Culture, one of the keywords of our time, became common, as Raymond Williams has suggested, in Western discourse in the early nineteenth century.¹ Subsequently, pushed by both anthropological and literary-aesthetic studies and extended to global dimensions, the concept of culture, which supposedly expresses primordial naturalness and the irrational, is often played off against its counterpart from the beginning, the calculated mechanicalness of civilization, or the rational. More recently, in the burgeoning field of cultural studies, the boundaries between the two terms have become increasingly blurred. Now civilization, too, is seen as the domain of the irrational, masking itself in so-called rational representation.

With post-modernism, there is much talk about the Other. The Other, in this view, is the object of Western domination, which denies it true subjectivity. Edward Said's study of Orientalism (inspired by Foucault), for example, argues that Western scholarship has imposed a hopelessly ethnocentric perspective on Middle East materials, distorting the “reality” of Islam.² Implicit is his notion that, in seeking to depict the Other, the West is only exhibiting itself. That self, we are to understand, is made up solely of irrational drives, especially for power, masquerading as civilized rationality. If one were to use psychological terms, one would speak of projection.

Thus, civilization turns out to be simply another form of culture, in which our deepest and most unconscious fears and desires, as well as values, are expressed. Stephen D. Arata puts this development in more foreboding terms when he argues that “the fear [of what he calls reverse colonization] is that what has been represented as the ‘civilized’ world is on the point of being colonized by ‘primitive’ forces.”³ Here, psychological and ideological needs are plunged into the same cauldron.

In looking at three figures of the late nineteenth century, Freud, Haggard, and Bulwer-Lytton, I explore these rather abstract assertions in more specific terms. All three men were concerned with civilization, which they saw as being threatened by irrational and mysterious powers. They all drew upon the culture of their time in order to master that threat. The themes they treated are heterogeneous and hopelessly mixed. One can identify their feelings about sex, death, depths, and domination as psychological; but they are linked to ideas about race, gender, and imperialism. One can identify their views about religion, science, materialism, and evolutionary theory as ideological; but they manifest themselves in emotion-laden form.

I have remarked on Said's construction of Orientalism. Is there also an Africanism which is a “representation” of Africa that reflects its European observers rather than the peoples and lands of that continent itself?⁴ At least two of our figures, Haggard and Bulwer-Lytton, were directly associated with Africa. The other, Freud, envisioned it only as a continent of the mind. Yet it can be said that all three were drawing on what was basically a common European culture and using it for a basically common purpose of dealing with the problem of civilization and culture and the irruption of the irrational into both. In the end, however, as I shall argue, these three men emerged from their African explorations with very different maps of reality.

FREUD'S DREAM

A fitting manner in which to engage upon this particular piece of the archaeology of knowledge is to examine each of the three in reverse chronology, beginning with Sigmund Freud, the latest in time. Let us begin by looking at Freud's relation to literature rather than to the science of his time. His relation with literature, as well as literature's relation with him, is a matter of persisting interest. (In fact, the way in which Freud's work is part-literary and part-scientific continues to disturb us.) This examination will allow me to begin painting my triptych of Freud himself, Rider Haggard, and Bulwer-Lytton. This tripartite framing, in turn, as I have indicated, should provide us with what I hope will be a revealing perspective on late nineteenth-century-European culture.

Our jumping off place is Freud's reading of two of H. Rider Haggard's novels, especially She (1887), which were very popular in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Our evidence comes from The Interpretation of Dreams, written toward the very end of the Victorian period, in which Freud reports on one of his dreams.⁵ The text, even when pruned, is long:

At the beginning of a dream, which I have so far hardly touched upon, there was a clear expression of astonishment at the subject which had cropped up. Old Brücke must have set me some task; STRANGELY ENOUGH, it related to a dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and legs, which I saw before me as though in the dissecting-room, but without noticing their absence in myself and also without a trace of any gruesome feeling. Louise N. was standing beside me and doing the work with me. The pelvis had been eviscerated, and it was visible now in its superior, now in its inferior, aspect, the two being mixed together. … Something which lay over it and was like crumpled silver-paper had also to be carefully fished out. I was then once more in possession of my legs and was making my way through the town. …

Finally I was making a journey through a changing landscape with an Alpine guide who was carrying my belongings. Part of the way he carried me too, out of consideration of my tired legs. The ground was boggy; we went around the edge; people were sitting on the ground like Red Indians or gipsies—among them a girl. Before this I had been making my own way forward over the slippery ground with a constant feeling of surprise that I was able to do it so well after the dissection. At last we reached a small wooden house at the end of which was an open window. There the guide set me down and laid two wooden boards, which were standing ready, upon the window-sill, so as to bridge the chasm which had to be crossed over from the window. … I awoke in a mental fright.⁶

Freud's method of dream analysis, as is well known, consists of breaking the dream up into its pieces and analyzing these parts rather than the dream as a whole. At the beginning, he had spoken of a “dream, which I have so far hardly touched upon.” In fact, earlier in his book, Freud had reported that “in one of my dreams old Brücke had set me the task of making a dissection; … I fished something out that looked like a piece of crumpled silver-paper.”⁷ The association was to “stanniol,” that is, silver-paper or tin foil, a derivative of tin (stannium). Freud then recognizes that he had been thinking of the name of Stannius, the author of a greatly admired book on the dissection of the nervous system of fish and, in turn, with the first scientific task set for Freud by Brücke, which was concerned with the nervous system of a fish, Ammocoetes. All this is very persuasive, as far as it goes. We might add only two points. First, Freud had dissected about 400 eels before the Ammocoetes in an attempt to settle a question about their sexual organs, a clear case of overdetermination; and second, Freud repeatedly emphasized that Brücke was “old,” a key element of the dream, as we shall see.

