Heart of Darkness:
The Agon of
The Femme Fatale

[She is] beautiful always beyond desire and cruel beyond words; fairer than heaven and more terrible than hell; pale with pride and weary with wrong-doing; a silent anger against God and man bums, white and re pressed, through her clear features.
                                                                                            —A. C. Swinbume

Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say.
For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husband, each confirms the other's tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
                                                                                            —Rudyard Kipling

Queen Victoria, there's a woman. . . when one encounters a toothed vagina of such exceptional size.
                                                                                            —Jacques Lacan

What is the relationship between the feminine and the modern, or be tween the feminist and the modernist? In 1936 William Butler Yeats offered as the opening "poem" in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse an extraordinary selection, a text which suggests that, at least in one part of himself, the Irish visionary believed that woman had some originatory connection with modernity in general and with modern literature in particular. For, in Yeats's view, the first modern poem was not a work in verse by Swinburne or Rossetti, Hardy or Housman. Instead, it was a prose passage about a femme fatale—the famous description of "La Gioconda" from Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renais sauce (1873), which Yeats excerpted, versifled, and offered as a discrete work under the title "Mona Lisa":

She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the Vampire,
She has been dead many times,
And learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep seas,
And keeps their fallen day about her;
And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants;
And, as Leda,
Was the mother of Helen of Troy,
And, as St Anne,
Was the mother of Mary;
And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
And lives
Only in the delicacy
With which it has moulded the changing lineaments
And tinged the eyelids and the hands.'

Though Yeats radically decontextualized this passage—cutting it free from Pater's speculations about both the painter Leonardo and his real- life subject—the Irish poet (who was not ordinarily in the habit of fashioning poems trouve') clearly shaped "his" text to emphasize what he saw as the crux of Pater's fascination with Leonardo's famous portrait: the fact that "Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy" of "a perpetual life" and "the symbol of the modern idea" of "humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life."² In doing so, he followed the lead of his sometime mentor Oscar Wilde, who cited the same passage from Pater in his crucial "The Critic as Artist" (1884) in order to justify the authority of the interpretor (as against that of the creator) with the explanation that "it is. . . the beholder who lends the beautiful thing its myriad meanings . . . and sets it in some new relation to the age so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives and a symbol of what we pray for, or per haps, of what"—tellingly—"wefear that we may receive" (emphasis ours).³

Of course, it may be argued that (as James Longenbach has claimed) Yeats, even more than Wilde, privileged Pater's meditation by beginning his anthology with a strange collaboration between himself, Pater, and Leonardo because he wanted i:o stress the paradox that for him, as "for Pater, what is modern is nothing more than the sum of everything rh~r h~s nreceded it."⁴ But how had it come about that for Yeats—as for Pater and Wilde—both prehistory (in Yeats's first line, "She is older than the rocks among which she sits") and history (in the line that pre cedes Yeats's first line, she represents "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age") are incarnated in a fertiale figure who has become what Wilde called "a vital portion of our lives"? We are accustomed to a Yeatsian mysticism that locates history's turning points in the bodies of such mythic heroines as Leda, Helen, and Mary, but it is nevertheless surprising to find that this major modernist introduces and defines the canon of the new with an evocation of female priority and primacy that, at lea,,t covertly, figures history itself as feminine.⁵

We will argue here, however, that male writers from Pater to Wilde to Yeats, along with many of their descendants, linked a new perception of what they saw as the archaic power of the feminine with the reactive urgency of the modern aesthetic they were themselves defining, because, as we suggested in The War of the Words, women were in some sense what one journalist called "the cause of modernism."⁶ In our first volume, we argued that sophisticated avant-garde strategies of linguistic experimentation need to be understood in terms of male anxiety about unprecedented female achievement in both the social sphere and the literary marketplace. But if this point is subtly articulated in many of the major monuments of unaging intellect produced by fin de-siecle and twentieth-century literary men, it is even more flamboyantly dramatized in a number of widely-read popular works, works that include She and King Solomon's Mines, the most famous "hits" by Rider Haggard, late Victorian England's "King Romance," as well as George MacDonald's Lilith, Wilde's Salome, Brain Stoker's Dracula, and Stoker's less well-known The Lair of the White Worm.

Though some of these fantasies and romances might seem at first radically different from the far more complex and ambitious works that form the usual canon of this period's masterpieces, in fact the sex ual imperatives that, say, Haggard and Stoker transcribe can be said to shape writings by such diverse contemporaries as Sigmund Freud and Joseph Conrad as well as by a number of other major protomodernist and modernist thinkers. Thus an analysis of She—whose terse pro- nominal title suggests that the book might be an abstruse treatise on the female gender or a fictive exploration of the ontology of woman hood—can function as a paradigmatic reading of the turn of the century's bestselling, masculinist mythology.

Unlike the women earlier Victorian writers had idealized or excoriated, She was neither an angel nor a monster. Rather, She-who-must- be-obeyed was an odd blend of the two types—an angelically chaste woman with monstrous powers, a monstrously passionate woman with angelic charms. Just as importantly, however, She was in certain ways an entirely New Woman: the all-knowing, all-powerful ruler of a matriarchal society. But unlike such other symbolic New Women as Ten nyson's (or Gilbert and Sullivan's) Princess Ida, She was a mythic figure, a classic femme fatale whose charms and claims were enigmatically fantastic. Though the plot of Her story in some sense recapitulates the plot of both The Princess and Princess Ida—three dauntless male explorers penetrate the secret fastness of a female country—Haggard's romance is therefore significantly revisionary, echoing Wilde's use of the Pater passage as a hermeneutic touchstone and prefiguring Yeats's use of Pater to define modernism as much as it recalls Gilbert and Sullivan's use of Tennyson to repudiate feminism.

To be sure, though Gilbert and Sullivan's runaway princess is comically ineffectual, Tennyson's imperious Ida, "Robed in the long night of her deep hair," does often seem like a femme fatale.9 Yet, despite the Victorian poet's depiction of the battle in which Ida is engaged as fundamentally irrational, her demands are themselves rational: she and her female acolytes seek simply "To unfurl the maiden banner of our rights" (1 V.483), and, when they are defeated by their own tender femininity, Tennyson shows them quite reasonably (or so he implies) submitting to the inevitability of their domestication. Haggard's She, how ever, is a female of a very different species, for, as 'we shall see, even while Her powers allusively evoke the urgency of suffragists unfurling the "maiden banner" of their rights, they function, more fabulously, as objectifications of the primordial female otherness which may have been the real source of male anxieties about New Women. New Womanly as She in some sense is, in other words, She-who-must-be-obeyed is also an ontological Old Woman—at least figuratively "older than the rocks among which she sits"—whose mysterious autonomy brings to the surface everyman's worry about all women.

We will argue that it is especially because of this last point that Hag gard's portrait of Her was so popular, and so popular with male readers in particular, and we will show that because of this last point, too, Her story was both a summary and a paradigm of the story told by a number of similar contemporary tales: all were to varying degrees just the kinds of fictive explorations of female authority that Haggard's title promised and his novel delivered, and many solved what their authors implicitly defined as the problem of female power through denouements analogous to—perhaps even drawn from —the one that Haggard devised for She. Finally, we will demonstrate that both the fascination of Haggard's semidivine femme fatale and the compulsiveness with which he and his contemporaries made Her "the mainspring of works of imagination" were symptoms of a complex of late Victorian anxieties that were exacerbated not just by the battle of the sexes that we have already analyzed but also by a series of other key cultural changes, including the feared "recessional" of the British empire, the intensified development of such fields as anthropology and embryology, and the rise of a host of alternative theologies.

            Another Yle is there towards the Northe, in the See Ocean, where that ben                fulle cruele and ful evele Wommen of Nature: and thei han precious Stones                in hire Eyen; and thei ben of that Kynde, that yif thei beholden ony man with
            wratthe, thei slen him anon with the beyoldyne, as dothe the Basilisk.10

Such a Medusan queendom has always haunted the western literary imagination. Yet, in the detail and intensity with which Rider Haggard imagines Her, She is a notable nineteenth-century phenomenon, a creature who, metaphorically speaking, first appears around the beginning of the era, a few decades before Haggard himself was born, al most as if Her birth were a dramatic symbol of the birth of Romanticism.

Before and after Haggard claims Her and names Her, She is called La Belle Dame sans Merci, Geraldine, Moneta, Venus, La Gioconda, Cleopatra, Faustine, Dolores, Carmilla, Lilith, Salome, and Helen. As the allusiveness of so many of Her names suggests, She is from the first a version of the divine sorceress, one of those magical daughters of the Goddess—Morgan Le Faye, Duessa, Isolde of the White Hands, Me dea, Circe—whose mystical powers deprive man of his powers. But She is a different being now from the woman She was in medieval France or ancient Greece or for John Mandeville. Almost completely absent from literary history for some hundred years or more, She is gradually reimagined by the nineteenth century in response to circumstances that drastically revise Her nature.

For one thing, though She is thought to be immortal or nearly so, She is now located far more specifically in and through history than before. Indeed, She is now characteristically described in such a way that writer and reader seem to discover, almost simultaneously, that (even if invisible or unrecognized) She has always been there, making history or quietly subverting it. As the Paterian icon on whom Wilde and Yeats brooded, after all, "she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; . . . and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary." But considerably earlier, as Keats's Belle Dame, She evokes visionary generations of "death pale" kings and princes, and later, as Yeats's own female "Rose of the World," She has endured while, because of Her, "Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, / And Usna's children died." As Swinburne's Faustine, too, She is a woman whose "bitter and vicious loveliness" suggests "the transmigration of a single soul. . . through many ages and forms"; as his Venus, She is traced through ancient times to the Re naissance; and as his Cleopatra, "Under those low large lids of hers I She hath the histories of all time" while "her lips I Hold fast the face of things to be." Thus, as Harold Bloom has observed about Pater's Gioconda, in a remark that helps illuminate her significance to Yeats, She customarily "carries the seal of a terrible priority" so that She is perceived in and behind the forces of history like a half-concealed fatality, a secret cause that transcends and transforms the currents of events.'²

