the confidential clerk volume 2

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THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERKVolume 2

Journal of

THE CENTRE FOR VICTORIAN STUDIES

JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY

EDITORS

Saswati Halder (Coordinator)

Chandreyee Niyogi (Joint Coordinator)

Rudrani Gangopadhyay

Pramantha Mohan Tagore

EDITORIAL TEAM

Kush Sengupta

Sritama Chatterjee

COVER DESIGN

Adrija Ghosh


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CONTENTS

Introduction ........................................................................................

Abstracts .............................................................................................

The Spectral Plate: Fixing the Unreal in ‘Mark Stafford’s Wife’

Christina Maria Mirza ..........................................................................

Ayesha: Icon of ‘Morphologic Alterity’ in Rider Haggard's She

Anne Herbert .......................................................................................Of Alternative Dimensions: Flatland and the Victorian Worldview

Debarati Bandyopadhyay ....................................................................

Supernatural Soliciting?: Vestiges of Gothic Horror, Fantasy and the

Supernatural in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Withered Arm’ and ‘Barbara of

the House of Grebe’

Oindrila Ghosh .....................................................................................

Truth to Nature: Charting social time through Narration in The

Woman in White

Sabrina Gilchrist ..................................................................................

Those Dreadful Victorians - Penny Dreadful as Neo-Victorian

Speculative Fiction

Alison Halsall ......................................................................................

Subhasinir Katha

Rakhi Mitra ..........................................................................................

Notes on the Authors ...........................................................................


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Introduction

We are proud to present the 2 nd volume of The Confidential Clerk , an online journal

published annually by the Centre for Victorian Studies, Jadavpur University. Interdisciplinary,

international and innovative, the journal is broadly concerned with scholarship, new research and

a keen understanding of nineteenth century literary history and theory.The current issue is a collection of original and unpublished research papers on

‘Realizing the Unreal: Victorian Speculative Fiction in Context ’, from researchers and

academicians all over the world. The issue focuses on Victorian speculative fiction and its

generic, thematic, historical, and cultural contexts. Victorian speculative fiction is usually

described as ‘a flight from the real’; but we have selected submissions that go beyond this

understanding to show how the Victorian imagination engages with the unreality of the real or

creates alternative realities of the unreal in different forms of speculative fiction.

Christina Maria Mirza’s paper The Spectral Plate: Fixing the Unreal in ‘Mark

Stafford’s Wife ,’ looks into the changing nature of truth and reality in the nineteenth century,

due to the rise of photography. The paper analyzes the redefinition of the ghost in Charlotte

Mew’s short stories through the lens of psychology and photography.

Anne Herbert takes us to a tour of Africa, the ‘Dark Continent’ and the mother of many

speculative fictions in the nineteenth century. Her paper, Ayesha: Icon of ‘Morphologic

Alterity’ in Rider Haggard's She , looks into post-Darwinian configurations of monstrosity in

nineteenth century psyche. The notion of Africa is problematized and rhetorically shaped as a

threatening icon of ‘monstrous alterity’ to explore the contemporary social problems.

Debarati Bandyopadhyay’s paper Of Alternative Dimensions: Flatland and the

Victorian Worldview , investigates how the contemporary ideas of time and space are

transcended in Edwin Abbott’s novel Flatland , in order to construct a view of a world that is

almost extra-real in its essence. The paper also anticipates Einstein’s theory of relativity and

mathematics. The author tries to understand how the seemingly disparate worlds of utopia and

dystopia coalesce to subvert as well as complement existing paradigms of knowledge, power andauthority.

Oindrila Ghosh’s paper on Supernatural Soliciting?: Vestiges of Gothic Horror,

Fantasy and the Supernatural in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Withered Arm’ and ‘Barbara of

the House of Grebe,’ deals with Hardy’s usage of gothic, superstition, local rituals and ghosts in

his prose fiction. She weaves a colourful tapestry around Hardy’s interest in evolutionary biology,


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degeneration and eugenics to understand the socio-cultural milieu which had influenced the

literary narratives.

Sabrina Gilchrist’s paper titled Truth to Nature: Charting social time through

Narration in The Woman in White , traces the emergence of social time and discusses how the

new narratological strategy in Collins’ The Woman in White , not only disrupts the idea of a linear

time-frame but also helps the readers to engage with the text in a more holistic way. She arguesthat this narratological structure appears to reflect mid-nineteenth century technological advances

and historical events that prompted Victorians to rethink their constructions of linear timelines

and, therefore, narrative structure. Her fresh insights into the nature of ‘truth’ and ‘history’

further problematize our understanding of Victorian imagination of time.

Alison Halsall in Those Dreadful Victorians - Penny Dreadful as Neo-Victorian

Speculative Fiction, looks at the particular ‘dreadfulness’ associated with the nineteenth

century in Neo-Victorian speculative fictions, specifically Showtime’s recent horror television

series Penny Dreadful (2014). The paper shows how Showtime’s Penny Dreadful refocuses its

fantastical approach to the nineteenth century by depicting the mythical creatures and

supernatural entities (vampires, werewolves, demons, devils) who perambulate the foggy streets

of 1891 London, alongside characters from some of Victorian literature’s most sensationalist

stories.

Rakhi Mitra looks into the speculative elements in Tagore’s short fiction Subha . Her

paper, Subhashini-r Katha discusses the inarticulate thoughts of a mute woman named

Subhasini. The author explores the constraints of vocal articulation and questions the

epistemological supremacy of speech. In fact, the paper deconstructs the notion of speech as a

marker of reality and adds richness to what qualifies as speculative fiction.

It is hoped that this issue on Victorian Speculative fiction would offer us alternative ways

to look at the existing socio-cultural apparatus and to engage in a conversation with the past andthe future.

Happy reading!


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Abstracts

The Spectral Plate: Fixing the Unreal in ‘Mark Stafford’s Wife’

- Christina Maria Mirza

The literary fashion for the ghost story at the end of the nineteenth century intersected

with a growing interest in other modes of perceiving and understanding reality and the human

mind which evidenced itself in the fascination with the spirit world, the occult, and the

psychic, the rise of psychiatry and the discipline of psychology, and the emergence of new

technology such as photography, the phonograph, the telegraph and the telephone. Gothic

fiction exploited the new forms of knowledge available to reinvent the thrill of the uncanny

even while technology appeared to provide new ways to document and interrogate the

supernatural itself.

The rise of photography in the nineteenth century, which coincided with the rise of

realism, it has been argued, changed the way the Victorians experienced reality. The dialogue

between the art of photography and realistic fiction influenced techniques of representation.

Nineteenth century photographic discourse insisted on the camera as a recorder of ‘truth’

which could also provide insight into character. Early employed as a tool in the study of

mental illness by psychiatrists like Henry Welch Diamond, the representational authority of

the photograph was exploited by spirit photographers to provide documentary proof of the

existence of psychic entities invisible to the ordinary human eye. Spirit photography focalizes

the paradox of photography itself: at once an instrument for scientific inquiry into the visibleworld reduced to documented images and an uncanny, almost magical process that could

capture the invisible.

Glancing briefly at turn of the century stories like Richard Marsh’s ‘The Photographs’

which incorporate photography into the machinery of the gothic, my article will discuss how

photography, and in particular spirit photography, shapes the language of fiction in Charlotte

Mew’s short story, ‘Mark Stafford’s Wife.’ The narrator of ‘Mark Stafford’s Wife’ is an

amateur photographer and her idiom abounds in metaphors drawn from the art of


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photography. Written in the realistic mode, the story describes the narrator’s attempts to

fathom the elusive Kate Stafford whose ‘delusion’ of a shapeless horror staring persistently

into her soul suggests both mental illness and supernatural haunting. The narrator speaks of

the living Kate as though she were a spectral presence to be photographed and attempts to‘fix’ Kate’s character in a language that borrows heavily from spirit photography. On

developing the plate of the one photograph of her that is taken before her sudden and

mysterious death there appears, however, the spectral face of her husband, Mark Stafford,

who was in town that day. In this instance of speculative short fiction the image produced by

the camera both captures and problematizes the ‘real.

