SANDRA M. GILBERT
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Eliot's "The Love Song of St. Sebastian," D. H. Lawrence 's
"The Woman Who Rode Away," and Faulkner's "A Rose for
Emily." In all these works, a man or a group of men must
achieve or at least bear witness to a ceremonial assertion of phal–
lic authority that will free all men from the unmanning en–
slavement of Her land.
To notice that common anxieties impel these tales toward
an uncommonly ferocious denouement is not, however, to un–
derstand the real psychological, social, and historical anxieties
that underlie them. What, after all, worried Rider Haggard so
much that he was driven to create his extraordinary complex fan–
tasy about Her and Her realm in just six volcanically energetic
weeks? Why did thousands and thousands of Englishmen re–
spond to his dreamlike story of Her with as much fervor as if he
had been narrating their own dreams? I believe that the charisma
of this novel arose from the fact that the work itself explored and
exploited three intimately interrelated contemporary phenomena:
the nineteenth-century interest in Egypt, the nineteenth-century
fascination with spiritualism, and the nineteenth-century obses–
sion with the so-called New Woman.
It
is significant that the wisdom of other cultures, and spe–
cifically the wisdom of ancient Egypt was gradually emerging in
the nineteenth century through the work of spiritualist "adepts"
like Madame B1avatsky, for spiritualism, with its different but
equally serious emphasis on a realm of otherness, was the second
contemporary phenomenon that Haggard's novel exploited.
The novelist himself had actually been a spiritualist in his
youth, attending seances presided over by women, which dram–
atized yet again the fragility of the control the rational western
mind had achieved over a world of things and people that might
at any moment assert a dangerously alien autonomy. Where both
materialist science and traditional Christian theology declared
that there was nothing (for the dead were, if anywhere, else–
where), spiritualism seemed to prove that there was something.
When theosophy, fostered by spiritualist ideas, summarized a set
of radical hermeticist propositions about reality, reminding
readers that, as Madame B1avatsky argued, such mysticism had
always flowed like an underground river below western thought,
patriarchal rationalism was even more seriously shaken. Finally,
the appearance of Madame Blava tsky 's notorious
Isis Unveiled
