She: A History of Adventure

She: A History of Adventure

File:She title.jpg Title page of first book edition of She
Author	H. Rider Haggard
Illustrator	E.K. Johnson (Graphic) Maurice Greiffenhagen & C.H.M. Kerr (1888 ed)
Language	English
Series	Ayesha Series
Genre	Fantasy Adventure Romance Gothic
Publisher	Longmans
Publication date	1887
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (serial, hardback, paperback)
Pages	317 (1887 hardback)
ISBN	NA
Followed by	Ayesha, the Return of She

She, subtitled A History of Adventure, is a novel by Henry Rider Haggard, first serialized in The Graphic magazine from October 1886 to January 1887. She is one of the classics of imaginative literature, and with over 83 million copies sold in 44 different languages, one of the best-selling books of all time. She was extraordinarily popular upon its release and has never been out of print since it was first published. According to literary historian Andrew M. Stauffer, "She has always been Rider Haggard's most popular and influential novel, challenged only by King Solomon's Mines in this regard".

The story is a first person narrative that follows the journey of Horace Holly and his ward Leo Vincey to a lost kingdom in the African interior. There, they encounter a primitive race of natives and a mysterious white queen, Ayesha, who reigns in terror as "She" or "She-who-must-be-obeyed". In this work, Rider Haggard developed the conventions of the Lost World sub-genre, which many later authors emulated.

She is placed firmly in the imperialist literature of nineteenth-century England, and bound up with Rider Haggard's own experiences in South Africa and British colonialism. The story also expounds a number of racial and evolutionary preconceptions of the late-Victorians, especially notions of degeneration and racial decline prominent during the fin de siècle. In the figure of She, the narrative came to famously explore themes of female authority and feminine behaviour and has received praise and criticism alike for its gendered representation of womanhood.

Synopsis

A Cambridge professor, Horace Holly, and his ward, Leo Vincey, together with their servant, Job, travel to Africa, following instructions on the "Sherd of Amenartas" left to Leo by his father. They hire an Arabic packman, Mahomed, before journeying into an unexplored part of the African interior, where they discover the lost kingdom of Kôr, inhabited by the primitive Amahagger people. The adventurers learn that the natives are ruled by a fearsome white queen, who is worshiped as "Hiya" or "She-who-must-be-obeyed". The white-skinned interlopers are a source of great interest to the Amahagger, who have been forewarned by She of their coming. The chief elder of one of the Amahagger tribes, Billali, takes charge of the three men, introducing them to the ways of his people. One of the Amahagger maidens, Ustane, takes a liking to Leo and during a tribal feast sings lovingly to him. However, Billali informs Holly that he has to depart and report the arrival of the White men to She. In his absence, some of the Amahagger become restless and determine to eat the white-men as part of a ritual "hotpot". There is a scuffle; Mahomed is killed in the fray and Leo gravely wounded, but the three Englishmen are saved when Billali returns and declares that they are under the protection of She. However, Leo's injuries worsen and though he is tended by Ustane, he approaches death.

They are taken to the home of She, which lies under a dormant volcano amongst a series of cavernous tombs. There, Holly is presented to the mysterious queen, a white sorceress named Ayesha, whose beauty is so great that it enchants any man who beholds it. She, who is veiled and lies behind a partition, warns Holly that the power of her splendour arouses both desire and fear, but he is dubious. When she shows herself, however, Holly is enraptured and prostrates himself before her. He learns that She has lived in the realm of Kôr for over two millennia, awaiting the reincarnated return of her lover, Kallikrates (whom she had accidently slain in a fit of jealous rage). After she veils herself again, Holly remembers Leo and begs Ayesha to visit his ward. She agrees, but is startled upon seeing Leo, believing him to be the reincarnation of Kallikrates that she has so long awaited.

She heals Leo, but becomes angry at the attentions paid him by the girl, Ustane. The latter is ordered to leave the home of She-who-must-be-obeyed but refuses, and is eventually struck down by She. Despite the murder of their friend, Holly and Leo cannot free themselves from the power of She's beauty. They remain amongst the tombs as Leo recovers his strength, and She lectures Holly on the ancient history of Kôr. In the climax of the novel, Ayesha takes the two men to see the pillar of fire, passing through the ruined city of Kôr. She is determined that Leo should bathe in the fire so he may become immortal and remain with her forever. Navigating through a perilous cave, they come to a great cavern, but at the last Leo doubts the safety of entering the flame, and to allay his fears She steps into the Spirit of Life. However, with this second immersion she begins reverting to her true age, withering away in the fire. The sight is so shocking that Job dies in fright. However, before dying she tells Leo, "I die not. I shall come again."