Ayesha: Icon of "Morphologic Alterity" in Rider Haggard's She

- Anne Herbert

Thomas Richards argues that "at the height of Darwinism in late-Victorian Britain,

writers began to imagine a great variety of monsters that fell outside the sureties of lineage

enshrined in morphology." He observes that narrative representations of these morphologic

anomalies tended to destabilize and disrupt "the very order of things, even threatening to bring

about the end of Empire." In this essay, I explore H. Rider Haggard's fictive participation in the

discourse of this cultural phenomenon, She, and argue that Ayesha functions as an icon of what

Richards refers to as "morphologic alterity," which threatens to disrupt the Imperialist ideology

of Empire and the hierarchal order of Victorian culture in the late 19 th century.

In She, woman's body -- Ayesha's "proud Imperial form" -- bears the semiotic burden of

the eroticized Imperialist ethos and functions both as its rationalizing agent and as arbiter of thecultural anxieties and racial, caste/class ambivalences it generates, articulated in the novel by

Horace Holly, who is acutely averse yet attracted to Ayesha. Moreover, my contention in this

paper is that the narrative configuration of the racially ambiguous ("white" yet Arabic) Ayesha as

the eroticized embodiment of the Imperialist ethos also effects a complex immanent critique of

imperialism. This semiotically dense critique is mediated through Holly, whose acute

ambivalence toward Ayesha (SHE Who-Must-Be-Obeyed) is generated not only on the level of

the male/female power binary fear of penetration, which several critics have noted, but also on

two other levels: the destabilizing resonances of racist fear of miscegenation, as well as the


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Victorian "gentleman's" engagement with the epistemology of entropy and its unsettling

implications for the disintegration of the foundational order of Empire. In a narrative heavily

invested in the discourse of 19 th century African exploration and expansionism, I argue that the

configuration of Ayesha as a colonizing imperialist in relation to the "bastard" race of Amahaggers also deploys the discourse of narratives of social exploration in currency in late

Victorian London, such as Andrew Means' The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) and

William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). Within this narrative context,

Ayesha is rhetorically shaped as a threatening icon of "monstrous alterity" that registers the

anxieties engendered by racism and caste/class as it adumbrates the entropic erosion of the

Imperial Empire.

Of Alternative Dimensions: Flatland and the Victorian Worldview

- Debarati Bandyopadhyay

Victorian speculative fiction, tangentially placed vis-à-vis the real world, provided ideas of

other possible modes of existence in the same space but along a different time-frame (courtesy

H.G.Wells) or the same period with exploration of unknown space (as in the works of Jules

Verne) rather imaginatively. However, not only the concept of these alternative modes of

existence in Victorian culture, but also the works of speculative fiction in which they could be

found would succeed in critiquing contemporary socio-political and cultural conventions quite

effectively. Hence, while Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea could ascribe superior

scientific and technological knowledge and expertise to the non-white, Professor Challenger’s

expedition to the lost world, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s twentieth-century work wouldsimultaneously criticise human behaviour and extol any virtue that managed to shine through in

times of distress. The oscillation in these narratives, between the virtuous narrator from the

period and the meritorious ‘other’ elsewhere would effectively highlight the good, the ugly and

the evil inherent in the idea of Victorian England. Keeping in mind this Victorian worldview in

the works of speculative fiction of the period, the proposed paper will read Edwin Abbott

Abbott’s Flatland (1884) as interestingly positioned to move beyond contemporary ideas of

space and time, with the idea of alternative dimensions emerging as a pioneering thought. While

the lack of logical solutions to questions about the Flatlanders’ physiological processes prevent


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critics from reading Flatland as a work of science fiction, the preponderance of fantasy in

presenting a fictional account of alternative dimensions makes this work essential reading in the

history of speculative fiction. Abbott’s mathematical speculation, presented as fiction,

anticipated Einstein’s findings and earned his acknowledgement even as it remained a potentcritique of Victorian mores.

‘Supernatural Soliciting’?: Vestiges of Gothic Horror, Fantasy and the Supernatural

in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Withered Arm’ and ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’

- Oindrila Ghosh

As an architect by profession the association of the term ‘Gothic’ with ThomasHardy hardly seems problematic, what remains problematic however is its usage in and

implications for his fiction. Yet his novels and short stories are punctuated by the vestiges of

gothic horror, supernatural elements and even the germs of science-fiction. We cannot

dismiss Hardy's literary use of Gothic conventions. Although several critics and biographers

have indicated his interest in the Gothic and even the Gothicism of some of his minor works,

no thorough analysis of the aesthetic use of Gothic conventions in Thomas Hardy's shorter

fiction has yet been done. Rather, Hardy the writer has been criticized severely for

sensationalism and awkwardness in his fiction. Few studies till date have examined theGothicism of his novels and shorter fiction as a key to understanding his fictional technique

and artistic vision. His novels, such as The Return of the Native are interspersed with record

of rural customs, superstitions and gothic elements embedded in Dorset folklore, so also Tess

of the D’Urbervilles and the strange curse of her forefathers which hounds Tess all her life.

In my paper I would concentrate on the continuing use of the gothic, supernatural and

fantasy in Hardy’s fiction, especially the short stories, right from the beginning of his literary

career, unearthing Hardy’s use of Gothic features such as doubles, spectres and ghosts,

concentrating on Three stories—‘The Withered Arm’, ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’ and

‘An Imaginative Woman’. In ‘The Withered Arm’, Hardy exploits a universal fascination for

evil and horror, also known as the gothic or grotesque. The blighting of Gertrude's arm, the

character of the conjuror Trendle and his use of "magic" in the macabre cure of "turning the

blood" (touching the scorched neck of a hanged man) all add a gory aspect to this tale. The

story revolves around a blight caused by a succubus unleashed by a living person’s

jealousies. Like in ‘A Withered Arm’ Barbara, in the famous story form ‘a Group of Noble

Dames’, is subjected to the cruel, sadist and punitive practice of her aristocratic husband

Lord Uplandtowers, who compels her to view the mutilated statue of her former husband

whose Adonis-like handsomeness still enthralled Barbara’s heart. The horrors of the visionleave Barbara the wreck of her former self and she wastes away after repeated miscarriages.


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Collins’ Temporal Setting: Charting Time through Narration in The Woman in White

- Sabrina Gilchrist

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859-1860) fixates on the “right” time: the timing of

the crime for the villainous Count Fosco, the knowledge of the timing of events for the heroicWalter Hartright to uncover the truth, and the enumerative narratological viewpoints within the

book to incorporate multiple perspectives of time. In order to learn the truth of Fosco’s crime,

Hartright plans to “trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who

have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own

experience, word for word.” Collins’ use of these multiple narratological lenses reveals a

simultaneous desire for precision coupled with the uncertainty and discomfort about what the

“true” time is. This emphasis on an ultimate timeline was likely influenced by two significant

social changes that occurred concerning the tracking and recording of time: more historical

accounts were being published and read by a wider audience, and England was rapidly changing

from multiple distinct local times to standardized time. My argument, then, is that the

convergence of these two historical moments—the standardization of time and the influx of

varied historical accounts—appears to have influenced Victorian authors, particularly in their

structural and narratological choices.

In the nineteenth century, there was a surge in the demand for publications about history

(largely due to wider education and an increase of literary rates). However, the publication of

multiple historical texts created disparate versions of each historical event. Therefore, Victorian

readers were forced to determine which account was most accurate or blend together pieces of

different historical accounts as a means to better understand the timeline of the event.

