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SKIN, INTIMACY AND AUTHENTICITY

a
Michelle Aung Thin
a
University of Adelaide, Australia
Version of record first published: 12 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Michelle Aung Thin (2013): SKIN, INTIMACY AND AUTHENTICITY, Interventions:
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 15:1, 67-77

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 SKIN, INTIMACY AND AUTHENTICITY
Literary Representations of Anglo-Burmese Women in
The Lacquer Lady
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Michelle Aung Thin

University of Adelaide, Australia
................ In literary representations of ‘the other’ the borders that define how difference
Anglo-Burmese
itself is constructed are often hidden or unacknowledged. One senses these limits
authenticity in the absence of certain kinds of difference in literary texts. For example, British
colonialism is frequently portrayed in the English-language literary tradition, yet
intimacy
few novels have at their centre colonial Burma and even fewer an Anglo-Burmese
limit subject. Equally striking is the dearth of postcolonial scholarship in the area.
These literary and scholarly omissions seem to replicate colonial practices of
skin inclusion and exclusion based upon judgements about the author’s cultural
authenticity and choice of subject matter as well as adherence to European social
writing and moral codes. The Lacquer Lady, by F. Tennyson Jesse, is a rare example of a
novel set in colonial Burma with a mixed-race, Anglo-Burmese protagonist, yet
is overlooked by postcolonial literary critics. In this essay I will offer a reading of
The Lacquer Lady drawing on Didier Anzieu’s The Skin Ego (1989) and Imogen
Tyler’s essay Skin Tight (2001). In my reading, I will focus on the representation
of Fanny Moroni, the Anglo-Burmese figure, and consider the ways in which
intimacy and skin interact with the limit (a literal or metaphoric border that
informs subjectivity).
................

.....................................................................................
interventions, 2013
Vol. 15, No. 1, 67
77, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.771004
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
15 :1 68
.........................
In literary representations of ‘the other’ the borders that define how
difference itself is constructed are often hidden or unacknowledged. One
senses these limits in the absence of certain kinds of difference in literary
texts. For example, British colonialism is frequently portrayed in the English-
language literary tradition, yet few novels have at their centre colonial
1 Many Anglo- Burma and even fewer an Anglo-Burmese (or Anglo-Indian) subject.1 These
Indians migrated to omissions are not confined to commercial publishing. There are similar gaps
Burma post-
annexation, merging in the academic discipline of postcolonial studies. In his introduction to a
with the Anglo- recent special issue of Postcolonial Studies, Chua Beng Huat notes that little
Burmese population. attention has been paid by postcolonial scholars to the region even though it
This migration was
was highly colonized by Europeans. Chua gives two reasons for this: a
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internal, as Burma
was administered as privileging of the English language in postcolonial scholarship (most of the
a province of India. archive in Southeast Asia is untranslated from the vernacular); and the
traumatic rise of totalitarianism in many Southeast Asian nations post-
independence, which obscured colonial oppression. Certainly, most literary
representations of Burma deal with the country’s more recent political
2 I am thinking of history and the struggle to establish democracy.2 Equally striking is the
the novels of Wendy relative dearth of postcolonial scholarship in the area of mixed-race Anglo-
Law-Yone, in
particular Irrawaddy Burmese and Anglo-Indian experience. For example, the novel The Lacquer
Tango (2003). Lady by F. Tennyson Jesse, a text with an Anglo-Burmese protagonist that
recounts Burma’s formation as colony, has generally been overlooked by
postcolonial literary critics, while George Orwell’s canonical Burmese Days,
by comparison, has been frequently analysed. This general lack of scholar-
ship is all the more puzzling given the position of the mixed-race figure as an
‘icon’ of imperialism (Stoler 2006: 3).
Writing about the historicizing of Anglo-Indian identity, Adrian Carton
observes that mixed-race voices, such as Anglo-Burmese, are ‘deemed too
inauthentic to represent the voice of alterity’ and so are ‘lost to the
whitewash’ (Carton 2007: 144). In postcolonial scholarship perhaps these
voices are subsumed by the amorphous and vexed postcolonial concept of
hybridity. Yet such literary and scholarly omissions seem to replicate
colonial practices of inclusion and exclusion. The charge of inauthenticity
is typical of colonial discourses around mixed-race populations, where
authenticity is connected with an innate or intimate understanding of
European social and moral codes; this same strategy of exclusion, based
on a lack of authenticity (which supposedly revealed underlying psycholo-
gical or moral frailties) was practised across French, British and Dutch
colonial territories despite their ‘vastly different social and political land-
scapes’ (Stoler 2002: 80). Svetlana Boym (2000: 227) connects the authentic
with cultural intimacy, the ultimate form of belonging. She notes that
transparent, indisputable belonging is not only an ideal but also ideological,
sustaining a dominant culture or political system. As I have argued
elsewhere, authenticity still functions as a hidden limit in contemporary
 SKIN, INT IMACY AND AUTHENTICITY
Michelle Aung Thin
........................
69