Paradoxically concealed and revealed by history, Her power and Her secrecy are also manifested by Her command of an enigmatic language. Coleridge's Geraldine communicates with ghosts and hypnotizes Christabel with "shrunken serpent eyes." Swinburne's Cleopatra reads "the ravelled riddle of the skies" as well as "the shape and shadow of mystic things." Macdonald's Lilith tells "a tale about herself, in a language so strange and in forms so shadowy, that I [the narrator] could but here and there understand a little." Keats's Belle Dame speaks, of course, a "language strange," and even Pater's silent Gioconda be- comes, herself, a term in an untranslatable vocabulary, for her "unfath omable" smile graphically expresses "strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions."'³ Because She expresses such pas sions, however, She often stalks apart "in joyless reverie," and thus She becomes a kind of neo-Byronic heroine, tormented by a wounded con sciousness, a mysterious inner hell from which, given Her apparent immortality, She can find no release.'⁴

Such suffering is first dramatized by the "stricken look" and "sick assay" of Coleridge's Geraldine and then by the tears and sighs of Keats's Belle Dame as well as by the darting ferocity of her "wild wild eyes." But among Romantic figures it is perhaps most strikingly revealed by Keats's unveiled Moneta, who incarnates a sickness that is an alien consciousness, a "high tragedy / In the dark secret chambers of her skull." Later in the century, however, Swinburne's, Macdonald's, and Wilde's heroines experience equally dreadful agonies of the spirit. Perverse desires torment Swinburne's Faustine, his Dolores, and the Sappho of his "Anactoria," while powerful memories afflict his Cleopatra. Ternble hungers obsess Macdonald's Lilith; and such morbid passions rage in Wilde's Salome that her deeds seem to guarantee the dangers implicit in Sappho's words and Faustine's face. By the fin de siecle, in fact, as Wilde's Salome suggests, She has become a creature burdened by a consciousness so brimming with its own excess that She can only ex press the torment of self-awareness in a willed erotic annihilation of Her beloved. Thus, although, as Keats observes of Moneta, She Herself experiences "an immortal sickness which kills not," it does often rouse Her to destroy or devour precisely that obdurate otherness which first awakened Her desire.'⁵

Because Her consciousness is not only fierce but alien, though, and because She speaks a "language strange" while appearing in history only obliquely, She is almost always understood to inhabit odd spaces— underground caverns, shadowy corners, and labyrinthine passages— the interstices of "reality" Venus, of course, lives "under the hill," as Swinburne and Beardsley learned most notably from Wagner, but La Belle Dame also inhabits "An elfin grot," which, as Praz observed, adumbrates the geography of Tannhauser, i6 while even Lilith, Salome, and Swinburne's many perverse heroines dwell just on the other side of the ordinary world. The earth beneath which Venus, La Belle Dame, and their lovers move, moreover, is really no more than a kind of veil, a dark but prosaic surface that conceals them from everyone but the initiate. Thus, this deceptive outer layer is analogous to the "silken robe" that clothes the "mark" of Geraldine's "shame," the veils that shroud Moneta, the (punningly) "great grave beauty" that "covers" Cleopatra, the face that "suits" Faustine "for her soul's screen," and the "cold eye lids that hide like a jewel" the strange "hard eyes" of Dolores.'⁷ At the same time, however, the apparent innocence, or anyway neutrality, of all these surfaces, veils, and screens links them to the doors, mirrors, and bookshelves which open to admit Macdonald to Lilith's realm; to the secret drawers that let him into the predominantly female fairyland of Phantastes; and to the cistern from which Wilde's John the Baptist emerges into Salome's murderous, moon-haunted realm.

She is there, say Wilde and Keats, Pater and Swinburne, Macdonald and Beardsley, on the other side of mirrors, paintings, bookcases: under the hill of reality. And She is there in continents that during the nineteenth century became increasingly accessible to European explor ers, underdeveloped" continents where ordinary trade and comparatively ordinary geographical research inevitably became entwined with Her extraordinary existence. Rider Haggard located Her under a mountain in the heart of an African darkness. As we shall see, his portrait of Her strikingly integrates all the details we have outlined here even while his plot neutralizes Her powers through a defensive maneuver that was to become a common strategy with which turn-of-the-century male writers confronted and combated Her land, Her language, Her history.

The story the sherd tells is about the ill-fated romance of an Egyptian priest of Isis called Kallikrates, whose "grandfather or greatgrand father. . .was that very Kallikrates mentioned by Herodotus" (9). And as if to demonstrate Holly's (and his own) ability to deploy an expert patrius sermo or "father speech" which might ward off from the start the onslaughts of the female "other," Haggard repeats the account in uncial Greek, cursive Greek, "medieval Black-Letter Latin," "Expanded" medieval Latin, and modern English.'⁹ That in Book IX of his chronicle Herodotus really does mention a "Callicrates" who was "the most beautiful man . . in the whole Greek camp" gives uncanny solidity to Leo's heritage.²⁰ That the misadventures of this grandson or great- grandson of Callicrates have been recorded in every major western classical language makes them appear even more compellingly substantial. Moreover, the secondary texts that surround Leo's history, mainly philological analyses and historical commentaries, further guarantee the tale's authenticity. In a conversation with Holly, for instance, Leo's dying father traces the etymology of the name "Vincey" from the Greek "Tisisthenes," meaning "Mighty Avenger," through "the cognomen of Vindex" to its modern form of Vincey, "the final corruption of the name after its bearers took root in English soil" (11). Just as impressively, a series of signatures and inscriptions on the sherd and on some parchments that Leo inherits along with it express the feelings of Kallikrates' descendants in Latin, Old English, Elizabethan English, and various other scripts.

Earlier, Holly had remarked that "It is curious to observe how this hereditary duty of revenge, bequeathed by an Egyptian who lived be fore the time of Christ, is . . . , as it were, embalmed in an English family name" (34). But in this novel where embalming frequently be comes both theme and subject, it is not just "the hereditary duty of revenge" that is embalmed in language. Rather, given the elaborate parodic scholarship and self-reflexive historicity with which Haggard presents his tale, it is the story itself which (or so we are persuaded) has been embalmed in received history and conventional language. En countering the "sherd of Amenartas," therefore, we pass to the other side of The Persian Wars and discover an alternative history that has all along been mummified in Herodotus's official chronicle. With Leo Vincey and Horace Holly, we learn that implicit in the patriarchal account of battles that shook (or seem to have shaped) "the dawn" of modern civilization was this disquieting history of another force: a country ruled by a passionate and murderous woman.

To be accurate, the story the sherd tells is the record of a struggle between two women—the Egyptian princess Amenartas and the powerful white queen Ayesha, also known as She-who-must-be-obeyed—for the love of "Kallikrates (the Beautiful in Strength)." This descendant of Herodotus's handsome soldier broke his vows of celibacy to Isis in order to elope with Amenartas, but after a shipwreck and many other misadventures he and his lover found themselves in the domain of Ay esha, who is described in the sherd as being, mysteriously enough, "the Queen of the people who place pots upon the heads of strangers" as well as "a magician having knowledge of all things, and life and loveliness that does not die" (31). When Ayesha, too, falls in love with Kalli krates, the two women enter into a struggle that does not end until all three have journeyed to the secret place of "the rolling Pillar of Life," where Kallikrates definitively rejects Ayesha, and She, in a rage, "smites [and kills] him by her magic" (32). Amenartas's own "magic-- has made her impervious to the queen's murderous impulses, so that Ayesha, in fear, sends her back into the world, where she gives birth to the first vengeful Tisisthenes and finally dies in Athens, after inscribing her history on the potsherd that Leo Vincey will inherit more than two thousand years later.

The mission he receives along with this extraordinary heirloom is both dramatic and unequivocal: "seek out the woman, and learn the secret of Life, and if thou mayest find a way slay her" (34). But it is also surely significant that Leo's quest is not only for a woman, it is in behalf of a woman. Both his goal and its impetus, therefore, suggest his secondariness and instrumentality. Indeed, even the male lineage whose burden (and beauty) Leo inherits implies his own potential impotence, for he is obliged to undertake this quest only because all of his forefathers, throughout most of recorded history, have failed in it. This last point is particularly emphasized by a haunting letter that Leo receives from his dead father when he opens the casket containing the sherd and attendant parchments: "Through this link of pen and paper. .my voice speaks to you from the silence of the grave" (28), Leo's father has written, and he goes on to confess both his failure in the quest and his decision to commit suicide in grief over the death of yet another woman, Leo's mother.

At first, however, as Leo and his aggressively misogynistic guardian, Horace Holly, begin their journey, they do not seem to be adventuring into a realm whose strangeness inheres primarily in its femaleness. Certainly a conventional enough shipwreck flings the pair, along with their servant Job and an Arab named Mahomed, onto just the shore where Kallikrates and Amenartas had been cast twenty-two centuries earlier. And the coast itself offers a standard adventure story setting, complete with wild beasts, fever-inducing mists, and mysterious ruins. One ofthese ruins, though, is "a great rock carven like the head of an Ethiopian" (31) mentioned both by Amenartas and Leo's father. Monumental as Egypt's Sphinx, this object looms over the harbor like an emblem of strange thought that looks "devilish" to the xenophobic travelers, suggesting that they are about to enter a perverse and satanic domain.

As the men make their way inland, through vaporous marshes and stagnant canals, the landscape across which they journey seems increasingly like a Freudianly female paysage moralise. When they are finally captured by a band of natives whose leader is a biblical-looking Arab called "Father," the explorers are lifted into litters in which, captives though they are, they yield to a "pleasant swaying motion" (82) and, in a symbolic return to the womb, they are carried up ancient swampy birth canals through a rocky defile into "a vast cup of earth" (82) that is ruled by She-who-must-be-obeyed and inhabited by a people called the Amahaggar. About these people, moreover, they soon learn that in direct opposition to the habits of almost every other savage race in the world, women among the Amahaggar live upon conditions of perfect equality with the men, and are not held to them by any binding ties. Descent is traced only through the line of the mother, and while individuals are as proud of a long and superior female ancestry as we are of our families in Europe, they never pay atten tion to, or even acknowledge, any man as their father, even when their male parentage is perfectly well known. [85]

Though the details of Egyptian and Amahaggar peculiarities are not the same, in each case the country is described as uniquely alien, and alien in particular because relations between its men and women inhabitants are antithetical to those that prevail in "normal" civilized societies. Thus both Egypt and Kor, as Haggard's explorers learn the Amahaggar land is called, are realms where the matriarchal rule that most cultures define as disorderly, indeed "unnatural," has been shockingly legitimized.