The explication of the rest of the dream requires further data, which Freud himself provides for us. As he points out, the interpolation “strangely enough” at the dream's beginning is strange but easily explicable. As he tells us,

The following was the occasion of the dream. Louise N., the lady who was assisting me in my job in the dream, had been calling on me. ‘Lend me something to read,’ she had said. I offered her Rider Haggard's She. ‘A strange book, but full of hidden meaning,’ I began to explain to her; ‘the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions …’ Here she interrupted me: ‘I know it already. Have you nothing of your own?’—No, my own immortal works have not yet been written.’—‘Well, when are we to expect these so-called ultimate explanations of yours which you've promised even we shall find readable?, she asked, with a touch of sarcasm.”⁸

It is at this point that Freud favors us with his own interpretation, and again we, as readers, must submit to a long, but now last, quotation:

The task which was imposed on me in the dream of carrying out a dissection of my own body was thus my self-analysis which was linked up with my giving an account of my dreams. Old Brücke came in here appropriately. … The further thoughts … had been stirred up in me by the mention of Rider Haggard's She. The judgment ‘strangely enough’ went back to that book and to another one, Heart of the World, by the same author; and numerous elements of the dream were derived from these two imaginative novels. The boggy ground over which people had to be carried by means of boards brought along with them, were taken from She; the Red Indians, the girl and the wooden house were taken from Heart of the World. In both novels the guide is a woman; both are concerned with perilous journeys; while She describes an adventurous road that had scarcely even been trodden before, leading into an undiscovered region. The tired feeling in my legs … had been a real sensation during the day-time. It probably went along with a tired mood and a doubting thought: ‘How much longer will my legs carry me?’ The end of the adventure in She is that the guide, instead of finding immortality for herself and the others, perishes in the mysterious subterranean fire. A fear of that kind was unmistakenly active in the dream thoughts.⁹

After a few more comments, Freud concludes, “I woke up in a ‘mental fright,’ even after the successful emergence of the idea that children may perhaps achieve what their father has failed to—a fresh allusion to the strange novel in which a person's identity is retained through a series of generations for over two thousand years.”¹⁰ Unable to let the dream go, Freud comes back to it some pages later in the Interpretation, remarking on how his hair was growing grey (overlooking the association to the fact that the hero, Leo, a blond-haired youth at the beginning of She, returns from his journey grey-haired) and commenting that “the grey of my hair was another reminder that I must not delay any longer. And, as we have seen, the thought that I should have to leave it to my children to reach the goal of my difficult journey forced its way through to representation at the end of the dream.”¹¹

In fact, of course, Freud's first comment about children achieving what the old (Brücke, his second father) cannot do seems to point to his, Freud's, achievement, while the second comment seems to reverse the roles, with Freud being displaced by his children. What is certainly clear is Freud's concern with aging, immortality (of person or works), the eternal feminine, the rivalry of old and young, and his own ability to “dissect” dreams by crossing over perilous and boggy grounds and chasms while avoiding succumbing to fatigue and loss of courage.

Undoubtedly much more could be done in interpreting Freud's dream (in fact, he himself has already given us a pretty extended series of associations), but my intent is otherwise.¹² My present questions are more cultural than clinical, starting with the query as to why, in general terms, Freud had bothered to read Haggard and what Haggard's novels, specifically She, have to tell us about the culture that prevailed in one part of Western Europe, late Victorian England.¹³ The psychoanalytic, of course, is part of that culture and cannot be totally neglected; yet it is the larger whole that engages my attention here. Freud's dream, then, is merely a royal Road leading us, in the map I am drawing here, not back to his personal analysis but forward into the public realm of culture.

FREUD AND HAGGARD

It does seem strange at first that Freud should ever have read Haggard's She. After all, the latter, a successful pot-boiler written in six weeks, was hardly a major work of literature.¹⁴ Since She was published in 1887 and Heart of the World in 1896, Freud would have had to have read at least the latter while struggling to establish his medical practice, supporting his growing family, and writing his early works, including Studies in Hysteria (1895) and the Interpretation. Nevertheless, he did read them, along with such other popular novels as those by Alexander Dumas. Clearly, such books appealed to him. Although at the time he was in his thirties and forties, Freud was still much the adolescent, a stage so dramatically evident in the recently published letters between him and his boyhood friend, Eduard Silberstein.¹⁵ Moreover, Freud, who read English easily and had spent a few months as a youth visiting relatives in England, was fascinated by things English and roamed widely in English literature from Shakespeare to George Eliot. It is, therefore, the “trashy” nature of She that occasions surprise as we gaze at the portraits of the bearded old-man, Freud.¹⁶

We should not be bound by our stereotypes of the cultured man. Popular culture was as much part of Freud's culture as it is of ours. He shared special ties with Haggard. Both men were born in 1856, were exact contemporaries, and shared the same Victorian world (though in the different countries of Austria and England). Both initially held idealized views of women and had an intense interest in sex. Both made marriages that settled down into boring domestic arrangements which became sexless after some years and the requisite children.¹⁷ Both men were interested in archaeology and in the play of civilization against savage passions, as well as in the decline of ancient civilizations. The comparison could be extended further, but the point is not that Freud knew of these similarities in Haggard; rather, that they were simply there and manifested themselves in She and Heart of the World in ways that would naturally appeal to the Viennese doctor, who was struggling to deal with these matters for himself. Instead, therefore, of trying to match Freud with Haggard personally, I want to re-emphasize what was common in the culture by analyzing the novel She itself.