constructions of difference, particularly forms that complicate rather than

clarify (Aung Thin 2010).
In my own novel, The Monsoon Bride (Aung Thin 2011), I write about
Anglo-Burmese subjects in 1930s Burma, exploring the affective complexity
of cultural belonging during the height of colonialism. In researching the
novel, what struck me repeatedly was how crucial the skin was to the
cultural intelligibility of the Anglo-Burmese subject. In British colonial
discourse, Anglo-Burmese skin is sometimes perceivable or visible and
sometimes not and this visibility/invisibility seems to be connected with
the charge of the inauthentic or authentic. Stoler writes that ‘physiological
attributes only signal the nonvisual and more salient distinctions on which
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racism rests’ (where racism relies on the assessment of difference) and these
distinctions are ‘cultural competencies . . . psychological propensities, moral
susceptibilities’ (Stoler 2002: 84). Perhaps the phenotypical ambiguity of
Burmese skin, its slipperiness in the context of identity, signals these cultural,
moral and political distinctions. Yet its closeness to both the European and
the Burmese
its capacity to contain both these modes of identification

complicates difference.
In this essay I will offer a reading of The Lacquer Lady, considering the
ways in which intimacy and skin interact with the limit
where limit can be
the skin, a literal border, as well as the ideas, myths and metaphors, and
affects that inform subjectivity. Originally published in 1929 and based upon
lived events, The Lacquer Lady was a popular success in its day,
transforming Mattie Calogreedy, Fanny’s real-life counterpart, into a
celebrity. Somerset Maugham describes a meeting with her in The Gentle-
man in the Parlour and I will compare his representation with that of Jesse’s.
The novel fictionalizes the interpersonal conflicts that precipitated the
1886 annexation of Burma and the revelation at its heart is that these
machinations were not played out among political or commercial leaders,
but rather between the young Moroni/Calogreedy and her French lover, a
commercial agent. On the surface, it would seem that the politics of sexuality
and sexual intimacy frame political events in Burma. Yet the way Moroni’s
skin is represented implies a different mode of intimacy where skin orders
and disorders colonial space, complicating and threatening the intelligibility
of difference upon which colonial order is based.
In The Skin Ego, Didier Anzieu announces that his work is motivated by
the need to ‘re-establish limits, restore some frontiers . . . that will produce
differentiation’ (1989: 8). In his concept of the skin ego, he proposes that
skin is the surface implicated in the formation of the Freudian ego; it
mediates the relationship between the subject and the external world,
enabling exchange, but also the formation of the individual psyche
the
limit of the self. The skin ego is, as Jay Prosser notes in his essay Skin
Memories, ‘as powerful a global concept as an individual one’ (2001: 54). As
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
15 :1 70
.........................
a literal, psychic and metaphoric border, the capacity to protect the essential
self, maintaining the individual as a discrete entity also allows the perception
of difference. For Anzieu, skin becomes ‘the everything in general and
nothing in particular that made every difference possible’ (Connor 2003: 39).
However, as Imogen Tyler points out in her essay Skin Tight (2001), some
bodies (in her analysis, specifically maternal ones) complicate the limit of the
self by blurring the distinction between self and other. The skin of a pregnant
woman is a skin in common with that of her child and thus images of
pregnancy were, until very recently, culturally prohibited. This unease is
related to the essential indivisibility of the individual whose skin forms a
strict limit. A maternal skin does not strictly limit but rather contains, and
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Tyler argues that the ‘taboo surrounding the representation of pregnant