Characters

• Horace Holly - protagonist and narrator, Holly is a Cambridge don whose keen intellect and knowledge was developed as a source of solace in light of his ape-like appearance. Holly knows a number of ancient languages, including Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, which allows him to communicate with the Amahagger (who speak a form of Arabic) and She (who knows all three languages). Holly is also interested in archaeological history and the origins of civilisation, which lead him to explore the ruins of Kor.
• Leo Vincey - ward of Horace Holly, Leo is an attractive, physically active English gentleman with a thick head of blond hair. He is the confidant of Holly and befriends Ustane. According to She, Leo resembles Kallikrates in appearance and is his reincarnation.
• Ayesha - the title character of the novel, called "Hiya" by the native Amahagger, or "She". Ayesha was born over two thousand years ago amongst the Arabs, mastering the lore of the ancients and becoming a great sorceress. Learning of the Pillar of Life in the African interior, she journeyed to the ruined kingdom of Kôr, feigning friendship with an old hermit who was the keeper of the Flame that granted immortality. She bathed in the Pillar of Life's fire after she found the old man dead one day.
• Job - Holly's trusted servant. Job is a working-class man and highly suspicious and judgemental of non-English peoples. He is also a devout Protestant. Of all the travellers, he is especially disgusted by the Amahagger and fearful of She.
• Billali - an elder of one of the tribes of the Amahagger.
• Ustane - a maiden of the Amahagger. She becomes romantically attached to Leo, caring for him when he is injured and fiercely protective. However, when Ayesha comes to believe that Leo is the reincarnation of Kallikrates, she orders Ustane to leave. Ustane initially refuses, but is cowed by the power of She-who-must-be-obeyed. However, she secretly stays within the catacombs, trying to get near Leo; Ayesha discovers this, and in front of Holly and Leo kills Ustane with her magic. Despite their horror at the act, the two Englishmen remain in the thrall of She.
• Kallikrates - an ancient Greek, the husband of Amenartas, and ancestor of Leo. Two thousand years ago, he and Amenartas fled Egypt, seeking a haven in the African interior where they met Ayesha. There, She fell in love with him, promising to give him the secret of immortality if he would kill Amenartas. He refused, and enraged She struck him down.
• Amenartas - an ancient Egyptian priestess and ancestress of the Vincey family. She was a priestess of Isis and therefore protected from the power of She. When Ayesha slew Kallikrates, she expelled Amenartas from her realm. Amenartas then gave birth to Kallikrates' son, beginning the line of the Vinceys.

Background

South Africa

In 1875, Haggard was sent to Cape Town, South Africa, as secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer, the lieutenant-governor of Natal. In his memoirs Haggard wrote of the aspirations he held at this time of becoming a colonial governor himself, and of his youthful excitement at the prospects that lay before him. The central event during his time in Africa was the 1877 annexation of the Transvaal by Britain. Haggard was part of the expedition that established British control over the Boer republic, and on 24 May 1877 helped raise the Union flag over the capital, Pretoria. Writing of the moment, Haggard declared:

It will be some years before people at home realise how great an act it has been, an act without parallel. I am very proud of having been connected with it. Twenty years hence it will be a great thing to have hoisted the Union Jack over the Transvaal for the first time.

Rider Haggard had advocated the British annexation of the Boer republic in a journal article, "The Transvaal", which appeared in the May 1877 publication of Macmillan's Magazine. In this piece, Haggard touched on the idea of the 'white man's burden', maintaining that it was Britain's "mission to conquer and hold in subjection" lesser races, "not from thirst of conquest but for the sake of law, justice, and order". However, Boer resistance to British rule and the resulting Anglo-Zulu war caused the imperial government in London to revoke the pursuance of British sovereignty over the South African interior. Haggard considered this to be a "great betrayal" by Prime Minster Gladstone and the Liberal Party, which "no lapse of time ever can solace or even alleviate". Thereafter, he became increasingly disillusioned with the realities of colonial Africa. As Victorian scholar Patrick Brantlinger notes in his introduction to She: "Little that Haggard witnessed matched the romantic depictions of 'the dark continent' in boys' adventure novels, in the press, and even in such bestselling explorers' journals as David Livingstone's Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857)."

During his time in South Africa, Rider Haggard, like many British colonials, developed an intense hatred for the Boers, but also came to admire the Zulus. Although a staunch defender of the British Empire, he saw the treatment of the Zulus as unjust, and in 1914 wrote a fervent letter in their defence to the Colonial Office: "[The Zulus] receive from the white man, their master, little save his dislike, his disease, and his drink". However, Haggard's admiration of the Zulus did not extend to other African peoples; rather, he shared many of the racist assumptions that underlay contemporary Victorian politics and philosophy. One of the most prominent formulators of late-Victorian theories on race was James Hunt, the President of the Anthropological Society of London. In his 1863 paper On the Negro's Place in Nature, he concluded:"the Negro is inferior intellectually to the European...[and] can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans", going on to say in light of the post-Darwinian climate, "that the analogies are far more numerous between the Negro and apes, than between the European and apes". The inherent inferiority of the 'darker races' to the Victorians, made them the object of a civilising impulse in the European Scramble for Africa. Although disenchanted with the colonial effort, Haggard remained committed to this belief, believing that the British "alone of all the nations in the world appear to be able to control coloured races without the exercise of cruelty".

Return to Britain

Rider Haggard after his return to England in 1881.