The alarming misrule that the Amahaggar share with Herodotus's ancient Egyptians reminds us that Callicrates' grandson or greatgrand son, Kallikrates, was a priest bound by terrible vows to the Egyptian goddess Isis. When he escaped those vows, moreover, he journeyed from one alien country into a realm of even fiercer misrule, almost as though the vengeance of the goddess were pursuing him. That Leo is soon seen not only as an heir but as a reincarnation of this Kallikrates strengthens our sense of his secondariness: in coming to Kor he has fallen into the power of women, becoming, like so many men before him, a helpless stranger in Her strange land. When he is chosen as a husband by an aristocratic Amahaggar woman who seems in both her nature and her culture like a reincarnation of the royal Amenartas, we are persuaded of the ineradicability of his family's doom. Not only must the female be obeyed, so must the fate that makes the Vinceys her victims. Periodically returning these male travelers to the womb of Africa, the wheel of reincarnation enforces a sort of hideous repetition compulsion, a masculine inability to struggle free of woman's power.

She-who-must-be-obeyed, however, manifests the severity of Her misrule only after some delay. At first, it is Her subjects who express the murderous female sexuality that She Herself tends to deny. Thus we learn before meeting Her what it means for Her to be the queen of a people who, bizarrely, "place pots upon the heads of strangers" (31), for shortly after the explorers arrive in Kor they are invited to a feast at which a group of the Amahaggar try to kill the Englishmen's Arab guide, Mahomed, by putting a red hot earthen pot on his head. This astonishing mode of execution, a cross between cooking and decapitation which seems to have had no real anthropological precedent, is such a vivid enactment of both castration fears and birth anxieties that it is hardly necessary to rehearse all its psychosymbolic overtones. Yet the sexual symbolism becomes almost comical, as if Haggard had deliberately transcribed a nightmare vision of sexual intercourse, when—just before the victim's head is supposed to be devoured by a fiery female symbol—the cannibalistic Amahaggar ceremony prescribes that he should be seduced into submission by a particularly voluptuous woman, who must "pretend ... that he [is] the object of love and admiration [and thereby] cause him to expire in a happy and contented frame of mind" (106) -22

But if the hotpotting episode is grotesquely sexual in its elaboration of the ways in which female misrule can cause a vessel associated with domesticity to become as deadly as woman's anatomy seems in the worst male nightmares, the inner landscape of Kor itself is both more melodramatically sexual and more unnervingly historical. She-who-must-be- obeyed inhabits a great cave in the wall of an extinct volcano whose "vast ancient crater" holds countless exotic birds, beasts, and flowers as well as the "colossal ruins" of the city of Kor. As Holly describes it, more over, entering her domain is at least as symbolic as being hotpotted, though (in several senses) graver. Blindfolded, the explorers are carried (again) on litters "into the bowels of the great mountain . - . an eerie sensation, that of being borne into the dead heart of the rock we knew not whither" (137). Their destination is just as eerie, for the cavern palace where She dwells is both luxurious and sepulchral, half a set of elegant apartments "under the hill," like the Venusberg of Wagner's Tannhauser or Swinburne's "Laus Veneris," and half a set of "vast catacombs," a sort of Hades where "the mortal remains of the great extinct race whose monuments surrounded us had been first preserved, with an art and a completeness that have never since been equalled, and then hidden away for all time" (142).

She Herself, therefore, turns out to be an interesting cross between Venus and Persephone. As Venus, for instance, She commands the absolute erotic devotion of any man who looks upon Her unveiled. When She removes her wrappings, Holly sees Her as "Venus Victrix" (163), as Circe (167), and as "Aphrodite triumphing" in "that dear plea sure which is [Her] sex's only right" (199)—the pleasure of bringing a man to his knees in adoration of Her sexuality. But even swathed in ghostly white, She has the Circean power of transforming human males into animals. Visitors are supposed to crawl in Her presence, and though the Englishmen refuse to abase themselves, they are reduced to their beastly essences by new, animal names that they are given during their stay in Her land. Holly becomes "the Baboon," Leo "the Lion," and the servant Job "the Pig," and their animalism is further emphasized by the fact that they eat meat and milk while She sustains Herself only on fruit and water.

While She is as voluptuous as Venus, however, She is also a Perseph one, married to death and queen in a country of shadows. Shrouded in a "white and gauzy material" that makes Her look like "a corpse in its grave-clothes" (149), She judges and condemns the hapless Amahaggar with the lucid indifference of eternity, explaining that "those who live long . . . have no passions save where they have interests" (185). For recreation, She takes Her visitors on a tour of Her domain, a "whole mountain peopled with the dead, and nearly all of them perfect" (179). Besides commanding a realm of tombs and ruins, She has spent, it soon appears, more than twenty necrophiliac centuries watching, praying, cursing, and sleeping by the side of the dead Kallikrates, who has been miraculously preserved in a secret catacomb. Finally Kor, the name of the dead city she rules, links Her even more definitively to the bride of Dis, for Persephone is also, after all, called Kore or Kora. But the ambiguity of the word Kor emphasizes in addition the crucial ambiguity of the city's queen. Ruling this domain which is at the core or heart of the earth, She-who-must-be-obeyed is part a Kore collecting corpses in the "dead heart of the rock" and part a Venus collecting coeurs or hearts, and seducing or enchanting the flesh that is the living corpus of the earth.

In Her striking duality, then, She transcends the traditional arche types of Venus and Persephone to become a resonant amalgam of their collective attributes. Such early and middle twentieth-century psychoanalysts as Jung, Freud, and Nandor Fodor responded to Her enigmatic complexity by arguing in ahistorical terms that She is a perfect incarnation of the "anima," a type of the "Ewig-Weibliche," or a fantasy, vision of the "Beloved" extrapolated from prenatal memories. More recent critics, among them Henry Miller, Morton Cohen, Norman Etherington and Nina Auerbach, have made similar, if sometimes more historical, arguments, relating Her to fin de siecle visions of the unconscious or to eternal male desires for eternal female beauty.23 But precisely the contradictions and complexities that interest so many of these readers suggest that She is primarily an avatar of the femme fatale who haunted writers from Coleridge, Keats, and Swinburne to Pater, Wilde, Macdonald, and ultimately Yeats, so much so that Her character in a sense summarizes and intensifies all the key traits these artists brooded on.

Having lived under the hill of ordinary reality since classical antiquity, for instance, She chats familiarly about Greek and Arab philosophers with the bemused Holly; clearly, like Pater's Gioconda, She has "learned the secrets of the grave ... and trafficked . . . with Eastern merchants." Wherever she studied, moreover, She acquired strange herbal wisdom, esoteric healing powers, and arcane alchemical knowledge. In addition, because She is a connoisseur of a language strange as that spoken by Keats's Belle Dame, only She can decipher the writing on the walls of the tombs among which She lives, and She has surrounded Herself with mute servants whose handicap She Herself has bred, depriving an entire lineage of language so that no one will speak Her secrets. Nevertheless, despite Her supernatural powers, She is tormented by desire and regret, burdened like Macdonald's Lilith, Swinburne's Sappho, or Wilde's Salome by an alien consciousness. Like Moneta, moreover, She is condemned to the perpetual repetition of a terrible psychodrama in the "dark secret chambers of her skull," while, as Henry Miller puts it, "Jealousy, manifesting itself in a tyrannical will, in an insatiable love of power, burns in her with the brightness of a funeral pyre."²⁴ Finally, indeed, one suspects that just as the name KOr applies at least as much to Her as to the lost city She rules, the name Kallik rates has as much to do with Her as with the dead priest who was Her victim. For, like Kali, the Indian goddess of destruction, She is murderous: She condemns men quickly and casually to death by torture and is ca pable of "blasting" those she dislikes with a Medusan glance. In Kalli krates' first incarnation, She murdered him, and now, in his second, She murders the Amahaggar woman who seems to be a reincarnation of Her hated rival.

Like the Indian god Brahm, however, or like the Great Mother as Neumann and others have defined her, She is not merely a destroyer; because She is a combined Persephone and Venus, She is a destroyer and a preserver.²⁵ In fact, She has evidently learned many of Her techniques of preservation from the dead priests of Kor, and perhaps the most peculiar feature of Haggard's discussion of Her kingdom is his ruminative, obsessive, even at times necrophiliac interest in the mummies that surround Her as well as the embalming techniques through which they have been preserved. From the royal tombs She and Her visitors tour to the little white mummified foot the servile Arab "Father" Billali carries with him everywhere like an erotic good luck charm, the dead are ubiquitous in Kor. The Englishmen are shown a "pit about the size of the space beneath the dome of St. Paul's" (190) filled with the bones of Kor-dwellers, and they peer voyeuristically into chambers occupied by beautiful embalmed bodies, including a pair of lovers clasped in a quasi-sexual embrace beneath the inscription "Wedded in Death" (194). Even more bizarrely, they regularly dine in a cave decorated by bas-reliefs that show it was used by the priests of Kor for embalming as well as eating, and they are invited to a ceremonial feast at which the torches are flaming human mummies as well as the severed limbs of those mummies. In K6r, even the arms and legs of the dead become significant fragments with which She illuminates Her ruins.

The literal as well as metaphorical piling up of all this dead flesh reminds us, of course, that the womb of the Great Mother is also a tomb. But such mysterious preservation of the flesh also implies other and perhaps more uncanny points, for, as Haggard presents it throughout She, the very idea of embalming paradoxically evokes anxieties about both the ordinary world the Englishmen represent and the extraordinary realm She rules. The mummy-crowded tombs of Kor, for instance, hint that dead history may still be willfully present in the living moment. Just as Amenartas's vengeful imperative was "embalmed" in the apparently ordinary modern name of Vincey, so the quests and failures of Leo's "ordinary" ancestors are embalmed in Leo. In a sense, indeed, the mountain of death in which he finds himself is like a huge vessel on which the message of the sherd has been rein scribed: tombs full of enigmatic corpses and indecipherable hieroglyphs suggest the haunting persistence of the past, the affliction of history, the burden of ancestry. Worse still, like the wheel of reincarnation, with its perpetual repetition of the same characters and the same messages, the mummies evoke the dread associated with the imagined persistence of the self through history and thus the nausea of belatedness.

At the same time, however, the unnatural practices that have pre served the mummies evoke an unnatural culture—not just Herodotus's peculiar Egypt but also the strange Egypt that was being diligently studied in the nineteenth century. More metaphysically, the alien opacity, inertness and silence of the lifelike but embalmed bodies quite literally incarnate the horror of otherness and specifically the horror of the body that is other than one's own and therefore opaque to one's thought. Indeed, Haggard's romance of the Great Mother may secretly imagine the same connection between mummies (as bodies) and mummies (as mothers) that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein makes.²⁶ Certainly Ayesha is both powerful Mother Goddess and shrouded mummy. In fact, She Herself seems to be the most theatrical example of unnatural preservation that we encounter in the book that tells Her story. More than two thousand years old, She has been embalmed alive. Herself both destroyer and preserver, She has been spectacularly preserved. But She lacks the crucial third ability of creation, and She lacks the ultimate power of self-preservation. Implicit in such lacks is the spectacular moment of Her destruction, a sexual climax that can be defined as a sort of apocalyptic primal scene.