SHE

The novel is presented as an authentic history, a tried convention, of course, going back to the early years of the genre. What concerns us here is the particular shape given to this convention by She.¹⁸ The supposed editor of the account wishes us to believe that the “author,” Holly, a character in the novel, is actually giving us a “real African adventure,”¹⁹ which, in turn, is supposedly more real than the numerous accounts in Central African travel books that have been appearing regularly at the time. Holly speaks, in Rankean terms, of describing the journey “exactly as it happened”²⁰ and of presenting to the world a “most wonderful history, as distinguished from romance.”

To bolster the claim to history, the message of the shard, from which the adventure begins, is given in scholarly pages of uncial Greek, translated into cursive character, into old English versions, and then into modern English. The heavy black Greek and medieval letters marching across most of a chapter make a claim to classical scholarship (Haggard had had friends compose them for him), which is then supplemented by elaborate footnotes. Observations are made on the “natural history” of the regions into which the protagonists of the book penetrate, an interest quite in tune with the contemporary interest in collecting. (The protagonists, incidentally, add to the verisimilitude of the account by insisting that while the editor should make full disclosure of everything else, he “shall disguise our real names, and as much concerning our personal identity as is consistent with the maintenance of the bona fides of the narrative,”²¹ an injunction that could come right out of a psychoanalytic case study.)

What makes She different from the conventional claims of reality in some fictional accounts is the way in which it does actually combine a kind of realism with romance. Haggard had been in Africa and had experienced real adventures filled with dangers. He had intently listened to others who told him their essentially true stories. He read carefully the numerous travel accounts appearing then. Thus, there was a solid realistic basis to his account (what use he made of it is another matter). To this, however, he then added an extraordinary note of romance and fantasy. Realism was wrapped in a poetic style that, coupled with his myth-like themes and his dream-filled stories, made for as strange a marriage as that of his youthful hero, Leo, with the ageless She.

The power of Haggard's novel lies in this mixture of realism and romanticism. He perambulates on the border where life and death seem to meet, where daily activity and dreams merge, and where the humdrum world is transmogrified by fantasy. When he declares that “no nightmare dreamed by man, no wild invention of the romancer, can ever equal the living horror of that place,”²² we are almost prepared to believe him. When his numerous dream accounts come “true” (for, unlike Freud, who broke them into pieces as in a jigsaw puzzle, Haggard took them entirely as premonitions), we are almost convinced that they are fated outcomes. In short, Haggard, by his embrace of what I call romantic realism or realistic romance, immerses his contemporaries and us in the shadow world of the unconscious, blurring the lines between everyday reality and age-long myth, fact and fiction. It is a contested land in which modern humanity wanders back and forth.

The next major element in She concerns the eternal feminine symbolized in the title. Here we seem to cross the border into fantasy.²³ A glance at the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, however, shows us how grounded in its reality Haggard's literary statements turn out to be. Love, sex, and death all become condensed in the person of She, also called Ayesha, in his treatment.

First of all, the novel is a love story. But what a strange love story. The love described stretches over two thousand years. At that early time, we are told, Ayesha kills the man she loves, Kallikrates, out of jealousy, then secures prolonged life, and waits the two thousand years for her lover's incarnated form to appear. He appears in the form of Leo, who is the descendant of the original Kallikrates and his Egyptian wife, who had borne a child; that child's offspring had continued to perpetuate themselves down unto Leo's father, who passes on to his son, in the form of the shard, the assignment to avenge (the family name, Vincey, etymologically derives from Avenger) the original murder and to kill Ayesha. One can only let out a long-held breath at this account, but somehow or other Haggard manages to carry it off, and us with it.

In any case, Leo takes up his task—the novel thus fits into the quest genre—and, after extraordinary adventures, he and his friend Holly arrive at the mountain, where Ayesha, the She of the title, rules.²⁴ Freud has already told us the outcome: Ayesha's beauty and power are so compelling that Leo falls in love with her, but when she steps into the fire, for this gives her almost eternal life, to show him how he will participate in her prolonged existence, she shrivels into an ancient hag and dies.

I do not want to bog down in the incredible details.²⁵ Instead, I want to isolate a few of the leading elements in this ostensible love story. Misogyny is one. The love-hate feelings toward women are overpowering. Holly, a confirmed bachelor, though he falls under Ayesha's spell, frequently expresses his dislike and disdain for the female sex. Oddly enough, this antifeminism is balanced by the fact that among the Amahagger, over whom Ayesha rules, women court the men and seem to rule the roost—that is, until the men decide enough is enough and, as one explained, “we rise, and kill the old ones as an example to the young ones, and to show them we are the strongest.”²⁶

Yet these same men go in fear and trembling before Ayesha, who is known to them as “She-who-must-be obeyed.” Woman as all-powerful authority is another leading element in the story. She's power comes from being both terrible and fascinating. She has power because she is the eternal female, in the sense of having a long and seemingly indestructable life. She is terrible because while she frightens men, she also allures them and is often described as gliding serpent-like, with a serpent ornament around her waist. The Medusa resemblance is pointed. Lurking in the background is also the Eve story. As Holly exclaims, “Curses on the fatal curiosity that is ever prompting man to draw the veil from woman, and curses on the natural impulse that begets it.”²⁷ It is noteworthy that She always has a veil around her head, except in the moments she chooses to reveal her beauty.

The other unveiling is of her body, which, we are told, is beautiful beyond description. However, Haggard titillates the reader with teasing erotic passages describing breasts, legs, and the body as a whole that, like the serpent around She's waist, circumvent the Victorian sense of decorum about sex. Such eroticism is heavily invested with necrophilia, for the perfume of death, as well as life, lingers around She and her kingdom. In that life-and-death kingdom, bodies, like the ancient Egyptians, are embalmed. Kallikrates is kept free from decay by She, who visits his tomb regularly, thus preserving him in death as much as She is in life.