In 1881 Rider Haggard returned to Britain. At the time, England was increasingly beset by the social and cultural anxieties that marked the fin de siècle. One of the most prominent concerns expressed at this time was the fear of political and racial decline, encapsulated in Max Nordau's Degeneration (1895). Where barely half a century earlier Thomas Babington Macaulay had declared "the history of England" to be "emphatically the history of progress", late-Victorians living in the wake of Darwinian evolution had lost the earlier positivism of their age. Uncertainty over the immutability of Britain's historical identity, what historian Tim Murray has called the "threat of the past", was manifested in the Victorian obsession with ancient times and archaeology. One such example was furnished by the ruins (re)discovered at Zimbabwe in the 1870s and which interested Haggard enormously. In 1896 he provided the preface to a monograph that detailed a Victorian history of the site, noting that "Unhappily it cannot tell its story, for if this were to be possible a most mysterious and fascinating chapter of history would be open to us". Haggard went on to declare:

What was the condition of this so-called empire, and what the measure of the effective dignity of its emperor, are points rather difficult to determine... now, after the lapse of two centuries... it is legitimate to hope, it seems probable even, that in centuries to come a town will once more nestle beneath these grey and ancient ruins, trading in gold as did that of the Phoenicians, but peopled by men of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Haggard's comment encapsulates the dichotomy of fear and hope prevalent in late-Victorian Britain, and the racial preconceptions of the time. Haggard was strongly influenced by archaeology and evolutionary theories, especially ideas about the "racialisation" of historical decline. His distaste for the Boers stemmed in part from their depiction as a 'mixed' race, descended from various European stock and intermarried with African locals. Lack of racial purity was seen as leading to evolutionary degeneration and national decline. In 1862, Robert Knox warned the public to maintain racial purity, declaring: "Even England, with all her professions of humanity and philanthropy, cannot afford to admit within the pale of society any coloured, that is, savage race".

By the time Rider Haggard began writing She there was also mounting concern over the role of women in society. Late-Victorian debates regarding "The Woman Question", as well as anxieties over the increasing position and independence of the "New Woman", dominated Britain during the fin de siècle. Alarm over social degeneration and societal decadence further fanned concerns over the woman's movement and female liberalisation, which challenged the traditional conception of Victorian womanhood. The role and rights of women had changed dramatically since the early part of the century, as they entered the workforce, received better education, and gained more political and legal independence - free from men. However, writing in 1894, Haggard felt that marriage was the natural state for women: "Notwithstanding the energetic repudiations of the fact that us at every turn, it may be taken for granted that in most cases it is the natural mission of women to marry; that - always in most cases - if they do not marry they become narrowed, live a half life only, and suffer in health of body and of mind". Despite such conservative sentiments, Haggard did not view women as inferior to men, and the character of She-who-must-be-obeyed "provided a touchstone for many of the anxieties surrounding the New Woman in late-Victorian England".

Concept and creation

According to Rider Haggard's daughter, the phrase She-who-must-be-obeyed originated from his childhood and "the particularly hideous aspect" of one rag-doll: "This doll was something of a fetish, and Rider, as a small child, was terrified of her, a fact soon discovered by an unscrupulous nurse who made full use of it to frighten him into obedience. Why or how it came to be called She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed he could not remember". Haggard himself wrote that "the title She" was taken "from a certain rag doll, so named, which a nurse at Bradenham used to bring out of some dark recess in order to terrify those of my brothers and sisters who were in her charge".

In his autobiography, Haggard spoke of how he composed She within a six-week period across February and March 1886, having just completed Jess, which was published in 1887. The period was an intensely creative process, with Haggard maintaining that the text "was never rewritten, and the manuscript carries but few corrections", going on to declare: "The fact is that it was written at white heat, almost without rest, and that is the best way to compose." However, when he began writing he admitted to having no clear story in mind:

I remember that when I sat down to the task my ideas as to its development were of the vaguest. The only clear notion that I had in my head was that of an immortal woman inspired by an immortal love. All the rest shaped itself round this figure. And it came--it came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down.

Despite Haggard's contention, various scholars have detected a number of analogues to She evident in earlier literature. According to Brantlinger, Haggard certainly read and was aware of the stories of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in particular A Strange Story (1862) which includes a mysterious, veiled woman called "Ayesha", and The Coming Race (1871) about the discovery of a subterranean civilisation. Similarly, the name of the underground civilisation itself in She, known as Kôr, derives from Norse mythological romance, where the "deathbed" of the goddess Hel is called Kör and means "disease" in Old Norse, echoing the plague that wiped out the original inhabitants of Kôr in She.

According to Haggard, he wrote the final scene of She's demise whilst waiting for his literary agent, A. P. Watt, to return to his offices. Upon completion he entered Watt's office and threw the manuscript "...on the table with the remark: 'There is what I shall be remembered by'".