women . . . is linked to the divisibility of the pregnant body’ (2001: 73).
Anglo-Burmese skin similarly blurs the line between self and other and in my
reading I will argue that F. Tennyson Jesse’s representation of Fanny
Moroni’s skin similarly ‘threatens to collapse a signifying system based on
the paternal law of differentiation’ (Doane in Tyler 2001: 73).
The term Anglo-Burmese was invented around the turn of the nineteenth
century and although, strictly speaking, it applied to those of British and
Burmese parentage, in practice it extended to any child of a European parent
and one of any ethnicity within Burma such as Shan, Karen or even Indian
(Koop 1960: 1
2). John Koop, a statistician who surveyed the Anglo-
Burmese community in the post-independence period (1948), preferred the
term Eurasian, as its vagueness better accommodated the complex ethnic and
cultural mixtures found in that population. In her article ‘Half-Cast: Staging
Race in British Burma’, Penny Edwards describes the term and the
taxonomic impulse that authorized the community as a ‘semantic notion
of a separate . . . identity’ (2002: 287). Anglo-Burmese were not necessarily a
community bound by a distinct culture, but rather were a group based upon
the formal legislation of difference.
The plethora of rules, formal and informal, intended to clarify the social
place of Anglo-Burmese instead deepened the ambiguity of their position.
Anglo-Burmese were kept at a distance from Europeans (and the Burmese)
through what Edwards (2002: 288) refers to as institutional barriers,
separate educational systems and biased employment practices. However,
in those institutions where the body was handled intimately, such as civic
hospitals, Europeans and Anglo-Burmese were treated in wards reserved for
them alone and kept apart from Burmese and Indians. The civil administra-
tion also linked mixed-race with domiciled white populations, considering
their political and socioeconomic interests to be identical (British Govern-
ment India 1934, 1935, 1936). Thus Anglo-Burmese were sometimes
separated from Europeans in Burma, but often connected or contiguous
with them. The complexity and subtlety of these distinctions are caught in
 SKIN, INT IMACY AND AUTHENTICITY
Michelle Aung Thin
........................
71

the attitudes of English characters to the half-caste men, Samuel and Francis,
in George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days. The protagonist Flory describes
Anglo-Burmese (or ‘yellow-bellies’) as typically asserting an essential ‘white-
ness’ or what he calls a ‘pretension to being Europeans’ (Orwell 2001: 126).
Despite his liberalism, Flory still considers such claims pathetic; to proclaim
such a dubious entitlement is to instantly undermine oneself, revealing
instead of concealing your difference (uncovering the yellow-belly). A true
European would know better. However, even this understanding of who is
‘classified as subject or citizen’ is not straightforward (Stoler 2002: 84). To
Elizabeth Lackersteen (an Englishwoman newly arrived in Burma), the sight
of Eurasian men living a dissolute life in public view of the Burmese is a ‘bad
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example . . . almost as bad as if one of us [genuine English] was like that’