She presents us with a chaotic mix of love, sex, eroticism, necrophilia, death, and male curiosity about the supposed eternal feminine. Ambivalence is too limited a term to convey the surging feelings aroused by the book. (What the effect is on female readers—for obviously, as the sales figures reveal, they also read She—must be left to other imaginations.)²⁸ Haggard said that he had written the book for boys, but in fact, he directed it at those adult men who were intrigued and obsessed with the pubescent aspect of masculinity. For such men, women are everlastingly mysterious, dominating, immoral, terrifying, and fascinating, especially so in the Victorian period. Freud expressed the unconscious aspects of the masculine view of his time, which overtly placed women on a moral pedestal, when he wrote to his friend Silberstein that “a woman, let alone a girl, has no inherent ethical standard.”²⁹ In creating the character of She, Haggard gave a realistic shape to that age-old fearful fantasy.

For Haggard, women symbolically embody the “greatest mystery in the world.” Solving this mystery and finding the “spot where the vital forces of the world visibly exist” give Leo and Holly, and thus mankind, the power to rule over the world “by the pure force of accumulated experience.”³⁰ At this point, the underlying meaning of the book flies off in two directions, carrying the reader to the Darwinian context of the work and to the imperial setting of the time.

Throughout the book, there is much play on the idea of monkeys and baboons. Holly, who is very ugly, is frequently referred to, even by Ayesha, as a baboon, though generally with affection. His relation to the handsome Leo is explicitly represented as that of Beauty and the Beast, with the Beast obviously a baboon. Haggard has one of his women characters call Holly a “monster” and claim that he “had converted her to the monkey theory.”³¹ To add to the Darwinian confusion, we are told at the end of the book that when Ayesha shrivels in the fire, she grew gradually smaller and smaller until “she was no larger than a baboon.”³² Evolutionary theory seems to have been turned backwards.

T. H. Huxley spoke of the “mystery of mysteries,” meaning the origins of life and humanity. Haggard's mystery, as noted earlier, is of a different kind. His “greatest mystery” is, disappointingly, a mystical evocation of strange, occult forces. He sets them in opposition to the Huxley-like materialism of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory. “It is weary work enough,” Haggard has Holly say, “to argue with an ordinary materialist, who hurls statistics and whole strata of geological facts at your head, whilst you can only buffet him with deductions and instincts and the snowflakes of faith.”³³ In short, playing off the public's fascination with Darwinian biology, She offers us a spiritual, and spirited, adventure down into the past in place of the soul-less, that is, materialist, “descent” of man à la Darwin. This element must explain much of the novel's appeal to a Victorian audience bewildered and made anxious by the godless assertions of materialistic scientists.³⁴ (She, incidentally, is always capitalized, as would be a feminine god.)

Finally, the other appeal I want to deal with in this essay is the imperial one. Again, Haggard reaches his reader on a primary, irrational level.³⁵She acts out the earlier legend of a “mighty Queen of a savage people, a white woman of peculiar loveliness.”³⁶ Are we supposed to be prepared for this reenactment by the title with its echo of the Queen of Sheba? She's rule is mainly psychological. As she explains, “How thinkest thou that I rule this people? I have but a regiment of guards to do my bidding, therefore it is not by force. It is by terror. My empire is of the imagination.”³⁷ One other mind-boggling extension of She's imperial imagination is her plan to leave their savage subjects and live in England, once Leo also has extended life. At this point, Holly has the horrible presentiment that She, who presumably could not be killed, would no doubt “assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth.”³⁸

We are in the presence of a grandiosity that is, in fact, a mirror image of part of the actual British imperial rule and its claim to world dominion.³⁹ The white Queen who, in fact, rules over savages is Queen Victoria. Her rule, too, is based largely on imagination; for British regiments are always outnumbered by the savages among whom they exist but whom they dominate psychologically.

Queen Victoria, of course, unlike She, is thought of as a moral ruler. While her subjects recognized that violence is primeval, and inside themselves—Holly speaks of “that awful lust for slaughter which will creep into the hearts of the most civilized of us”—they believed that it could be exorcised and sanctified in a sacred cause.⁴⁰ That sacred cause was the preservation, indeed extension, of civilization, which they viewed as rational and ethical and not just a form of imperial dominion and which was embodied in the British nation and its queen. She thus serves ideological and psychological needs of British imperialism, although in a muddled and inchoate fashion—wherein lies exactly part of its power.⁴¹

HAGGARD AND BULWER-LYTTON

There is a direct imperial connection to one more topic that I wish to pursue. In 1875, Rider's father, William, discovering that his neighbor, Sir Henry Bulwer, nephew of the novelist Bulwer-Lytton, was about to proceed to Natal as Lieutenant-Governor, asked if he would take Rider as a member of his staff. William Haggard's purpose was to get his son out of England and away from the girl, Lilly Jackson, with whom he had fallen unbecomingly in love. In fact, Lilly was the pure, idealized woman whom Rider Haggard was to worship all of his life, even after she had married another man, and who was the inspiration in back of almost all of his writing. In the event, Sir Henry agreed, and, at age nineteen, Rider Haggard's realistic romance with Africa was to begin.

While in Africa, Haggard spent time traveling, working, and reading, mainly exploratory and historical accounts but also novels, including one by Bulwer-Lytton, his neighbor's uncle. In any case, by 1887 Haggard would write that “my two favourite novels are Dickens' Tale of Two Cities and Lytton's Coming Race. Both these books I can read again and again, and with an added pleasure.”⁴² It is to Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, so fortuitously but also fortunately connected with Haggard's own career, that I now want to turn.

