(1965)
“You are a whale at parables and allegories and one thing reflecting another.”
—Rudyard Kipling, in a letter to Rider Haggard.
Rider Haggard is a writer whom it is difficult to approach with straight face and serious intent. Though he wrote most of his early novels in an attitude of the most extreme High Seriousness, the reader tends to treat them as though they were comic books, and read them, if at all, on the sly. He had great success, both popular and critical, during the last decades of the nineteenth century and was ranked with Kipling and Stevenson, yet to-day his particular combination of high-flown rhetoric and bathos brings a wince to the sensitive nostril of the stylistic analyst, while those willing to go further than the flawed surfaces of his prose in search of significant archetypes may well founder in a morass of half-grasped symbols, promising but dead-end literary references, and only semi-mythic plots. The usual judgements made are of two kinds: The Adventure Yarn stance in which King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, and the later adventure stories are praised for their internal coherence, excitement of plot, and fidelity to exotic detail and claimed as cognates of Kipling and Stevenson and direct antecedents of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the muscle-flexing hard-hunting male mags, and (ultimately, with an effort) of Hemingway; and the Burning Imagination approach which places Haggard’s romances with such late-flowering allegorical fantasies as George Macdonald’s Lilith and W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age and singles out She for special praise. The latter approach habitually includes a tribute from Henry Miller (note the dust-jacket on any modern edition) and leads to such statements as, “The story… has bewitching power, the sort one is accustomed to meet only in superior works of art such as ’Christabel’ and some of Poe’s masterpieces.” Those eager for more literary parallels may see the mysterious central figure of She as someone who ought to have been included in Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony: another appearance of the Fatal Woman, a literary sister of Pater’s Mona Lisa and of Swinburne’s various vampire Venuses. Such peripheral connections abound, but the difficulty remains, and seems to be one which is inseparable from the study of any interesting but second-rate writer: many comments are possible but none seem necessary.
Haggard said of She, “There is what I shall be remembered by,” and one might be content to read, remember accordingly, and leave it at that. The motives for going further are similar to those that connect themselves with jigsaw puzzles: curiosity, an assumption that the pieces can be fitted together somehow, and a desire to see what the total picture looks like: for She remained a puzzle to Haggard, unsolved, unresolved, throughout his life. He did not consider the novel finished, and wrote three sequels to it which he thought of as approaches towards ultimate Truth but which only succeed in thickening the metaphysical mists which cloud the first novel. He was obsessed with the personality of Ayesha, the central figure in She, and offers various lame hints of her “meaning” in letters to his friends; for instance, “Of course the whole thing is an effort to trace the probable effects of immortality upon the mortal unregenerate. She’s awful end is also in some sense a parable —for what are Science and Learning and the consciousness of Knowledge and Power in the face of Omnipotence? The same event happened to them all —and like She in all her loneliness they are liable to be resolved ’with laughter and hideous mockery’ into what they really are. At least that is what I want to convey;” but the reader tends to share the perplexity of the “Editor” when he says, in the introduction to She, “At first I was inclined to believe that this history of a woman, clothed in the majesty of her almost endless years, on whom the shadow of Eternity itself lay like the dark wing of Night, was some gigantic allegory of which I could not catch the meaning.”
She does indeed bear some resemblance to a “gigantic allegory,” but it reads like a Faerie Queene from which the supporting theological and political substructures have been removed: the emblematic topography and the stylized figures are present but they have no specific referents. A search for this missing factor, the book’s ideological structure, leads backwards toward its possible sources. She was written in six weeks, and Haggard himself says of its genesis, “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.” One biographer concludes that Haggard was “writing deep, as though hypnotized,” and proceeds to connect She with the world of the psychological unconscious and with scraps of past experience such as Haggard’s childhood fear of an ugly rag doll “of particularly hideous aspect” which came to be named “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,” his early discovery of the terror of death, his interest in antiquity and myth, and his adventures in Africa. These associations are doubtless valid as far as they go; however, they relate only to some of the incidental detail and can explain neither the unresolved plot nor the ambiguous central personalities of She.
