In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [44]
This time, however, I had some excuse. My field of specialization was the nineteenth century, and I was busying myself with Victorian quasi-goddesses; and no one could accuse Haggard of not being Victorian. Like his age, which practically invented archeology, he was an amateur of vanished civilizations; also like his age, he was fascinated by the exploration of unmapped territories and encounters with “undiscovered” native peoples. As an individual, he was such a cookie-cutter country gentleman—albeit with some African travelling in his past—that it was hard to fathom where his overheated imagination had come from, though it may have been this by-the-book-English-establishment quality that allowed him to bypass intellectual analysis completely. He could sink a core-sampling drill straight down into the great English Victorian unconscious, where fears and desires—especially male fears and desires—swarmed in the darkness like blind fish. Or so claimed Henry Miller, among others.
Where did it all come from? In particular, where did the figure of She come from—old-young, powerful-powerless, beautiful-hideous, dweller among tombs, obsessed with an undying love, deeply in touch with the forces of Nature and thus of Life and Death? Haggard and his siblings were said to have been terrorized by an ugly rag doll that lived in a dark cupboard and was named “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” but there is more to it than that. She was published in 1887, and thus came at the height of the fashion for sinister but seductive women. It looked back also on a long tradition of the same. Ayesha’s literary ancestresses include the young-but-old supernatural women in George MacDonald’s “Curdie” fantasies, but also various Victorian femmes fatales: Tennyson’s Vivien in The Idylls of the King, bent on stealing Merlin’s magic; the Pre-Raphaelite temptresses created in both poem and picture by Rossetti and William Morris; Swinburne’s dominatrixes; Wagner’s nasty pieces of female work, including the very old but still toothsome Kundry of Parsifal; and, most especially, the Mona Lisa of Walter Pater’s famous prose poem, older than the rocks upon which she sits, yet young and lovely, and mysterious, and filled to the brim with experiences of a distinctly suspect nature.
As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pointed out in their 1989 book, No Man’s Land, the ascendency in the arts of these potent but dangerous female figures is by no means unconnected with the rise of “Woman” in the nineteenth century, and with the hotly debated issues of her “true nature” and her “rights,” and also with the anxieties and fantasies these controversies generated. If women ever came to wield political power—to which they were surely, by their natures, unsuited—what would they do with it? And if they were beautiful and desirable women, capable of attacking on the sexual as well as the political front, wouldn’t they drink men’s blood, sap their vitality, and reduce them to grovelling serfs? As the century opened, Wordsworth’s Mother Nature was benign, and “never would betray/The heart that loved her”; but by the end of the century, Nature and the women so firmly linked to her were much more likely to be red in tooth and claw—Darwinian goddesses rather than Wordsworthian ones. When, in She, Ayesha appropriates the fiery phallic pillar at the heart of Nature for the second time, it’s just as well that it works backward. Otherwise men could kiss their own phallic pillars goodbye.
“You are a whale at parables and allegories and one thing reflecting another,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in a letter to Rider Haggard, and there appear to be various hints and verbal signposts scattered over the landscape of She. For instance,