Between Two Worlds: The Divided Self in Kipling’s Adolescents

Abstract

It would be difficult to say that Kipling’s sense of social ambivalence is any more pronounced in the Mowgli tales than it is in Light — so emphatic is the clash in Dick Heldar’s life between the culture of London and the Eastern milieu. However, it is certainly possible to argue that this motif receives a far more satisfactory treatment in the Mowgli stories than it did in the earlier works. At last Kipling was projecting his psychic drama into the age group with which he felt the fullest empathy, adolescents. Other factors were pertinent too. In Soldiers the psycho-cultural conflicts were too muted to reach aesthetically significant proportions, and in Light the arrantly biased and polemical tone prevented a really meaningful contest between the opposed forces. In the Mowgli stories, however, Kipling has greater success in utilizing his obsessive ambivalence because the conflicting claims on Mowgli are closer to possessing an equal status. Kipling still tips the scales in favour of one of the two worlds, of course, but this oversimplification is less objectionable in a fable than in a realistic work.