A second major shift in Victorians’ concepts of time came in the 1840s when England

rapidly switched from local times to standardized time, a change triggered by train schedules

using GMT. The necessity and synchronization of standardized time prompted, as Eviatar

Zerubavel argued, a shift from a “summary of individual experiences, which are of value only

for the person who experiences them” to a “category of time…[that is] common to the group, a

social time” (2). I propose that this new sense of ”social”/communal time influences a trend of

incorporating multiple narrators in Victorian literature. Much like popular Victorian clocks


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with two different minute hands (one for local time, the other for standard time), each narrator

provides a new vantage point of viewing the timeline of the story—each moving independently,

yet reflecting the same moment.

By setting The Woman in White during 1849, Collins allows us to examine some of the

different ramifications of the emergence of social time. In this essay, I will emphasize how his

new narratological form prompted readers simultaneously to look both forwards and backwards

through multiple historical timelines to create a more accurate thread of events in a new

communal narrative/history. In other words, Collins’ new narrative technique disrupted the

traditionally accepted linear timeline, prompting his audience to question more critically the

potentially unreliable narrators and engage with a historical text using communal time. This

narratological structure appears to reflect mid-nineteenth century technological advances and

historical events that prompted Victorians to rethink their constructions of linear timelines and,

therefore, narrative structure.

Those “dreadful” Victorians – Penny Dreadful as Neo-Victorian Speculative Fiction

- Alison Halsall

This paper proposes to look at the particular “dreadfulness” associated with the

nineteenth century in Neo-Victorian speculative fictions, specifically Showtime’s recent

horror television series Penny Dreadful (2014). Gruesome violence and shocking sexual

themes are very much de rigueur in Neo-Victorian speculative texts, Penny Dreadful in

particular. Non-normative and alternative sexualities, not to mention monstrous andsupernatural creatures from Victorian fiction showcase a distinctly different and entirely

fantastical vision of those reportedly stodgy Victorians. In a different category altogether

than John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman with its painstaking attention given to

Victorian detail, Showtime’s Penny Dreadful refocuses its fantastical approach to the

nineteenth century by depicting the mythical creatures and supernatural entities (vampires,

werewolves, demons, devils) who perambulate the foggy streets of 1891 London alongside

characters from some of Victorian literature’s most sensationalist stories.


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Showtime’s Penny Dreadful is Neo-Victorian speculative fiction, as I will argue in

this paper, in terms of its project and its content. Its very title takes its inspiration from

low-brow literature of the time, predominantly sensational literature popularly characterized

as “horrible” and “awful,” and in so doing releases itself from serious questions of historicaland literary accuracy. It reinterprets classic literary creations freely by mediating them

through a-typical genres, horror and supernatural thriller, revisiting canonical works of Gothic

and Aesthetic fiction as sensational subject matter populated by the mythical creatures and

supernatural entities of speculative fiction. It thus populates an authentic-seeming Victorian

present with re-deployed figures from Victorian fiction (Victor Frankenstein) and iconic

figures from Victorian society (the prostitute, the spinster/clairvoyant, the American cowboy,

the colonialist adventurer, the slave trader, and the Aesthete) in its fantastical recreation of the

nineteenth century. Penny Dreadful fastens upon the late nineteenth century not because it

is heavily invested in capturing the elusive “real” of the Victorian period, but because it

relishes in the period as it is popularly re-imagined in the twenty-first century, relying on

stereotypes and popular details about the period and its literatures, and enjoying the

sensationalism of it in the process. Historical authenticity quickly gives way to the tantalizing

sexual spectacle of speculative fiction that tells us more about our twenty-first-century sexual

preoccupations than about the Victorian present proper. Dorian Gray’s BDSM sequence

with Brona Croft, the prostitute, capitalizes on the furor ignited by Fifty Shades of Grey ,

while blowing away any conception of Victorian prudery. Spinster / clairvoyant Vanessa

Ives’ horrifying possession during Madame Kali’s séance is more reminiscent of The Exorcist

than of tales of possession in the nineteenth century, once again reimagining the conception

of the Victorian period as somehow staid. In this regard, the “dreadful” of Penny Dreadful renders the delicious paradoxes of the nineteenth century as distinctly salacious food for

modern viewers.

If regarded as an “authentic” vision of the nineteenth century, this Neo-Victorian

example of speculative fiction would certainly be considered “dreadful.” That is simply not

the point. The spectacle of “dreadful” is, and that is how this show is an example of

Neo-Victorian speculative fiction.


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The Spectral Plate: Fixing the Unreal in “Mark Stafford’s Wife”

Christina Maria Mirza

The rise of photography in the nineteenth century created a popular photographic

discourse which valorized and mythologized the special ability of the medium to “fix” reality

with absolute authority. The new technology, it was widely recognized, offered a significant

advantage over the arts in the scientific objectivity of its image-making. Thus the photographic

image provided a special access to truth. Both the popular and the professional imagination

credited the camera eye with a superior intelligence and insight into character which, as certain

Victorian psychiatrists claimed, made it an invaluable tool in the study of the individual and the

processes of the mind. At the same time, the great sensitivity of the photographic plate, which

could capture things invisible to the human eye, and the quasi-magical element of the

photographic processitself allied the medium with spirit photography and the occult.These

underlying assumptions in the early era of the photograph presented photography as not merely a

new mode of “fixing” reality but also a special vantage point for investigation and insight which

could be adopted by the writer concerned with the complexities of perception and representation

and with the intricacies of the human mind. Charlotte Mew’s short story, “Mark Stafford’s Wife”

(1905), is an interesting example of the way in which photographic discourse shaped the

language of fiction and fashioned the role of narrator/author as photographer. While the

photograph is absorbed into the machinery of Mew’s Gothic tale, technology becomes a means

of both representing and problematizing reality. Further, Mew’s exploitation of spirit

photography allows an investigation of gender issues central to the woman writer.

I


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Since its invention in 1839 with the daguerreotype, photography had become increasingly

the new mode of documenting reality. Not only did the new medium provide a means of “fixing”

reality with mirror-like faithfulness, it also influenced the way in which the Victorians viewed

reality. Cultural historians have demonstrated the centrality of technologies of the visual in

shaping the way the Victorians experienced the world. Nineteenth century optical inventions

such as the camera lucida, the graphic telescope, the photographic camera, the binocular

telescope, the binocular microscope, the stereopticon and the kinetoscope, changed the way

reality was perceived, projected and recorded (Christ and Jordan xix). Jonathan Crary points out

that these optical devices are “ points of intersection where philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic

discourses overlap” (8). Exploring the connection between fiction and photography, Nancy

Armstrong notes that “the novel’s turn to pictorialism coincided with the sudden ubiquity of

photographic images in the culture at large” ( 37) and that Victorian fiction began to offer “visual

description as the most direct access to the real” (38). The reciprocal dialogue that developed

between the two furnished the realistic writer with new stylistic techniques and metaphors. The

“Westminster Review,” for instance, was early to make the connection between the “mirror like

narrations” of Thackeray and the “permanent mirrors” of photography (“Thackeray as Novelist

and Photographer” 15).

Despite its alliance with nineteenth century realism, however, the photograph from its

very inception was linked in the literary and popular imagination with a kind of magic. Human

agency in the photographic process was limited. Early pioneers of the form like Nicéphore

Niépce referred to the process as “heliography” or “sun-writing” and Fox Talbot called the

camera “the pencil of nature.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance, wrote delightedly to a

friend on viewing daguerreotypes for the first time:

Think of a man sitting down in the sun and leaving his facsimile in all its full

completion of outline and shadow, steadfast on a plate, at the end of a minute and


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a half! The Mesmeric disembodiment of spirits strikes one as a degree less

marvelous … (2).

Susan Sontag points out that some of that early sense of magic remains for the photograph,

unlike the painting, is not merely an image or interpretation of the real; it is “a trace, something

directly stenciled off the real”:

… a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves

reflected by objects) – a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting

can be … (80-81).

The developing mythology of the camera also credited it with the extraordinary power of

capturing not merely the image of the individual but the “essence” of his character. The

American daguerreotypist, James F. Ryder, personified his box camera, describing the lens as the

“soul” with “an all-seeing eye”:

No misrepresentations, no deceits, no equivocations …What he saw was faithfully

reported, exact, and without blemish. He could read and prove character in a

man’s face at sight (qtd. in Rudisill 76).

