WAR OF NO PITY

War of No Pity

War of No Pity

Introduction

Christopher Herbert is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University. He is the author of three previous books, including Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery.

Herbert's analysis of Victorian and early modern writings about the Rebellion in terms of cultural "trauma" is thorough and largely convincing. Like John Kucich in Imperial Masochism, Herbert insightfully applies psychoanalytic theory to cultural phenomena (Kucich, 2006). He contends that the Rebellion was traumatic above all because it entailed for the British a "shock of horrified self-recognition".

Discussion

Thoughtful Victorians were not reacting just to the massacres carried out by the rebels; they were also reacting to the unleashing of unlimited "retribution" by British forces, and therefore to the revelation of a "heart of darkness" within supposedly civilized, Christian English souls. Even in texts that rationalize slaughtering the "mutineers," such as Lt. V. D. Majendie's “Up among the Pandies” (1859), there is a revulsion against uncontrolled "vengeance" and bloodshed. Majendie exhibits, writes Herbert, an "expressly traumatic split between two states of feeling or actually two opposed selves, a humanitarian one and a callous bloodthirsty one," which "exemplifies just the pattern of experience--of ambivalence carried to its utmost pitch--that forms the essential thematic of Mutiny literature" . Herbert shows how some version of that "Gothic" ambivalence characterized most British responses to the Rebellion. (Majendie, 1859)

War of No Pity is a vital and vitally important work of literary, cultural, and historical criticism, one that no student of the Victorian period can afford not to know. Christopher Herbert has done post-colonialists, Victorianists, and indeed anyone interested in modern violence a remarkable service in reading a vast amount of Mutiny literature and returning to tell the tale of it.

War of No Pity explicates the kind of violence ...