SANDRA M. GILBERT
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tant ways an entirely New Woman: the all-knowing, all-powerful
ruler of a matriarchal society.
It is especially because of this last point that Haggard's portrait
of Her was so popular (and so popular with male readers in par–
ticular).
In
addition, Her story was both a summary and a para–
digm of the story told in a number of similar contemporary tales,
all of which were to varying degrees just the kinds of fictive ex–
plorations of female power that Haggard's title promised and his
novel delivered, and many of which solved what their authors
implicitly defined as the
problem
of female power through de–
nouements analogous to-perhaps even drawn from-the one
that Haggard devised for
She.
Both the fascination of Haggard's
semidivine New Woman and the compulsiveness with which he
and his contemporaries made her "the mainspring of works of
imagination" were symptoms of a complex of late Victorian so–
ciocultural and sexual anxieties that have until recently been
overlooked or even ignored by critics and historians alike.
At first, of course, as Haggard's hero Leo Vincy, his aggres–
sively misogynistic guardian Horace Holly, and their servant
Job begin their journey toward Herland, they may not seem to be
adventuring into a realm whose strangeness rests primarily in its
femaleness. The African coast on which they are shipwrecked,
for instance, seems a standard adventure story setting, complete
with wild beasts, fever-inducing mists, and mysterious ruins. As
they travel inland, however, through vaporous marshes and
stagnant canals, the landscape across which they journey seems
increasingly like a Freudianly female
paysage moralist?
When
they are finally captured by a band of fierce natives whose leader
is a biblical-looking Arab called "Father," our suspicions are
confirmed. Lifted into liners, the explorers yield to a "pleasant
swaying motion" and, in a symbolic return to the womb, they
are carried up ancient swampy birth canals into "a vast cup of
earth" that is ruled by She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed and inhabited
by a people called "the Amahaggar." About her people they
soon learn that
in direct opposition to the habits of almost every other savage
race in the world, women among the Amahaggar live upon
conditions of perfect equality with the men, and are not
held
to
them by any binding ties. Descent is traced only