(Orwell 2001: 125).
Formal and informal legislation of sexual morality
in particular, female
sexuality
also distinguished between true Europeans and the Anglo-
Burmese. Rangoon liquor licences were revoked for businesses employing
European barmaids if they served native and mixed-race men, but these same
white women were still permitted to work in non-public roles, such as
cleaning or setting up. The reason for this legislation, or so the authorities
insisted, was the discomfort of such women in serving ‘natives’ and mixed-
race men. Those domiciled Englishwomen who actively ‘solicited coolies in
public’ for sex were officially pathologized as cases of ‘nymphomania’
(Ballhatchet 1980: 139). Legislation preserved the myth of white female
virtue. By contrast, Anglo-Burmese women were characterized as sexually
available. Cedric Dover, in his 1937 defence of the mixed-race ‘type’,
pathologizes the allegedly promiscuous behaviour of ‘half-caste’ women as a
hysterical reaction to religious repression, reinforcing the label of availability
and implying an innate inability to resist sexual temptation, a moral laxity
that is inherent and pathological (Dover 1937: 18).
In The Lacquer Lady F. Tennyson Jesse undertakes the telling of the ‘true
story of the causes which led to the Annexation of Upper Burma’ (1929: vii).
She insists upon the authenticity of her story in the novel’s foreword; the
whole tale was told to her by barrister Rodway Swinhoe, who was in Upper
Burma at the time of the Annexation and, as ‘Father of the Mandalay Bar’, a
reliable authority (1929: vii). In this sense, ‘authentic’ means factually
correct, given that the story relates how the personal affects political change.
Although her novel represents an alternate world in which feminine power
dominates, embodied by Fanny, the Burmese Queen and to a degree Agatha,
daughter of an English missionary and Fanny’s school friend, F. Tennyson
Jesse is nonetheless a white, well-born woman describing a culture she did
not know well and writing transgressively about subjectivities (Anglo-
Burmese and Burmese) of which she had little direct experience; thus her
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
15 :1 72
.........................
position is best read as colonial and, certainly, a colonial viewpoint informs
the novel.
The novel is set in the period leading up to and prior to annexation when
Lower Burma was already a British Territory but Upper Burma was still
under the control of the Burmese royal family. The narrative follows the
young, mixed-race Fanny Moroni from her school in England to her arrival
in Burma. Most of the narrative relates her relationship with the Burmese
royal family, in particular Queen Supaya-lat, and her love affair with
Bonvoisin, a French commercial agent. Bonvoisin is negotiating government
contracts in secret with the royal family on behalf of the French. He is one of
many Europeans in Mandalay (Italians, English and French
some of whom
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act on behalf of several nations at once, emphasizing the binary of

European
Burmese), all of whom are trying to extract lucrative commercial
concessions for their home nations. The Frenchman breaks his promise to
marry Fanny, citing her race as a barrier and chooses instead a young and
virginal Frenchwoman as his bride. Fanny revenges herself upon him by
exposing his secret contract between the French and the Burmese king,
delivering a copy to the British chief commissioner. This action not only
ruins Bonvoisin, but also directly results in the military occupation of Upper
Burma and dethronement of the royal family.
Upon a first reading, Fanny Moroni seems an imperial icon par excellence.
Her actions, driven by sexual ambition and jealousy, deliver Upper Burma to
the British, saving the territory from their French rivals. Fanny is responsible
for transforming Burma into a single and whole colonial entity, joining
the lower to the upper part of the country. Upper Burma is described by the
celibate English missionary, Edward Protheroe, as a ‘nation [that] had the
danger of the female in its essence’, that ‘stood for feminine domination, for
feminine guile and points of view’ (Jesse 1929: 46). This idea of a ‘whole’ is
framed by colonial heterosexual fantasies of reproductive order and fertility.
Jesse represents Fanny along the stereotypical lines of mixed-race
femininity; she is flirtatious, immodestly and inappropriately so, has a
strong ‘quality of sex’ (1929: 83) and a ‘gift for love’ (85). One of her chief
attractions is an uncannily lovely laugh, described as ‘a peal of fairy bells’
(xxii). Her skin is eroticized, in part through descriptions of her dress, ‘all
pleats and puffs and frills’ (132) that hang and move about her form. Steven
Connor writes that ‘the libidinal charge of rags’ (or clothing that is ragged in
appearance with hanging or textured trim) refers to the sensory function of
the skin
‘a body alert or awoken to touch’ (2003: 32). On the boat from
England to Burma, Fanny tests her sexual attractiveness on various male
passengers, but finds her ‘sense of power’ undone by the image of masculine
colonial/western probity and authority, Mr Danvers (a civil servant of high
position) who instead fills her with the certain knowledge of her ‘utter
futility, an inescapable cheapness’ (Jesse 1929: 7).
 SKIN, INT IMACY AND AUTHENTICITY
Michelle Aung Thin
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73