A more directly productive territory for pattern-hunters is available, in the five works of fiction that Haggard wrote during the three years before he wrote She. Two of these are the “Adventure Yarns” already mentioned; two are usually dismissed as bad Gothic Romances in which “the people he creates are caricatures illustrating maxims;” and the fifth is classed as a realistic novel which expresses the bitterness Haggard felt over the ceding of the Transvaal to the Boers. Yet these five books, when examined, are found to contain, not only unmistakable suggestions of every thematic element that makes She an unusual book, but also the gradual development of the personality of Ayesha, She herself. Haggard may have been writing “deep, as though hypnotized;” but if so the unconscious experience he was drawing upon was the creation of his previous books. The problematical themes and the patterns of She had been present in his work since the writing of his first work of fiction.
Before attempting to catalogue the pertinent elements of character and imagery in the earlier works it would be well to outline the main features of She. The plot turns upon an assumption of cyclical reincarnation. Although the story takes place in the nineteenth century, its events were set in motion two thousand years before, when Ayesha killed Kallikrates, the man she loved, through jealousy of his wife, an Egyptian princess named Amenartas for whom he had broken his vows as a priest of Isis. Ayesha, having obtained virtual immortality by bathing in the fires of the Place of Life, a cavern in the heart of a mountain, has spent the intervening centuries brooding over the preserved body of her lover and waiting for his next incarnation. Amenartas fled from Africa and gave birth to a son, through whom her story has passed along a line of descendents to Leo Vincey, an Englishman who decides to explore the mystery with his guardian Horace Holly. They reach Kor after a perilous journey across the ocean, through vast fever-ridden swamps and through a maze of tunnels in Kor’s surrounding mountains. Leo is almost killed three times: once during a storm on the ocean, once by the Amahaggar, the cannibalistic matrilineal tribes who are under the government of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and once by swamp-fever; however he is preserved the first time by Holly, the second by Ustane, a native girl who has attached herself to him as a wife, and finally by She herself.
Ayesha, or She, makes her appearance halfway through the book. From the first she is a split personality, or so she appears to the story’s narrator, Holly. With her immortality she has gained an irresistible superhuman beauty, “a rich and imperial shape, instinct with a life that was more than life, and with a certain serpent-like grace which was more than human;” she is described in terms of divinity, her expression one of “a godlike stamp of softened power, which shone upon that radiant countenance like a living halo.” But her beauty is sinister: “I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—or rather, at the time it impressed me as evil…. Never before had I guessed what beauty made sublime could be —and yet, the sublimity was a dark one —the glory was not all of heaven…. It bore stamped upon it a seal of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion.”
The ambiguity of Ayesha’s moral nature is reflected in two opposed groups of associations. The sinister ones suggest the power and evil of witchcraft. In the chapter entitled “A Soul in Hell,” she is described as a “white sorceress,” a “modern Circe;” she curses her dead rival Amenartas with “an appalling malevolence” and an “awful vindictiveness.” With her immortality she has also acquired supernatural intelligence and supernatural power; she can kill by the force of her will alone, and it is thus that she destroys Ustane, who, the reader is led to believe, is a reincarnation of Amenartas. She is a mistress of illusion, a mindreader with the ability to see events at a distance (though she herself says, “There is no such thing as magic, though there is knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature”, and to enchant and mesmerize, as she mesmerizes Leo over the corpse of Ustane, compelling him to yield to her, much against his better nature.
On the positive side, she is connected with a statue that stands in the ruins of Kor, a winged female figure representing Truth, “perhaps the grandest allegorical work of Art that the genius of her children has ever given the world.” The inscription reads, in part, “Behold! Virgin art thou, and Virgin thou shalt go till time be done. There is no man born of woman who may draw thy veil and live, nor shall be. By Death only can thy veil be drawn, O Truth.” Ayesha’s earlier comparison of herself with the goddess Artemis whose unveiling meant death for Actaeon —“I too, O Holly, am a Virgin goddess” —underlines the identification, as does Holly’s rather obvious comment: “As usual, Ayesha was veiled like the marble Truth, and it struck me then that she might have taken the idea of covering up her beauty from the statue.” When she is seen as the embodiment of this ideal of ultimate Truth, she is “more perfect—and in a way more spiritual —than ever woman was before her.”
