Sandra M. Gilbert
RIDER HAGGARD'S HEART OF DARKNESS
More than fifty years ago, Mario Praz wrote about the
nineteenth century that "In no other literary period . .. has sex
been so obviously the mainspring of works of imagination." In
his groundbreaking study of
The Romantic Agony,
how.ever,
Praz amassed evidence to demonstrate, almost overwhelmingly,
that as the century wore on it was nOt just "sex" but specifically
the female sex, and even more specifically the power of the fe–
male sex that increasingly obsessed mal e writers in France and
England.
It
should not be surprising, then, that one of the major
bestsellers of the period was a novel whose terse title was an un–
adorned female pronoun, suggesting that the book might be an
abstract treatise on the female gender or a fictive exploration of
the nature of womanhood. Published in 1887, Rider Haggard's
She
sold a nearly record-breaking thirty thousand copies within
a few months, and most of its charisma seems to have come from
the regal radiance of its heroine.
The formal title of this woman (whose "real" name was
Ayesha)-She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed-was hardly less shocking
than the title of the novel in which She starred, yet it was as crucial
to the book's power as it was in representing Her power. For
Haggard's heroine was in many ways a definitive fin-de-siecle
embodiment of fantasies that preoccupied countless male writers
who had come of age during a literary period in which,
to
go
back to Praz 's remark, the (female) sex had been "obviously the
mainspring of works of imagination." Unlike the women earlier
Victorian writers had idealized 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 mon–
strous powers, a monstrously passionate woman with angelic
charms. Just as significantly, however, She was in certain impor-
This is an abridged version of an essay that will appear in
Coordinates: Placing
Science Fiction and Fantasy.
lO
be published by Southern Illinois University
Press.
