Swastika Night: Katharine Burdekin and the Psychology of Scapegoating

Abstract

In July 1940, the Left Book Club monthly selection was, unusually, a novel. Swastika Night, by a reclusive but respected writer called Murray Constantine, was originally published by Victor Gollancz in 1937, but was reissued in July 1940 as a Left Book Club² selection, fulfilling the need ‘in these difficult summer months’³ for a psychological analysis of fascism which could reveal potential weaknesses in the Nazi psyche. Nearly fifty years later, Swastika Night was republished by Lawrence and Wishart at the instigation of an American researcher, Daphne Patai, who had discovered that Constantine, whose first novel Proud Man had also been published by Gollancz, was, in fact, Katharine Burdekin writing under a pseudonym. Both Swastika Night and Proud Man are important for their thoroughgoing analysis of the psychological construction of gender identity, more than two decades before Lacanian psychoanalysis and the burgeoning second wave of feminism prepared the way for an understanding of gender ideology and sexual politics. Burdekin’s theorisation of fascism as a logical extension of the ‘debasement’ of women within the male psyche finds echoes today in the writings of such theorists as Klaus Theweleit⁴ but was, at the time, a thoroughly radical proposal.

Fear of effeminacy, and the feeling among men that boys are naturally effeminate and must be most carefully trained to be manly, would seem to show that at the bottom of their minds dwells a great fear of the suppressed power of the female sex.

Katharine Burdekin writing as Murray Constantine, Proud Man¹