George Papanikos

Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 4, Issue 2 - October 2002

Mary Kingsley: A Case Study in Intellectual and Cultural Rebellion in Victorian Britain

Many present day-historians and theorists, in identifying a consolidated establishment whereby science-as-culture supported Victorian imperialism and vice versa, have neglected the individual in favor of more fashionable processes; this study aims to reclaim it. An examination of eccentric Victorian adventurers—the present study focuses on Mary Kingsley—dents the myth of European consensus advanced most stridently by postcolonial theorists, but also (insofar as they recognize the imperial establishment) certain historians.

These travelers courted the 'other' found on the margins of empire and articulated their eccentricities largely in opposition to Victorian convention, thus simultaneously reinforcing and undermining discursively-sanctioned perceptions. They share, most significantly, a strand of individualism—often expressed dramatically and thus disregarded by theorists and historians alike—whose identification profoundly alters the monolithic construction of the Victorian establishment. This individualism is identified here chiefly through primary documents, including published travel narratives as well as manuscripts consulted at the British Library and Royal Geographical Society archives in London, England.

Mary Kingsley's career as an African explorer, brief though it was, stands as a case study in marginality, that concept oft-cited by contemporary historians.¹ It was peculiar circumstance that allowed Kingsley to leave Britain in the first place: the consecutive deaths, only two and a half months apart, of first her father George Kingsley and then mother Mary Bailey Kingsley left twenty-nine year old Mary—who, by all accounts, spent her first three decades confined to the family residence, either nursing the ailing mother or immersing herself in books—essentially free of domestic responsibilities.²

During the last half of 1892, her first voyage, ostensibly a health furlough, brought Mary Kingsley to the Canary Islands, whose proximity to the mainland allowed her to take brief jaunts to and, at the very least, set foot upon Africa. Here also she encountered for the first time the rough-hewn English traders to whom she would dedicate the last years of her life. Indeed, she was so smitten with the traders of the West Coast that she adopted their guise herself a year later during her first extended visit to the mainland of Africa. Kingsley's most well-known voyage—the one on which her two major books are based—took her again to West Africa in 1895. The eccentric traveler spent the next five years in the public eye. She wrote Travels in West Africa (London: Macmillan, 1897), West African Studies (London: Macmillan, 1899), and, for a more general audience, The Story of West Africa (London: Horace Marshall, 1900), not to mention numerous articles; she lectured all over Britain on subjects ranging from native culture and religion to colonial administration; she became a spokesperson for trading interests based in Liverpool. Mary Kingsley made one last voyage in 1900, this time to South Africa where she nursed Boer prisoners-of-war at Simon's Town until enteric fever claimed her.

Kingsley would not, however, be forgotten after her death. Quite the opposite, in fact, she became a national hero ranking alongside Florence Nightingale. In the preface to Katherine Frank's A Voyager Out, Rosellen Brown is direct in asserting that "Mary Kingsley is a heroine English children have grown up on."³ But to lionize is to distill and often distort reality in favor of the ideal; thus the Mary Kingsley of myth is necessarily two-dimensional. Even intimate friend Alice Stopford Green defers to archetype and eulogized Kingsley as "a skilled nurse, a good cook, a fine needlewoman, an accomplished housewife,"⁴ a rather liberal interpretation of the spinster's service to brother Charles.

In this way, Kingsley's individual achievements were—and are—minimized and her value gauged only as an example of her type, in this instance the Victorian woman. Thus the Morning Leader bravely announces in obituary that "Mary Kingsley the woman will hold a much more important place than Mary Kingsley the traveler."⁵ Whereas Mary Kingsley the woman was made central to Victorian Britain's conception of femininity, Mary Kingsley the traveler was marginal both scientifically and politically.

In the realm of science, Kingsley's interests were largely ethnographic⁶ and her experience was appropriately typified by her complex relationship with Primitive Culture author and armchair theorist Professor Edward Burnett Tylor. Despite the sincere respect she felt for Tylor, the same man who she idiosyncratically dubbed her 'great juju,' Kingsley was apt to express frustration with her role as mere data collector. After being "blown up" for not providing a specific photograph requested by the Professor, she confided to RGS Secretary John Scott Keltie in a letter, "I am not a wandering photographer." The exasperated traveler also coyly raised the specter of Victorian decorum in mentioning the "most improper songs" collected on the ground for Tylor in connection with his study of funeral custom.⁷

Kingsley's public career was similarly complex. Despite a decidedly eccentric style and a taste for the liberty afforded only on that exotic coast, Mary Kingsley was shortly after her return from that crucial third voyage drawn into a discourse that could only be conventional in tone and utterly English. Most significantly, this political dialogue precluded a return to West Africa.

