448
PARTISAN REVIEW
She is destroyed, of co urse, by the very flame of life that has
heretofore preserved Her (and which at one time presumably
created Her). She is quite unexpectedly annihilated by the "roll–
ing pillar of Life" that has kep t Her alive. The "rolling pillar of
Life" that brings Haggard 's romance to its apocalyptic climax is
an almost theatrically rich sexual symbol. At regular intervals, it
appears wit.h a "grinding and crashing noise ... rolling down
like all the thunderwheels of heaven behind the horses of the
lightning" and, as it enters the cave, it flames out "an awful
cloud or pillar of fire, like a rainbow many colored," whose very
presence causes Haggard's narrator to rejoice "in [the] splendid
vigor of a new-found self." Such celestial radiance and regenera–
tive power suggest that this perpetually erect symbol of mascu–
linity is not just a Freudian penis but a Lacanian phallus, a fiery
signifier whose eternal thundering return bespeaks the inexor–
ability of the patriarchal Law She has violated in Her Satani–
cally overreaching ambition.
As Henry Miller notes further, however, Ayesha's death is
not just a death or even a "reduction" but, quite literally, a "de–
volution" in which Her very flesh is punished for Her presump–
tion. As She passes through the stages of her unlived life, aging
two thousand years in a few minutes, the " language strange" of
her beauty shreds and flakes away, Her power wrinkles, Her
magic dries up, and the meaning of her" terrible priori ty" is re–
vealed as de-generation rather than generation. More terrible
than the transformations of Dr. Jekyll or Dorian Gray, this " re–
duction" or "devolution" of goddess to beast is the final judg–
ment upon Her pride and ambition.
She
is not only a turn-of-the-century bes tseller but also, in a
number of dramatic ways, one of the century's literary turning
points, a pivot on which the ideas and anxieties of the Victorians
began to swivel into what has come to be called "the modern."
If
She is a classic
Belle Dame Sans Merci,
for instance, the stony
wasteland that She rules is modern in its air of sexual and histor–
ical extremity. And certainly in England the ceremonial sexual
act that brought about Her "reduction"
or
"devolution " was fol–
lowed by a number of similar scenes in turn-of-the-century and
modernist tales, ranging from Wilde's
Salome
(1894), Mac–
donald's
Lilith
(1895), and Stoker's
Dracu la
(1897), to
T.
S.
