(Filling in this week for Ellid)
If Rudyard Kipling was the Poet Laureate of the British Empire, then H. Rider Haggard was its skald, its teller of rousing tales of heroic deeds. His most famous book is King Solomon's Mines, but its close second –some critics would argue that it is even greater – is SHE, a story of love, death and reincarnation set in the darkest corner of Darkest Africa. While King Solomon's Mines is one of the seminal works in the “Lost Civilizations In Africa” genre, SHE takes that theme and adds to it a fusion of two opposing images of Womanhood in the Victorian Imagination: that of the Feminine Ideal and that of the Femme Fatal, creating one of the iconic figures in Victorian literature.
Personally, I prefer King Solomon's Mines to SHE, and I don't particularly like the latter's title character; but I can't deny that She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed is a compelling figure who has been a model for beautiful yet dangerous women for over a century.
The story's narrator is an ugly but good-hearted Cambridge professor named L. Horace Holly. Like Alberecht the Dwarf, he learned as a young man that with his brutish features he was never going to get any Rhinemaidens swimming after him, and so he had long since been resigned to burying himself in a boring, celibate career as an academic. He might have atrophied into a bitter and cynical misanthrope, scorning the world around him from his cloistered digs at the University, but for the influence of his youthful ward, DickGra-- sorry; Leo Vincey.
Leo is everything Holly isn't: young, tall and handsome, his perfect features framed by a halo of golden hair. He's a virtual Adonis, which makes his friendship with the misshapen Holly particularly amusing to some of the Cambridge students. In a conventional adventure tale, Leo would be the obvious leading man: he has the looks, he has the charisma, and he has the affection of two female characters. And yet, Holly is the more engaging character. Apart from the fact that we see the story through His eyes, Holly has a greater involvement in the plot than Leo, and spends more time interacting with the story's title character. But I get ahead of myself.
Also, I regret to say, Leo does not come off as being terrible intelligent. Which is probably an unfair assessment. He doesn't seem to be particularly stupid, but I suspect that he has never had to be terribly smart, simply because he was so beautiful. If you think about it, Leo is really a pretty devastating critique of the cliched Dumb Blonde who exists only to be desired by the males and has no interesting qualities apart from her beauty. Leo is a bimbo.
Is there a homoerotic subtext hidden in the relationship between these two men? Considering the rest of the plot, probably not; or if there is, it's pretty well buried.
On his 21st birthday, Leo receives a family heirloom, entrusted to Holly by Leo's late father: an ancient potsherd inscribed with an incredible story about a city in Africa ruled by a beautiful but wicked queen. An ancestor of Leo's, a priest of Isis named Kallikrates, had found the city but was killed by the jealous queen. His lover, a renegade Egyptian princess, escaped and wrote an account of his death so that their unborn child could avenge his death. Centuries upon centuries have passed and the legend passed down from generation to generation.
Leo decides to investigate the truth of the legend and so he and Holly and their comical servant, Job, travel to Darkest Africa. After many exciting adventures; including shipwreck, being nearly eaten by cannibals, and having a beautiful native girl fall in love with Leo; they arrive at the Ancient City of Kôr.
The Amahagger people who live here mostly fill the role of Superstitious Primitives who provide a threat in the background, but they present a few features which deserve special mention. One is their language. Haggard gets around the translation problem by having the Amahagger speak an ancient dialect of Arabic. Since both Holly and Leo have studied Arabic to prepare for their journey, (having come through Egypt and down the Red Sea), this is convenient. But the author renders their speech, and the speech of Holly when speaking to them in their language, as a kind of pseudo-King James English which comes off as stilted, especially in the longer passages. Haggard did the same thing in King Solomon's Mines, and in both cases you can argue that the deliberately archaic style reflects that the language spoken is an ancient one rather than a modern one. And the choice of style imports a sense of formality and gravity to their speech. (And in the case of King Solomon's Mines, Alan admits he is not a literary man and the only books he reads much of are the Old Testament and the Ingolsby Legends, so it makes sense that he would fall back on the language of King James when rendering the speech of noble warriors).
The Amahagger did not build the City of Kôr; the city had been abandoned for untold centuries when the Amahagger arrived. The original inhabitants had an advanced and highly sophisticated society, and are strongly hinted to have been white. The Amahaggar, (“The People of the Rocks”), dwell in the ruins and tombs of the kingdom that remain.
Holly makes friends with a tribal elder of these people, a wise and prudent man named Billali who impresses Holly with his nobility of character. (He's a cannibal, to be sure, but as Consiel observed in a different book, it is possible to be a cannibal and an honest man, just as it is possible to be a gourmand and honest; the one does not exclude the other.)
Leo makes a friend too: a young Amahagger woman named Ustane who comes up to him a plants a great big smooch on him. Leo kisses her back, naturally, commenting to Holly that it's only polite to reciprocate their custom. The women in the Amahagger tribe enjoy considerably more freedom and social power than is common in African tribes, Holly learns, and this is how women select their choice of mates. Although Holly doesn't state this directly, it's easy to guess that the status of women in their culture reflects the fact that they are ruled by a queen whom they worship as an immortal goddess. It's a nice bit of foreshadowing on Haggard's part. Ustane becomes passionately devoted to Leo, and when the young man becomes gravely ill from a fever contracted in the pestilential swamps of the region, she stays by his side tending to his illness. This will cause problems later.
