Queer Colonial Journeys: Alfred Russel Wallace and Somerset Maugham in the Malay Archipelago

This article analyzes the connections among several queer colonial journeys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which are suggestive of a historical relationship between heterodox sexuality and social and political radicalism. The odyssey of the eminent English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in the Malay Archipelago in 1854-62 is discussed with a focus on the fluid same-sex cross-cultural household he established in an effort to emulate middle-class status while postponing marriage to pursue scientific and financial aspirations. The intimate six-year relationship with his Malay servant and companion Ali is compared briefly to other, quite well-known, historical same-sex interracial relationships and placed on a spectrum of ‘homogenic love’. Wallace’s unique version of Victorian domesticity is shown to be significant in the context of his unorthodox views about British colonial policy and human development. The article then proceeds to examine the appropriation of Wallace’s published narrative of his journey, The Malay Archipelago (1869), by the enormously popular author W. Somerset Maugham. Wallace inspired Maugham’s own journey to the archipelago with his lover Gerald Haxton in 1921, providing him with opportunities to explore further his emerging homosexual identity as well as to observe human nature and cultures and collect interesting material for his fiction. It is argued that Maugham read Wallace through the lens of a homosexual man, and that at the center of some of his fictional narratives were journeys that encoded homosexual desire in ways derived from Wallace as well as from personal observation and experience. By paying attention to the consonance between the narratives, a small but rich vein in the archaeology of cultural expressions of homosexuality is uncovered