The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Beautiful White Devil (1896) 

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The Beautiful White Devil was written by Guy Boothby. The Australian Boothby (1867-1905) was a mediocre but quite successful author of genre fiction. The Beautiful White Devil is a humdrum adventure novel whose only appeal to modern readers are the titular character and the protagonist’s Chinese companion.

The Beautiful White Devil is the story of how George de Normanville, an English doctor, meets and falls in love with Alie Dunbar. De Normanville is traveling in Hong Kong when he hears stories about “The Beautiful White Devil,” a white woman who is a pirate on the seas of the Far East. The stories tell of her daring, her cunning, her successes–she preys on the rich and the ruling class, both English and native–and her ruthlessness, for in at least one case most of the crew of a ship she captured were killed. De Normanville is approached by Walworth, a Chinese man, and asked if he would be willing, for a thousand pounds, to make a covert mission to help an island plagued with smallpox. De Normanville is interested enough to agree to this and after a midnight meeting with Walworth is brought onboard a junk. On the way to the meeting the crew of the junk attack Walworth and de Normanville, who defend themselves but are injured in the process. De Normanville recovers and is met by the Beautiful White Devil, who is bankrolling the mission of mercy. The Devil lives on a secluded Pacific island inhabited by a large native population, and the natives are suffering from an outbreak of smallpox. She was being honest in hiring him, rather than luring him to be kidnapped and ransomed as she has done with other men. De Normanville does his best to help the natives, discovering while doing so that the Beautiful White Devil, whose real name is Alie Dunbar, is actually an intelligent and kind person who rules over the natives as a benign yet firm queen. Alie’s father was a member of Her Royal Highness’ Navy but was forced into a life of piracy through an injustice, and after he died Alie took up the practice. But Alie is not inherently wicked and only preys on those who can afford to lose their money and those who deserve to be punished. De Normanville falls in love with Alie, and she with him, and the rest of the novel concerns their adventures together as he helps her kidnap and punish evil men, one of whom flogged three natives to death and insulted Alie’s honor. She kidnaps this man and gives him twenty-four stripes, six for each native and six for not respecting her. De Normanville leaves her for a year’s time, at her request, but they are reunited in London. She is recognized by one of her victims and arrested, but De Normanville and Walworth free her from custody and they sail away. De Normanville and Alie are married in Madeira and live happily ever after on her island.

The Beautiful White Devil is a mildly diverting story of a nautical female Robin Hood and how she finds true love. Boothby has an adequate narrative style and a few nice descriptive passages, but for the most part The Beautiful White Devil is only a competent love story and not much more. There is little action, a great deal of only passable dialogue, and a dull main narrator. Of interest are only two things: Walworth, and Alie Dunbar, the Beautiful White Devil.

Walworth enters the story as a portly Chinese man speaking in the painful-to-read pidgin English all too common to stories from this era. After making sure that de Normanville is trustworthy, he drops his act and begins speaking perfect English, which is a shocking contrast to the Chinese men and women in dozens of Victorian narratives who are unable to speak in anything other than a racist patois. Walworth turns out to be an assistant and friend to Alie, devoted to her, reliable, and enormously capable. He is clever, calm under stress, a good shot, skilled at disguise, and far more capable in a crisis than de Normanville. Although his attitude toward Alie is excessively servile, Walworth is otherwise a surprisingly non-racist character. Like Wung-Ti (see: Bail Up!’ A Romance of Bushrangers and Blacks), Walworth stands out as an honest attempt on the part of his author to create a non-stereotypical Chinese character—a relative rarity among the fiction of the 1890s, especially among novels written by Australian authors.1 When considered against the backdrop of traditional anti-Chinese racism among white Australians, especially the Yellow Peril imagery and vocabulary used in Australia to support the 1888 decision of the Second Intercolonial Conference to exclude the Chinese from Australia and the 1896 Immigration Restriction Act, Walworth and The Beautiful White Devil are striking. Walworth, as mentioned, is servile toward Alie Dunbar, and like Wung-Ti Walworth ends up being an admirable Other rather than a three-dimensional character. But for the time period—Kenneth Mackay’s loathsome The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia2 had been published in 1895, only a year before The Beautiful White Devil’s publication—Walworth is a progressive portrayal of a Chinese character.

Alie Dunbar, the Beautiful White Devil, seems to be equally progressive. In most ways she is an English lady of the upper middle classes, proper in her behavior and well-educated in her tastes in architecture, decorating, and literature. Although her acts as a pirate are unseemly for a lady, in all other ways she is respectable. Her motivation for piracy is partly financial but mostly altruistic; she wants to rob the undeserving and help the unfortunate and usually gives at least half of what she steals to the poor, both on her island and around the Far East. As a pirate her modus operandi is to socialize with the upper classes of Society, whether in Hong Kong, Ceylon, or other British colonies, become friendly with a particular target, convince them to go sailing with her, and then kidnap them while at sea. She succeeds at doing so through being good company, being wily, and being skilled at disguise. She also is good at seeing the true motivations of people and at detecting those who would play her false or betray her. She is a good concept woman, clever at hatching schemes and in executing them as well as, so that she personally designed her yacht so that its looks could quickly and easily be altered. Her crew is loyal to her, as are the natives on her island. She is similarly loyal to them, although she can be a strict and even lethal disciplinarian if the circumstances call for it. She even treats the Polynesian natives on her island well.

But her attitude is replete with the paternalistic racism of the worst of British colonialism, caring for the natives but at the same time believing them to be child-like and acting accordingly. In the person of the Dunbar Boothby plays out the racist fantasy of the white man (woman, in the case of Dunbar) ruling completely, benignly, and without resistance over a group of childlike natives. Boothby also takes a character who to brief observation seems like a New Woman and makes her a male fantasy figure: the powerful and beautiful woman who is not only willing but eager to surrender her power and submit to the right man. (See, for example, Ayesha in She).

Apart from Walworth and an interest in the ways in which Boothby portrays racist and sexist white male fantasies, The Beautiful White Devil is without interest and can be passed over by the modern reader.

Recommended Edition

Print: Guy Boothby, The Beautiful White Devil. London: Ward, Lock, 1935.

Online: https://archive.org/details/beautifulwhitede00boot

For Further Research

Christine Doran, “The ‘Beautiful White Devil’: A Colonial Heroine in Borneo Waters,” RIMA: Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 37, no. 2 (2003): 67-82.

 

1 See Ouyang Yu, Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888-1988 for much more on this, although Yu somehow overlooked Walworth and The Beautiful White Devil.

2 Yu, in Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888-1988, 74 ff., describes the plot and context of The Yellow Wave and two similar novels at length.

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