THE COMING RACE

The Coming Race (1871) can be easily summarized. Unlike She, there is little real adventure in it. The hero investigates a mine and accidentally discovers a passage leading to an underground civilization. Here he is surrounded by humans “of another race.”⁴³ They belong to an advanced civilization which possesses an all-powerful force called vril. Most of the book is a dilation of their inventions and customs and of the hero's reactions to them. At the end, he returns to the upper earth, aware that someday the Vril-ya, as they are called, will take over above ground: hence the title, “The Coming Race.” Hardly an exciting story. And Bulwer-Lytton's writing style has little to recommend it. What is truly strange about the account of what the author calls “this strange world” is that, nevertheless, the book manages to fasten its grip upon the reader and not let go.⁴⁴ One can come to understand its hold on Rider Haggard.

Why does the book appeal (it was a best seller in its time)? By looking at the similarities and differences with She, I shall try to get at its essence.⁴⁵ Both books, to begin with, are about underground civilizations. She is set in the interior of a huge mountain, but the queen's inner sanctum, located among catacombs, is filled with embalmed subjects; the Pillar of Fire itself seems to be at the center of the earth. The Coming Race leads immediately to the bowels of the earth, to a world without sun. (Yet, because of constant artificial light, there is no night.) In both cases, the concern with the underground appeals both to ancient mythical accounts of journeys below and to modern geological investigations.⁴⁶ Bulwer-Lytton, writing almost immediately after Lyell and Darwin, is obviously capitalizing on the public's interest in the history of the earth, though, like Haggard, appealing to much deeper feelings as well.

The Vril live a long life, averaging around 100 years. While not up to Ayesha's standard, they are obviously appealing to our interest in prolongation of life that is the other side of the concern with death. Longer life, as in She, is also coupled with power, for such life gives power based on greater experience; in good Baconian fashion, experience is the basis for power. Power is also associated in both books with the female. In Vril land, women are not only equal to men in rights but are superior to them in both reason and physical strength. Further, the woman does the wooing, and the man cannot decline the invitation. She's counterpart in Bulwer-Lytton's book is Zee, a majestic figure of beauty and awe, who strikes terror into the heart of the hero, especially when she picks him as her consort to be. The plot thickens, so to speak, at this point, for the Vril do not allow miscegenation with the hero, who is regarded as an inferior. In fact, to save her loved one from death, Zee is ultimately forced to return him to the upper earth.

The issue of miscegenation is worth pursuing here. I had not mentioned earlier that in She, Haggard has had Leo involved with a black woman, Ustane. The relation is one of both love and sex. (Even after She has blasted Ustane, whom she sees as a rival in love, Leo is so bewitched by She that he transfers his love to her.) In real life, it appears, Haggard himself had had sexual relations, his first, with a black girl and for the rest of his life felt, compulsively, that he must atone for this sin.⁴⁷ In The Coming Race, there is no actual sex play as such, and the Vril feel that mixing with the white man will adulterate the race—but the same feelings are involved. This provides an interesting inversion in which the European here serves as the forbidden, exotic sex object.

It seems quite clear that Zee and the attitudes toward the eternal feminine expressed by Bulwer-Lytton exerted an influence on Haggard when he created She (even the names sound alike). As the details of his biography show, Bulwer-Lytton, followed later by Haggard, was disposed by his own unhappy and unfulfilling marriage to seize on a current of feeling flowing strongly in late Victorian society. The same is true in regard to the obsessive interest in other races and falling civilizations.

Both men in their own lives served the cause of empire building. Bulwer-Lytton, in fact, rose to be secretary of state for the colonies, and we have already noted Haggard's experiences. Here, however, some of their differences begin to appear. On the surface, for example, Haggard brings Africa into the very structure and content of his work, but Bulwer-Lytton's underground Vril land has nothing to do with any actual British possessions. Haggard's imperialistic realism is totally absent in Bulwer-Lytton. Deeper down, however, other differences begin to matter. The major one is that the Coming Race is not only superior to present Western civilization but is supposed to represent the utopian dreams of the present projected not into the future but underground in the immediate moment. She also represents a superior power, but it is based on her personal force, not that of a whole people. In Bulwer-Lytton's world, in contrast, technology makes the difference. Vril land is filled with inventions, such as winged boats that fly through the air, as do people, and automatons that move about silently serving people.

The scientific invention, of course, is vril, a form of super electricity. As the author tells us, there is

no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvinism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energie agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Farraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation.⁴⁸

As we can see, Bulwer-Lytton here characteristically invokes a farrago of scientific and pseudo-scientific references; elsewhere he ranges from phrenology to linguistics to geology and then back to electro-chemistry, tossing about names such as Max Müller and Faraday.

Vril is an all-purpose force. It can destroy when contained in a baton (something like the Force in the contemporary movie, Star Wars). Vril can cleave rock, influence the variations of temperature (“atmospheric magnetism”), and “can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics.”⁴⁹ In short, though Bulwer-Lytton seems to substitute vril and science for She and her magic, his force, too, is finally a form of magic.

Freed from the necessity of work by the power of vril, Bulwer-Lytton tells us that the vril themselves have become indolent.⁵⁰ The vril represent a strange mixture: a more advanced civilization and race which threatens our own—as, of course, did She—and yet is both dull and without greatness. There is no possibility of heroism in the Coming Race. It is exactly at this point, in my view, that Haggard, a few decades later, picks up the burden of empire building and gives us a heroic view. He is less concerned with technology and more with spirit. She is an heroic adventure tale and not an excursion into technological utopianism.