Wishes for Ayesha's destruction, however, have been carefully cul tivated in the chapters that precede the catastrophe in the "place of Life," for Her actions and ambitions are shown to become increasingly Satanic as the novel progresses and Her fatal attraction to Her lover, as well as Her willful desire for complete possession of him, gathers energy. In the chapter called "Triumph," for instance, She "blasts" Leo's Amahaggar wife Ustane, and when he protests Her deed, She "blasts" him too, with slightly less force but fiercely enough so that he feels "utterly cowed, as if all the manhood had been taken out of him" (234). Worse still, She follows up this sexual insult by tearing away her veils and seducing the unwilling Leo, so that, "with the corpse of his dead love for an altar [he plights] his troth to [this] red-handed murderess...for ever and a day" (239). Worst of all, within twenty-four hours of this grisly seduction scene, She is planning, like some monstrous anti-Victoria, to "assume absolute rule over the British dominions and probably over the whole earth" (267). "It might be possible to control her for a while," speculates Holly,

This "power," as Holly and Leo soon learn, is not only in its aims but in its origin illegitimate, because, like most diabolical capabilities, it has been usurped. En route to the "place of Life," Ayesha reveals that it was actually a hermit-philosopher called Noot who discovered the miraculous fire, and She, then authentically young and beautiful, charmed him into sharing its secrets.²⁷ The terrible punishment in store for such a transgression begins to emerge when She and Her companions reach an abyss that they must cross on a narrow plank. Plunged into darkness for most of every day, this gulf can only be bridged when, passing though a cleft in the rock, "like a great sword of flame, a beam from the setting sun [pierces] the Stygian gloom" (285). The moment of illumination that follows, says Holly, is exhilarating, for "Right through the heart of the darkness that flaming sword was stabbed" (285). Prefiguring phallic weapons of light and hearts of darkness in works by Haggard's literary descendants from Conrad to Lawrence, Holly's imagery also both illuminates and foreshadows Ayesha's doom. For She is, metaphorically speaking, destroyed during a moment of unholy intercourse with the phallic "pillar of Life" whose sexual comings and goings, the English men now discover, eternally shake the secret "womb of Earth." Thus She Herself represents a "heart of darkness" into which the flaming sword of patriarchal justice must be ritually stabbed.²⁸

The "rolling pillar of Life" that brings Haggard's romance to its apocalyptic climax is an almost theatrically rich sexual symbol. At regular intervals, it appears with a "grinding and crashing noise... roll ing down like all the thunderwheels of heaven behind the horses of the lightning" (300—30 1) and, as it enters the cave, it flames out "an awful cloud or pillar of fire, like a rainbow many colored," whose very presence causes Holly to rejoice "in [the] splendid vigor of a new-found self" (301). Both Alexander Grinstein and Nandor Fodor claim that (for obvious reasons) it represents the sexual energy of the Father, with Fodor going so far as to argue that its powerfully persistent, rhythmic return into the rosy cave draws upon prenatal memories to depict pa rental sexuality from the point of view of the unborn child.²⁹ Be this as it may, it seems clear from the pillar's celestial radiance and regenerative power that this perpetually erect symbol of masculinity is not just a Freudian penis but a Lacanian phallus, a fiery signifier whose eternal thundering return speaks the inexorability of the patriarchal law She has violated in Her Satanically overreaching ambition.

Like the stars whose imperturbable order defeats Lucifer in George Meredith's "Lucifer in Starlight," this phallus comes and goes on an "ancient track," indifferent, omnipotent.³⁰ Like the "pillar of fire by night" that helps Moses lead the children of Israel out of an Egypt even more perverse than Herodotus's, it expresses the will of the divine Fa ther, and in doing so it will lead Holly and Leo out of Her degrading land back into the kingdom of their own proper masculinity.³' Flaming out "like a rainbow many colored," it also recalls the covenantal rain bow of Genesis, and thus it becomes, in a sense, the pillar of society, an incarnate sign of the covenant among men (and between men and a symbolic Father) that is the founding gesture of patriarchal culture.³² In addition, as a powerful male sexual symbol, it comments dramati cally upon the less powerful female symbols deployed by the Amahag gar in the earlier hotpotting episode, for it is radiant, insubstantial, transcendent, where the hot pots were inert, earthen, grotesque. In fact, the novelist Henry Miller grasps the purpose of this pillar of fire more accurately than those psychoanalysts who have emphasized its Freudian function at the expense of its Lacanian signification, perhaps because of his belief (which we discussed in The War of the Words) that "the eternal battle with women . . . enlarges the scope of our cultural achievements."³³ Ayesha's fate, Miller notes, "is not death, indeed...but reduction," and he adds that "one is privileged, as it were, to assist at the spectacle of Nature reclaiming . . . the secret which had been stolen."³⁴ As Harold Bloom observes of Pater's Gioconda, Ayesha "incarnates too much, both for her own good and [from a masculinist point of view] for ours."³⁵ Finally, therefore, naked and ecstatic, in all the pride of Her femaleness, She must be fucked to death by the "un alterable law" of the Father.

As Miller also notes, however, Ayesha's defeat is not really a death or even a "reduction" but, quite literally, a "devolution."36 If She has incarnated "more than was good for her, or for us," Her very flesh is punished for such presumption. As She passes through the stages of Her unlived life, aging two thousand years in a few minutes, the language strange of Her beauty shreds and flakes away, Her power wrinkles, Her magic dries up, and the meaning of Her "terrible priority" is revealed as degeneration rather than generativity. The Mosaic reality behind the false commandments of She-who-must-be-obeyed, Holly and Leo learn, is and always was a bald, blind, naked, shapeless, infinitely wrinkled female animal, "no larger than a big ape," who raises herself "upon her bony hands ... swaying her head slowly from side to side as does a tortoise" (308). More terrible than the transformations of Dr. Jekyll or Dorian Gray, this reduction or devolution of goddess to beast is the final judgment upon Her pride and ambition. "Thus She op posed herself to the eternal law," concludes Holly, "and, strong though she was, by it was swept back into nothingness—swept back with shame and hideous mockery" (309).

In Ayesha's shame and in fate's mockery of Her, Holly also observes, he sees "the finger of Providence." For—and here he begins to articu late the secret fear that really energizes Haggard's fantasy—"Ayesha locked up in her living tomb, waiting from age to age for the coming of her lover, worked but a small change in the order of the world. But Ayesha strong and happy in her love, clothed with immortal youth, godlike beauty, and power, and the wisdom of the centuries, would have revolutionised society, and even perchance have changed the des tinies of Mankind" (309). As Miller, again most astutely, puts it: with Ayesha's defeat, "Isis, to whom she had sworn eternal devotion, will be no more."³⁷ When She dies, therefore, Holly and Leo-—and Hag gard—bear witness not just to the death of a mortal woman but to the annihilation of the goddess, the deconstruction even of the idea of the goddess.³⁸

She was not only a turn-of-the-century bestseller but also, in a number of dramatic ways, one of the century's literary turning points, a pivot on which the ideas and anxieties of the Victorians began to swivel into what has come to be called "the modern." Most obviously, this is because Haggard's novel both summarized and transformed the history of the femme fatale whose character so preoccupied the nineteenth century. For although She is a conventionally romantic Belle Dame sans Merci, the stony waste land that She rules is modern in its air of sexual and historical extremity. One of the outposts of "death's dream kingdom," it threatens the living empire of England with dismemberment, fragmentation, incoherence. Ultimately, in fact, it can only be redeemed through a sexual conflagration that is not merely an appropriate but also, for the explorers, a secretly desired climax of the combat that has set so many men and women of this novel so violently against each other.

Like the extreme perversity of Her land, however, this erotic apocalypse represents a crucial revision of earlier depictions of the femme fatale, in which it had become a sort of nineteenth-century tradition for the Circean woman to survive and triumph. Even Flaubert's notorious Salammbo only swoons to death after she has witnessed the hideous torture-execution of her lover, Matho. On the surface, indeed, it seems as if most of Haggard's precursors could barely begin to imagine the death of the goddess, so enthralled were they by her magic and so dependent on her charms. But perhaps, too, those charms, sinister as they often seemed, had not yet become so threatening that a serious defense against them was required: the femmes of Keats and Swinburne may not have seemed quite fatale enough to be condemned to death themselves. She, however, was associated with a new era in the fictionalizing of female power. Certainly in England the ceremonial sexual act that brought about Her "reduction" or "devolution" was followed by a number of similar scenes in fin-de-siecle and modernist tales 39

Most striking, because most shocking in their late Victorian context, are the ritual slaughters that conclude some of the fantasies about female power that were published in the decade after She appeared. The most theatrical of these is no doubt the climactic moment in Brain Stoker's Dracula (1897), when, on what would have been the first day of their marriage, the noble Englishman Arthur Holmwood drives a phallic stake into the dark heart of his "Un-Dead" fiancee Lucy Westenra. The body, Stoker tells us in what emerges as a masterpiece of double entendre, "shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam."⁴⁰ But finally, a "holy calm" succeeds the tumult in the coffin. In thrall to Dracula, Lucy was also an emissary of the goddess, for the body of the Transylvanian count had been borne mysteriously back and forth across the English Channel in ships called the Demeter and the Czarina Catherine, as if he were an embalmed inhabitant of Kor, part of the cargo that She-who-must-be-obeyed would import if She could reach the British Isles. Staked, beheaded, and stuffed with garlic like some savory roast meat, however, Lucy is definitively screwed into her coffin, neutralized. Now "No longer is she the devil's Un-Dead," murmurs kindly Dr. Van Helsing. "She is God's true dead, whose soul is with Him!"'"

Similarly, in Macdonald's Lilith (1895) the vampire princess Lilith must be mutilated—specifically, she must have her hand chopped off— in a symbolic defloration-and-castration scene, so that she can "sleep the sleep."⁴² Preternaturally gleaming, Adam's ancient sword is as Lacanian a phallus as the "rolling pillar of Life," for, explains the Father of mankind, "the angel gave it me when he left the gate."⁴³ After it flashes toward Lilith, therefore, there is "one little gush of blood" and in a minute this archetypal female rebel is both peaceful and powerless.

