Becoming the Ideal Host: Masculinity and Hospitality in John Buchan’s The Island of Sheep

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper examines John Buchan’s exploration of ideal leadership in connection with his use of the notion of hospitality in his final Richard Hannay novel, The Island of Sheep (1936). As presented across the Richard Hannay series, hospitality may be a key basis for understanding the other, but it entails certain risks, particularly when the host or hostess fails to exercise sound judgment, leading to instability and insecurity. Focusing on the transformation of the novel’s main character, Valdemar Haraldsen, from a recluse and an exile into an ideal host and master of the house, this paper argues that Buchan constructs in The Island of Sheep a moral and political allegory of the renewal of community, enabled by the reaffirmation of masculine leadership and a proper balance between hospitality and retaliation. In contrast to the main antagonist’s decadent, destructive streak and the various shortcomings of other characters as hosts or guests, Haraldsen’s development foregrounds Buchan’s model of ideal leadership, rooted in a masculinist sense of control and discipline and ultimately articulated through the practice of hospitality. This paper argues that Buchan’s ideal hospitality is a conditional form of welcome, dictated by a male leader with moral authority. It echoes Jacques Derrida’s account of conditional hospitality, with its practices grounded in conventional forms of hospitality. In The Island of Sheep, Buchan imagines a wishful vision of a renewed social order, one that depends on the restoration of masculine authority and a carefully managed balance between welcome and exclusion.