Publication

She was first published as a serial story in the Graphic, a large folio magazine printed weekly in London, between October 1886 and January 1887. The serialisation was accompanied with illustrations by E. K. Johnson. An American edition was published by Harper and Bros. in New York on 24 December 1886; this included the Johnson illustrations. On the 1 January 1887, an English edition was published by Longmans, Green, and Co., but without any images. It was the first publication of She in book format, and featured significant textual revisions from the Graphic serial made by Haggard. Further revisions were made for an 1888 publication, which also included illustrations by Maurice Greiffenhagen and C. H. M. Kerr. In 2006 a Broadview publication of She became the first edition to reproduce the Graphic serial text since its initial run ended on 7 January 1887.

Narrative revisions

Rider Haggard's recreation of the Sherd of Amenartas, now in the collection of the Norwich Castle Museum.

Rider Haggard contended that romances like She or King Solomon's Mines were best left unrevised because "wine of this character loses its bouquet when it is poured from glass to glass". However, Haggard made a number of significant alterations to the original Graphic serialisation of She for the story's publication as a novel in 1887. One of the most notable was to the third chapter concerning the sherd, which was substantially expanded from the original to include the tale of Amenartas in uncial and cursive Greek scripts. Facsimile illustrations of an antique vase made-up by Haggard's sister-in-law, Agnes Barber, to resemble the sherd of Amenartas were also included. A number of footnotes containing historical references from the narrator were also included. Haggard was keen to stress the historicity of the narrative, improving some of the information about geography and the history of ancient civilisations in chapters 4, 13, and 17.

The 1887 novel also featured a substantial rewrite of the "hotpot" scene, in which Mahomed is killed. In the original serialisation of She, the cannibal Amahagger place a large heated pot over the head of Mahomed, enacting out the hotpotting ritual in preparation for eating him. However, one of the major criticisms of Haggard's stories was the level of violence, and accordingly he toned down the hot-pot incident for the novelised edition, having Mahomed die when Holly inadvertently shoots him amidst the scuffle with the Amahagger. Comparing the serial and novel editions of She, Stauffer describes the more compact narrative of the original as a reflection of the intense but short burst of creativity in which Haggard composed the story, arguing that "the style and grammar of the Graphic [edition] is more energetic and immediate", although as he noted, "sometimes more flawed".

Haggard continued to revise She for later publications, with the "New Edition" of 1888 containing over 400 minor alterations. The last revision by Haggard to be published was in 1896.

Genre

Fantasy and science fiction

Illustration in the Graphic (1887). Journey to the Spirit of Life; Ayesha, having crossed the ravine, beckons Holly, Leo, and Job to follow her using the wooden plank. A shaft of light divides the darkness about them. She contains various fantasy, adventure, and gothic genre conventions.

She is one of the foundational works of fantasy literature, coming around the time of The Princess and the Goblin (1858) by George MacDonald, William Morris' The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World's End, and the short stories of Lord Dunsany. It is marked by a strong element of "the marvelous" in the figure of Ayesha, a two-thousand year-old sorceress, and the 'Spirit of the World', an undying fire that confers immortality. Indeed, Haggard's story is one of the first in modern literature to feature "a slight intrusion of something unreal" into a very real world - a hallmark of the fantasy genre. Similarly, the carefully constructed "fantasy history" of She foreshadows the use of this technique that characterises later fantasies such as The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time series, and which imparts a "degree of security" to the secondary world. However, the story of She is firmly ensconced in what fantasy theorists call 'primary world reality', with the lost kingdom of Kôr, the realm ruled by the supernatural She, a fantastic "Tertiary World" at once directly part of and at the same time indirectly set apart from normative "primary" reality. Along with Haggard's prior novel, King Solomon's Mines, She laid the blueprints for the "Lost World" sub-genre in fantasy literature, as well as the convention of the "lost race". As Brantlinger has noted of the novel's importance to the development of the "secondary world" in fantasy literature, "Haggard may seem peripheral to the development of science fiction, and yet his African quest romances could easily be transposed to other planets and galaxies". In his history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss notes the frequency with which Ayesha's death in the pillar of fire has been imitated by later science fiction and fantasy writers: "From Haggard on, crumbling women, priestesses, or empresses - all symbols of women as Untouchable and Unmakeable - fill the pages of many a scientific romance".

Adventure romance

She is part of the adventure subgenre of literature which was especially popular at the end of the 19th century, but which remains an important form of fiction to the present day. Along with works such as Treasure Island (1883) and Prince Otto (1885) by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jules Verne's A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1871) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1875), She had an important formative effect on the development of the adventure novel. Indeed, Rider Haggard is credited with inventing the romance of archaeological exploration which began in King Solomon's Mines and crystallised in She. One of the most notable modern forms of this genre is the Indiana Jones movie series, as well as the Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and recently Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000). In such fictional narratives the explorer is the hero, with the drama unfolding as they are cast into "the nostrum of the living past". Holly and Leo are prototypes of the adventurer, who has become a critical figure in modern fiction.

