Being a White Man was, as Edward Said wrote, ‘an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the non-white worlds. It meant in the colonies speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgments, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend.’ This imperial masculinity (or ‘manliness’) was defined as strength, authority and above all control: the control over subordinates earned by the White Man's (or the White Officer's) strength and knowledge, the control over nature exerted by English technological superiority, and above all the White Man's self-control that can ‘force your heart and nerve and sinew / To serve your turn long after they are gone./ And so hold on when there is nothing in you / Except the will that says to you, “Hold on!”’(W, 556). That, anyway, is the ideal, acutely described by a catty Virginia Woolf as ‘Mr. Kipling's officers who turn their backs; and his Sowers who sow the Seed; and his Men who are alone with their Work; and the Flag – one blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy’.

Such manliness is certainly preached in several Kipling poems, notably ‘The White Man's Burden’, ‘If ‘ and ‘The ’Eathen’, and celebrated in fictions such as ‘Only a Subaltern’, ‘The Brushwood Boy,’ ‘The Tomb of his Ancestors’ and ‘His Private Honour’. Yet, as the post-colonial commentators Joseph Bristow in Empire Boys and Zohreh Sullivan in her study of Kipling have pointed out, the ideal of masculine authority in Kipling's stories is always in danger of subversion by weakness in young Englishmen destined to rule. Bristow and Sullivan argue forcefully that the colonial fantasy of controlled rational masculinity has to define itself not only against the unruly ‘natives’ but against the subject's own unmanly weakness.