That her double nature is split also into eternal youth and extreme age is first divined by Holly in his dream of a Nightmare Life-in-Death: “Then in the background of the vision a draped form hovered continually which, from time to time, seemed to draw the coverings from its body, revealing now the perfect shape of a lovely blooming woman, and again the white bones of a grinning skeleton, which, as it veiled and unveiled, uttered an apparently meaningless sentence: ’That which is alive hath known death and that which is dead yet can never die, for in the circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.” Holly first sees Ayesha as a “swathed mummy-like form,” and is then astounded by the freshness of her beauty when she unveils; but her skeleton aspect overtakes her in the Place of Life, where she has led Holly and Leo in order to let them become as immortal as herself. She passes through the fire again in order to demonstrate its effects for Leo, but somehow its powers are reversed: suddenly the weight of her great age falls upon her and she shrivels into a monkeylike figure “no larger than a big ape,” and dies. Holly exclaims with horror over this withered embyro, “And yet—it was the same woman,” and the unification of opposites—ugliness and beauty, youth and age, the desirable and the sinister—is complete in the Place of Life, now identical with the Place of Death.
Yet the symmetry of the pattern, and even its effectiveness as a parable of the nature of Nature (which seems to be one of the meanings Haggard thought he intended) is disturbed by the presence of Ustane. Ayesha’s true moral nature is inevitably connected with the justice of her murder of Ustane. Ayesha herself says, “her sin is that she stands between me and my desire,” but this is hardly an adequate excuse. Ustane is portrayed throughout with great sympathy: she saves Leo’s life at the risk of her own, nurses him during his critical fever with absolute devotion, and defies Ayesha with what Holly calls “moral courage and intrepidity.” At no time is it suggested that Ustane is evil: rather it is Ayesha whose “sin” is constantly emphasized and whom Leo calls a “fiend and murderess” for her deed. But Leo must judge between the two, and he eventually chooses Ayesha. As in most nineteenth-century romances in which the hero must decide between two women, the choice is of great importance: he is choosing a fate, a soul, and, ultimately, an ideology. Although it is clear by the end of the book that Leo considers his choice of Ayesha to have been the right or good choice, and that the murder of the innocent Ustane is thereby condoned (Holly even writes a footnote rationalizing it), it is never made clear what Ustane is supposed to represent, and therefore what two sets of values Leo is really choosing between. She might be considered an occasion for one more demonstration of Ayesha’s power and her defiance of conventional morality, were it not for the hints that identify her with Amenartas and the predictions that future reincarnations will somehow involve a struggle between Ayesha and the “other woman” for the control of Leo’s soul.
Other versions of the same battle take place in the earlier books. Since all six books, including She, tend to have a common vocabulary of images and symbols, it is possible to trace the character-types as the moral values assigned to them shift from book to book. The hero himself tends to be static: he is always an English Gentleman, and, in the love triangles and rectangles, always displays the passivity of a bone being disputed among dogs. From the beginning of his writing career the heroines seem to be Haggard’s major interest. The first novel, Dawn, written in 1883, has been called “a shapeless anthology of two-dimensional actors, vague symbolism,… and blood-curdling horror-stories,” but although the plot is somewhat involved, the relationships among the female figures are almost diagrammatic. There are three central women —one good, one bad, and one either both or neither—with hair to match, in the traditions of the nineteenth-century romance convention (blonde, black, and chestnut). The good woman is Angela, after whom the first version of the book was named (Haggard re-wrote it on the advice of a publisher). She is a pale blonde Ideal, chiefly associated with great intelligence, and a spiritual beauty. “But how it is possible to describe on paper a presence at once so full of grace and dignity, of the soft loveliness of woman, and of a higher and more spiritual beauty?” the author asks, and proceeds to devote a page to such description, scattering references to saints, “the harps of Heaven,” and Angela’s “spirit look” with lyric fervour. Like Ayesha she is a “marble goddess,” but her symbolic statue is not Truth but a marble Andromeda that adorns the villain’s study and is the only thing saved from the fire that eventually consumes his house. Each of the three women in Dawn has a “philosophy,” and Angela’s is a pure belief in individual immortality. She says to the hero, Arthur Heigham (who is obsessed by death, and of course chooses a graveyard by moonlight as the setting for his proposal), “I am sure that when our trembling hands have drawn the veil from Death, we shall find his features, passionless indeed, but very beautiful.” Towards the end of the book, when she thinks she has lost Arthur, she writes him a long letter expressing the belief that their fates are linked eternally and that she will join him after death. It is of interest that in the first version of the novel Angela was doomed to an early death, presumably leaving Arthur to be semi-consoled by the chestnut-haired lady, Mildred Carr.