From this European, colonial perspective, sexual morality is linked with a

kind of economy of flesh. Fanny is beginning to understand the rules of this
economy, and while her flirtatiousness is a means of testing her value, it is
also read as cultural incompetence, the sort of questionable judgement that
belies her ‘moral susceptibilities’. It is an example of misapprehension used
to exclude or include ‘those of ambiguous racial membership’ from
European subjectivity (Stoler 2002: 84). The moral burden lies almost
entirely with Fanny and not with those who pay her attention. It is worth
noting that her most enthusiastic admirer is a Rangoon merchant also of
mixed-race or ‘eight annas in the rupee’ who is sheepishly reunited with his
wife when they dock, affirming the association of morally laxity among
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those of mixed-race (Jesse 1929: 2).

However, in the Upper Burmese capital of Mandalay, the rules of sexual
morality are quite different. Fanny, now widowed, makes herself sexually
available to the Frenchman Bonvoisin outside of (European) marriage.
Nonetheless, in keeping with the economy of flesh practised on the boat, she
does not favour the well-placed Burmese clerk, Maung Yo (who delivers the
French contract into her hands), despite his perfect English and French, his
European clothing and his privileging of Europeanness in general (Jesse
1929: 273). He is not a European and her sexual tastes are legislated by the
colonial perspective on European cultural competence.
Mandalay, the capital, is represented as a city in a state of flux where
political favour is based upon royal caprice and labyrinthine sexual and
political alignments. Out of favour, a ‘kala’ might be ruined financially,
imprisoned or even executed. Yet Jesse also describes life in the Burmese
palace as a fairytale, comparable to Kubla Khan (Jesse 1929: 230).
Contained by history, this incarnation of Fanny Moroni is already an
imperial icon, ‘the lacquer lady’.
In this part of the novel, Fanny inflects her identity as European or
Burmese, always emphasizing her exoticism
her uncanny similarity and her
essential difference. She does this at her English school to gain status, but this
backfires on her and she is instead revealed as a girl of dubious ethics.
However, at the Burmese court she is able to use this strangeness to her
advantage; she is officially recognized as European maid of honour because
European enough to translate between the two cultures, but not so wholly
alien that she is unacceptable to the Burmese queen as a true ‘kala’ or
foreigner may be. Fanny exploits this position to get Bonvoisin as a lover,
using her influence to secure his release from the palace prison and, in
consequence, further his commercial interests. But it is this same strangeness
that ultimately is used against her. Bonvoisin rejects Fanny as a potential
wife (although in Burmese practice they are in effect married), taking as his
bride ‘a pale innocent’ French girl, virtuous and virginal, ‘who had never
been alone with a man in her life until she was married to him’
a fact that
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
15 :1 74
.........................
he relishes (Jesse 1929: 298). Fanny’s rejection is based not solely upon her
race but also on her management of her sexuality and, specifically, the
formal and informal legislation of sexual intimacy between races
who you
may marry and who you may have as a sexual partner (authenticity also
differentiates between a real or valid and fake or pretend wife).
Fanny’s reaction to rejection is extreme and conforms to stereotypes of
Eurasian hypersensitivity, duplicity and disloyalty. She is unable to see
or
doesn’t care about
the consequences of her actions. In revenging herself
upon Bonvoisin, Fanny destroys all the things she holds dear: her benefactor
and close friend, Supaya-lat, the queen of Burma; the court of Ava, her one
true spiritual home; and her prestige as a maid of honour and a European.
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After annexation, she is never again considered European and does not enjoy
the privileges of Europeanness. Like the Anglo-Burmese in Burmese Days,
she too fails to understand that Europeanness is a conferred privilege and a
measure of cultural acceptance, not necessarily a right by birth. Ironically,
her actions enable the colony of Burma to exist as a whole entity but also
make her complicit with her own destruction and degraded racial status.
In The Lacquer Lady it would thus seem that the politics of sexuality and
sexual intimacy frame political events in Burma. The masculine overcomes
the feminine power that so disturbs the missionary Protheroe and is
associated with the Burmese queen and with Fanny’s racial impurity or
contingency, which is tolerated, even of value. Looming over the action is the
coming annexation and the colonial order based upon rigid taxonomies, the
time of the writing of the piece (a temporal containment). Even so, the way
Fanny’s skin is represented suggests another form of intimacy
that of
looking and the way skin orders and is ordered within a specific space.
The word ‘intimate’ can be used as an adjective to describe closeness, the
innermost or internal, the familiar and the exclusive in terms of relation-
ships. Anglo-Burmese skin is read as intimate with both Europeanness,
Burmeseness and yet inauthentic. In Boym’s reading of cultural authenticity
as the ultimate form of belonging, this closeness is an ironic intimacy, for
through intimacy there is separateness. Used as a verb, to intimate means to
suggest, hint or allude. Anglo-Burmese skin always intimates. It alludes to
sexual transgression and to the other. It stretches the idea of skin and what
may or may not be contained within it. It connects to and stands in for other
skins (where skin delineates the limit of or is a metaphor for a subject).
Through this continuous allusion, this contingency, it complicates rather
than clarifies difference.
In The Lacquer Lady the success of the colonial project, which reorders
the space of Burma, is contingent upon Fanny’s ability to intimate something
else
Europeanness to the Burmese, Burmeseness to the Europeans. Fanny’s
ability to ‘suggest’ the other by emphasizing specific facets of her cultural
identity enables her to pass through the palace gates with impunity
a
 SKIN, INT IMACY AND AUTHENTICITY
Michelle Aung Thin
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75