Imperial Gothic

She is also one of the central texts in the development of Imperial Gothic. Many late-Victorian authors during the fin de siècle employed Gothic conventions and motifs in their writing, stressing and alluding to the supernatural, the ghostly, and the demonic. As Brantlinger has noted, "Connected to imperialist adventure fiction, these interests often imply anxieties about the stability of Britain, of the British Empire, or, more generally, of Western civilisation". Novels like Dracula and the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde present depictions of repressed, foreign, and demonic forces at the heart of the imperial polity. In She the danger is raised in the form of Ayesha herself:

The terrible She had evidently made up her mind to go to England, and it made me absolutely shudder to think what would be the result of her arrival there... In the end she would, I had little doubt, assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and, though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the most glorious and prosperous empire that the world had ever seen, it would be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life.

She's threat to replace Queen Victoria with herself echoes the underlying anxiety over imperialism and European colonialism emblematic of the Imperial Gothic genre. Indeed, Judith Wilt characterises the narrative of She, in which British imperialist penetration of Africa (represented by Holly, Leo, and Job) suddenly suffers a potential "counter-attack" (from Ayesha), as one of the archetypal illustrations of the "reverse colonalism" motif in Victorian Gothic. Similarly, She marks one of the first fictional examples to raise the spectre of the natural decline of civilisation, and by extension, British imperial power, which would become an increasingly frequent theme in Gothic and invasion literature until the onset World War I.

Style

Rider Haggard's writing style was the source of much criticisms in reviews of She and his other works. His harshest critic was Augustus Moore, who wrote "God help English literature when English people lay aside their Waverley novels, and the works of Defoe, Swift, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and even Charles Reade for the penny dreadfuls of Mr Haggard"; adding, "The man who could write 'he spoke to She' can have no ear at all". A more common sentiment was expressed by the review of She in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine: "Mr. Rider Haggard is not an exquisite workman like Mr. [Robert Louis] Stevenson, but he has a great deal of power in his way, and rougher qualities which are more likely, perhaps, to 'take the town' than skill more delicate".

Modern literary criticism has tended to be more circumspect. As Victorian scholar Daniel Karlin has noted, "That Haggard's style is frequently bathetic or clumsy cannot be denied; but the matter is not so easily settled". Stauffer cites the passage where Holly is meditating as he tries to fall asleep as emblematic of "the charges against" Haggard's writing. In this scene, Holly lays down,

Above me... shone the eternal stars... Oh that we should shake loose the prisoned pinions of the soul and soar to that superior point, whence, like to some traveller looking out through space from Darien's giddiest peak, we might gaze with the spiritual eyes of noble thoughts deep into Infinity! What would it be to cast off this earthly robe, to have done for ever with these earthly thoughts and miserable desires... Yes, to cast them off, to have done with the foul and thorny places of the world; and like those glittering points above me, to rest on high wrapped forever in the brightness of our better selves, that even now shines in us as fire faintly shines within those lurid balls...

The passage concludes with a wry remark from Holly, "I at last managed to get to sleep, a fact for which anybody who reads this narrative, if anybody ever does, may very probably be thankful". According to Stauffer, "the disarming deflation of the passage goes a long way toward redeeming it, and is typical of the winning contradictions of the narrator's style". Tom Pocock in Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire has also highlighted the "literary framework" that Haggard constructs throughout much of the narrative, referencing Keats, Shakespeare, and Classical literature to imbue the story with a "Gothic sensibility". Yet as Stauffer notes, "Ultimately, however, one thinks of Haggard's plots, episodes, and images as the source of his lasting reputation and influence.

Themes

Imperialism

She is set firmly in the imperialist literature of the late-Victorian period. The so-called "New Imperialism" marking the last quarter of the 19th century witnessed a further expansion of British power, particularly on the African continent, and was characterised by a seemingly confident sentiment in the merits of empire and English civilisation. Thus She "invokes a particularly British view of the world" as Rider Haggard projects concepts of the English self against the foreign otherness of Africa. One such example occurs when Holly is first ushered into the presence of Ayesha, walking into the chamber behind a grovelling Billali who warns Holly to follow his example, or "a surety she will blast thee where thou standest". Holly hesitates, becoming scared: "my knees began to give way of their own mere motion; but reflection came to my aid. I was an Englishman, and why, I asked myself, should I creep into the presence of some savage woman as though I were a monkey". Indeed, She is preoccupied with stressing quintessential British qualities through the "adventure" of empire, usually in contrast to foreign barbarism. However, the notion of imperialism is further compounded by the figure of She, who is herself a foreign colonising force. "In a sense then", writes Stauffer, "a single property line divides the realm of Queen Victoria and that of 'She-who-must-be-obeyed', two white queens who rule dark-skinned natives of the African continent".