This said, it must immediately be added that both books share common aims. They are strongly anti-materialistic, anti-democratic, and anti-Darwinian. In this sense, one can say that they are anti-modern (an attitude which is itself, of course, part of modernism). Both are obsessively concerned with the possibility of degeneration and miscegenation and with (especially for Bulwer-Lytton) the threat that technology might preserve the less fit. Both authors are also concerned with the need to defend and extend civilization, which they see as a spiritual, not material, task. Both see this task as a mission to be carried out by Englishmen. Yet, at the core of being an Englishman—who, for them, is a combination of gentleman, secular missionary, and empire builder—there lurks the sense of unrestrainable passions symbolized by the eternal feminine. Hence the sense of terror and foreboding of evil at the heart of their books.

A TRIANGULATION

I have now presented a triptych, a tripartite screen, focused around She. In it, I have connected Freud to Haggard and Haggard to Bulwer-Lytton, in a kind of reversal of time. With all their differences, the three men, explicitly linked as they are by one novel, She, have a much more important implicit tie: a compelling involvement with a number of aspects deep in Victorian culture.

The first relates to the late nineteenth-century romance with the buried past. It is embodied in geology, with the geologists' hammers steadily tapping away at the credibility of the Biblical account, uncovering a long and striated history of the earth, strata by strata. It lies in the fossils steadily uncovered, from Lamarck's shells to the Neanderthal bones (uncovered in 1857) to the avalanche of skulls and bones discovered thereafter. It begins to emerge in the archaeological digs marked by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (in 1799) and stretching to include the excavations of Troy and Etruscan towns. Building on geology's discoveries in inanimate rock, these explorations link the animate, both vegetable and animal, the latter including the human, into one prehistoric past (the term prehistoric itself was given currency by Sir John Lubbock in his Prehistoric Times [1865]).⁵¹

The next major aspect or theme can be indicated by the phrase, “the eternal feminine,” which symbolized for many the erotic, sexual element underlying the thin veneer of civilized man. It is the sexual impulse that leads to the unconscious, where the buried impulses and passions of the bestial side of humanity can be found. (It is only natural, of course, that the geological fixation of the time would congenially concur with an expression of this theme in the language of “caverns” and underground passages of the mind.) The fiery eroticism of the sexual flares up in a phrase, such as the “seething cauldron” of the id. Repressed desire is given additional strength by its setting in the Victorian family, which itself sought both to encourage individual expression and to offer a stabilizing, civilizing context for it. The result, as we know, was unusual ambivalence and spiritual conflict, whose expression we can see in all three of our authors, as well as in so many of their contemporaries.

The last aspect noted here is the Darwinian, especially in its connection to racial feelings. Starting in large part from Lyell's geology and its transformationism, Darwin went on to biology and evolutionary theory. At the heart of his work, of course, was sex; for procreation makes for Malthusian overpopulation in relation to food supply, which in turn leads to natural selection or the struggle for existence. By 1871 and The Descent of Man, Darwin was making explicit that man is also subject to this rule of nature. One of his declared aims in this book was to consider the “value of the differences between the so-called races of man.”⁵²

The point to be emphasized here is not Darwin's own treatment of race per se but to note how it accords and sustains the overwhelming centrality of the racial issue in late nineteenth-century Europe. The sense of lesser breeds threatening a pure race, of Western civilization possibly facing spiritual decline as a result of racial mixture, and of the empire and civilization vanishing in the face of barbaric forces (admittedly, now both inner and outer) hangs palpably in the European air.

With Haggard and Bulwer-Lytton we have seen how that sense took a British shape. That particular shape, for them, as already noted, is inextricably tied to imperialism and the empire. It is a connection understandably absent, at least explicitly, in Freud. Racism, as Wendy Katz has shown so well, in Britain serves as an ideology for empire. Nevertheless, even the British raison d'empire has as one of its leading characteristics the working out of unconscious drives, as well as those of state. These unconscious drives manifest themselves in both personal, that is, individual, and public forms, the latter in the sense of being shared by a large group, in this case a nation. My concern here, while using Freud, Haggard, and Bulwer-Lytton as fitful sources of illumination, has been mainly with the group, that is, with the way the unconscious can find expression and mix with the culture.

All three of our authors drew in common from the Dark Continent of the mind, the underground kingdom of the unconscious.⁵³ Haggard and Bulwer-Lytton were horrified by what they saw in these recesses. As a way of dealing with repressed impulses, they supported imperialism, which for them meant civilization, but regarded with great suspicion the forces of reason, rational discourse, and the science that appeared increasingly to dominate that civilization. Their response to modern industrial and scientific society was, in fact, to seek to nullify the irrational, aggressive threats to it in the unconscious by embracing some of those very irrational and aggressive forces.

Freud's way was different. He sought to make the irrational rational and thus to subject it to humanity's reasoned control. He sought to do this by founding a science, psychoanalysis, exactly on the underground ruins to be found in the mind. He, too, wrote stories, which one anthropologist called the “Just So” stories.⁵⁴ Embracing the irrationality of dreams, Freud aimed at turning it and them into the “Royal Road” to scientific understanding, rather than to Haggard's realm of She.⁵⁵

Freud's way, also imperialistic, was an imperialism of the inner mind as well as, or more than, of outer empire. He, too, it must be admitted, shared at least unconsciously in the racist and imperialist mind-set of almost all Europeans. His case, however, is more complex than that of Haggard and Bulwer Lytton. Although Austria did not have overseas colonies, it had continental ones (Slavic and others). Although as a Jew he was as much colonised as a coloniser and although Austria did not have colonies in Africa, Freud shared the Westerner's view that the natives were somehow inferior to their white counterparts; and his thinking included the category of “lower races.”