privilege the English are denied. Ambiguity is not simply tolerated, but lends
her influence and status: she is the favoured European maid of honour at
court; her position enables her to get Bonvoisin and further his interests; and
when he jilts her this helps her to convince Maung Yo (who admires her for
her Europeanness) to copy the French treaties. Fanny is also able to act as
spy, an extension of English skin; she is the eyes, ears, the sense organs of the
British. She stretches to contain both English and Burmese. Here then is a
different economy of skin from that on the boat, one in which Fanny’s
‘border’ skin lends her power.
As a border figure in a borderline state
that is, a space in flux
Fanny
defies limits, presiding over what the English missionary and ‘convinced
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celibate’ Edward Protheroe sees as a dangerous chaos so unintelligible it is

beyond words or explanation (Jesse 1929: 46). In Upper Burma, Burmese
and European are continually in and out of balance. This disorder is
eroticized
feminized in Protheroe’s terms
and this too is evident in the
representation of Fanny’s skin; the ‘libidinal charge’ of her clothing, which
also suggests ‘transformation’ (Connor 2003: 32).
Colonial heterosexual iconography is further undermined by ironic and
uneasy, sexually transgressive fantasies. Such fantasies are ‘intimated’
because they are also unspeakable. In the ‘kala’ (or foreigner’s) town,
buildings are deliberately flimsy to prevent them from being fortified. Private
space, so valorized in western cultures, is denied to the Europeans who must
always remain in public view. Intimacy is explicit; it spills from the private to
the public, as do the desires of the ‘kala’ town occupants
for commercial
gain, for ‘souls’ to convert, for pleasure and for access to the space behind
the rose-coloured walls of the Burmese palace. The town is situated at the
palace’s western gate, the gate of excreta, where the rubbish is emitted and
worse, from which the dead bodies of massacred princes and princesses pour
out. This is the only orifice that colonial forces are allowed to penetrate and
in terms of sexual metaphors, evokes anal sex, a homosexual or ‘taboo’
heterosexual practice which ironically results in death rather than the birth
of new life. In this context the English themselves are abject and otherly.
Within the context of colonial order, this reversal threatens that ‘system
based on the paternal law of differentiation’ and the limit between self and
other (Tyler 2001: 73). In Jesse’s representation of Fanny, what Anglo-
Burmese skin intimates is that fixity is a fantasy. Proximity to this skin
throws into relief the contingent and chaotic nature of the colonial project;
how it is reliant upon affect rather than reason; moreover, how colonialism
relies on subjectivity that is itself contingent, that defies the limit of essential
identity and from which other selves are generated from the body itself.
Post-annexation, Upper and Lower Burma are reunited, put back together
by the English army and Anglo and Burmese are separate and distinct
subjectivities; colonial coherence relies on this distinction. It is no accident
 i n t e r v e n t i o n s
15 :1 76
.........................
then that Fanny’s French lover, Bonvoisin, gives her the soubriquet ‘lacquer
lady’
also the title of the novel
comparing her with ‘one of those golden
lacquer figures on a screen’ (Jesse 1929: 261). Lacquer is made with the sap
from a tree native to Burma and is applied in a series of layers to bamboo or
wood structures until a hard, glossy surface forms that is smooth and
slippery to the touch (McKeen Di Crocco 1998: 166). A lacquered skin
would be a highly lustrous shell. Tyler describes skin represented with a
glossy sheen as both hyper-visible and yet concealed through surface. A
lacquer lady is all surface, skin and only skin
and as such, an object
contained separate and exterior.
Connor associates hard shiny skin with ‘male fantasies of . . . a kind of
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hardness that would enclose, canalize or otherwise discipline the threatening

