The oddness of “Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger” within the canon of British anti-colonialist fiction is outweighed only by the extent of its placement within that body of work as a devastatingly corrosive work of satire. By the post-World War I era of the 20th century, such works of fiction by British writers aimed as the ugly imperialist history of the previous century was becoming routine. Saki’s story appeared in a collection of short stories in 1911 and thus positions him somewhere near the middle of those writers of the era at the vanguard of the anti-colonialist writers. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Nostromo precede “Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger” within a decade while Somerset Maugham’s “The Outstation” belongs to the post-WWI era. Of these four examples, one clearly does not fit and yet it is Saki’s story that winds up being almost a literary terrorist attack upon the fundamental character of Britain.
What makes the devastation of the story so striking is that to outward appearances it seems like nothing more than a barely vicious attack upon the shallowness of Edwardian high society. Mrs. Packletide and her socialite rival are presented as only slightly less of a twit than Bertie Wooster. And, just like Wooster, these privileged yet unenlightened representatives of modern England are accompanied by member of the underclass who winds up being revealing that the brains and class division have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Unlike Jeeves, however, Louisa Mebbin’s role in the story is about class division, but rather trickle-down economic theory and in the end her guilt is implicated alongside the upper classes.
“Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger” works so effectively as anti-colonialist literature precisely because Saki treats it so comically. He confounds reader expectation by writing a story that is the equivalent of Miss Mebbin. Just like she is by Packletide, the story is underestimated by the reader. At first glance, Miss Mebbin seems like a very minor character who will play no significant role in the rivalry between Packletide and Loona Bimberton. By the end, it turns out the story was all about Louisa Mebbin and really not at all about Loona. Understanding of the story starts out by being entertained on a Wooster and Jeeves level about the member of the underclass outwitting once again the self-inscribed born superiority of the upper class. Packletide gets her comeuppance and that’s that. Time to move on to the next story and within minutes forget all about Packletide and her tiger.
Except the story doesn’t want to work that way. The typical reader who really pays attention will undergo an experience like getting a song stuck in your head. Packletide’s tiger hunt gets stuck there and only gradually is the reason why revealed. It is not—with all apologies to P.D. Wodehouse—simply a silly Wooster story. There is real meat on the bone here. Mrs. Packletide goes to India and pays the natives to help her exploit a natural resource found there which will be brought back to England for her benefit. One back home, she completely confounds the reality of what happened in India to the point that it is almost a completely fiction, the only truth left being that the tiger skin rug on her floor was actually brought back to England from India. Rather than questioning this fiction-as-history, her fellow British socialites not only accept it, but give her the respect that would have come had the story been true…or had the true story itself actually been worthy of respect. Neither is the case. Only one other person knows the truth and she is more than prepared to expose it, but now it never will be exposed because she has herself benefited from the exploitation of a foreign country’s resources and people existing in the public sphere as a completely fictional example of heroism and virtue.
That alone would qualify “Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger” for high placement within the canon of works of fiction which attack British colonialism and imperialism. But Saki isn’t satisfied with that because he is writing not from the Victorian standpoint of Conrad, but the more progressive perspective of the Edwardian era. Suffragettes were beaten and humiliated when Conrad was writing about Kurtz. By 1911, the movement had grown too powerful to be denied much longer. Women were going to take seats in Parliament and women were going to vote in England. And men were terrified. Amidst all that misogyny, Saki published a story indicting the British history of colonialist imperialism in which there is not one single major male character to be found. He was basically implying that giving women the vote and letting them sit in Parliament wasn’t going to matter since the men who had been in charge of things for the past century were acting just like Mrs. Packletide, Loona Bimberton and Louisa Mebbin, anyway.