Mildred is a doll-like widow who falls in love with Arthur when he has been exiled to Madeira for a year through the plottings of Angela’s cousin George, the villain of the book. Mildred, who possesses a certain amount of worldly wisdom, quickly realizes that Arthur loves another woman; nevertheless she makes herself omnipresent in his life on Madeira, and hopes to become indispensable to him. Arthur develops a brotherly affection for her but does not discover the true state of her feelings until shortly before the year of his exile is up. He leaves Mildred and returns to England to marry Angela, only to discover that the latter, deceived by a false report of his death, has undergone a marriage ceremony with her cousin George. Arthur flees to Mildred, who receives him tenderly, takes him on a yacht cruise, and tries to replace the memory of Angela. Like Angela, Mildred represents a “philosophy:” her faith is placed in “neither death nor immortality, but… the full, happy, pulsing existence of the hour, and… the beautiful world that pessimists like yourself and mystics like Angela think so poorly of, but which is really so glorious and so rich in joy… as for life after death, it is a faint, vague thing, more likely to be horrible than happy. This world is our only reality, the only thing that we can grasp; here alone we know that we can enjoy.” Mildred is not an evil woman: she is kind, tender and devoted; but as the embodiment of a carpe diem philosophy she can only be a dangerous temptation on the allegorical journey. She plays “Calypso” to Arthur’s Ulysses, is a “hothouse flower” on the lush “lotus-eating” island of Madeira. Thinking that she may be able to salvage something from his ruined life, Arthur asks her to marry him, but she refuses him because she realizes she can never gain his full love. When the evil George has been neatly disposed of by Arthur’s bulldog and Angela has recovered from the insanity caused by her mock-marriage and the knowledge that she has been deceived, the two lovers are reunited and Mildred is left brokenhearted, an example of “the vanity of passions which suck their strength from earth alone.”
The third member of the female triad is Anne Bellamy. She is George’s confidante, and the prime contriver of the plot to sell Angela to George at the price of some family estates which will be returned to Angela’s avaricious father by the marriage. Throughout the book she is presented as an evil but intriguing Egyptian “Sphinx,” an enigma. She is first seen through the eyes of Philip, Angela’s father, who is “at a loss to know whether this woman, so bizarrely beautiful,” fascinated or repelled him: “The head was set squarely on the shoulders, the hair was cut short, and clustering in ringlets over the broad brow; whilst the clearly carved Egyptian features and the square chin gave the whole face a curious expression of resoluteness and power.” A conversation between Angela and Arthur pinpoints her emblematic identity:
“What does Lady Bellamy remind you of?” Angela asked Arthur.
“Of an Egyptian sorceress, I think. Look at the low, broad forehead, the curling hair, the full lips, and the inscrutable look of the face.”
“To my mind she is an ideal of the Spirit of Power. I am very much afraid of her.”
Her position on the allegorical map is made even clearer when the author calls her “Princess of Evil,” and when she says, speaking of Angela’s nature, that it is “in its way… greater even than my own, representing the principle of good, as I represent the principle of evil.” Her philosophy is one of power, and she attempts to practise it through her manipulation of her ineffectual husband, her plot to sacrifice Angela, and her dabblings in occult science by which she hopes to gain “power over Nature.” That she is both prophetess and sorceress is suggested by Arthur’s reaction to her; “she looked oracular. Her dark face and inscrutable eyes, the stamp of power upon her brow, all suggested that she was a mistress of the black arts. Her words, too, were mysterious, and fraught with a bitter wisdom and a deep knowledge distilled from the poisonous weeds of life.” However, her Faustian aspirations lead her to a sticky end. When threatened with exposure by her husband, who has obtained the compromising letters that reveal her past relationship with George, she decides to commit suicide, hoping thus to probe the mysteries of Death; but the potion she drinks does not kill her, and she awakes to find herself paralyzed, doomed to a “living death.”