fluidity attributed to the female body’ (1999: 46). Furthermore, shining skin
is ‘connectedness without articulation’, where articulation is ‘the skin that
can be written into’ or ‘written across . . . incised’ (1999: 47
8). A skin that
shines may intimate (suggest transgressions or connections) but it may not
articulate (it is not clearly or lucidly any specific thing). In other words,
Anglo-Burmese skin cannot be ‘authentic’ because it cannot be marked in
one way or another. Thus the name is a wholly appropriate one. Fanny is
certainly associated with feminine power and the chaotic, transgressive
fluidity of the Mandalay court, which is neutralized through her actions. In
the new order she is contained, and although she retains her ambiguity she is
nonetheless fixed within a shell and becomes exterior to colonial binaries
that underpin intelligibility. For in the eyes of her school friend Agatha,
young Fanny, the lacquer lady, ‘ceased to exist since the British had taken
Upper Burma even while her dimmed semblance had yet lingered there’
(Jesse 1929: 378).
This enclosing and fixing in space is caught in the representation of Fanny/
Mattie in The Gentleman in the Parlour. In Maugham’s travelogue, told
from a colonial point of view, Fanny Moroni’s real-life counterpart, Mattie
Calogreedy, is an established celebrity: a tour of Burma for well-connected
European tourists is not complete without visiting her. Yet intimacy with her

or the celebrated events of her past
is impossible for she is a ‘closed door’
(Maugham 1986: 35
6). An icon, the lacquer lady is curiously empty of the
affects, gestures and desires that, in Anzieu’s terms, are contained within a
skin and inform subjectivity. Fanny/Mattie is unable to articulate her
thoughts and feelings
even her memories are elusive or non-existent. She
is that ‘dimmed semblance’, her laughter no longer the peal of fairy bells but
instead a ‘ghostly chuckle’ and her eyes, ‘ironic’. Fanny/Mattie, however,
demonstrates once again her moral and emotional insensitivity, the lack of
understanding about how one ought to feel; she cannot even recall the face of
the French lover on whom she exacted revenge and turned the fortunes of an
entire country. Like a lacquer vessel, she is brittle and empty.
 SKIN, INT IMACY AND AUTHENTICITY
Michelle Aung Thin
........................
77

In this essay I have attempted to read the way Anglo-Burmese skin of the
iconic figure Fanny Moroni/Mattie Calogreedy is represented in the context
of the limit that enables the perception of difference and the intimate. I have
examined the authentic and the intimate as limits of Anglo-Burmese
subjectivity and I have attempted to address how such representations
revealed the way colonial writers Jesse and Maugham thought about the way
bodies ordered the space about them. This reading is part of a larger body of
research that explores the connection between the skin and writing, which
has been necessary to the development of my novel.
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