Again, though it is far more self-reflexive and ironic, Wilde's Salome (1894) hints at such a denouement, for after the depraved daughter of Herodias destroys two men—the "young Syrian" and John the Baptist—another man avenges their wrongs and restores patriarchal order, in a crucial swerve from the story outlined in the New Testament.⁴⁴ "Kill that woman!" exclaims the hitherto unkingly Herod in the last line of the play and, just as Salome is indulging her unholy desire for the head of Jokanaan, "the soldiers rush forward" and "crush beneath their shields Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea."45 Salome's unnatural power is expressed in the qualifying phrase that emphasizes her matrilineal descent—"daughter of Herodias"—as if to explain precisely what must be crushed out of her, and why. And significantly, though her destruction is commanded by one man it is finally a communal act, performed not by a single executioner but by a band of men acting in unison.

Perhaps the most apocalyptic act of this sort, an act of destruction more divine than communal, is the quasi-scientific but really cosmic annihilation of the femme fatale that concludes Brain Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm (1911), a fantasy far less well-known (and less skillful) than Dracula which nevertheless reiterates the themes of the earlier novel and of She in, if possible, even more flagrantly "Freudian" terms. Like Ayesha, like Keats's Lamia and dozens of other femmes fatales, Lady Arabella March, the villainess of this book, has strange and deadly powers. Specifically, she has become an avatar of a gigantic White Worm, a "monster of the early days of the world" that lives in a well-hole on her ancient estate, Diana's Grove, and "be she woman or snake or devil" she must be destroyed.⁴⁶ But the task is not an easy one. A paradig matic phallic woman, Lady Arabella is seductively feminine, with, in her human guise, a "sinuous figure" (29) and a voice of hissing sweet ness, and, at the same time, monstrously masculine, appearing in her White Worm form as "a long white pole, . . . an immense towering mass . . . tall and thin, . . . a tall white shaft" (143). Admits Stoker's hero, who is (appropriately enough) named Adam,

His comrades-in-arms agree, and one offers a battle plan that suc cinctly summarizes the strategies deployed by the heroes of all these books: "Now, Adam, it strikes me that, as we have to protect ourselves and others against feminine nature, our strong game will be to play our masculine against her feminine" (135).

Ultimately, "play[ing] our masculine against her feminine" is what Stoker's heroes do, at least in a symbolic sense, for Lady Arabella as both worm and woman is destroyed by a Jovian bolt of lightning which ignites a load of dynamite that her male antagonists have inserted into "her" well-hole. Listening outside Diana's Grove at the height of the retributive thunder storm, Adam and his young bride realize that "Something was going on close to them, mysterious, terrible, deadly!" Then, when Lady Arabella's stately home explodes, they witness a virtual orgasm of death as they gaze voyeuristically toward "where the well-hole yawned, a deep narrow circular chasm" from which "agonised shrieks were rising, growing ever more terrible with each second that passed":

            The seething contents of the hole rose, after the manner of a bubbling spring,
            and Adam saw part of the thin form of Lady Arabella, forced up to the top
            amid a mass of slime, and what looked as if it had been a monster torn into
            shreds. . . .At last the explosive power . . . reached the main store of
            dynamite. .The result was appalling. The ground for far around quivered and
            opened in long, deep chasms. . . . The hole . . . sent up clouds of dust and
            steam and fine sand mingled . . . which carried an appalling stench. . . . Then
            almost as quickly as it had begun, the whole cataclysm ceased.                       
            [186—187]    47

To identify the fictionalized anxieties that impel the stories of Ayesha, Lucy, Lilith, Salome, Lady Arabella, and many other powerful women toward a common and uncommonly ferocious denouement is not, however, to understand the history of the psychological and social anxieties that underlie all these texts. What, after all, worried Rider Haggard so much that he was driven to create his extraordinarily complex fantasy about Her and Her realm in just six volcanically energetic weeks? Why did thousands and thousands of English and American readers respond to his dreamlike story of Her with as much fervor as if he had been narrating their own dreams for them and to them? Within a few months after She made its first appearance in bookstores, Haggard was the literary celebrity of his day both in England and the United States. The critic Walter Besant confessed that he had read the book in a single night . . . it was impossible while [it] was in my hand to take my eyes from a single page." "Ten thousand readers. . . demand imperatively to know the colour of Mr. Haggard's eyes," reported the American Literary World. "Many a provincial lad," recalled J. P. Collins, "rashly [mortgaged] the income of months in order to burst into a bookshop and buy She."49 Why and how did Haggard's romance in spire such enthusiasm?

Of course, like any writer, Haggard had personal reasons for fantasizing the way he did. As a child, for instance, he had actually owned a fierce-looking rag doll that was used by "an unscrupulous nurse" to frighten and bully the terrified boy, who therefore called it "She-who must-be-obeyed." In any case, the young Rider seems to have been shy, dreamy, dull, all qualities that would trigger later anxieties. Of seven sons in his family, only he "was denied a 'proper' schooling" because even his mother, herself a published writer, thought him "as heavy as lead in body and mind."⁵⁰ As a young man, moreover, he was painfully jilted by the woman he always considered his true love, the beautiful Lily Jackson, whom members of the Haggard family nicknamed "Lilith." Because such a complex of early private humiliations might well lead to later fantasies about power and powerlessness, it is comparatively easy to trace the personal dynamics that transformed She-the doll into She-the-goddess or the real man called Haggard into the fictional people called the Amahaggar. It is easy, too, to see why such a man would have had to convince himself that, like his imperious doll, both his icy beloved and his arrogant goddess might ultimately be nothing more than the collection of pathetic fragments his friend Rudyard Kipling—in a poem tellingly entitled "The Vampire" (1 897)—declared that even the most fatal woman was: "a rag and a bone and a hank of hair."51

What comparable public dynamics, however, affected not only Haggard himself but She's throngs of eager readers? We want to suggest that the charisma of this novel arose from the fact that the work itself explored and exploited three subtly interrelated late Victorian phenomena: an interest in Egypt and, more generally, a preoccupation with colonized countries and imperial decline; a fascination with spiritualism; and an obsession not just with the so-called New Woman but with striking new visions and re-visions of female power.

As Edward Said has noted, Egypt in the nineteenth century became more than ever a focal point for imperialist anxieties and passions.⁵² In the alien, barely decipherable hieroglyphs of its history and in the many mysteries of its ancient and modern religious practices, it must always have seemed to many Europeans to summarize and symbolize, as it had for Herodotus and as—together with Kor—it did for Haggard, the mystifyingly obdurate power of what we might call geopolitical other- ness.⁵³ But now such otherness was being notably redefined. To begin with, philological analyses undertaken by Champollion on the Rosetta Stone and carried forward by other nineteenth-century Egyptologists started to make definitively clear the range and sophistication of linguistic experience possible even among supposedly "barbaric" races. Similarly, increasingly aggressive exploration of Egyptian and Nubian tombs and pyramids was uncovering the startling extent of what one writer has characterized as "the vast underground network of caverns and burial chambers" in, say, the Theban necropolis and other elaborate burial sites.⁵⁴

No doubt because of this intensified archaeological activity, the practice and processes of mummification—which Europeans had in any case always regarded with awe—had now become subjects of respectful scientific analysis as well as, more than ever before, material for plot and metaphor. In popular literature, tales of mummies' curses and other ancient spells proliferated, while more elite artists, from Giuseppe Verdi (Aida, 1871) to Anatole France (Thass, 1890) and W. B. Yeats, drew in vanous ways on comparable Egyptian lore. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, Yeats was elaborating Egyptian imagery: the powerful spiritual consciousness he longed to have would be, he wrote, "wound in mind's pondering I As mummies in the mummy cloth are wound," and he metaphorized apocalyptic transformation as "a crop of mummy wheat!"⁵⁵

Finally, as if to reinforce the fascination that such artists felt, the translations of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and similar sacred texts that had been begun by E. Wallis Budge and other scholars were also emphasizing the richness of what had long seemed a hopelessly opaque or chaotic theological system, while the new orientalists' studies of Islam clarified what they saw as the dangerous coherence of a creed that had been traditionally defined as "barbaric" and confused. By 1911, former prime minister Arthur James Balfour was lecturing Parliament on the greatness of Egypt and asserting, "We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country. We know it further back. . . . It goes far beyond the petty span of the history of our race. . . . Look at all the Oriental countries. Do not talk about superiority or inferiority. "56

Such attention to ancient Egypt and modern Islam was not an iso lated phenomenon. Rather, it was part of a larger surge of philological, archaeological, and anthropological scholarship that was throughout the nineteenth century drastically revising western notions of prehistory, of comparative religion, and of "primitive" social structures. To be sure, as Morse Peckham has observed, a good deal of early scholar ship in these fields was based—as Darwin's theory of evolution also was— on an implicitly ethnocentric "chain of being" that subordinated the "primitive" native to the "civilized" westerner so that "the value of anthropology for imperial management should not be underestimated."⁵⁷ At the same time, though, Peckham notes that the studies of, for instance, Edward Tylor (whose Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom [1871] essentially founded modern anthropology) revealed significant similarities between the supposedly primitive and the ostensibly civilized: such a man was well on his way to becoming a cultural relativist, as were many of his contemporaries and descendants.⁵⁸ Moreover, as Frances Mannsaker has observed, meditating on anxieties about imperial decline, "the idea of evolution ... was open to many different interpretations. What, for instance, did 'fittest' mean? It might not nec ssarily be equated with a western European definition of 'best'; the civilised might not be those most fitted to survive."⁵⁹

Thus, increasingly revealing the complexity (or at least the potency) of cultures that had been thought simple and the sophistication of societies that had been thought crude, anthropological and archaeological researches dramatized the haunting enigma of human otherness that might not be, as many Europeans still struggled to believe, inferior, but merely different. In the 1840s, in "Locksley Hall," Alfred Lord Tennyson had created a representative young man who declared "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.--co But within a few decades it was becoming obvious that a cycle of Cathay (or, indeed, Egypt) might be just as eventful and important as a cycle of Europe, despite the radical distinctions between the two civilizations.