Arranged according to their ages and functions, the three women in Dawn form a Robert-Graves-White-Goddess trinity, with Angela as Maiden, Mildred as Nymph, and Lady Bellamy as Crone. In terms of the moral values they represent, Angela is at the Good end of the spectrum and Lady Bellamy at the Evil one, with Mildred in between. But another arrangement is possible. Lady Bellamy, who was once a minister’s wife but was led into evil paths by George, is a fallen Angela, a great intellect that has been distorted. In an interview between the two at the end of the book Lady Bellamy wishes to atone for the harm she has done by making Angela her protégé in the study of the secrets of Nature; but Angela chooses to devote herself to Arthur instead. At the same time there is some suggestion that Lady Bellamy may eventually be redeemed through Angela’s saving spiritual vision. Mildred, also, has affinities with Lady Bellamy. They meet on Madeira and Lady Bellamy offers to help Mildred in her attempt to win Arthur. Although Mildred refuses aid, the two women “interest” each other. The recurring image of Lady Bellamy as an “Egyptian sorceress” links her with Mildred’s museum, a tomb-like structure called the Hall of the Dead which houses a collection of mummies and Egyptian curiosities and which is the scene of Mildred’s final heartbreak. Arthur, pondering on Lady Bellamy’s “expression of quiet power, of conscious superiority and calm command… tried to think what it reminded him of, and remembered that the same look was to be seen on the stone features of some of the Egyptian statues in Mildred’s museum.” In this arrangement, then, Lady Bellamy becomes the middle term. She is seen not only as Angela’s opposite but also as her complement, the intellectual and aspiring mystic turning her powers to evil instead of good; while Mildred is associated with the Egyptian-sorceress aspect and with her ultimate defeat and mummy-like living death.
The pattern of Dawn is repeated, with significant variations, in Haggard’s next novel, The Witch’s Head (completed in 1884). The figure that corresponds to Angela is Eva Ceswick, a woman “beautiful as an angel” who is compared to a “swan” and “the light of a star.” She is the novel’s Ideal, but, as the hero’s friend Mr Alston remarks, “Something gone wrong with ’the Ideal,’ I should say… that is the way with ideals;” for poor Eva is weak-willed and “not finely strung.” The hero, Ernest Kershaw, falls in love with her and becomes engaged to her, echoing Angela’s words to Arthur, “You are my fate, my other self,” with “You are my fate, my other part” but, having killed his cousin in a duel, he is exiled from England, and Eva is left to become a prey to fate in the form of her sister Florence, “strong as Fate and unrelenting as Time.”
Florence is the Lady Bellamy of this book; but, unlike the latter, she is in love with the hero. She reveals her love when Ernest, before his first meeting with Eva, kisses her lightheartedly. At this time Florence says menacingly that she has a “heart as deep as the sea,” and that she has the power to both love and hate intensely; whereupon Ernest reflects that “he was not in the smallest degree in love with Florence Ceswick; indeed, his predominant emotion towards her was one of fear.” When Florence realizes that Ernest loves Eva, she dedicates herself to revenge, and finally accomplishes it by forcing the weak-willed Eva to renounce Ernest and marry the sinister Mr Plowden, a clergyman with a varicose-vein cross on his forehead. The descriptions of Florence constantly recall those of Lady Bellamy. When first encountered she remarks that it is her intention to “exhaust every emotion,” and as she speaks her expression is remarkable for its “power and unchanging purpose.” She is the possessor of a “strength of purpose and rigidity of will that few of her sex ever attain to at any period of their lives,” but she dedicates her talents to “conscious wickedness” because her love has been thwarted. Like Lady Bellamy she manipulates the fate of the Ideal; but she is able to succeed, whereas Lady Bellamy ultimately fails.
