THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES: FRAUENFIGUREN IN KIPLINGS WERK

Kipling's depiction of women mirrors his own experiences and his personal dreams and fears; but like most of his middle-class contemporaries, he was also a victim of the delusions and prejudices about women common at the time. Thus we find, as an early ideal, the famous Mrs Hauksbee, who bears traits of Kipling's mother but is also a distinctly literary fin de siècle type, foreshadowing the witty motherly sphinxes of Wilde's and Shaw's comedies. "William the Conqueror", though modelled after a friend of the family, is another dream woman of Kipling's: the "woman of action." Maisie, the product of Kipling's disappointment with his first love, Flo Garrard, is again a figure typical of the time, the frigid femme fatale malgré lui. Besides women of dreams and nightmares we find, as a third group, the silent sufferers: Lispeth and her dusky sisters, and Badalia Herodsfoot, and the later, and much more complex, Mary Postgate, Grace Ashcroft, and Helen Turrell. In his mythological parables, finally, Kipling suggests that the antagonism between man and woman may be inevitable, but that it can be overcome by love — and humour.