As both Morton Cohen and Norman Etherington have noted, Rider Haggard was both a dedicated amateur Egyptologist and, through his friendship with Andrew Lang, a student of anthropology.⁶' In January 1888, just after She was published, Haggard sailed for Egypt, which was, in Cohen's words, "the land of his dreams," and in 1907 he replied to a query from The Bookman about the volume he had most enjoyed that year by choosing Breasted's Ancient Egyptian Records. 62 In his autobiography, moreover, he claimed to have had four recurring visions of his own previous incarnations as a "primitive" man:

Together, Etherington wittily comments, these might constitute "tableux from the ethnographic section of a museum." In addition, Haggard knew about the discovery in 1871 of the mysterious stone ruins at Great Zimbabwe, traveled extensively in Africa, and assiduously studied goddess worship among the Zulus and in "ancient Arabic religion."⁶⁴ It is significant, therefore, that She broods on one manifestation of the newly haunting enigma of geopolitical otherness not only in Haggard's use of the preclassical goddess Isis but in his naming of Her and Her land: Ayesha or Aisha was the second and favorite wife of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, to Christian readers the incarnation of alien theology, and Her strange land of K6r, besides recalling hearts of darkness, corpses, and the pagan goddess Kor6, evokes the Kor-an, the Islamic holy book which is in its essence Other than the "good" (western) book of the Bible.⁶⁵

But the wisdom of other cultures, and specifically the wisdom of ancient Egypt, was also gradually emerging in the nineteenth century through the sermons and seances of spiritualist "adepts" like Madame Blavatsky and her disciples, for spiritualism, with its different but equally serious emphasis on a realm of otherness, was the second contempo rary phenomenon that Haggard's romance exploited through its con struction of a 2,000-year-old heroine and through its flirtation with the concept of reincarnation. The novelist himself had been an active spiritualist in his youth, attending seances in the London homes of Lady Poulett and Lady Caithness, events which impressed him so deeply that he described them in vivid detail thirty-five years later. "At one," says Morton Cohen, "he saw a massive table that skipped like a lamb and a lady spirit with an elongated neck like Alice's in Wonderland." 66 More over, his novel Stella Fregelius (1904) begins, as Etherington puts it, "in the world of Jules Verne's science fiction and ends in the realms of Madame Blavatsky's theosophy" while in 1912 he explained his "ethnographic" visions of earlier incarnations by advancing a full-fledged Victorian theory of metempsychosis.⁶⁷ But such destabilizations of orthodox Christianity, originating with the disruptions of reality enacted at seances that were presided over—even enacted—by women, must have dramatized yet again the fragility of the control the rational western mind had supposedly achieved over a world which might at any moment uncannily assert itself. Where both materialistic science and traditional Christian theology declared that there was nothing (for the dead were, if anywhere, elsewhere), spiritualism seemed to prove that there was something, a realm of insistent consciousness pressing against the far side of appearances and straining to be spoken.⁶⁸

When theosophy, fostered by spiritualist experiences and ideas, systematized a set of radical, hermeticist propositions about reality, re minding readers that, as Madame Blavatsky argued, such mysticism had always flowed below western thought like an underground river, the hegemony of patriarchal rationalism was even more senously shaken. Certainly the appearance of Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1877), as well as the charisma and notoriety of its female author and of her quasi-feminist disciple the birth-controller Annie Besant, must have not only cemented the connections between the "adepts" of the orient and such challenges to a commonly agreed-upon "reality," but also emphasized the link between, on the one hand, the alternative historical and theo logical possibilities propounded by spiritualism and theosophy and, on the other hand, the possibilities of disorderly female rule.⁶⁹

Even more than Madame Blavatsky or Annie Besant, the notorious American femme fatale Victoria Woodhull incarnated both these revolutionary possibilities. Beginning her career, together with her equally notorious sister Tennessee Claflin, as a magnetic healer and spiritualist, Woodhull soon ascended the lecture platform to speak for the twin causes of free love and women's suffrage.⁷⁰ In addition, again together with "Tennie C." (as she liked to be called), she founded both a radical newspaper—Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly—and, with the backing of Cornelius Vanderbilt, a Wall Street brokerage firm. Beautiful, seductive, and frequently married, she and her sister were known (and even caricatured) as the "Bewitching Brokers" or the "Fascinating Financiers," and their paper was read by a range of dissident groups (figure,

But it was as president of the National Society of Spiritualists, as the author of the "Woodhull Memorial" to Congress (calling for votes for women), as a fiery advocate of free love, as an implacable opponent of what she considered the sexual hypocrisy of the renowned clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, and as—repeatedly and quixotically—a candidate for the presidency of the United States that Woodhull became most famous and posed the most unnerving threats to established nineteenth-century values, in her capacity as a spiritualist leader, for in stance, she proclaimed that her creed "demonstrates the fallacy of the existence of the orthodox heaven and hell.. . .The churches and the politicians may sneer at the intentions of the spirit world, but they may do well to remember that it is in arms and impatiently waits the signal to move upon their threshold."⁷² Just as rebelliously, in her capacity as suffragist, Woodhull spoke before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives—becoming the first woman to appear before that august body—"praying Congress to enact such laws as were necessary to enable women to exercise the right to vote already vested in them by the Fourteenth Amendment."⁷³

As for Woodhull's most widely publicized role, that of free love advocate, her impassioned speeches on the subject, made to overflow crowds in huge auditoriums, were marked by a rhetoric that theatrically mingled the language of purity with the vocabulary of desire. "I deem it false and perverse modesty that shuts off discussion" of the erotic, she asserted during a famous appearance at New York's Steinway Hall, adding, "So long as [women] knew nothing but a blind and servile obedience. . . to the will and wish of men, they did not rebel; but the time has arrived . . . wherein they rebel, demanding . . . freedom to hold their own lives and bodies from the demoralizing influence of sexual relations that are not founded in and maintained by love."⁷⁴ Such a rhetoric, combining a redefined feminine purity with a rousing feminist frankness, also characterized Woodhull's stance throughout what became known as the "Beecher-Tilton scandal," a case in which she was sued at the behest of the Puritanical Anthony Comstock for having revealed in her Weekly details of Henry Ward Beecher's clandestine affair with the wife of his disciple Theodore Tilton.75 As public sympathy for her cause mounted, she herself, like some American Ayesha, triumphantly repeated to the New York Evening Post a statement that she attributed to the poet William Cullen Bryant: "The terrible syren has defeated you and charmed your cohorts and battalions to silence and inaction." 76

But perhaps it was in her repeated campaigns for the presidency that Woodhull most bizarrely prefigured Ayesha's plan to "assume ab solute rule" and "to change the order of the world." When the "Victo ria League" first nominated her for the office in 1872, the "terrible syren" frankly vaunted her ambitions, making the extent of her pro gram quite explicit in an article in the Weekly:

And indeed, though Woodhull's candidacy was hopeless and her cam paigns often farcical, by the 1880s she had invaded England, where she married a wealthy banker and where, in preparation for the election of 1884, she "issued a manifesto to the English newspapers" calling for "the people of all Europe, America, and the world" to "rally round her standard."⁷⁸

Whether or not Haggard followed the activities of this "other Victoria," then, the third contemporary phenomenon that concerned him and his readers would in a sense have integrated the first two, for like both the ideology and the image of rebellious women spiritualists, the figure of the New Woman, strengthened by new visions of the power of Everywoman, vividly suggested an ultimate triumph of otherness. Although most were more decorous than Woodhull, feminist thinkers from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Maud Gonne had long identified their work for women's rights with such related challenges to patriarchal authority as spiritualism, abolitionism, and the Home Rule movement in Ireland. Moreover, even without overt articulation of the links between feminism and other antipatriarchal movements, the very idea of the New Woman was, as the sexual battle she precipitated suggests, so threatening that her aspirations might indeed tend to evoke all the other subversive aspirations that were suddenly, or so it seemed, being voiced throughout the empire and in the New World, with some even being conveyed from the invisible realm of the dead. But beyond the anxieties aroused by suffrage militancy, men of Haggard's generation would have had cause to worry about the principle Goethe had decades earlier termed the "Ewig-Weibliche." For during the nineteenth century the very nature and history of the "feminine" were being radically defined by both biologists and anthropologists, redefined in such a way that Goethe's eternally angelic "Loving-holy penitent women," as well as his forever welcoming Mater Gloriosa, could no longer be said to function, the way they had in Faust, as little more than nobly passive handmaidens to men.⁷⁹

From classical Greece onward, woman's womb—her hyster—had usually been imaged as an empty and inert vessel (or, if not appropriately "filled," as a troublesome animal whose importunate appetites fostered hysteria). Similarly, the female "seed" was generally seen as no seed at all, but simply "matter" (mater) to be shaped by the spirit or essence carried in the male seed. Apollo's famous judgment at the end of the Oresteia—"The true parent is he who mounts, the mother is not the parent at all"—was therefore frequently associated, until at least the eighteenth century, with "the highly influential concept of the relative roles of male and female in development" which Aristotle postulated in his Generation of Animals: males were believed to provide "the form, at once formal, efficient, and final cause" and females no more than "the substance, the material cause, for the new organism."⁸⁰

Thus when, in 1845, the American gynecologist Marion Sims first inserted a rudimentary speculum into a human vagina, he was astounded by the intricacy of the organs he viewed, a kind of internal landscape about which he spoke in terms that seem almost to prefigure the amazement recorded by Haggard's male travelers into Her queen dom. "Introducing the bent handle of a spoon," confided Sims, "I saw everything as no man had ever seen before.. . . I felt like an explorer in medicine who first views a new and important territory. 81 To be sure, Sims imagined himself as a colonizing and conquering hero; in deed, as G. J. Barker-Benfield observes, he depicted himself as "Columbus," the vagina as his "New World."⁸² But his astonishment at the terrain he surveyed also suggests a new awe at the complexity of female anatomy and therefore at the creative potential of female destiny.

Just as disturbing to male self-assurance must have been some of the discoveries of embryologists which counterpointed Sims's work: by the end of the eighteenth century, Caspar Friedrich Wolff's theory of ovular epigenesis (emphasizing the activity rather than the passivity of the woman's part in reproduction) had been widely accepted, and by the end of the nineteenth century, in just the years when Haggard fictionalized Her powers, experimental embryologists had established the nature of the cleavage by which the egg-embryo manifests its develop mental potency.⁸³ Equally—or perhaps even more—disturbing, however, would have been some of the anthropological speculations which gave further resonance to these biological discoveries, specifically speculations about the possibility of a matriarchal prehistory.

