Lispeth

"Lispeth" is a short story published in 1886 by the English author Rudyard Kipling. First appearing in the Civil and Military Gazette newspaper, "Lispeth" tells the story of a family of farmers struggling to survive in British-occupied India. "Lispeth" explores ideas of race as they relate to the attitudes of both European missionaries and the British Empire's indigenous subjects.

Sonoo and Jadeh are farmers living in Kotgarh, a valley community located around fifty miles outside Simla, the capital of the Himachal Pradesh province and "the summer seat of the British Government of India." They have a young daughter named Lispeth. Calamity strikes when the family's corn crops fail and their opium poppies are destroyed by bears.

Feeling betrayed by their religion and belief system, the family embraces the Christianity offered by the local missionaries. Unfortunately, their luck gets even worse after the conversion; Sonoo and Jadeh both die of cholera, leaving Lispeth an orphan. With nowhere else to turn, Lispeth is invited by the local Christian chaplain to serve as his wife's companion and servant.



Over time, Lispeth grows to five feet, ten inches. Each day, she goes on long walks, between twenty and thirty miles, between Kotgarh and Narkunda. The author refers to them as "little constitutionals," reflecting his admiration of the Kotgarh locals' athletic ability and Lispeth's particularly long stride as a tall woman. One day, she returns to the Christian Mission with an unconscious Englishman she came across on her walk. Excited to have found her "husband," Lispeth is severely chastised by the chaplain and his wife for having brought scandal on their family. In the eyes of the chaplain and his wife, the problem is not so much that Lispeth picked up a random man off the side of the road, but that the man is white and Lispeth is not.

Despite being accused of deep impropriety, Lispeth continues to spend time with the Englishman, whose occupation is vaguely defined. He seems to be a sort of amateur horticulturist and lepidopterist. The Englishman eventually recovers. Yet while he appreciates Lispeth's efforts to nurse him back to health, and although he finds her attractive, the Englishman says he must leave, for he has a fiancée back in England to whom he must return. In a misguided and rather cruel effort to avoid causing a scene, the chaplain's wife tells the Englishman he should promise his hand in marriage to Lispeth before departing.

Lispeth waits in agony for the Englishman's return. Tired of Lispeth's wailing and uncertainty, the chaplain's wife reveals her deception, telling Lispeth that a marriage between a white man and a non-white woman is "wrong and improper." Lispeth is angry, less because of the wife's racist views of miscegenation but more because of her lies. In response, Lispeth vows to leave the Mission, denounce Christianity, and return to her indigenous community.



Still eager to obtain a husband, Lispeth impulsively marries a wood-cutter who turns out to be viciously abusive. For the chaplain's wife's part, she has little sympathy for Lispeth, saying, "There is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of the heathen...and I believe that Lispeth was always at heart an infidel."

The author's own views of whether Lispeth is an innocent or an "infidel" are complicated by the fact the story is told to him by Lispeth herself. Rather dismissively, the author adds that Lispeth, "when she was sufficiently drunk, could sometimes be induced to tell the story of her first love-affair." Rather than view the story in simple binary terms--Lispeth was either a wounded maiden or a hussy "native," the missionaries either noble and well-intentioned or wicked and hypocritical--the scholar Harold Bloom examines the story in more explicitly imperial terms:

"While the denser of [Kipling's] contemporary English readers might have overlooked the irony and simply interpreted [Lispeth] as either an affirmation of their beliefs on miscegenation and the 'White Man's Burden' or a quaint tragedy about true love lost, perceptive readers were forced to ask themselves just what good the missionaries brought to this girl's life and whether the same holds true for the imperialist enterprise as a whole."



While the racial politics of Kipling's writing here and elsewhere is undeniably problematic by modern standards, it's true that he was one of the only Western writers at this time willing to relate stories from the perspective of non-white protagonists.