In the most literal sense, Kingsley's political activism bound her to Britain and forestalled a projected return to her beloved coast. Her foray into politics was, despite the sincerity with which Kingsley gave herself to it,⁸ thus considered in the end to be at best a sideline. Furthermore, her participation—indeed, her partisanship—in the colonial discourse made the terms of Kingsley's criticism mundane. To the extent that the discourse was the establishment, the hut tax was irrelevant. The Crown Colony system was irrelevant. Ultimately, Mary Kingsley herself was irrelevant. As if mounted on a wall, Kingsley was rendered in two dimensions, made at once visible and assailable; she became a partisan in a debate that was, at its heart, a shill. By thus reducing the eccentric traveler to digestible material, the discourse overwhelmed and undermined Kingsley—and not as merely a woman, but as a personality—as certainly as it did the world at large.

Yet this is the Mary Kingsley who bedazzles and frustrates late-twentieth century historians, as sensitive as they are to both the obscure mechanisms of colonial discourse and the often-overlooked histories of 'marginal' peoples. Kingsley, situated at the intersection of the two, has enjoyed a terrific amount of attention in recent decades but has been only partially appreciated.

Feminist authors in particular, recognizing a woman successful in print as well as politics who enjoyed the freedom to travel alone into the wilderness of West Africa, have been eager to claim Kingsley, despite the traveler's deliberate distance from contemporary feminist issues, above all the question of suffrage. Frank acknowledges in A Voyager Out Kingsley's published and unpublished remarks on the subject—which consistently decry the suffragette movement—but never without a disclaimer. Elsewhere, significant issues such as the traveler's reluctance to contribute to the establishment of an African Society on the grounds that her role might embolden other women to take an interest (and "ladies must not be admitted"⁹) are dismissed with the unsubstantiated claim that such sentiments constituted a 'cultivated façade' and that Kingsley merely 'maintained the appearance of conforming to traditional women's roles.'¹⁰

Alison Blunt, in Travel, Gender, and Imperialism, comes closest to appreciating the complexity of not only Kingsley herself but also her milieu. Blunt's approach corrects the fundamental flaws in the feminist treatment of Mary Kingsley, while at the same time exhibiting certain idiosyncratic tendencies of the postcolonial camp. Like the feminists, she considers Kingsley's outward opposition to women's rights a betrayal but, in keeping with colonial discourse theory, refuses to excuse it by speculation. Instead Blunt condemns her subject, criticizing Kingsley's attitude towards European and, especially, indigenous women on the grounds that it was 'not transcended by a sensitivity to any common female experience.'¹¹ Furthermore, Blunt's conclusions suggest that Kingsley sought to substitute gender inferiority at home with racial superiority abroad, and that travel abroad, to West Africa specifically, was the mechanism whereby she achieved this end.

Engaging such a tone, Blunt self-consciously eschews biography, particularly that of the feminist stripe. "Attempts to reclaim feminist 'heroines' from the past," she asserts, "perpetuate rather than challenge traditional masculinist and humanist categories of analysis by isolating individual subjects from their discursive contexts." Her concern is 'studying an individual without celebrating individuality' and thus Blunt's conception of Kingsley is 'discursively positioned rather than biographically defined.'¹²

Central to Blunt's project, however, is a correction of 'traditional' colonial discourse theory. Edward Said, she notes, advanced a conception of the Western imperial establishment that was too simplistic, a 'totalizing metanarrative.' Blunt, following the example of Lisa Lowe, attempts to avoid the monolithic model by focusing on ambivalence as well as historical and geographical specificity. Mary Kingsley thus becomes a 'historical site,' a window from which to view the historical processes outlined by colonial discourse theory.¹³ Once more, the individual is negligible.

Appropriately, then—and again unlike the feminists—Blunt does not seek to delineate Kingsley's legacy. Biographer Stephen Gwynn admits that it is elusive: "If her influence exists or existed, it is not traceable in material conditions, but in ways much less easy to define." Kingsley's rebellion is doubly hard to distinguish as it was not only subtle in itself but also obscured by all the mechanisms past and present outlined above. Hers was a challenge in style, but not because it lacked substance; the substance was simply impossible to translate into any language spoken by the establishment. Kingsley's dramatic and intuitive style suggests the emotional edge that permeated her persona.