Again, from classical Greece (or indeed biblical Palestine) onward, prehistory had usually been imagined in the west as patriarchal, with (in the Bible) founding fathers begetting famous sons and (in Greek myth) Titanic males struggling to fashion inert mother earth into meaningful shapes. But in 1861 the Swiss jurist J. J. Bachofen pro posed in his massive Mother Right a startling new argument: the earliest form of social organization, he declared, was matriarchal, and though his notion appeared shocking, it was soon widely disseminated.⁸⁴ By 1903, in her ambitious Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, the British classicist Jane Ellen Harrison had censoriously noted that "the modern mind, obsessed and limited by a canonical Olympus, an Olympus which is 'all for the Father,' has forgotten the Great Mother," but, she added jubilantly, as she commented on the Cretan excavations of the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, "in Crete most happily the ancient figure of the mother has returned after long burial to the upper air. 85

Within several decades after Harrison wrote, her vision of the resurrected (matriarchal) mother was being elaborated by such diverse figures as Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence, and H. D., each of whom responded with (usually male) anxiety or (usually female) exuberance to the newly powerful idea of the Great Mother. Confessed Freud nervously in Totem and Taboo (1913), "I cannot suggest at what point a place is to be found for the great mother-goddesses who may perhaps in general have preceded the father gods."⁸⁶ As if explaining the reason for Freud's unusual bafflement, Lawrence grimly insisted in a 1929 essay on "Matriarchy" that the "modern young man is afraid of being swamped, turned into a mere accessory of bare-limbed swooping women.

He knows perfectly well that [man] will never be master again."⁸⁷ But H. D. (who had quarreled with Freud over precisely the issue of the mother goddess) exclaimed ecstatically, in a draft of The Gift (1941— 43), that "Beneath every temple to Zeus . . . there was found on excavation without exception, some old cell or cellar or the rough ground work of some primitive temple to the Early Goddess. . . the first deity, the primitive impulse, the primitive desire, the first love."⁸⁸

In addressing himself to a fantasy of Ayesha and Her land, Haggard was surely meditating on many of these same issues. Not only does the dreamlike landscape of his romance recall the extraordinary "territory" discovered by Sims, but that landscape, with its glamorous intricacy, functioned as a kind of "objective correlative" for ideas about female power that were increasingly popularized throughout the nineteenth century. In 1875, the Christian Scientist Mary Baker Eddy had defined "MOTHER" as "God; divine and eternal Principle; Life, Truth, and Love," while in 1885 Haggard had one of the three heroes of King Solomon's Mines meditate on "Asthoreth of the Hebrews . . . the Astarte of the Phoenicians. . . who afterwards was the Aphrodite of the Greeks."⁸⁹ Thus, though Ayesha is not herself a mother, she has quasi- maternal powers over life and death, and when the American writer Mary Austin, visiting London in the 1920s, asked Haggard "whether he hadn't figured 'She' as the matriarch, he admitted that he had."90 Indeed, in Ayesha, the Return of She (1905), Haggard had himself made this point explicit by portraying his reborn heroine as "the head priestess of a cult whose central symbol is an idealized representation of Universal Motherhood." 91

At the same time, besides confronting the mythic and psychological meanings of female power, Haggard was also, consciously or not, examining the frightening yet fascinating possibility of female political and literary power. The son of one of the many nineteenth-century "scribbling women" who not only read romances to their children but actually wrote such works themselves—his mother's epic poem Myra, or the Rose of the East appeared in 1857, a year after he was born—he had special personal reasons to be absorbed by "the woman question."92 But as a citizen of a community that was becoming increasingly absorbed by that "question," Haggard had equally pressing reasons to be concerned by the matter, even though (or perhaps because) he was a professed antifeminist.93 In just the year when he dated the arrival in his imaginary Cambridge of the palimpsestic sherd that was Her emissary, the real Cambridge was also being invaded by women: for the first time, in 1881, female students were allowed to matriculate at the university and to be examined for degrees along with their male peers.~ In addition, his adult reading as well as his childhood listening was, at least at one point, focused on the product of a female imagination: the first bestselling novel ever written about Africa was, after all, a book by a woman, and a feminist woman at that—Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883).

Like Englishmen from Gladstone to Rhodes, Haggard read African Farm with fascination. In fact, he always identified it as one of the two books that had meant the most to him (the other, interestingly, was Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).95 At his first opportunity, he sought out Schreiner to express his admiration, although some of his comments about African Farm suggest that he felt toward its author exactly the kind of ambivalence that (as we argued in The War of the Words) many modernist men felt toward particularly successful female precursors and contemporaries. Nevertheless, Haggard's magnetic Ayesha may have been half-consciously modeled on Schreiner's equally magnetic Lyndall, a femme fatale whose passionate self- possession enthralls her male admirers just as surely as Ayesha's captivates hers.

But Schreiner's feminine realism—perhaps, indeed, her feminist pessimism—dooms her heroine to a life far shorter, drabber, and less triumphant than Ayesha's: with bleak irony, Schreiner argues, as we shall show, that it is fatal to be a femme fatale, while Haggard fantasizes, on the contrary, that such a femme must be punished with "devolution" precisely because she is fatale. His revision of Schreiner's Lyndall suggests, then, that She is haunted not only by overt anxieties about "the matriarch" but also by covert worries about both the feminist Schreiner and the femme fatale Lyndall, as well as about the meaning of the society such an author and such a heroine might imagine for themselves.96

Finally, therefore, what might have been Schreiner's utopia—a "world elsewhere" in which Lyndall could survive and thrive—became Haggard's dystopia, a dystopia that dramatically integrates nineteenth-century male fears about the rise, and the redefinition, of female power with imperialist worries about the claims of colonized peoples and Christian fears about the challenges posed by alternative theologies. Following thinkers like Levi-Strauss and Simone de Beauvoir, the French feminist theorist Helene Cixous has argued that patriarchal culture is founded on equivalent sets of "hierarchical oppositions"—"Culture/ Nature . . . Father/Mother . . . Man/Woman . . . Superior/Inferior"—that analogically relate woman with the other, the inferior, the earth, nature.⁹⁷ But when we consider the European imperialist consciousness in the context of these equations, it becomes clear that (as a number of other thinkers have also observed), women = "outlanders"/ "barbarians" = colonized peoples, and hence colonized peoples = women, a point that Freud emphasized when he defined female sexuality as a "dark continent" and to which Ashley Montagu implicitly addresses himself when he reminds us of the "Victorian saying that the last thing man would civilize would be woman."⁹⁸ That both women and "natives" simultaneously began to manifest frightening drives toward independence just as England's great century of empire drew to its uneasy close would, of course, have sealed the fin-de-siecle connection between these two previously silent and disenfranchised groups.

As Lewis Wurgaft has pointed out in his useful study The Imperial Imagination, such a connection had long been implicit in, say, the psychohistory of the British Raj. Analyzing "Myth and Magic in Kipling's India," Wurgaft argues that the colonized peoples of India, particularly the Hindus of Bengal, were associated in the minds of their Victorian rulers with "fantasies of destructive female sexuality." From the point of view of administrative Englishmen, a "highly charged female sensuality" marked "native India's plains and cities."⁹⁹ More specifically, "the mercurial mother goddess Kali," who ruled the plains, "seemed to fascinate the British," and the harem, or zenana, struck them not as a place of female subordination or imprisonment but rather as a kind of Kor, a separate female realm ruled by "'a shrill-tongued virago, a tyrant unassailable in her own domain.'"

In many of the Indian stories and sketches by Haggard's longtime friend Rudyard Kipling, Wurgaft observes, these concerns are quite openly explored.101 But perhaps Kipling's most explicit text on the subject is a poem he published in 1888, a poem which seems almost like a kind of addendum to Haggard's novel. Entitled "An Interesting Condition," this sardonic vers libre piece—which has something of the stylistic flavor of Yeats's odd redaction of Pater—portrays an "Ewig Weibliche" whose politicized sexuality reflects just the sexual politics on which so many fin-de-siecle thinkers were brooding:

            Above all, reposes the East.
            She is old, but she is beautiful.
            A beautiful woman is always old. As old as Beauty.
            She is of moral reputation indifferent. . With the Tourkh.
            It was an affaire militaire only. .
            With the Rajput; with the Hindou. It was to pass the time. .
            With the Frenchman.
            It was an affair of the heart. .
            It is now the Englishman who is kicking her children
            to school. She has a menage of the Britannic ideal-
            solid, sumptuous, and wearying above all. .
            The Englishman has taken her by the arm. He
            promenades with her upon Sundays. He laughs.
            He exhibits his teeth. She slaps his leg. He
            also pats her upon the back.
            These things are the marks of the husband.
            English. But. . . ask her.
            She has seen many lovers.
            A woman who has seen many lovers will see more.
            This woman will exist for ever, and she will
            always be beautiful. 102

Simultaneously subordinated (a wife to the imperial "husband") and insubordinate (she will see many more "lovers" and no doubt rebelliously welcome them), this feminized colony endures as beautifully and alarmingly as Haggard's Ayesha or Yeats's and Pater's Gioconda have for two thousand years, suggesting that Kipling himself might have liked to invent an extended fiction like Haggard's romance of the seductress of KOr. Certainly, as Wurgaft notes, he tried to do so: throughout his years in India, "he was at work on a manuscript entitled Mother Maturin," a book he was never able to bring to completion but which evidently articulated his obsession with the "castrating female" side of India, and which must have colored his admiration for both She and Haggard.103

But of course, even before Kipling and his imperialist contemporaries sexualized colonized India in this way, the western imagination had, in America, connected racial otherness with sexual pollution, and, in England, associated the orient with feminization, with a blurring of gender boundaries, and more generally, with sexual perversity of all kinds. In the United States, as Barker-Benfield points out, the eugenics movement and the attempt by gynecologists to sanitize female sexuality had much in common. Many nineteenth-century

Indeed, with almost allegorical appropriateness, many of Marion Sims's earliest (and most excruciating) gynecological experiments—some thirty in a four-year period—were performed on a black slave named Anarcha.'05 It must have been more than a little unnerving, then, that Victoria Woodhull's running mate in her first (1872) bid for the presidency was a black reformer—Frederick Douglass. To the melody of "Comm' Thro' the Rye,' " her supporters chanted

            Yes! Victoria we've selected
            For our chosen head:
            With Fred Douglass on the ticket
            We will raise the dead.
            Then around them let us rally
            Without fear or dread,
            And next March, we'll put the Grundys
            In their little bed.106