Race and evolution

Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, Rider Haggard "proceeds on the assumption that whites are naturally superior to blacks, and that Britain's imperial extensions into Africa are a noble, civilising enterprise". Although Haggard penned a number of novels that portrayed Africans in a comparatively realistic light, She was not among their number. Even in King Solomon's Mines, the representation of Umbopa (who was based on an actual warrior) and the Kukuanas, drew upon Haggard's knowledge and understanding of the Zulus. In contrast, She makes no such distinctions. Ayesha, the English travellers, and the ancient inhabitants of Kôr are all white embodiments of civilisation, while the darker Amahagger, as a people, illustrate notions of savagery, barbarity, and superstition. Nonetheless, the "racial politics of the novel are more complex than they first appear", given that Ayesha is in origin an ancient Arabian, Leo is descended from, and physically resembles a blond Hellenistic Greek, while Holly is said to resemble a baboon in facial appearance - an animal Victorians typically associated with black Africans. Whilst critics like Wendy Katz, Patricia Murphy, and Susan Gubar have analysed the strong racist undercurrent in She, Andrew Stauffer has taken note of the qualifications through which "the novel suggests deeper connections among the races, an ancient genealogy of ethnicities and civilizations in which every character is a hybrid".

Indeed, there is a strong Darwinian undercurrent framing the representation of race in She, stemming from Haggard's own interest in evolutionary theory and archaeological history. In particular the theme of racial degeneration is a prominent aspect in the novel. Moving into the fin de siècle, late-Victorians were increasingly concerned about cultural and national decline resulting from racial decay. In She, this evolutionary concept of degeneration is manifested in Ayesha and the Amahagger. Haggard represents the Amahagger as a debased mixture of ethnicities, "a curious mingling of races", originally descended from the inhabitants of Kôr but having intermarried with Arabs and Africans. Racial hybridisation of any kind "entailed degeneration" to Victorians, a "decline from the pure blood" of the initial races, and thus "an aspect of their degeneration is the idea that the Amahagger have lost whatever elements of civilization their Kôr ancestors may have imparted to them". Thus, Ayesha proudly proclaims her own racial purity as a quality to be admired: "for Arabian am I by birth, even 'al Arab al Ariba' (an Arab of the Arabs), and of the race of our father Yárab, the son of Khâtan[...] of the true Arab blood". However, the novel's starkest evocation of the evolutionary principle occurs in the regressive demise of Ayesha. Stepping into the pillar of fire, the immortal She begins to wither and decay, undergoing as death what Judith Wilt describes as the "ultimate Darwinian nightmare", evolution in reverse.

Female authority and sexuality

Illustration from the Graphic (1886). Holly first looks upon the figure of She, while Billali lies prostrate on the floor fearing to look up.

When Rider Haggard first conceived of She he began with the theme of "an immortal woman inspired by an immortal love". Although ostensibly a romance, the novel is part of the wider discourse regarding women and womanhood in late-Victorian Britain. Many scholars have noted how She was published as a book in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and Andrienne Munich argues that Haggard's story "could fittingly be considered an ominous literary monument to Victoria after fifty years of her reign". Indeed, in her devotion to Kallikrates (two thousand years after his death), Ayesha echoes the long-lasting fidelity of Victoria to her husband, Albert. However unlike the "benign" Victoria, the question of female authority is realised to the extreme in the figure of She-who-must-be-obeyed, whose autonomous will seemingly embodies Victorian anti-feminist fears of New Women desiring 'absolute personal independence coupled with supreme power over men'. Haggard constantly emphasises this anxiety over female authority in She, so that even the rationally minded and misogynistic Holly, who has put his "heart away from such vanity as woman's loveliness", ultimately falls upon his knees and worships Ayesha "as never woman was worshipped". Similarly, although the masculine and chivalric Leo is determined to reject Ayesha for killing the devoted native girl Ustane, he too quickly falls under her will. In fact, Ayesha's absolute command over the male sex is one of the most startling and unnerving aspects of the story.

In her role as the seductive femme fatale, Ayesha is part of "a long tradition of male fantasy that includes Homer's Circe, Shakespeare's Cleopatra, and Keats's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'". Brantlinger identifies the theme of "the white (or at least light-skinned) queen ruling a black or brown-skinned savage race" as "a powerfully erotic one" with its opposite being "the image of the helpless white woman captured by savages and threatened, at least, with rape". The figure of She both inspires male desire and dominates male sovereignty, represented in her conquest of the enlightened Victorians Holly and Leo. The two Englishmen embody the powers of manhood, with Leo a reflection of masculine physicality and Holly a representation of man's intellectual strength; but both are conquered by the feminine powers of She, who rules as much through sex-appeal as through sorcery, immortality, and will. Thus Steven Arata describes her as "the veiled woman, that ubiquitous nineteenth-century figure of male desire and anxiety, whose body is Truth but a Truth that blasts". Similarly, Sarah Gilbert sees the theme of feminine sexuality and authority realised in Ayesha as critical to the novel's success: "Unlike the women earlier Victorian writers had idealised or excoriated, She was neither an angel nor a monster. Rather, She was an odd but significant blend of the two types - an angelically chaste woman with monstrous powers, a monstrously passionate woman with angelic charms".