Nevertheless, while all three men, Freud, Haggard, and Bulwer-Lytton, were building on the same chaotic sands of racial feeling, of the male concept of the eternal feminine, and of prehistoric remains, only Freud sought to ground his structured response firmly on the bedrock of geological and evolutionary science.

Such can be the strange uses of a common culture. As a result of Freud's work, itself founded in that culture which is given much rawer expression in Haggard's and Bulwer-Lytton's novels, we can interpret more readily what is present in that very culture. By making the irrational accessible to rational comprehension, we are enabled to grasp and then to understand the hidden connections of geology, evolution, and science; of racism and fears of miscegenation and degeneration; of imperial politics and historical progress; and of individual and group feelings. These connections run through the erotic and rely on fantasy. Their presentation, paradoxically, gives us a firmer grasp on the everyday cultural reality in which we have acted out our historical existence since the late nineteenth century.

Notes

1. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Doubleday: Garden City, N.Y., 1960) and Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University, 1976).

2. Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Press: New York, 1979).

3. Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies, 33:4 (Summer 1990), 623.

4. In such an Africanism, there would be one clear difference from Orientalism: the theme of hunting. As John MacKenzie suggests in his book, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1988), 80, “hunting offered the elite … a symbolic dominance of the environment, a means of asserting boundaries of territory, action and behaviour.” See, also, William Beinart, “Review Article. Empire, Hunting and Ecological Change in Southern and Central Africa,” Past and Present, no. 128 (August 1990), 162-86. Orientalism, sans hunting, has to find other means of symbolic dominance.

5. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 5 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74, 1953), 24 vols.

6. Ibid., 452-3.

7. Ibid., 413.

8. Ibid., 453.

9. Ibid., 454.

10. Ibid., 455.

11. Ibid., 478.

12. Max Schur, Freud's personal physician, in his book, Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), mentions the dream in the context of Freud's overall work, but offers little in the way of further interpretation. For such interpretations, however, see Alexander Grinstein, Sigmund Freud's Dreams (New York: International University Publishers, 1980, enlarged second edition of On Sigmund Freud's Dreams, 1968) and Didier Anzieu, Freud's Self-Analysis, Peter Graham, tr. (The Hogarth Press: London, 1986; original two volumes in French, L'auto-analyse de Freud et la découverte de la psychoanalyse, Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1975). Bearing in mind Freud's own caution (often ignored by him) about interpreting a dream without the dreamer being available to freely associate to the details, a few further interpretations may be hazarded. One would involve the question of latent homosexuality. In She, the relation of Holly, the older man, to his Greek-like protege, Leo, is highly suggestive. We know that in Freud the question of latent homosexuality was a constantly troubling one.

    Of much greater significance is the fact that at the time Freud was having this dream, he was struggling with the realization that some of what his patients were telling him, about seductions in early childhood, was untrue; that, as he came to realize, they were fantasies. (As is well known, this is today a subject surrounded by intense controversy.) Freud was, therefore, locked in an epistemological battle with himself. He now had to deal with fantasy as a possible obstacle to the development of his science. His solution was to treat fantasy as a part of reality—and a way into it. The appeal of She at this point would be great, for it seemed to deal imaginatively with the same problem of reality and romance that Freud was dealing with scientifically. (I owe much of this interpretation to conversations with Lewis Wurgaft, who is a clinical psychologist, as well as an historian and student of literature, especially of colonial affairs.)

    Speculation of this sort about Freud's dream can be fascinating, but I wish to underline the fact that it is not the focus of my concern here.

13. It would be nice to have more details about Freud's initial reading of Haggard and his conscious reactions to the book. I am unaware, however, of any further allusions to his reading of the English writer.

14. The book was written, as Haggard, tells us at “white heat, almost without rest. And it came—it came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down” (quoted in Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard. His Life and Work, 97 (London: Macmillan, 1968). Haggard seemed to write the book in a trance: a kind of “automatic writing”. One result is that there seems almost no gap between Haggard's conscious and unconscious; his deepest feelings appear on the surface. In such a situation, a psychoanalytic interpretation of Haggard as a person seems both obvious and redundant. See, however, for informed comments both Cohen (1968: 114 and passim) and D. S. Higgins, Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller (London: Cassell, 1981).

15. The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871-1881, Walter Boehlich, ed., A. J. Pomerans, tr., 199 (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap, 1990). Cf. the review by Phyllis Grosskurth in The New York Review of Books, January 17, 1991, 34-35.

16. I say “trashy” nature. This may be too strong. In fact, many writers, such as C. S. Lewis and Henry Miller, admired Haggard as a literary figure, emphasizing his qualities as a writer. Indeed, there are many fine passages in She as well as in Haggard's other works. I, too, have fallen under his spell as a story teller; but to place any of his productions in the canon of high culture seems to me to be stretching the matter.

17. In Haggard's case, upon the death of his son, Haggard and his wife renewed their sexual relations long enough to conceive another child, but seemingly not much beyond that. For some of the details, see Cohen, Rider Haggard, 136-8. Cohen's biography, the first on Haggard, is a careful, solid piece of work.

18. All page references given in the text will be to the edition of She to be found in the collection of three of his novels (the other two are King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain) published by Octopus Books Ltd. (London: 1979).

19. Ibid., 194.

20. Ibid., 195.

21. Ibid., 195.

22. Ibid., 410.

23. For a sustained analysis of this subject, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated from the French by Richard Howard (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1975; orig. French, 1970).

24. Elaine Showalter perceptively remarks, “Quest narratives all involve a penetration into the imagined center of an exotic civilization, the core, Kôr [the name of Ayesha's domain], coeur, or heart of darkness which is a blank place on the map, a realm of the unexplored and unknown” (Sexual Anarchy, Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, 81 (New York: Viking) 1990). This book is essential reading, both for its pages on She and in general.