The emblematic identities of Eva and Florence are partially defined by three pictures which Florence draws while she is meditating Eva’s destruction: one of Eva as a doe being chased by a hound that looks like Mr Plowden, another of Eva as a statue-like Andromeda chained to a rock while a serpent with the head of Mr Plowden rises from the water, and a third, drawn after the marriage has taken place, of herself as a dark winged shape, its face hidden, brooding over a scene in which Ernest drowns while Eva looks on, horrified. Florence is more completely defined by her identification with a strange but beautiful mummified head (after which the book is named) that is discovered by Eva in a crumbling graveyard. The head, with its “malicious” and “mocking” smile is “awfully fascinating.” “Those who had seen it once would always long to see it again.” The dark rippling hair is the same colour and texture as Florence’s, and the features, “the beautiful teeth and the fixed hard smile,” are like hers: “The dead face was more lovely indeed, but the woman of the Saxon era and the living girl of the nineteenth century might have been sisters, or mother and daughter.” Florence herself realizes that there is some bond between herself and the dead woman, and comments ominously, “I think she must have been a witch.” Although the head is introduced as a major factor in the plot it soon disappears from the story almost completely; its only real purpose is to establish Florence’s identity as immortal sorceress. Florence herself vanishes from the book after Eva’s marriage, reappearing only once at Ernest’s wedding as a mysterious veiled lady: “She raised her thick veil and fixed her keen brown eyes upon the two who stood before the altar, and, as she did so the lips of this shadowy lady trembled a little, and a mist of trouble rose from the unhealthy marshes of her mind and clouded her fine-cut features… Then she rose, did this shadowy, lonely-looking lady, and glided from the church, bearing away with her the haunting burden of her sin.”
The woman that finally captures Ernest is Dorothy Jones, whom he has known from childhood; she is the ward of his uncle and the sister of his lumbering friend Jeremy, who also loves Eva Ceswick and who plays an unintellectual version of Horace Holly to the “Grecian statue” Ernest’s Leo Vincey. Dorothy, or “Doll” as she is called, is a sweet house-wifely woman whom Ernest thinks of at first as a “sister” but who loves him secretly (recalling Arthur’s relationship with Mildred). After Ernest has lost Eva to Mr Plowden the book concerns itself with the conflict between the devotion of Dorothy and Ernest’s idealized memory of Eva. When Ernest returns from Africa, blinded by lightning, Dorothy is waiting to care for him and to “weave herself into the substance of his life,” attempting (like Mildred) to take the place of his lost beloved. Ernest cannot forget Eva, though he refers to her as the “evil destiny” that has destroyed his life. When he proposes to Dorothy it is in words that anticipate one of the major themes of She: “It is somehow fixed in my mind that my fate and that woman’s are intertwined. I believe that what we are now passing through is but a single phase of interwoven existence, that we have perhaps already passed through many stages, and that many higher stages and developments await us. Of course it may be fantasy, but at any rate I believe it. The question is, do you care to link your life with that of a man who holds such a belief?” Dorothy replies that, if there is such a future existence, she expects to share it with Ernest in some way that will not exclude Eva.
From the first two novels, then, a common triangle emerges. Each book contains an Ideal who is associated with the purity of marble statues and with a future immortal love; a sinful Dark Sorceress who is an “Ideal of Power” and is inscrutable, veiled, linked with images of antiquity: the Sphinx, the Egyptian sorceress, the mummified witch’s head; and a Domestic Woman who can offer the hero little beyond her loyalty and the mundane and more earthly comforts. In each book the Dark Sorceress concerns herself with the destruction of the Ideal, but in each book the real battle for the hero’s soul is between the Ideal and the Domestic Woman. In Dawn the Ideal wins (although she was originally to have died), the Dark Sorceress is rendered powerless and the Domestic Woman defeated, but in The Witch’s Head the outcome is not decisive: Florence merely vanishes, and neither Eva nor Dorothy manage to gain full possession of Ernest’s heart.
