Like Henry Rider Haggard’s other romance novels set in Africa, including King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887), She: A History of Adventure is based in part on Haggard’s experience in that country. As assistant to Sir Henry Bulwer, lieutenant-governor of Natal, a British colony, Haggard hoped to rise in the ranks of British colonial representatives. However, the unrest in Africa, particularly the Boer Wars, both disillusioned and endangered Haggard when he brought his new wife, Louisa Margitson, to a newly established ostrich farm in Natal. The couple later had to abandon the project, and Haggard settled down in England to practice law and write romances that expressed his fantasies not only about Africa but also about women.
Separated from his first and true love, Lilith Jackson, by his determined father, Haggard would project her as his ideal into many of his stories in the form of his fictional women. However, in the figure of Ayesha, or she-who-must-be-obeyed, a light-skinned ruler of an undesirable African tribe who has discovered the secret to mortality, Haggard went far beyond his ideal of woman to describe every man’s terror.
Feminist critics especially would later point out the danger to males represented by Ayesha’s power and her symbolic role as the “eternal feminine.” Her use of uninhibited sexuality to control employs language of interest to psychoanalytic critics, as when she speaks of her enduring beauty, inviting the novel’s narrator not to blame her “if passion mount thy reason.”
New Historicist critics note Haggard’s focus on British imperialism and his shared belief that the British were the most superior of all members of the white race and bore the burden to enlighten “noble savages.” Those included members of the Zulu tribe, a group always represented in his fiction as heroic, although also of questionable ability to be educated.
In addition, Haggard had long believed that the Boers, although white, were ignorant detestables who had somehow not developed in the same way as the British, reflecting his post-Darwinian belief in all humans as a member of the same species but with enormous biological and cultural differences. While he found certain aspects of the “gentleman” in the Zulus, he found no such aspects in the Boers or those whose brown skin color suggested a mixing of light and dark races.
She is narrated by Horace Holly, a proclaimed misogynist with ugly, near apelike features who acts as guardian to Leo Vincey, the novel’s young adventurer protagonist. While Leo’s Christian name suggests the aristocratic position of king, his surname suggests the conflicting idea that he remains “vincible,” or defeatable. In a later scene when a crocodile, representative of Africa and Ayesha, fights a lion in a graphically violent struggle that leaves both dead, readers will recognize foreshadowing.
Vincey discovers a family history suggesting his duty in life is to seek revenge, and that the ancestor he should revenge first was named Kallidrates, meaning the-beautiful-in-strength, who was killed by a mysterious woman. When Holly and Vincey travel to Africa, they are almost killed by a brown-skinned tribe of cannibals, the Amahaggar tribe, who torture their victims by placing hot pots on their heads. Their tribal name suggests that of the biblical figure Hagar, the Arab woman with whom the father of all Jewish tribes, Abraham, fathered Ishmael, supposedly the progenitor of the Arab tribes.
Because Hagar was cast off by Abraham upon the birth of the wife’s son Isaac, Christian-Judaic tradition suggests the brown-skinned Arab’s inferiority. Haggard practices a neat character twist in both the simian Holly and the Arab character of Mahomed, subverting the negative connotations readers would bring to an understanding of both characters. When Vincey and another white man, Job, suffer enormous swelling due to the attack of mosquitoes, Holly tells the reader that he had come off best, likely owing to his darker skin and his abundant body hair, while he notes that in Mahomed the mosquitoes recognized “the taste of a true believer” and would not touch him. He adds, “how often, I wonder, during the next week or so did we wish that we were flavoured like an Arab!”
The Amahaggar’s dwelling of Kôr is ruled by the light-skinned Ayesha, a fearsome queen who controls through her sexuality and magic abilities. She saves Vincey from a fatal illness and discovers he is the reincarnation of Kallikrates, whom she had murdered centuries earlier because he refused her love.
In true quest fashion, the group descends into the feared Place of Life, a cave where Ayesha urges the two white men to walk through the Fire of Life to become immortal. Haggard adopts the traditional symbol of fire as representative of new life and cleansing. However, the men refuse, and Ayesha herself enters the fire, only to be seemingly destroyed, undergoing a Darwinian transformation into an ancient, monkeylike figure that asks the men to remember her beauty before she dies. Like all quest heroes, the men ascend from the depths, burdened by a new wisdom, both horrified and awed by what they have observed. They hope to rediscover Ayesha, who will, indeed, be resurrected by Haggard in his later novels She-Ayesha (1905) and Wisdom’s Daughters (1923).
The novel has never been out of print, and Ayesha has been represented in multiple film and stage versions. Not only the plot but also Haggard’s employment of traditional quest and romance aspects continue to interest formalist critics. He incorporates the quest plot evident in the most traditional of all such tales, Homer’s Odyssey, even adopting some of Homer’s imagery. Where Homer repeatedly references the “rosy-fingered dawn,” Haggard begins the sixth chapter of She with the phrase “Next morning, at the earliest blush of dawn.” He also incorporates traditionally patriarchal references to females as evil temptresses, as when the woman-hating Holly refers to Ayesha’s perfect body as having a “serpent-like” grace, draped in a white robe with a belt “fastened by a double-headed snake of solid gold.” Ayesha also only shows weakness when considering her long-dead love, Kallidrates.
Bibliography
Brantlinger, Patrick. Introduction to She: A History of Adventure by Henry Rider Haggard. New York: Penguin Books, 2001, vii–xxvii.
Katz, Wendy R. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire: A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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