The ayah has, after all, made sure not to injure Punch's sense of self-importance.⁴ She spares him the embarrassment of correcting some of his misconceptions.⁵ Nonetheless, it seems significant that this masculine little boy should find himself relaying the story told by one adult woman to another adult woman; moreover, as intermediary between ayah and mother, he also accepts his younger sister as conarrator, though Judy has grasped far less of the story's import than he did and even lacks his own minimal skills as a storyteller.

Words, Punch admits at this stage of his early life, cannot convert him—or a ranee—into a tiger. Words even fail him when he tries to transform the ayah's story into a narrative of his own. Still, he has enjoyed his nurse's liberating joke so exceedingly that, in his excitement, the boy still in pinafores spills his mother's perfume not on her but on himself. “The Potted Princess” depicts a baptism of sorts. The feminine “essence,” for which Beerbohm so cruelly mocked Kipling, now bathes a very different writer. Kipling was ready to go beyond his misogynist and antimatriarchal fictions for adults in the restorative children's stories that tumbled from his brain after the composition of “The Potted Princess.”

In the first of the stories that “had to be told just so” for Effie, the “single, solitary shipwrecked mariner,” who proves as practical as the potter-prince, is afloat on the wide sea because he “had his mother's leave to paddle or else he would never have done it, because he was a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity” (“The ‘Just-So’ Stories” 91). As Kipling playfully suggests here, the sailor who prances and dances and bangs and clangs is not really a man at all but rather a resourceful little boy who can act as the grown-up author's link to his child auditor. His prowess is celebrated. It results, after all, in an evolutionary change by which whales “nowadays” are prevented from eating “men or boys or girls” (93). Still, this hero's mastery of the aggressive whale merely culminates with his return “home to his mother, who had given him leave to trail his toes in the water” (93).

Even after the death of his “American” daughter removed for Kipling the kind of creative interaction he dramatized in “How the Alphabet Was Made,” he was able to tap the creative power shared by Taffy and her “Daddy.” (When Taffy notes that “Mum shuts one's mouth up,” her father draws the carp mouth open: “That makes Ma-ma-ma!” [The Jungle Books and Just So Stories 392].) Whether Kipling's boy heroes are called Mowgli or Kim or Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, or even given the seeming adult stature of King Solomon (or, Suleiman-bin-Daoud, as Kipling prefers to call that wise and all-powerful magician), their resourcefulness inevitably is linked to female power. In this sense, the title of the story Kipling placed last in his first Jungle Book seems apt: humans and animals remain coequal “Servants of the Queen.” Mowgli must obtain Messua's approval before he can approach “the girl in a white cloth” and say his last farewell to his jungle companions. Similarly, the fairies who want to leave England in “‘Dymchurch Flit’” must rely on the permission of the Widow Whitgift to depart: “She was all their dependence. 'Thout her Leave an' Good-will they could not pass; for she was the Mother” (Puck of Pook's Hill 191).

Kipling, too, depended on maternal goodwill to sanction the exile he came to accept. In “The Enemies to Each Other,” the retelling of Paradise Lost that he placed at the beginning of his 1924 volume of Debits and Credits, Lady Eve compounds the mistakes that led to the expulsion from Eden. Asked by the peacock “which is greater, the mother or the child,” she replies, “Of a surety, the mother” (19), and, emboldened, tears down the mirror-altar in which Adam had sought to worship himself. When Adam asks “my Co-equal” why she has stripped him of his self-respect, Eve replies: “Because it has been revealed that in Me is all excellence and increase, splendour, terror and power. Bow down and worship” (20). Only laughter and the acceptance of gender strife finally can cause both partners to face the limitations of their existence. Still, Eve is reluctant to give up a sense of her innate superiority to Adam. Although she allows that she is “no goddess in any sort, but the mate of this mere Man whom, in spite of all, I love,” she cannot forbear to regale the peacock “with tales of the stupidity and childishness of our pure Forefather” (22). Eve's, however, is a story for grown-ups. And even we can only tell one tale at a time.