In the next two novels, King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain, (both 1885), the primary emphasis shifts from the female triangle to Haggard’s version of the quest theme, which takes the form of an imaginative exploration of the African landscape, with the goals of an ancient forgotten treasure (in the first book) and an ancient forgotten civilization (in the second). The physical features of the journey—deserts, mountains, underground rivers, Coleridgian chasms—are treated, not as the abstract contents of a dream vision (as they are in Dawn, where Arthur’s search for Angela is prefigured by an allegorical dream of a walk through a forest, then along a wilderness path which ends at an “illimitable ocean”), nor as realistically-handled settings for the action (as in the African portions of The Witch’s Head), but with the combination of solid detail and symbolic suggestiveness that makes the landscape of She an integral part of the story’s force. The female figures in these two adventure stories are relatively undeveloped, but they deserve brief mention. King Solomon’s Mines has a sorceress of the darkest dye in a most hideous phase: the witchfinder and prophetess Gagoola, known as “Mother of Evil,” the keeper of the secret of the “Place of Death” (a grisly cave-tomb which conceals the treasure). The previous Sorceress figures have only suggestions of immense age, but it appears that Gagoola, a shrivelled monkey-like creature very much like Ayesha at the time of her death, must be actually several hundred years old at least. King Solomon’s Mines was written as a boys’ adventure yarn and “petticoats” were excluded from it on purpose; but in its sequel, Allan Quatermain, the battle for the hero’s heart is resumed, though it does not occupy the centre of the stage. The two women involved, the twin sister-queens of the lost country of the Zu-Vendis, are much more recognizably the Fair Beautiful and the Dark Sublime of earlier nineteenth-century romantic convention from Scott’s Ivanhoe on, but they have some habitual Haggard attributes also. Nyleptha, “The White Queen,” “a woman of dazzling fairness,” has her familiar allegorical statue (“… a draped female form of such white loveliness as to make the beholder’s breath stand still. And as for the calm glory that shines upon her perfect face—well, I can never hope to describe it. But there it rests like the shadow of an angel’s smile; and power, love, and divinity all have their part in it.”) while Sorais, “The Lady of the Night,” has the cruelty and passion of the Dark Sorceress type: “Somehow her face, quiet and even cold as it was, gave an idea of passion in repose, and caused me to wonder what its aspect would be if anything occured to break the calm. It reminded me of the deep sea, that even on the bluest days never loses its visible stamp of power.” When she sings, her voice has “all the sorrow of the world and all the despair of the lost.” The Domestic Woman is nowhere to be seen, perhaps because Nyleptha assumes her functions at the end of the book, after Sorais has committed suicide. The impression that the sister-queens are divided halves of a single personality is very strong.
In Haggard’s next novel, Jess, which he completed a month before he started to write She, a rearrangement of types and a consequent shift of moral values has taken place. The book’s heroine, Jess Croft, is called “the soul of it all,” and although the story is ostensibly a treatment of the Boer rebellion in the Transvaal it is her personality that is the centre of interest. In terms of the earlier triangle, Jess is a peculiar combination of the Ideal and the Sorceress. She has exceptional intellect and a will stronger than that of the hero, whom she “mesmerizes” at a critical moment much as Sorais holds Curtis spellbound and Ayesha mesmerizes Leo Vincey. She combines the coldness of a “Virgin Goddess,” a marble maiden, with the emotional intensity of Lady Bellamy, Florence, and Sorais: she is “very cold—cold as stone—but when she does care for anybody it is enough to frighten one.” Above all she is “uncanny,” “a riddle,” “an Egyptian Sphinx,” and an inscrutable veiled woman: “For here and there there is a human heart from which it is not wise to draw the veil —a heart in which many things slumber as undreamed dreams in the brain of the sleeper. Draw not the veil, whisper not the word of life in the silence where all things sleep, lest in that kindling breath of love and pain dim shapes arise, take form, and fright thee.”
Jess’s sister Bessie is the epitome of the Domestic Woman: “housewifely,” a picture of “healthy, happy womanhood,” a good practical woman not overburdened with intelligence. The hero, John Neil, an ex-army English Gentleman who comes to work on the farm where the two sisters live with their uncle, finds himself attracted to both sisters, and both secretly love him; but Jess sacrifices her love for Bessie’s sake and leaves the farm to visit Pretoria, and John proposes to Bessie. Then the Boer rebellion breaks out and John goes to Pretoria to fetch Jess, where he discovers that he has made the wrong choice: it is Jess and not Bessie who is, in Haggard’s terms, his “fate.” However, both he and Jess consider his engagement to Bessie binding, even after they have escaped from Pretoria together and sworn eternal love while facing death at the hands of the book’s villain, a rival for the hand of Bessie. Jess rapidly becomes more and more ethereal: (“Her face was more like that of a spirit than of a human being, and it almost frightened him to see it.”); she dies at the end of the book after committing a murder to save her sister from a forced marriage to the villain, and John marries Bessie while continuing to hope for the reunion that Jess has promised him after death.