Reception

After its publication in 1887 She became an immediate success. According to The Literary World "Mr. Rider Haggard has made for himself a new field in fiction". Comparing the novel to King Solomon's Mines the review declared: "The book before us displays all the same qualities, and we anticipate for it a similar popularity. There is even more imagination in the later than in the earlier story; it contains scenes of greater sensuous beauty and also of more gruesome horror". The Public Opinion was equally rapturous in its praise:

Few books bolder in conception, more vigorous in treatment, or fresher in fancy, have appeared for a long time, and we are grateful to Mr. Haggard for carrying us on a pinion, swift and strong, far from the world of platitudinous dullness, on which most young writers embark, to a region limited only by his own vivid imagination, where the most inveterate reader of novels cannot guess what surprise awaits him.

The fantasy of She received particular acclaim from Victorian readers and critics. The review appearing in The Academy on the 15 January was impressed by the "grown-up" vision of the novel, declaring "the more impossible it gets the better Mr. Haggard does it... his astonishing imagination, and a certain vraisemblance ["verisimilitude" (French)] makes the most impossible adventures appear true". This sentiment was echoed in The Queen: The Lady's Newspaper, with the reviewer pronouncing that "this is a tale in the hands of a writer not so able as Mr. Haggard might easily have become absurd; but he has treated it with so much vividness and picturesque power as to invest it with unflagging interest, and given to the mystery a port of philosophic possibility that makes us quite willing to submit to the illusion.

"I must write to congratulate you upon a work which most certainly puts you at the head -a long away ahead - of all contemporary imaginative writers. If fiction is best cultivated in the field of pure invention then you are certainly the first of modern novelists."

-Sir Walter Besant.

The Spectator was more equivocal in its appraisal of She. The review described the narrative as "very stirring" and "exciting" and of "remarkable imaginative power", adding: "The ingenuity of the story... is as subtle as ever romancer invented, and from the day when Leo and Holly land on the coast of Africa, to the day when the pillar of fire is revealed to them by the all but immortal 'She who must be obeyed', the interest of the tale rises higher and higher with every new turn in its course". However, the review took issue with the characterisation of She and the manner of her demise: "To the present writer there is a sense of the ludicrous in the end of She that spoiled, instead of concluding with imaginative fitness, the thread of the impossible worked into the substance of this vivid and brilliantly told story". Haggard was moved to respond to the criticism of Ayesha's death, writing that "in the insolence of her strength and loveliness, she lifts herself up against the Omnipotent. Therefore, at the appointed time she is swept away by It... Vengeance, more heavy because more long delayed, strikes her in her proudest part - her beauty".

A number of reviews were more critical of Haggard's work. Although the reviewer of She in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine considered it better than King Solomon's Mines, he opined, "Mr. Rider Haggard has not proved as yet that he has anything that can be called imagination at all... It might be wrought up into an unparalleled stage effect: but it is rather a failure in pen and ink. The more fearful and wonderful such circumstances are intended to be, the more absurd is the failure of them". Even more scathing was Augustus Moore in the May edition of Time: A Monthly Miscellany, who declared: "In Mr haggard's book I find none of the powerful imagination, the elaborate detail, the vivid English which would entitle his work to be described as a romance... [rather] it seems to me to be the method of the modern melodrama". Moore was particularly dismissive of the novel's style and prose: "Mr Haggard cannot write English at all. I do not merely refer to his bad grammar, which a boy at a Boarding School would deserve to be birched for... It can only have been written by a man who not only knew nothing, but cared nothing for 'English undefiled'." Haggard's English was a common source of criticisms, but Moore was even dismissive of the character of She who widely garnered universal praise. "Ayesha", Moore declares, "is about as impressive as the singing chambermaid who represents the naughty fairy of a pantomime in tights and a tow wig". Concluding his review, Moore wondered at the success which had greeted She:

It is a sad thing to own that such a commonplace book as She... so crammed with tawdry sentiment and bad English should have become the success it has undoubtedly been. It is a bad sign for English literature and English taste, and argues that the English Press which has trumpeted its success must be utterly corrupt.

Despite such criticism, the reception that met She was overwhelmingly positive and echoed the sentiments expressed by anthropologist and literary critic Andrew Lang before the story's first publication: "I think She is one of the most astonishing romances I ever read. The more impossible it is, the better you do it, till it seems like a story from the literature of another planet".

Modern interpretations

Feminist

Image depicting She about to enter a spiralling fire. Holly, Leo, and Job lie cowering on the ground.

Illustration by E. K. Johnson for the Graphic (1887). Ayesha about to enter the Pillar of Fire, with Holly, Leo, and Job dumbstruck in fear. Feminist literary theory identifies Ayesha's death in the fire as a punishment for her transgression of Victorian gender boundaries.