Notes

1. In his recent biography of Kipling, Martin Seymour-Smith wonders: “How are we to explain the antipathy of Max Beerbohm?” Yet in confronting his own question (strangely situated in a discussion of Stalky, which he, but not Beerbohm, excoriates as “one of the bad books” [273]), Seymour-Smith comes up with no answers. Instead, he prefers to attack the “Kiplingites” for ignoring Beerbohm's persistent criticism of Kipling in no less than nine caricatures, “P.C., X, 36,” and two essays. Seymour-Smith, who maintains that Kipling suppressed not only all “homosexual tendencies in himself” but also “any tenderness or ‘femininity’” (103), seems uninterested in all of the children's books except for Stalky and, to a lesser extent, Kim, which he reads as a “safe” indulgence on Kipling's part “of paedophilic emotions” (303). His inattention to the Just So Stories or even The Jungle Books is deplorable, since a closer look at them would have greatly complicated his stance toward Kipling's suppressed femininity. Given his own thesis, Seymour-Smith might have easily answered his question about Beerbohm by analyzing the caption of Beerbohm's cartoon, “De Arte Poetica. J.B. to R.K.,” in which John Bull, who misreads Shakespeare and Tennyson as masculine writers, praises Kipling for being more “wholesome” than Byron or Shelley. As McElderry implies, Beerbohm could not forgive Kipling for supplying “manly vigor” as the “proper antidote” to a Wildean aestheticism to which both men had been temperamentally attracted but which Kipling, unlike Beerbohm, felt compelled to deny (134).

2. “Toomai of the Elephants,” which appeared in the December 1893 issue of St. Nicholas, preceded the publication, also in St. Nicholas, of “Tiger-Tiger!” and “Mowgli and His Brothers.”

3. Randall Jarrell's remarks about Kipling's inability to include his parents in his revenge fantasies are extremely astute: “From the father's bas-reliefs for Kim to the mother's ‘There's no Mother in Poetry, my dear,’ when the son got angry at her criticism of his poems—from beginning to end they are bewitching; you cannot read about them without wanting to live with them; they were the best of parents. It is this that made Kipling what he was: if they had been the worst of parents, even fairly bad parents, even ordinary parents, it would all have made sense, Kipling himself could have made sense out of it. As it was, his world had been torn in two and he himself torn in two; for under the part of him that extenuated everything, blamed for nothing, there was certainly a part that extenuated nothing, blamed for everything—a part whose existence he never admitted, most especially not to himself” (341).

4. The ayah informs Punch that there “was a new star” on the night of his birth. But her confirmation of the boy's sense of being special also carries an ominous counterweight: “I saw it. A great star with a fiery tail all across the sky. Punch will travel far” (165). Does Kipling mean to set this story around the same time in which the opening of “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” takes place? The allusion to a comet, the traditional harbinger of disaster, would suggest that once again the ayah knows about the changes that will come about after Punch's travel “far” beyond India.

5. When she tells Punch that the “prince of low birth was so lowly that the little boys of the city driving the cattle to pasture threw mud at him,” her listener fails to grasp the degradation: “‘Ah!’ said Punch, ‘mud is nice. Did they hit him?’” (166). The ayah avoids an answer by introducing the prince's mother, the ranee, in the unqueenly activity of “gathering sticks to cook bread” (167). The cross-reference to “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” where Punch mires himself in mud to forget his own degradation, seems intentional.

Works Cited

Beerbohm, Max. A Christmas Garland. London: William Heinemann, 1922.

———. “Kipling's Entire.” In Around Theatres. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953.

Carrington, C. E. The Life of Rudyard Kipling. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1955.

Caserio, Robert L. “Kipling in the Light of Failure.” Grand Street 5 (1986): 179-212.

Cruikshank, George. Punch and Judy, with Twenty-Four Illustrations. London: George Bell and Sons, 1881.

Jarrell, Randall. “On Preparing to Read Kipling.” In Kipling, Auden and Co.: Essays and Reviews (1935-1964). New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980.

Kipling, Rudyard. “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.” Vol. 6 of The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913.

———. “The Enemies to Each Other.” Vol. 31 of The Writings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926.

———. “In the Rukh.” In All the Mowgli Stories. London: Macmillan, 1964.

———. The Jungle Books and Just So Stories. New York: Bantam Books, 1986.

———. “The ‘Just-So’ Stories.” St. Nicholas 25 (December 1897): 89-93.

———. The Light That Failed. Vol. 9 of The Writings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913.

———. “The Man Who Would Be King.” In The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Stories. Vol. 5 of The Writings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913.

———. “The Potted Princess.” St. Nicholas 20 (January 1893): 164-69.

———. Puck of Pook's Hill, ed. Sarah Wintle. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987.

———. Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown. London: Macmillan, 1937.

———. The Story of the Gadsbys. Vol. 6 of The Writings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Intro. Leon S. Roudiez; trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

McElderry, Jr., Bruce R. Max Beerbohm. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972.

Seymour-Smith, Martin. Rudyard Kipling. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. New York: Viking Press, 1978.