Working in the belief that mental states are manifested in the physiognomy of the patient and

that the external manifestations of passion provided clear indication of internal derangement, Dr.

Hugh Welch Diamond, superintendent of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum (1848-1858) and a

member of the Photographic Society of London, created a catalogue of photographs of his

patients for the purpose of diagnosis, classification and treatment. Diamond presented himself as

psychiatrist in terms of a photographer who:

… catches in a moment the permanent cloud, or the passing storm or

sunshine of the soul, and thus enables the metaphysician to witness and trace

out the connexion between the visible and the invisible (qtd. in Green-Lewis

168-169).


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The dual character of photography, at once an instrument for scientific inquiry into the

material world and an uncanny, almost magical process, was exploited by the so-called spirit

photographers of the later nineteenth century who sought to provide documentary proof of the

existence of psychic entities invisible to the ordinary human eye. Coinciding with the rise of

Spiritualism, which countered the materialistic atheism of the age with the assertion of the reality

of spirits and the possibility of communion between the human and the spirit world, the first

“authentic” spirit photograph was taken by the American, William Mumler, in 1861. Mumler’s

success – and notoriety – led to the great interest in the genre in England. As one editor of a

volume on the subject defined it:

The term “spirit photographs” is generally used to describe photographs of

psychic entities who cannot be seen by ordinary persons, but can be photographed

by a medium, or with the help of a medium, and with the cooperation of these

unseen entities (Glendinning v-vi).

Six such categories are described: pictures of psychical entities not seen by normal vision;

pictures of objects not seen nor thought of by the sitter or by the medium or the operator; pictures

which appear to have been copied from art; pictures of “materialised forms”; pictures of the

“wraith” or “double” of persons still in the body; and portraits on plates invisible to the normal

eye but seen by clairvoyants and mediums when in trance (vi-vii). There were, however, also

instances of accidental spirit photography where amateur photographers discovered spectral

presences or “extras” in their photographs. The spectral images obtained in spirit photography

were often blurred and misty but in others, the ghosts as much as the living human sitters, appear

to be consciously posing for the camera (Harvey 60). Though usually recognizable as deceased

relatives of the sitters, sensitive photographers often discovered extras that neither they nor their

sitters could identify. In several such psychic photographs the spirits appear as disembodied

faces surrounded by a kind of vaporous aureole. Some depict spirits clad in ethereal drapery

whereas others have manifestations in recognizably contemporary costume. In some photographs


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the spectre is superimposed on the sitter’s body; in others, the spectral face or figure hangs

wistfully in the background or with a ghostly hand placed upon the shoulder of the oblivious

sitter in an attitude of consolation or reassurance.

The evidence and implications of spirit photography were investigated, among other

psychical phenomena, by the Society for Psychical Research whose deliberations, conducted in

the spirit of enlightened scientific enquiry,were published in compendious tomes. Whereas

previously the testimonial of witnesses had been the only way of documenting the supernatural,

photography now provided a means of recording such visitations and apparitions towards a

rationalized “Science of Ghosts” (Stead 14). Spirit photography thus shared with psychiatric

photography the larger aim of tracing “the connexion between the visible and the invisible.”

The vantage point of the camera came to represent a privileged position of authority and

insight which afforded new possibilities to the modern writer.Photography represented a mode of

seeing which allowed the author/narrator to record reality with truthful objectivityand to “focus”

and “fix” character, that is, to represent and thus to study character and the mind, so that the

author/narratorwas both faithful portraitist and psychiatrist. In addition, the perspective of the

“sensitive” photographer also provided a special magical vision into the plane of the

otherworldly invisible to the ordinary human eye.

This framework is useful in examining Mew’s technique in “Mark Stafford’s Wife,” a

short story which provides a case study for realistic fiction based on the perceptual model and

stylistic paradigm represented by photography. Mew’s narrator, an amateur photographer, usurps

the language and the special vision of photography, often presenting key moments in

photographic terms.

II


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When the narrator of “Mark Stafford’s Wife” finds herself duenna to the enigmatic Kate

Relton, a young woman of “remarkable attraction and substantial fortune”, it is to the idiom of

portrait photography that she turns in an attempt to define hercharge. She is perplexedly aware

that while Kateis “a perfect copy” of her beautiful dead mother “the likeness ended with her

face.” The tranquility of her demeanour seems a screen for the hidden flame within. Looking

beyond her “pose” of gay indifference the narrator glimpses the “real,” “excessively romantic”

Kate Relton (170). Identifying as much as capturing that “pose” the narrator adopts the narrative

mode of photographer, a method, as we have seen, particularly suited in the discourse of the age

to the presentation and analysis of character. Kate, who is self-consciously aware of herself as a

photographic object, enjoys “posing” for the charismatic author, Mark Stafford. The literary

artist is here explicitly compared to a portraitist: “Do you mean to say he will have the assurance

to put you down in black and white?” (174).The narrator’s description of the artistic process is as

suited to literature as it is to photography though she does not otherwise approve of Stafford’s

style. A novelist in the naturalistic school, the “impartiality” credited to the camera eye is in his

case “pitiless.” He is too much “the vivisectionist at work; the man with the knife,” a “literary

surgeon” rather than a “literary artist” (172-173).

The narrator’s scrutiny of Kate’s “bright” and “unnatural sanity” in bereavement amounts

to that of a psychiatrist. Ruling out the “fashionable curse of nerves,” she determines that though

Kate is “beautifully sound” it is the soundness of “flawless glass” with a “frailness” that will

simply “break” under a strain (171). The smiling façade, she learns, is the result both of an

extraordinary self-control and a delight in mystification. Kate has a deeply private, independent

core: “I must be myself and stay myself and belong, in a fashion, to myself alone” (174). In a

half-jesting twist on the Bluebeard story, she says that even after her marriage, “whoever owns

the poor little house, there must be rooms of which, to the end, I keep the key” (174). Aware that

she intrigues Stafford, for whom “the passion of the chase” lies in the hope of “pure discovery,”

she yet believes herself to be as elusive as the Snark in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, The


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Hunting of the Snark (1876). Kate is a fairytale tale creature belonging to the type of the

archetypically wild, magical women of the ballads of Mary E. Coleridge and Rosamund Marriott

Watson that Mew develops in her later poem “The Farmer’s Bride.”

Both the narrator and Stafford have recourse to a language which suggests the spectral

and references the lore of the faerie in their descriptions of Kate. From the very outset the

narrator faces difficulties in actually “fixing” Kate, admitting that there is something not quite

real about her: “she gave a hint of unreality, or rather of intangibility” (170). She seems, in fact,

“to hang between two worlds” (170). The narrator’s descriptions suggest that Kate is caught

between the worlds of ordinary reality and the otherworldly, a ghostly figure with “a vague

companionship with spirits of a lighter air” (180), an idiom which derives from the language of

spirit photography. Scrutinizing Kate as though looking at a spirit photograph, the narrator seeks

vainly for the “spectre” in the background, aware of “some intention in the picture missed.”

(170). 1 She is surrounded by “a vague atmosphere of mist” (177) reminiscent of the “spirit fog”

that frames photographed spectres. A creature of dreams, she is clad in “gossamer” (170), an

image which suggests as much the translucent drapery of the ghostly extra as it does the fairy, for

closely allied to the Victorian interest in spirit photography was the desire to capture fairies on

camera. There is something more sinister, however, in Stafford’s description of her as a “shy,

reluctant fay” (181) who must be waited for “in a sense, in ambush” (177). Keeping discreetly

“in the shadow,” he seems to be constantly watching heras though in fact waiting “in ambush”

for her.The distrustful narrator, who has already experienced the subtly imposed “charm” or

“influence” of his powerful mind, has no doubt of his ability to “swoop” upon his prey (173).

