A Nightmare After Christmas: Imperial Horror in Rudyard Kipling's The Mark of the Beast (1890)

This understudied Gothic short story opens with an inebriated group of British colonialists celebrating New Year’s Eve in India and quickly develops into a terrifying tale of bestial transformation and torture. This paper looks at how Kipling transforms quintessential homely spaces, such as the fireplace and dining room, into sites of terror. These traditional focal points for family and social gatherings devolve from places of domestic pleasure into places of horror. By circling away from the association of NYE with Victorian domestic values of the home, hearth and Christian celebration, Kipling attempts to separate the realities of life in colonised India from the ideals of home. In this paper, I will map the imperial politics of Kipling’s tale, drawing attention to how Kipling uses colonial New Year celebrations as the platform to launch an alternative, more equivocal, winter morality tale. In particular, I will draw on the story’s numerous story ‘narrative gaps,’ - whereby the dialogue abruptly cuts away and leaves a distinct silence – to explore how these function as both stylistic conventions to increase tension, and as strategic omissions which can be interpreted as a form of censorship over the colonised subject. Whilst this encourages a view of Kipling espousing an imperialistic agenda, the article also considers a more sympathetic interpretation. In examining Kipling’s use of satire, irony and narrative justice, I suggest that he offers a subtle critique of the empire.