25. For a full account of the story, see D. S. Higgins, Rider Haggard, 92-99. Higgins is the other fine biographer of Haggard; his work is somewhat less traditional in its approach to its subject than Cohen's. Other biographies are Peter Berresford Ellis, H. Rider Haggard, A Voice from the Infinite (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) and Norman Etherington, Rider Haggard (Boston: Twayne, 1984).

26. Haggard, She, 276.

27. Ibid., 309.

28. Cf. Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions. The Temptations of Emma Bovary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), and especially the review of it in The New York Times Sunday Book Review by Michael Vincent Miller, in which he remarks, “The scarcity of previous theory about female sexual perversions reflects how little we have wanted to raise the specter of women motivated by unorthodox sexuality, or perhaps any sexuality at all” (February 17, 1991, p. 24).

29. Freud's letter of February 28, 1875 to Eduard Silberstein. Freud's sometime disciple, and eventually Satanic adversary, Carl Jung, too, occupied himself with She as the eternal feminine. In his exposition, She exemplifies the anima, the feminine force in man. For further details, see Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar and Rinehart Inc., 1939) and Psychology of the Unconscious (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1952). A good summary of his view can be found in Cohen, Rider Haggard, 112-3.

30. Haggard, She, 212.

31. Ibid., 198.

32. Ibid., 403. A comparison with Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray may well be in order here, if differences are duly noted.

33. Ibid., 332. See also 339, however, for Haggard's willingness to embrace social Darwinism.

34. Perhaps one should note here the Victorian fascination with psychical research, which sought to incorporate both spiritual and scientific elements. Examples would be phrenology, seances, Christian Science, and parapsychology as explored by Arthur Conan Doyle and many others, including Freud.

35. There is, of course, an extended literature on the psychology of colonialism. See, for example, O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban. The Psychology of Colonization, Pamela Powesland tr., (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964. The book was first published in French in 1950 by Editions du Seuil, Paris, under the title Psychologie de la Colonisation). See also Philip Mason, Prospero's Magic. Some Thoughts on Class and Race (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). More specifically on one colony, India, see Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence. British Imperialism in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967); the present author's “India and Colonial Attitudes,” Chapter 6 of James and John Stuart Mill. Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1975; paperback ed. with a new introd., New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 1988); and Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination. Magic and Myth in Kipling's India (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983). Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) ranges more widely, over the whole of the empire, including Africa.

36. Haggard, She, 199.

37. Ibid., 319.

38. Ibid., 376.

39. Illustrative in this regard is the comment written to Haggard in 1897 by the youthful Rudyard Kipling, a few days before he wrote “Recessional”: “Now, any nation save ourselves, with such a fleet as we have at present, would go out swiftly to trample the guts out of the rest of the world; and the fact that we do not seems to show that even if we aren't very civilized, we're about the one power with a glimmering of civilization in us” (quoted in Higgins, Rider Haggard, 167).

40. Haggard, She, 268.

41. Wendy R. Katz, Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire. A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987) is a thoughtful, well-argued book emphasizing the imperialistic aspects of Haggard's work, including She. It is a necessary counterpoint, with its stress on the ideological, to my stress on the unconscious elements afloat in nineteenth-century European culture, as exemplified in the three figures whom I have chosen to treat here. Katz's book is a direct confrontation of Alan Sandison's The Wheel of Empire (London: Macmillan, 1967), whose portrayal of Haggard as a cultural relativist Katz vigorously refutes.

42. Higgins, Rider Haggard, 20.

43. All page references given in the text are to the fourth edition of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871). The specific passage here is on page 16.

44. Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race, 11.

45. More light is shed on this question of appeal by a comparison with Samuel Butler's Erewhon, which appeared a year after The Coming Race (indeed, being published anonymously, Erewhon was originally thought to be by the same hand as the earlier novel, much to Butler's disgust). Erewhon, as is well known, also was a form of utopia, or rather dystopia, dealing with both Darwinism and the threat of expanding technology.

46. An interesting treatment of Western fascination with the underground is Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground. An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1990). Specifically, Williams deals with Bulwer-Lytton but not with Haggard.

47. For the evidence and arguments to this effect, see Higgins, Rider Haggard, 35-36.

48. Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race, 47.

49. Ibid., 48.

50. Echoes of this theme are evident again, though later, in H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895).

51. According to George Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, London: Collier Macmillan, 1987), 73, the word itself was coined by Daniel Wilson, of Edinburgh, in 1851, in his The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland.

52. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, 390. (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.).

53. Freud's remark, in “The Question of Lay Analysis,” was that “the sexual life of the adult female is still a dark continent for psychology” (quoted in Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud et la Femme, 13 Paris: Calmann-Lèvy, 1983), a book worth reading in its entirety.

54. Freud mistakenly identified the anthropologist as “Kroeger,” a misspelling or misprint for “Kroeber,” the well-known American anthropologist. The comparison with a “Just So” story was actually made in a review of Totem and Taboo, not by A. L. Kroeber, but by the English anthropologist, R. R. Marett, in The Athenaeum (Feb. 13, 1920), p. 206 (See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works, vol. XVIII, 128 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Stachey and Alan Tyson [London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74].) It is worth noting in passing that when asked to name “ten good books,” Freud included Kipling's Jungle Book on his list, making it clear that the British author was one of his favorites (See Ibid., vol. IX, 245-6).

55. For a more extended treatment of the way Freud combined science and literature in an effort to create his new “science,” psychoanalysis, see “Darwin: The Bedrock of Psychoanalysis,” ch. 1 in my book, The Leader, the Led, and the Psyche (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).

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