As Stafford’s “influence” begins to prevail over Kate she gives the narrator the curious

impression of “a person listening and looking for something she hoped not to find, walking on

1 The allusion is to the puzzle prints of “The Shade of Napoleon Visiting his Tomb” extremely popular through the

nineteenth century. The curious shape of a pair of adjacent willow trees in these puzzle print creates the optical

illusion of a ghostly figure of Napoleon standing by his tomb.


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tiptoe, opening and shutting doors” as though the rooms of her inner privacy had somehow been

invaded (175). It is at this time the narrator divines a “flaw” in her fine composure which

betokens a jarring of the machinery of her mind (175). Kate soon breaks off her engagement to

the unpretentious Charlie Darch. Affianced to Stafford, she seems “determinedly” to shake away

the mists, and emerges as “an intensely actual figure shining with a hard, new brightness” (180).

Kate is soon a greater social success than her famous husband, leading Stafford to observe that

the “fay” has been tempted into the “vulgarities” and “mortalities of daylight” (181). The

troubled narrator, however, whether with the vision of hindsight or with unconscious intuition,

presentsher as acted upon by psychic forces, a spirit materializingas at a medium’s call or

hypnotized by a mesmerist, “intimately held, detained by an influence” (182).

Matters come to a head at a house party for Stafford’s birthday at which the guests are to

be photographed in elaborate tableaux by the narrator. Kate, who in her beautiful composure is

completely unsuited to her pose as Ophelia, elicits Stafford’s remark that “Pure Reason” cannot

“condescend” to look distraught. He adds strangely, “She would be worth watching in a

panic …” (185). Kate is clearly as much an enigma to him as she ever was and Stafford, that

vivisectionist of character, is not satisfied. Yet, Kate’s remote serenity is a mask kept with

difficulty in place. That evening, for the first time, the narrator does win an outburst of passion

from Kate, who responds with hysterical randomness when questioned on her renewed

involvement with Darch:

Is even death itself the end? We can’t see – can’t possibly see – though we are

seen , and not by any means in a glass darkly. If one was sure – but nothing’s

sure – that there was at the close – deliverance from this awful light, this uplifting

darkness, that we are in the grip of – blind – blind stumblers – – ! (186)

In the grip of a terror that she strives desperately to conceal, Kate’s words, an allusion to Le

Fanu’s collection of supernatural tales, In a Glass Darkly (1872), indicate her sense of being


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her case, she discovers that Katehas “saved herself,” as Stafford unemotionally puts it, “by

dying” (192).

It is some weeks later, on developing the photograph of Kate, that the narrator finds

“evidence” of Kate’s “delusion.” On the plate, beside Kate’s face, twisting over her shoulder,

there emerges “the semblance of another face,” not initially either “human or recognizable,” but

gradually becoming “hideously distinct, monstrously familiar,” the face of her husband, Mark

Stafford (193). Aware that Stafford was absent when the photograph was taken, the narrator

realizes that the plate has recorded the “shapeless horror” that Kate had sensed looking over her

shoulder and into her soul. Frozen at first with horror, she flings the plate violently outside the

window where it shatters in pieces (193).

Mew’s story draws the photograph into the machinery of the Gothic where it functions

not only as a manifestation of the supernatural but as the visible “trace” and permanent residue of

a supernatural “reality” not visible to the ordinary eye. Our notion of the reality of the

phenomenal world is constructed through the information received through the senses. Scientific

experiments involving electric current, ultra-violet rays and fluorescence, for example, which

proved that the camera could photograph that which was invisible to the naked eye had already

problematized vision as the source of truth. Mew’s story addresses the possibility that we see

reality indeed as “in a glass darkly” for human vision is both limited and fallible. The

photographic plate becomes documentary evidence of the existence of a psychic plane of reality

to which we have ordinarily no access but which coexists with and affects our own. The plane of

spectral or psychic reality is available only to the “inner eye” or the camera’s sensitive plate.

There is much in the contemporary fascination with the occult which would support the

narrator’s finding. The sensitivity of the camera plate was established by science and exploited in

science fiction narratives of the period, while its occult sensitivity was proclaimed by spirit

photographers. In the spectral image of Stafford’s face Mew exploits the Gothic device of the


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double or wraith, not as it traditionally appears in folklore as a premonition of imminent death or

as the result of a near death experience but, as revealed in occult lore, a transcorporeal projection

brought about by an act of will. H. P. Blavatsky, whose investigations led her to the occult

teachings of ancient Egypt and India, describes the “Thought Body,” one of three doubles

acknowledged by Theosophy, as “the vehicle both of thought and of the animal passions and

desires, drawing at one and the same time from the lowest terrestrial manas (mind) and Kama,

the element of desire” (“Dialogue between the Two Editors” 219). W. T. Stead in his immensely

popular collection, Real Ghost Stories , narrates the case of the society hostess who, studying the

occult side of Theosophy, cultivated the ability of going about in her “Thought Body.” Of “finer

matter than the gross fabric of our outward body,” the “Thought Body,”contained within and the

exact counterpart of the material body, is capable of sight, hearing and consciousness, is

independent of the laws of space and time, and can move with the swiftness of the mind (Stead

60).

While Mew was close enough to Theosophist circles to have a story printed in The

Theosophist in 1914, she may also have come across the notion of the double in Egyptian lore

which enjoyed a great vogue at the fin-de-siècle. Mew, who researched extensively at the British

Museum, may have encountered the notion of the “Ka” or “Double” in a book on Egyptian Ideas

of the Future Life (1899) by Dr. Budge, Keeper of the Assyrian and Egyptian Antiquities at the

British Museum, or perhaps via Bram Stoker, who acknowledges Dr. Budge in his novel, Jewel

of Seven Stars (1903). The “Ka,” explains Budge, is the “abstract individuality or personality” of

an individual and endowed with all his characteristic attributes. Of absolutely independent

existence, it is free to wander at will over earth and heaven (Budge163-164). In Stoker’s novel,

Abel Trelawney describes the phenomenon of the projection of the astral body: “the gifted

individual can at will, quick as thought itself, transfer his body whithersoever he chooses, by the

dissolution and reincarnation of particles” (Stoker 219). It is in fact following the Staffords’

extended honeymoon in Egypt that the narrator begins to remark that Kate seems “hypnotized”


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(181) and held by some strange “influence” (182). One may conjecture that Stafford, already

gifted with an almost uncanny ability to “influence” people and penetrate their minds, has

dabbled in the occult so as to effect the extension and perfection of his naturally formidable

powers. It is then inevitable that Stafford should turn this ability to study the one being that

eludes him and whom he has “ambushed” in vain, his wife.

While the story contains no direct suggestion that Stafford was responsible for his wife’s

death, the circumstances are in themselves mysterious and the narrator is afraid to learn the

manner of her death. Stafford explains her sudden demise as the result of a course of action too

violent and unnatural for her quiet nature: she simply “failed – and ended” (192). Blavatsky, in

an article published in The Theosophist , “Can the Double Murder?”, explains a case of

mysterious death as murder committed by the transcorporeally projected double or “mayavi-

rupa” of a mesmeric subject. In the editorial comment which prefaces the article, Blavatsky

observes that death may result from “psychical causes” for a “mortal wound may be inflicted

upon the inner man without puncturing the epidermis” (Blavatsky 99).The sudden and

ambiguous manner of Kate’s death as well as Stafford’s chilling composure leave the conjecture

of psychical violence open. Her death, which affords Stafford a strange satisfaction, seems to

mark the completion of his “ambush” of her, granting him the insight he has never had. Looking

upon her face “fixed” in death, he sees “Kate herself” and remarks, “I could almost believe I had

never before seen her” (192).