Kingsley displayed this edge when she described the landscapes of her destinations. The awe-inspiring descriptions found in Travels in West Africa are often saturated with a morose impulse toward self-negation. Kingsley's stated reasons for her travels share this morbid tone. "My life," she wrote in a letter,

has been a comic one: dead tired and feeling no one had any need of me anymore, when my Mother and Father died within six weeks of each other in '92, and my Brother went off to the East, I went down to West Africa to die. West Africa amused me and was kind to me and was scientifically interesting—and did not want to kill me just then. I am in no hurry.¹⁵

Such sentiments, however, cloak the eccentric traveler's discovery of the self. Kingsley's suicidal mission was founded on the premise that she did not exist as a personality; earlier in the letter quoted above, she claimed, "The fact is I am no more a human being than a gust of wind is. I have never had a human individual life." The West African experience, and most significantly the realization that it was indeed filtered through an ego, was Mary Kingsley's redemption. This allowed her in 1899 to open a sketch of her life with the following, at once self-deprecating and self-aware: "My life can be written in very few lines. It is, and has been, and will be, one wholly without romance or variety in the proper sense of the word."¹⁶

If Kingsley's original lack of identity—born from a life of domestic service—was indeed imposed by the Victorian establishment, then her career in Africa was not the chauvinistic quest for superiority suggested by Alison Blunt but an attempt to transcend the very system that fabricated the 'binary oppositions' (i.e., 'masculine' and feminine,' 'domestic' and 'exotic') which the post-colonial camp hold responsible for conceptually dominating history ever since. Furthermore, Kingsley's shrewd manipulation of the unspoken assumptions of her circumstances, bound up as they were in the Victorian establishment, demonstrates an individual awareness whose existence in itself is sufficient to undermine an order dependent on smokescreens and subterfuge.¹⁷

REFERENCES

Primary sources examined include Kingsley's two major publications—Travels in West Africa and West African Studies—and items of correspondence housed at the British Library's Manuscripts Collection and the Royal Geographical Society. Stephen Gwynn's Life of Mary Kingsley, written thirty years after her death, is the earliest attempt at biography. While not as critical as later efforts (particularly those bound with post-colonial thought), it offers contemporary insight as well as otherwise-unpublished primary material—specifically letters passed between Kingsley and Gwynn, and one of Kingsley's last bits of correspondence, an illuminating letter sent to the editor of The New Africa. The latter half of the twentieth-century saw a resurgence of academic interest in the explorer and, along with it, a reappraisal of Kingsley in keeping with the new currents of intellectual thought—feminism and post-colonial theory. Katherine Frank's A Voyager Out was popular enough to merit a paperback edition, but many other books remained confined to academia. Of these, Lila Marz Harper's Solitary Travelers ("Mary H. Kingsley: In Pursuit of Fish and Fetish" concludes the larger study that incorporates other Victorian lady-travelers) and Alison Blunt's Travel, Gender, and Imperialism (which is dedicated entirely to Kingsley) have informed the present analysis. Deborah Birkett's Mary Kingsley: A Biographical Bibliography is helpful in locating Kingsley documents, both published and unpublished. Back
Her brother's travels to the Far East further reduced her obligations, although Kingsley would continue to serve him sporadically as housekeeper until her death. Back
Frank, p. xvii. Back
Quoted in Harper, p. 221. Emphasis added. Back
Quoted in Harper., p. 221. Back
Her other interest was biology; Kingsley collected specimens everywhere to return to her benefactor at the British Museum, Dr. Albert Charles Gunther. All told, she supplied the Museum with over a dozen rare specimens and discovered three new species of fish, all named after her: Ctenopoma kingsleye, Mormyrus kingsleyae, and Alestes kingsleyae. Frank, p. 222. Back
Mary Kingsley to John Scott Keltie, 13 April 1898, pp 101, 113, RGS Archives. Emphasis in original. Back
The following is not intended to undercut the authenticity of Kingsley's political activism. As an author and as a speaker, the eccentric traveler did indeed devote herself to furthering trading interests during the last years of the nineteenth century. Back
Quoted in Harper, p. 220. Emphasis in original. Back
Harper, p. 191. Back
Blunt, p. 85. Back
Blunt, p. 4, 163. Back
Blunt, p. 4-5, 25-6. Back
Gwynn, p. 259.
Quoted in Gwynn, p. 26. Back
Quoted in Gwynn, p. 25. Back
Her feigned furor over the propriety of her data collection for E.B. Tylor has been noted, but her insistence that "I am not a wandering photographer" stands in stark contrast to the contents of a letter addressed to Mrs. Farquharson—whose petition in favor of women's admission into the Royal Geographical Society was dismissed by Kingsley. Here she adopted the opposite position in order to excuse herself, writing, "I know I have no right to speak at all. I have never had a school education and in science I am only collector of specimens and as a traveler, though I have traveled in West Africa than any of my countrymen, still I have never fixed a point or taken an observation or in fact done any surveying work that entitles me to be called a geographer." Mary Kingsley to Mrs. Farquharson, 26 November 1899, pp 101, 113, RGS Archives. Back

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