Reconsidered against the background of the novels written before it, She is seen as an amplification of earlier patterns. In it Haggard combined the larger-than-life landscapes of King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain with the larger-than-life personalities of Dawn, The Witch’s Head, and Jess, and the sphinx-like female who is not quite believable as a genteel Englishwoman or even as the niece of an ostrich-farmer in Africa is able to become a character who creates her own decorum and who moves in a setting that mirrors the precipices, tombs, and unhealthy marshes of her own Gothic mind. Ayesha’s double nature parallels that of Jess: she is a combination of the Ideal and the Dark Sorceress types: but whereas in Jess the Ideal predominates, Ayesha is at first more notable for her sinister qualities. The question of Ustane’s function in the “gigantic allegory” is, by analogy, partially answered: she is a camouflaged version of the Domestic Woman, offering the fleshly, the earthly, the daily, as opposed to Ayesha’s virginal inaccessibility, semi-divinity, and immortality; but Ustane too is immortal and will be re-incarnated whenever Ayesha reappears, as the sequel to She implies; for their opposition is eternal.
It is perhaps making one of Haggard’s own mistakes, that of attempting to pile more weight on his “allegory” than its flimsy fabric will bear, to attempt to suggest further significances. However, those interested in literary patterns may note that Haggard, consciously or unconsciously, was working within the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction, re-creating the split heroine, the tension between domestic and exotic, in yet other forms. Whereas Rowena’s victory is almost unequivocal and remains decisive throughout such duets, or duels, as those between Hawthorne’s Priscilla and Zenobia, Dickens’ Biddy and Estella (the former is seen, too late, as the right choice) and Meredith’s Lucy and the temptress Bella, Haggard’s re-vision is closer to the ambiguity of Melville’s Pierre and Poe’s Ligeia, with the final triumph, in Ayesha; or The Return of She, of the sublime over the merely beautiful. Predictably, as Ayesha moves from withered mummy to beautiful woman to divine spirit, almost a reversal of her progress in She, Asene, the reincarnation of Amenartas and Ustane, takes over many of Ayesha’s original evil qualities, and Ayesha as Hes, the Nature-Goddess, becomes not double but triple; her allegorical statue is not a virginal marble truth but a divine Mother carrying a human child (a parody of the Virgin-and-Christ-Child). The hero perishes, none the less, through his disregard for her deathly aspect; in his attempt to marry her before he himself has become immortal, he is “withered” by her kiss. Haggard’s great popular success might lead the cultural trend-tracer to conclude that he was dramatizing some of the central conflicts of his society, and to find a connection between the rise of feminism towards the end of the century and the development of Haggard’s power-hungry Superwoman (with a passing glance at the impassioned plea for women’s rights in The Witch’s Head), or between the growing disillusionment with the efficacy of material progress as a panacea for England’s ills, and the movement of Haggard’s hero away from English domesticity towards the African wilderness in yet another attempt to return to something more primitive and more essential. His books are full of passages deprecating the shallow veneer of European civilization and praising “Nature,” but it is a Nature inscrutable, powerful and death-ridden. Haggard’s hero can never quite decide whether Nature-Red-In-Tooth-And-Claw and Behind-the-Veil may not, after all, turn out to be the same thing. In Haggard’s vaguely allegorical world, which is really a world of inverted romanticism carried to its extreme, the English Gentleman does not have as clearly defined a choice towards the end of the century as he had at the beginning. Ultimately any choice that leads to earthly happiness becomes impossible: the true enemy of the hero’s salvation and spiritual fulfillment proves to be The Angel In The House; the only good woman is a dead woman, preferably swathed in the graves-clothes of mystery; and, in Butler’s paraphrase of Tennyson, “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.”