Mew’s story plays with the Gothic motif of the sinister husband, evoking the shudder of

the uncanny or “ unheimlich ,” as Freud has analyzed it, precisely by locating it within the safe

space of the “ heimlich ,” the “familiar” or “homely.” For women writers, the formulas of the

Gothic provided a way of engaging with the anxiety, even the terror, of the home space and the

domestic ideal of marriage. In his seminal essay, “The Uncanny,” noting that “ heimlich ,” the

linguistic opposite of “unheimlich ,” also means “secret” and “hidden,” Freud


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observes, “ Not only is heimlich a word the meaning of which develops towards an

ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich ” (Freud 80) but “everything

is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light” (Freud 79).

The photographic plate reveals the hidden terror of the home space through the spectral image of

the “monstrously familiar” face of Mark Stafford. It is Stafford’s almost vampiric preying on

Kate’s soul which is captured in the spectral image of his double on the plate, a metaphor for

both the surveillance and psychological violence inherent in their marriage. Mew’s story was

written against the background of heated debates on the marriage question. In 1903, the Society

for Promoting Reforms in the Marriage and Divorce Laws of England was founded, and by 1909

a Royal Commission was appointed. There was much arguing over greater liberalization in the

marriage laws, and debates over the real and proper relations between men and women, the

unequal status and degradation of women in marriage, and the husband’s legal right to the person

and the property of his wife. Mew’s story confronts these issues through the Gothic. The spirit

photograph is not merely an ingenious plot device as in Richard Marsh’s “The Photographs”

(1900), a tale in which photographs of the double of a convicted man’s wife prove his innocence

in an admixture of the supernatural, the technological and the sentimental, but also a tool of

critical exposure.

III

It is significant that the psychically aggressive husband figure of Mew’s story is a writer.

Stafford’s pursuit of Kate is informed by a pathologically invasive need to “discover” and thus to

“get” or possess her (174). Read in the context of the debates raised about the New Woman, Kate

is, as George Egerton said of woman in literature, “terra incognita.” Represented “as man liked

to imagine her,” woman “as she knew herself to be” was the “one small plot” left for women

writers to tell (qtd. in Showalter xii). Masculine authorship, assert Gilbert and Gubar, building

their argument on sexual metaphors in accounts of authorship and creativity by male writers, is


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an act of phallic possession. Their insights into “Ruskin’s phallic-sounding ‘Penetrative

Imagination’” (5) are valuable in reading the relationship of Kate and Stafford. In Modern

Painters , Ruskin’s phallic imagery describes a masculinized imagination which “penetrates,”

“pierces” and “takes possession” of the contemplated subject, reaching “by intuition and

intensity of gaze [italics mine], (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing

power), a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things” (284). In fact, Stafford’s

methods in pursuing Kate are a chilling take on the male gaze and a surprising, supernaturally

exact working of Ruskin’s “Penetrative Imagination”:

… no matter what be the subject submitted to it, substance or spirit; all is alike

divided asunder, joint and marrow, whatever utmost truth, life, principle it has,

laid bare … (251)

The writer, Stafford, is described as “vivisectionist,” “literary surgeon”, and “pathologist” (187),

and his relationship with Kate is on one level but the practice of his craft. She is an object of

investigation and marriage no more than a means to the final end of appropriating her very self, a

process which leads to her death. In the final analysis, the issues raised by the spectral plate serve

to interrogate the patriarchal model of authorship. Stafford is the type of the male artist,

vivisectionist and adept in the occult arts,whose“incisive touch”(173) turned to life kills his

subject, while the narrator represents another model, the narrator/author as photographer whose

final spirit photograph has a clairvoyant brilliance.

Mew’s story makes an interesting case study of a kind of fiction based on the perceptual

and stylistic model of photography. The representational possibilities of the photographic mode

inform the work of many nineteenth century writers including Henry James, whose influence is

very evident in Mew’s story. These authors, however, as Green-Lewis remarks, in a self-

conscious attempt at achieving the position of scientific objectivity and the “neutral, impersonal,

disengaged” photographic gaze, deliberately efface the figure of the photographer as subject and

agent. The photographer remains only as “a theory rather than a person, a perspective rather than


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a source, a style of writing and a way of looking but not an individual human subject” (Green-

Lewis 94). Mew’s story restores the figure of the photographer to the narrative process,

reclaiming the creative force and special intuition of the camera in the figure of the narrator/

woman writer.The technology and language of photography provide new ways of interrogating

and appropriating models of authorship and of fashioning the narrative process itself.

Works Cited

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Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “On the Daguerreotype.” Illuminations: Women Writing on

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Glendinning, Andrew. “Preface.” The Veil Lifted: Modern Developments of Spirit Photography.

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95. Print.

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body” strategically punctuate the narrative to validate the Victorian Vincey's royal rights

to Ayesha's ancient imperial Kor. Even before Ayesha's first appearance, the possessed

female servant Ustane assumes Ayesha's “proud imperial form” to deliver Ayesha's

“thoughts and forebodings” to Leo, Holly and the Amahagger (92). And when Ayesha

first unveils herself to Holly, he describes her “form” as “only robed in a garb of clinging

white that did but serve to show its perfect and imperial shape” (155). Horace's

ambivalence toward what he sees before him is registered in his reluctance to relate the

unspeakable: “I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this

beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil – at least at the time, it struck meas evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot – simply, I cannot!” (155). Significantly, in

Holly's assessment, the only certainty is that Ayesha's “loveliness … lay rather, if it can

be said to have had any fixed abiding place, in a visible majesty; in an imperial grace”

(155). Moreover, “drawn by some magnetic force” [which he] “could not resist” (156),

Holly is seduced by Ayesha – “this awful woman” and her imperial splendour. In an

attempt to reassess his reactions to Ayesha's “uncanny” allure, Holly dismisses Ayesha as

a “white sorceress” as he “… curses … the fatal curiosity that is ever prompting man to

draw the veil from woman, and curses on the natural impulse that begets it!” (159). When

Ayesha unveils herself to lure Leo away from the dead body of his beloved Ustane, Holly

describes “her glorious radiant beauty and her imperial grace” (229) as being much more

than Leo could resist. Thus, at this point, the focus of the narrative shifts to an

exploration of Holly's acute ambivalence towards Ayesha, who represents the eroticized

embodiment of the Imperialist ethos. As such, Ayesha's female body evolves into a

threatening emblem of “monstrous alterity.”


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My contention in this essay is that Haggard's embodiment of the imperialist ethos

in Ayesha, the eponymous SHE (-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed), also contains an implicit

critique of imperialism. Significantly, this critique is mediated through the pensive,

philosophical Holly, the Cambridge don who reluctantly accompanies his adopted son,

Leo Vincey, on the young man's pre-ordained quest to Africa to avenge his royal ancestor,

Amenartas. I suggest that Holly's acute ambivalence toward the quest itself, and those

racial “Others” he encounters at the core of Africa, registers the national ambivalence

toward imperialist imperatives. On both the national and nationalist scales – England

and Englishman, Horace Holly – this ambivalence is generated not only on the level of the male/female power binary fears of penetration, i but also by the racist fear of

miscegenation. Compounding this late nineteenth-century cultural angst is the Victorian

gentleman’s uneasiness with the concept of entropy ii and its implications for the

disintegration – the weakening and wearing down – of the order and structure of Empire.

Within this analytic context, in this essay, I will attempt to demonstrate how Ayesha's

“monstrous alterity” functions as a harbinger of the inevitable entropy of Empire through

Haggard's fictional narrative investment in the discourses of exploration, discovery and

conquest in Africa and at home.

Imperialist Discourse of African Exploration and Conquest

As noted by several critics who analyze Haggard's fiction within the historical-

cultural context of the 1890's, She participates in the nineteenth century imperialist

discourse of African exploration and conquest – what one critic refers to as “the

androcentric mystique of exploration … pure male fantasy … clearly focused on the

experience of the white male out on the imperial frontier.” iii In Haggard's version of this


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male imperialist fantasy, Ayesha rules over the core (Imperial Kor) of the African

continent – also configured as a female body to be penetrated, explored and conquered in

order to dis-cover (‘unveil’) Ayesha, the white female embodiment of imperialism at its

centre. Thus, as the container for the imperial core, a gendered Africa serves as the

repository of imperialism which resides in the antiquity of Kor. Indeed, the “Chinese

box” that several critics adduce as evidence of the complex structure and theme of

Haggard's narrative, is also apparent in the symbolic density of its imagined Empire,

Imperial Kor.