Feminist literary historians have tended to define the figure of She as a literary manifestation of male alarm over the "learned and crusading new woman". In this view, Ayesha is a terrifying and dominant figure, a prominent and influential rendering of the misogynistic "fictive explorations of female authority" undertaken by male writers that ushered in literary modernism. Ann Ardis, for instance, views the fears Holly harbours over Ayesha's plan to return to England as being "exactly those voiced about the New Woman's entrance in the public arena". According to the feminist interpretation of the narrative, the death of She acts as a kind of teleological "judgement" of her transgression of Victorian gender boundaries, with Ardis likening it to a "witch-burning". However, to Rider Haggard, She was an investigation into love and immortality and the demise of Ayesha the moral end of this exploration:

When Ayesha in the course of ages grows hard, cynical, and regardless of that which stands between her and her ends, her love yet endures[...] when at last the reward was in her sight[...] she once more became (or at the moment imagined that she would become) what she had been before disillusion, disappointment, and two thousand wretched years of loneliness had turned her heart to stone[...] and in her lover's very presence she is made to learn the thing she really is, and what is the end of earthly wisdom and of the loveliness she prised so highly.

Indeed, far from being a radical or threatening manifestation of womanhood, recent academics have noted the extent to which the character of She conforms to traditional conceptions of Victorian femininity; in particular her deferring devotion to Kallikrates/Leo, whom she swears wifely obedience to at the story's climax: "'Behold!' and she took his [Leo's] hand and placed it upon her shapely head, and then bent herself slowly down till one knee for an instant touched the ground - 'Behold! in token of submission do I bow me to my lord! Behold!' and she kissed him on the lips, 'in token of my wifely love do I kiss my lord'." Ayesha declares this to be the "first most holy hour of completed womanhood".

Legacy

She is one of the most influential novels in modern literature, with authors like Rudyard Kipling, Henry Miller, Graham Greene, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Margaret Atwood all acknowledging the importance of the work to their own and others writing. With over 83 million copies sold, the work is one of the biggest selling fictional titles of all time and has been translated into 44 languages. According to Stauffer, "She has always been Rider Haggard's most popular and influential novel, challenged only by King Solomon's Mines in this regard". Such was the popularity and influence of the novel that it was cited in the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the latter describing the character of She as a manifestation of the anima figure.

The story is one of the most important texts of imaginative literature and had a lasting impact on the fantasy genre, directly giving rise to the 'lost civilisation' tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the creation of mythologised locations such as Shangri-la. Tolkien recognised the importance of She to his own fantasy works, especially in its foregrounding of a fictional history and narrative. The figure of She is also considered by many scholars to be a formative influence on Galadriel and other characters in Tolkien's Legendarium, such as Shelob (who is referred to as "She" and "Her" in the text). Indeed Haggard's characterisation of Ayesha became the prototype of the female antagonist in modern fantasy literature, most famously realised in the figure of the White Witch, Jadis, from C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia.

Adaptations

She has been adapted for the cinema at least nine times, and was one of the earliest films to be made in 1899 as La Colonne de feu (The Pillar of Fire). In 1925 a silent film of She was produced with the active participation of Rider Haggard and starring Betty Blythe. A decade later another cinematic version of the novel was released, featuring Helen Gahagan, Randolph Scott and Nigel Bruce. This 1935 adaption was set in the Arctic, rather than Africa, and depicts the ancient civilisation of the story in an Art Deco style, with music by Max Steiner. The 1965 film, She was produced by Hammer Horror and starred Ursula Andress as Ayesha and John Richardson as her reincarnated love, with Peter Cushing and Bernard Cribbins as other members of the expedition.

References

• Aldiss, Brian (2002). Billion Year Spree. New York: St Martin's. ISBN 978-0297765554.
• Auerbach, Nina (1982). Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674954076.
• Austin, Sue. "Desire, Fascination and the Other: Some Thoughts on Jung's Interest in Rider Haggard's 'She' and on the Nature of Archetypes", Harvest: International Journal for Jungian Studies, 2004, Vol. 50, No. 2.
• Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers.
• Brantlinger, Patrick (2001). "Introduction". She. London: Penguin Classics. pp. vii–xxxiii. ISBN 9-780140-437638.
• Fuller, Alexandra (2002). "Introduction". King Solomon's Mines. London: Modern Library Edition.
• Gilbert, Sarah M (1983). "Rider Haggard's Heart of Darkness". In Slusser, G. E; Scholes, R (eds.). Coordinates: Placing science fiction and fantasy. USA: Southern Illinois University Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |lastauthoramp=, |laydate=, |laysummary=, and |separator= (help)
• Gilbert, Sandra; Gubar, Sandra (1998). No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 2. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300066609.
• Ledger, Sally, ed. (1995). Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521484992.
• Marshall, Gail, ed. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to the fin de siècle. Cambridge Companions. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521615617.
• Rider Haggard, H. (1926). The Days of My Life. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
• Rider Haggard, H. (1877), "The Transvaal", Macmillan's Magazine, 36: 71–79 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Rider Haggard, Lilias (1951). The Cloak That I Left Behind: A Biography of the Author Henry Rider Haggard KBE. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
• Stauffer, Andrew M. (2006). "Introduction". She. Toronto: Broadview. pp. 9–29. ISBN 1-55111-647-2.
• Wilt, Judith (1980–81). "The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic, and Science Fiction". Journal of Popular Culture. 14: 618–628. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: date format (link)

External links

• She at Project Gutenberg
• She title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Rider Haggard Society