The Stranger Within the Gates

This chapter argues that in her fifth novel Boyle extends her critique of gender inequality to an analysis of the treatment of the young men who are expected to take up positions of power within Britain and its overseas territories, and the overt Kipling reference in the title offers evidence of Boyle’s desire to comment on the patriarchal imperialism that has produced the ‘stranger within the gates’. Boyle’s novel is most concerned with investigating the elements of the protagonist’s own character from which his upbringing has left him estranged. He is, then, effectively released from culpability for actions that impact profoundly on others—but that he doesn’t recognise as his own and therefore doesn’t take any responsibility for. Secondly, he is also denied access to parts of his character that would make for a more well-rounded figure. Here, Boyle evokes a second ‘parent narrative’—that of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and the central character of Boyle’s novel experiences a similar unleashing of a more atavistic version of himself, which takes possession of his body without his having memory or consciousness of the episodes.