Ostensibly, the rationale for Leo's mission – inherited from his father – is to bethe agent of vengeance for his ancestor Amenartas. However, the letter from Leo's father

indicates that the African quest has more to do with exploration and discovery: “ … to

investigate what, if it is true, must be the greatest mystery in the world” (29). Indeed,

Leo Vincey, Sr., believes that the legend inscribed on the sherd of Amenartas is true – not

“an idle fable” – and that “if it [Kor] can only be re-discovered, there is a spot where the

vital forces of the world visibly exist” (29). Moreover, his caveat to his son that “he who

would tamper with the vast and secret forces that animate the world may well fall a

victim to them” (29), not only anticipates Leo's ill-fated encounter with Ayesha, but

registers the Victorian fascination with the uncertainties of the unknown and unexplored,

the yet to be discovered outside England. Amenartas' message on the sherd is two-fold:

“ … seek out the woman” [to kill her]; and “learn the secret of Life” (31). As Holly, Leo

and the servant Job drift on the boat after a horrific storm in “the dreadful wilderness of

swamp” (73), Holly laments that they “would follow after myths and seek out the secrets

of nature” (74). Moreover, Holly is acutely ambivalent regarding the compelling nature


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of their African quest. He confesses that the curious physical landmark of their quest,

“the colossal negro’s head” (58) on the landscape, “excited my curiosity to an extent of

which I was secretly ashamed, and I was prepared to gratify it at any cost” (64).

Nonetheless, in the chapter entitled ‘Speculations,’ at the climax of his private

philosophical contemplations on the dangers of man's quest for “Full Knowledge” and

“too much wisdom”, Holly makes a grand allusion to English history – Sir Francis

Drake's third voyage to the new world, when Drake climbed to the top of a tall tree in the

mountains of Darien [Panama] to see the point of the world where the Pacific and

Atlantic Oceans meet. Holly proclaims:Oh, that we could shake loose the prisoned pinions of the soul and soar to

that superior space from Darien's giddiest peak, we might gaze with the

spiritual eyes of noble thoughts deep into Infinity! (Haggard 118).

This allusion to Drake clearly positions Holly the Englishman in a long tradition of

English voyages of discovery and the narrative of She in the late nineteenth century

imperialist discourse of exploration.

‘Imperial Kor’: Repository for the English Imperial Archive

While Haggard genders the imperialist ethos and its rationalization in the white

body of Ayesha (Africa) --also feminized --is configured as imperialism's archival

repository, i.e. the remains of ‘Imperial Kor’ are at the geological core of the African

continent. This is commensurate with Victorian historical knowledge: that is to say, the

evolution of civilization as Haggard understood it was, “the passing of the torch of

greatness from the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Romans to the Franks and finally to the

English” (Etherington, Norman 212). There is a conscious effort in the narrative to attest


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to this lineage and provide a narrative link between imperial Britain and Egypt and

Haggard’s imaginary Imperial Kor. The letter from Leo's father, for example, alludes to

“the extraordinary antiquity” of his son’s “race.” Moreover, according to Holly,

regarding the “Latin cognomen of Vindex or the Avenger”, Vindex was transformed first

into de Vincey, and then into the “plain modern Vincey” (37). Adducing this etymology

as evidence of authentic ancestral lineage, Holly comments: “It is very curious to observe

how the idea of revenge, inspired by an Egyptian before the time of Christ, is thus, as it

were, embalmed in an English family name” (37). Later in the narrative, Holly links

Egypt and Kor to London in his description of the “enormous pit” of bones:So far as I could judge, this pit was about the size of the space beneath the

dome of St. Paul's in London, and when the lamps were held up I saw that

it was nothing but one vast charnel-house, being literally full of thousands

of human skeletons, which lay piled up in an enormous gleaming pyramid

formed by the slipping down of the bodies at the apex as fresh ones were

dropped in from above [my emphasis] (181-182).

The pyramidal shape of the piles of bones alludes to an ancestral line traced from its

Egyptian origins, as does Ayesha's assertion that the people of Kor “embalmed their dead,

as did the Egyptians” (182). In this same passage, the relative brevity and inferiority of

the Amahagger's ancestral line is alluded to by the narrative's editorial footnote

associating the Amahagger's yellow linen clothing – taken from the tombs – which could

be bleached to its “former snowy whiteness” (182). That is to say, the Amahagger's

ancestral “whiteness” was only superficial. Their mixed (tainted) racial heritage was the

“true” marker of difference.


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The Imperialist Idiom and Narratives of ‘Social Exploration,’ Discovery and

Conquest

Although much has been written regarding the novel's deep narrative investment

in the discourse of expansionism – that is, in the non-fictive exploration, discovery and

conquest literature of African expeditions – I suggest that the class/caste differences

figured in relations of power between Ayesha and the aptly labelled “bastardAmahaggers” whom she rules evokes another imperialist idiom of Victorian culture – the

journalistic narratives of so-called ‘social exploration.’ This genre served as an important

arbiter of Victorian caste/class power relations. Moreover, ‘travel’ narratives into East

End London suggest an overlapping of the ideology of the imperialist at home – that is,

‘social exploration’ within ‘Deepest, Darkest England’ – with the ideology of the

imperialist abroad. However, in such narratives of social exploration, the crucial mark of

difference is not racial or national identity but class/caste identity. Significantly, in the

journalistic discourse of social exploration, by constructing the lower classes as the

degenerate Other, the discourse of social exploration emulates that of the larger

imperialistic project abroad – that is to say, ‘imperialist’ relations of power still obtained

on England’s home-front. In She, representative of popular journalistic narratives of

social exploration, class/caste identity is filtered through the prism of racial markers of

difference. And here, it is necessary to qualify my reading of the “racial” differences

between Ayesha and the Amahaggers who serve her: Ayesha is “white,” yet she is


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Arabic – not European – while the Amahagger is a “bastard” race, having miscegenated

with the people of Kor over the centuries. In the absence of a coherent racial identity for

the Amahaggers in the narrative, I see the power relations between Ayesha and the

Amahaggers, therefore, as reflecting more on the late-Victorian conceptualization of

class/caste than on clear-cut racial distinctions. Indeed, when Holly refers to the

Amahagger as “thy people,” Ayesha denies them:

My people! speak not to me of my people … these slaves are no people of

mine, they are but dogs to do my bidding till the day of my deliverance

comes; and, as for their customs, naught have I to do with them (153).Therefore, in a narrative drawing on the discourse of African exploration, Ayesha's

configuration as colonizing imperialist in relation to the “bastard” race of Amahaggers

also evokes narratives of social exploration current in late Victorian Britain which

intersect these Expedition narratives in interesting ways. For example, aligning the

foreignness of East End London with that of the African continent, Peter Keating points

out in his introduction to Into Unknown England , that Henry Mayhew, in his account of

‘social exploration’ ( London Labour and the London Poor ), attempted to provide

information about London's poor “of whom the public has less knowledge than of the

most distant tribes of the earth” (Keating 13). Keating observes that Mayhew uses the

“imagery of exploration” to critique the massive class inequalities in English society, of

which, presumably, the general public was unaware (Keating 13). Mayhew and other

Victorian social explorers described this mass of strange peoples variously as “a dark

continent that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office” (Keating 14) or


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in propagandist parlance such as: “As there is a darkest Africa, is there not also a darkest

England?” (Keating 14).

