Previous
Status and Racism
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Burmese Days, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Burmese Days represents both England and British-colonized Burma as societies in which high-class women are not supposed to work. This class prejudice against working women makes status-conscious female characters socially and economically dependent on their romantic relationships with men. This dependence, in turn, puts women at the mercy of men’s fickle sexual interest in them. For example, Ma Hla May, a Burmese woman in her early 20s, derives both social status and economic support from her British lover John Flory, a disaffected timber merchant in his mid-30s who has been working in Burma since age 20—until Flory falls in love with Elizabeth Lackersteen, a young British woman newly arrived in Burma. After Flory turns Ma Hla May out of his house, she is able to blackmail him for some money, but she ultimately becomes a low-paid, physically abused sex worker. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Lackersteen suffers both from the imperative against women working and from economic dependence on men. After her father dies, she works as a tutor in French family in Paris, but the father of the family sexually harasses her. After her mother dies too, she leaves Paris and comes to live with her uncle Mr. Lackersteen and her aunt Mrs. Lackersteen—but in short order, Mr. Lackersteen begins aggressively sexually harassing Elizabeth as well. Because Elizabeth sees returning to work as a worst-case scenario, she considers marriage (and economic dependence on a high-status husband) as her best escape from poverty and the threat of sexual violence by Mr. Lackersteen. After several romantic misadventures, Elizabeth does marry—her eventual husband, a self-satisfied older man named Mr. Macgregor, likes her primarily because she listens to his boring anecdotes without interrupting. This marriage encourages Elizabeth’s worst tendencies, and she ends up a conventional, narrow-minded, status-obsessed tormentor of her servants. The bad endings that face Ma Hla May and Elizabeth illustrate that economic dependence on men—and in particular on men’s sexual interest—tends to harm or corrupt women.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…
Class, Gender, and Sex ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Class, Gender, and Sex appears in each chapter of Burmese Days. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
chapter length:
Get the entire Burmese Days LitChart as a printable PDF.
Class, Gender, and Sex Quotes in Burmese Days
Below you will find the important quotes in Burmese Days related to the theme of Class, Gender, and Sex.
Chapter 4
Quotes
“Flory’s embraces meant nothing to her (Ba Pe, Ko S’la’s younger brother, was secretly her lover), yet she was bitterly hurt when he neglected them. Sometimes she had even put love philtres in his food. It was the idle concubine’s life that she loved, and the visits to her village dressed in all her finery, where she could boast of her position as a ‘bo-kadaw’—a white man’s wife; for she had persuaded everyone, herself included, that she was Flory’s legal wife.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7
Quotes
There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever; with Elizabeth, it was those two terms during which she rubbed shoulders with the rich. Thereafter her whole code of living was summed up in one belief, and that a simple one. It was that the Good (‘lovely’ was her name for it) is synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad (‘beastly’) is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious. Perhaps it is in order to teach this creed that expensive girls’ schools exist.
Chapter 8
Quotes
It was not the pwe girl’s behaviour, in itself, that had offended her; it had only brought things to a head. But the whole expedition—the very notion of wanting to rub shoulders with all those smelly natives—had impressed her badly. She was perfectly certain that that was not how white men ought to behave.
Chapter 13
Quotes
It was true what she had said, he had robbed her of her youth.
Chapter 15
Quotes
Mr. Lackersteen was sulking. What rot it was, the way these women put on airs and prevented you from having a good time! The girl was pretty enough to remind him of the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne, and damn it! wasn’t he paying for her keep? It was a shame. But for Elizabeth the position was very serious. She was penniless and had no home except her uncle’s house. She had come eight thousand miles to stay here. It would be terrible if after only a fortnight her uncle’s house were to be made uninhabitable for her.
Chapter 17
Quotes
He had not even the heart to be angry any longer. For he had perceived, with the deadly self-knowledge and self-loathing that come to one at such a time, that what had happened served him perfectly right. For a moment it seemed to him that an endless procession of Burmese women, a regiment of ghosts, were marching past him in the moonlight […]. He had dirtied himself beyond redemption, and this was his just punishment.
Chapter 18
Quotes
They would all have fallen at the feet of a lieutenant the Honourable if he had shown the smallest courtesy; as it was, everyone except the two women detested him from the start. It is always so with titled people, they are either adored or hated. If they accept one it is charming simplicity, if they ignore one it is loathsome snobbishness; there are no half-measures.
Chapter 20
Quotes
U Po Kyin’s version (he had a way of being essentially right even when he was wrong in detail) was that Elizabeth had been Flory’s concubine and had deserted him for Verrall because Verrall paid her more.
Chapter 23
Quotes
Verrall, it was quite certain, would never marry Elizabeth; young men of Verrall’s stamp do not marry penniless girls met casually at obscure Indian stations.