If conditions in England did not imply such radical threats from within the 'scepter'd isle," they were nevertheless just as alarming, since what was inside, or at the edge of, the empire was also, in a sense, inside England. Most notably, perhaps, in the mid-century, Sir Richard Bur ton, traveling through the east, became fascinated by the homoeroticism practiced in what he called the "Sotadic Zone," an area which was "bounded westwards by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat 43)" and "by the southern (N. Lat 30)" and which also "embrac[ed] Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sind, the Pun- jab and Kashmir" besides "enfolding China, Japan and Turkistan" along with most of the New World. In this huge geographical sector, "there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments," declared Burton, "a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically. Hence the male feminisme whereby the man becomes patiens as well as agens, and the woman a tribade, a votary of mascula Sappho, Queen of Frictrices or Rubbers." 107

More specifically, Burton associated Egypt, which—following Herodotus—he defined in any case as "that classical region of all abominations," with a celebration of hermaphroditism or "androgynic humanity": explaining that the "Phoenicians spread this androgynic worship over Greece," he brooded on "the castrated votar[ies] of Rhea or Bona mater, in Phrygia called Cybele" as well as on the "bearded Aphrodite" of Cyprus, "with feminine body and costume, sceptered and mitred like a man." More generally, as if to emphasize the female unruliness fostered by such gender fluidity, he reported the "formal outburst of the Harems" during "the unhappy campaign of 1856—57" and re marked, "In the Empire of Dahomey I noted a corps of prostitutes kept for the use of the Amazon-soldieresses." Although, as Said insists, such writings were no doubt "meant to be testimony to [Burton's] victory over the sometimes scandalous system of Oriental knowledge," they bear witness, at the same time, to a kind of representatively anxious western awe at the sexual otherness of the east.109

Burton's The Sotadic Zone first appeared as a "Terminal Essay" to the original edition of The Arabian Nights, which was brought out in this form by the Kama Shastra Society of London in 1885—86,just the years when Haggard was contemplating the composition of She. Although the startling epilogue was quickly suppressed, its original publication, in the words of one commentator, "shook the foundations of literary England, then at the crest of Victorian prudery" mia even while it must have implicitly confirmed not only the concept of what Said calls "Oriental sex" but also the connection between the (mysterious) "native" and the (perverse) "female." Whether or not Haggard ever read Bur ton's "Terminal Essay"—and it is hard to imagine that he was not, at the very least, aware of the furor it created—in 1885 he himself produced a sensationally successful adventure story, King Solomon's Mines, that linked the "female" and the "native" in its depiction of the trials and tribulations, as well as the opportunities for triumph, that colonized peoples offered to white men.

The explorers who journey into the wilds of Africa in this novel— three Englishmen and a native, prefiguring the group that is captured by the Amahaggar in She—encounter an evil but mortal native king instead of an apparently immortal queen who must be obeyed. But the terrain through which they travel is explicitly female, even more so than the paysage moralise in She. To reach Solomon's "treasure cave, the men must follow an ancient map which leads them to two mountains called "Sheba's breasts," and then "follow the map, and climb the snow of Sheba's left breast till he comes to the nipple, on the north side of which is the great road Solomon made, from whence three days journey to the King's Place" (34).llI And the "King's Place" is, of course, the queen's womb, a treasure chamber filled with diamonds which promises to make the invaders "the richest men in the whole world" (191) but which also, when they are trapped behind its five-foot-thick rock walls, threatens them with the terrible destiny of a living burial in female anatomy.

Equally to the point, the white men's guide during the final stages of their expedition is the bad black king's witchlike right-hand woman, Gagool, an ancient and bestial creature who is described throughout the novel much as Ayesha is depicted after her "devolution." Gagool is a bald and "wizened monkey-like figure" with "a most extraordinary and weird countenance" because she is "a woman of great age, so shrunken that in size [she is] no larger than. . . a year-old child" (109). Defining her fatal relationship to history (as Ayesha does), she crows, "1 am old! I am old! I have seen much blood; ha, ha! but I shall see more ere I die, and be merry. How old am I, think ye? Your fathers knew me, and their fathers knew me, and their fathers' fathers" (110). And indeed, before the tribe she rules is released from her awful hegemony, Gagool has not only decimated their numbers but also forced the supposedly dominant English explorers, who define themselves as "white men from the stars," to confront their own absurdity. Leading them into Solomon's "treasure chamber," she taunts the imperialists with the monstrosity of their own greed, functioning, until the moment when they manage to crush her beneath one of the rocky walls within which she seeks to confine them, as a paradoxical id and superego in one: "'Hee! hee! hee!' went old Gagool behind us, as she flitted about like a vampire bat. 'There are the bright stones that ye love, white men, as many as ye will; take them, run them through your fingers, eat them, hee! hee! drink them, ha! ha!' " (191).

Even before he wrote She, then, Haggard implied with anxious xenophobia that what Joseph Conrad's Kurtz was to call "the horror, the horror" of Africa, or of any of the "dark" colonized places on the globe, inhered in what seemed to be a subliminal conspiracy between "strange" races and the (eternal) feminine. Such racial/sexual otherness could un man western marauders, he hinted, precisely because it might ironically call into question the very nature and culture of the imperialist project, but at the same time, in a more Darwinian sense, it might be disturbing to supposedly "civilized" westerners because it forced them to confront what they feared was the primordial "barbarism" of the human. Certainly at least a few of Haggard's descendants dramatized this last point. As late as 191 1., for instance, Stoker thickened the plot of The White Worm by imagining an unholy affinity between the serpentine Lady Arabella March and a kind of descendant of Gagool, a male witch-hunter named Oolanga who was "a lost, devil-ridden child of the forest and the swamp" (31). And only a few years later, T. S. Eliot, despite his public decorum and his "suit of clerical cut," was sending Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound a series of bawdy verses about the obscene, indeed "barbaric," activities of one King Bob and his big black Queen. i i2

But ultimately the genius of She consisted in Haggard's less grotesque and more detailed dramatization of the notion that women and colonized peoples were analogically a single group, and that that group, from a masculinist point of view, was affiliated with a power of dark ness like the voice that spoke in "language strange" through Madame Blavatsky, Lady Caithness, and Victoria Woodhull, a power that, as Bachofen and Harrison argued, had always been there, abiding and biding its time under the hill of patriarchal reality. As he explored this intuition, moreover, Haggard not only anticipated the connections that Kipling and others tentatively outlined and that Cixous and Montagu would later make explicit but went beyond them in examining the possibility that the female and the "barbarian" may be other without being inferior, passive, or part of nature, a possibility that may have, finally, constituted the most unnerving aspect of "the white man's burden." In a sense, too, he presented, albeit in crude outline, just the complex of male imperialist and postimperialist anxieties that such figures as E. M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell were later to explore with greater subtlety in A Passage to India (1924) and The Alexandria Quartet (1957—60) as well as the configuration of racial and sexual tensions that would preoccupy, say, William Faulkner in Light in August (1932) and numerous other texts.

That such worries were, even in Haggard's time, both representative and well founded is clear. In 1897, Kipling—England's principal editorialist of "the white man's burden"—surprised a number of his admirers with a celebration of Victoria's jubilee which took the form of a somber "Recessional," a hymn that might have been written by one of the explorers of Kor. The British Empire seemed at the height of its hegemony that year, holding unquestioned "Dominion over palm and pine." Yet in verses warning against the arrogance of "lesser breeds without the Law" and haunted by the unruliness of "heathen heart that puts her trust / In reeking tube and iron shard," Kipling wrote bleakly about the decay of patriarchal / imperial rule: "The Captains and the Kings depart . . . Far-called, our navies melt away— / On dune and headland sinks the fire— / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Ninevah and Tyre!"113 Like Haggard—no doubt in part through Haggard—he seemed to have looked into the "heathen heart" of a darkness that threatened his country's empire from without and within.

First, a decade before he commented on the difficulty of "placing" mother goddesses but within a year or so of the composition of Kip ling's "Recessional," Sigmund Freud had a dream that, as his self-analysis revealed, depended heavily on details borrowed from She and from another Haggard novel with the resonant title The Heart of the World. In this dream, Freud wrote, he had been given a strange task which

As Freud himself rather dryly remarks, "a full analysis of this dream" would take up quite a number of pages, but he does undertake a partial explanation, which, significantly, emphasizes the influence of imagery drawn from She, a work he explains he had recently offered to lend to the Louise N. who "assists" him in the dream. "'A strange book,'" he tells us he had observed to her, "but full of hidden meaning. . . The eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions" (490). But his tentative words had merely elicited the scornful response, "I know it al ready. Have you nothing of your own?" to which he had nervously replied, "No, my own immortal works have not yet been written." Later in his comments he had added that in both She and The Heart of the World "the guide is a woman; both are concerned with perilous journeys; while She describes an adventurous road that had scarcely ever been trodden before, leading into an undiscovered region"—all points, especially the last one, suggesting ways in which Haggard's novels might have seemed to Freud to provide appropriate metaphors for the pioneering trips on the "royal road to the unconscious" along which his own female patients were guiding him. It is certainly likely, therefore, that, as Norman Etherington has argued, the very topography as well as the motion and direction of Haggard's quest-plots helped Freud conceptualize the psychic geography that was to be so crucial to his theory of "layered personality." 115

What are we to make, though, of the fact that Freud's Haggardesque adventure begins with a pelvic dissection that implies a desexing and that his journey ends in feelings of impotence and terror? Like Leo and Holly, who have to be carried on litters into the womb/tomb that is Her land, Freud seems to have been castrated and infantilized early in this dream, so that when he is borne inward over slippery, boggy ground it is hard, given his own hermeneutics, to avoid seeing his journey not as a classic trip into the self but as a voyage into an other who is horrifyingly female. His final despairing vision of "the chasm which had to be crossed" and of the sleeping, immobilized men and children would inevitably, then, lead to a sense of failure and "mental fright," not be cause (as he suggests) he wonders how much longer his legs will carry him toward the end of his self-analysis, the composition of his "own immortal works" but for precisely the opposite reason. Freud fears that he will reach an end that must include an impotent confrontation with- even an engulfment in—the "barbarous" but autonomous female.¹¹⁶

It is telling, however, that Freud's dream broods so insistently on "the chasm that had to be crossed" by means of narrow planks, for this frightening image derives from what is essentially the turning point of Haggard's tale. Holly, Leo, and Ayesha can only bridge the gulf they must cross in order to reach the "place of Life" when, "like a great sword of flame, a beam from the setting sun [pierces] the Stygian gloom." Then, as "right through the heart of the darkness that flaming sword [is] stabbed," they and their readers are given a symbolic preview of the fate in store for Ayesha. It is possible, therefore, that in his dream-allusion to this moment, Freud was not only enacting crucial male an