Indeed, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), William Booth's argument

is organized rhetorically around this analogy to the ideology of Empire (Keating 141-

151). One zealous social explorer, Andrew Mearns, in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London

(1883), stretches the analogy so far as to compare the slums and tenement dwellings of

East London's poor to slave ships:

... these pestilential human rookeries … where tens of thousands are

crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we have heardof the middle passage of a slave ship. To get into them, you have to

penetrate courts reeking with poisonous and malodorous gases arising

from accumulations of sewage and refuse scattered in all directions and

often flowing beneath your feet (Keating 15).

A review of the essays of social exploration compiled in Keating's anthology also reveals

the journalists' compulsion to dramatize a curious overlapping of the rhetoric of

imperialist ideology with the rhetoric of sexist power. Significantly, Keating comments

that the “language” that social explorers “use to describe even a commonplace event

serves to glorify their own special qualities: they seem never to walk or ride into a slum,

they penetrate it ” (16). Thus, the discourse of social exploration effects a utilitarian

amalgamation of adventure, imperialism, and sexual dominance, which thereby energizes

Victorian discourse in both arenas of ideological dissemination – that is, on the London

home-front, as well as in the Empire abroad – as do ‘imperialist romances’ such as

Haggard's She. Moreover, within the generic conventions of social exploration journalism


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and imperialist romances, geopolitical and domestic political dominance are conflated

with sexual dominance. Here, class/caste and non-European culture become “the Other”

to be. And, as we shall see, these relations of power are embodied and mediated by a

“monstrous alterity” – Ayesha, a “white sorceress living in the heart of an African

swamp” (46).

Viewing this social journalistic compulsion to explore caste/class from a gendered

racial perspective, She also evokes the Victorian social explorer's configuration of Africa

as either a female virginal space to be conquered or a womb-like space from which to

emerge victorious. Again, we can point to William Booth's In Darkest England and theWay Out , as the model for such discourse, as this document is particularly revealing in

terms of the intersection of images of sexual dominance with the idiom of social and

‘scientific’ (anthropological) exploration. Booth describes, for example, that in Henry M.

Stanley's exploration of the African terrain, Stanley “marched, tore, plowed, and cut his

way for one hundred and sixty days through this inner womb of the true tropical forest”

[my emphasis] (Keating 142). Here, the rhetoric of imperialist ideology is infused with

references to sexual aggression and dominance – the ravishment of the “womb” of the

African continent. Moreover, Stanley describes that the forest has:

nothing but trees, trees, and trees – great trees rising as high as an arrow

shot to the sky, lifting their crowns, intertwining their branches, pressing

and crowding one against the other until neither the sunbeam nor shaft of

light can penetrate it (143).

– a description which, again, is an eroticization of the explorer's interaction with the dark,

dense, “intertwining” mass of the African forest.


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Haggard, too, configures the African terrain as a female body to be penetrated. In

the chapter entitled ‘The Squall,’ the African landscape and perilous predicament in

relation to it are eroticized. Juxtaposing Africa to England, Holly narrates that he, Leo

and Job leave “… the quiet college rooms … the wind swayed English elms and cawing

rooks, and the familiar volumes on the shelves” (48), to confront, at the outset of their

African adventure, “a vision of the great calm ocean gleaming in shaded silver lights

beneath the beams of the full African moon” (48). After a severe storm, the tide thrusts

their boat into “dead water … in the mouth of a river … floating on the waters, now only

heaving like some troubled woman's breast” (48). Holly narrates:… the moon went slowly down in chastened loveliness, she departed like

some sweet bride into her chamber … and then the quivering footsteps of

the dawn came rushing across the newborn blue … quieter and yet more

quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded on her bosom (56).

Indeed, Holly's description acknowledges that it is the feminized body of Africa that

compels his and his companions' exploration into the unknown.

Racist Iconography: Arbiter of Cultural Anxiety and Acute Ambivalence

As a fictional narrative that participates in this discourse of both African

exploration and discovery and journalistic social exploration, She is replete with racist

iconography that, I suggest, both energizes and destabilizes it. Michael Pickering argues

that, after the 1870's, the common populace of the British Empire was “forcefully

charged with manifesting a firm and devout commitment to imperialist values” (184).

Pickering observes that nineteenth century “texts of popular entertainment and fiction

[were] often the bearers of imperialist values and sentiments” (185). Although Pickering's


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investigation of British Imperialism focuses on black minstrelsy as a locus of the inter-

articulation of racist and imperialist ideologies, I want to focus on his observation that

imperialist discourse was not “monolithic,” and its evolution was contingent upon the

expansion of Empire and changing historical conditions.

In the Victorian era, Pickering locates overtly racist values and attitudes after the

mid-nineteenth century, having evolved from a more moderate “racial and cultural

conceit” in the early nineteenth century. Significantly, he argues that concomitant with

“the actual seizure of land and material resources, (including labour) and the subsequent

establishment of colonial government” (188), the British imperialist project “involved thecreation of subject peoples and the justification of their subjugation” (188). And this

imperialist imperative of subjugation eventually “linked” Empire to “practices of race

thinking in the Victorian period” (Pickering 188). In relation to the value of racism to

imperialist ideology, Pickering argues that “nationalism and racism were indissolubly

part of imperialist discourse” (191) within the public economic sphere – as justification,

that is, for “territorial annexation” and “capitalist exploitation” of the racial Other's

property. Moreover, the nationalist/racist ideological foundation of imperialism “lent a

mystical dimension to conquest and rule and inflated self at the expense of a strategically

construed inferior who was knowable precisely because of being other” (Pickering 191).

And, as Peter Brantlinger has demonstrated, in late nineteenth century England, popular

fiction such as the Victorian romance and the so-called ‘racist romance’ literary genres

were essentially vehicles of such imperialist ideology.

In the remainder of this essay, I attempt to show how She exploits what Pickering

identifies as “the mystical dimension” of the conquest and rule of the Other and makes a


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significant contribution to this late nineteenth century discourse of imperialism with the

help of racialist iconography. Moreover, my contention is that in a cultural climate of an

eroding British Empire, racism destabilizes and contributes much toward the much-feared,

yet anticipated imperial entropy – the dis-ordering of an ordered ideology that had

maintained and manipulated power relations throughout the nineteenth century. As such,

She represents an imagined entropy of imperialism enacted in and mediated through

Ayesha's ambiguously “white” female body. My argument recognizes the feminist

readings of Ayesha as a fictive site of man's fear of the feminine as well as man's drive to

penetrate and control. The focus of my argument, however, is on how Victorian racialdiscourse destabilizes and delimits the imposition of imperialist imperatives, engendering

an acute ambivalence (in Holly) on two levels: the racial Other (Africa and the

Amahagger), and Ayesha, as the embodiment of the imperialist ethos.

It is significant that descriptions of the (gendered) African landscape is the

evidence of the intersection of imperialist power and articulations of racialist images of

the Other. Holly describes the African landmark for the entrance to Kor – i.e. the rock

shaped like an Ethiopian Head – in the typical racist terms of nineteenth century England:

The top of the peak … was shaped like a negro's head and face, whereon

was stamped a most fiendish and terrifying expression. There was no

doubt about it; there were the thick lips, the fat cheeks, and the squat nose

standing out with startling clearness against the flaming background.

There, too, was the round skull … and to complete the resemblance, there

was a scrubby growth of weeds or lichen upon it, which against the sun

looked for all the world like the wool on a colossal negro's head. (58)


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Holly asks: “Of what race could these people be?” Implicit in his question is the

well-worn notion that skin colour is the paramount marker of racial difference.

Significantly, though the Amahagger language is Arabic, Holly surmises that “they were

not Arabs … they were too dark, or rather yellow.” Significantly, he attests that “I could

not say why, but I know their appearance filled me with a sick fear of which I felt

ashamed” (77). I suggest that the fear of miscegenation – and its entropic implications

for Empire – provoked Holly's reaction. As Sander Gilman observes in relation to the

miscegenated female racial Other in late-Victorian England, miscegenation was a cultural

“fear not merely of interracial sexuality but of its results, the decline of the population”(237).

Moreover, an acute ambivalence toward imperialism is regis

the confidential clerk volume 2

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