It is while Leo and Holly are among the Amahaggar that they first hear of their queen, a powerful, reputedly immortal woman whom the Amahaggar worship as a goddess. Her name is Ayesha, but her subjects call her, "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed", or less formally, as “She”. (Yes, you Rumpole fans out there, that's where the title comes from). “She” has divined the coming of the Three White Men, (Leo, Holly and grumbling Job), and ordered her people to bring them to her. (They also have an Arab servant they picked up en route, but as far as Ayesha is concerned he doesn't count. So the Amahaggar figured it was safe to eat him. Cannibals, remember? The way they kill him is gruesome, yet picturesque).
She does not come to meet the travelers herself. She seems to initially regard them as curiosities and for all her sorcerous skills fails to divine how important one of them will be to her. Had she done so, she might have prevented a number of tragic situations, such as Mahomet getting a red-hot iron pot placed over his head. But Haggard wants to draw out the unveiling of Ayesha as long as possible. And I do mean that literally; when we first encounter her, she is veiled from head to foot.
Ayesha is the self-same queen of the legend. She has lived for over two-thousand years, having gained the secrets of immortality. She is incredibly wise and so staggeringly beautiful that no man can bear to look upon her without falling hopelessly in her thrall. (Hence the veil thing. It's for our own good. Really.)
And she is so...so... so full of herself!!!
She's always going on about how wise she is and how foolish everyone else is. The philosophers of Ancient Athens? Yep, she knew them. She hopelessly crushed them all with her superior wisdom and beauty. The sage rabbis of Jerusalem? They too foolishly rejected her. The Jewish Messiah whom Holly tells her of? Now, he came after her time and intrigues Ayesha a bit; and Holly finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to explain Christian theology to a master sophist spoiling for a fight.
At one point,where Holly is telling her about England, Ayesha comments that she'll have to go there some day and depose the English queen. This horrifies Holly, not just because he is a patriotic Englishman, but because he has no doubt that she could do it.
Ayesha moans about how she's tired of being worshiped as a goddess, and yet she's not above playing on men's hormones to get what she wants. Above all, she angsts about her lost love, Kallikrates, whom she killed in a jealous snit lo these millennia ago and for whom she has been waiting. Leo, you see, is the spitting image, and she believes the reincarnation, of Kallikrates. She doesn't realize this at first, because Leo is sick in bed with a fever and she doesn't meet him right away. She spends a lot of time talking to Holly, though, because he's intelligent enough to hold an interesting conversation and, I think, because she enjoys toying with him.
She murders Ustane, the native girl who committed the unpardonable sin of loving her Kallikrates, right in front of Leo very own eyes. But Ayesha could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue and Leo would still fawn over her like a pundit at a White House luncheon. Even Holly, who is a misogynist and should know better, grovels before her stunning beauty and enormous force of personality. (I expect Leo to act that way, because the author practically admits that he is little more than a handsome twit, but Holly is otherwise the voice of reason in the story).
Don't get me wrong. She is one of the great characters of Victorian adventure fiction, and a terrific villain; I just get mortally tired of the story's heroes cutting her slack because of her beauty. There's just far too much of: "I know she is evil, and yet I'm so in love with her that I am powerless before her!"
It's said that She embodies Haggard's ideas about the essence of Woman: mystery,fickleness, and raw sexual power. Of course, Haggard was a Victorian and his views towards women reflected society of his time. Ayesha both challenges the Victorian norms of female behavior, and in a sense validates them, because in the end karma comes to bite her in the immortal butt.
Haggard wrote asequel, The Return of She, (okay, but not as good as theoriginal); and a prequel, Wisdom's Daughter, in which Ayesha tells her life story. (I haven't read it, but based on her autobiographical remarks in She, I expect it to be pompous and unreadable). He also wrote one, She and Allan, in which the immortal queen meets Haggard's other great hero, Allan Quatermain. C.S.Lewis, who enjoyed Haggard's works but could look at them with a post-Victorian eye, said that Quatermain was the only character who was able to "see through" Ayesha. If anyone could resist the wiles and the beauty of She, it would be sensible, pragmatic Allan.
In C.S. Lewis's book, The Magician's Nephew, the character Jadis is a shout-out to Ayesha, a powerful, terrifyingly beautiful, and egocentric sorceress. At one point she arrives in London of Haggard's time and assumes that people will worship her. Because that’s what people are supposed to do. But the common Londoners on the street think she's a circus performer or that she's some kind of escaped lunatic and a policeman tries to arrest her. But although he mocks Jadis in that particular scene and she is a villain for most of the book, Lewis does pay the character some degree of respect. He gives Uncle Andrew, who like Leo and Holly falls under Jadis's spell; the last word, calling Jadis “a dem fine woman.”
As I mentioned, I have to admit that I don't particularly like Ayesha. But she reminds me of what a friend once said about the character of Power Girl, who at the time was appearing in the JUSTICE LEAGUE comics. “I don't like her,” my friend said, “but I think she's important.” She explained that most unlikable female characters in comics tend to be either “cats” or “bitches”; but Power Girl was different. “She is a butt-head”. My friend regarded PG as a trailblazer in obnoxiousness, breaking out of the old stereotypes and forging a new one.
I would not go so far as to call Ayesha a butt-head; but she does break the traditional bad girl type. She could have simply been a villain, like many other seductresses from Delilah on down; but Haggard made her much more: a forceful personality with a formidable intellect as well as devastating beauty, but one who possesses very human frailties: a capacity for remorse and a supreme loneliness. Possessing beauty and wisdom and eternal youth, she is denied the one thing she desires most of all.
ADDENDUM: My work schedule zigged when I thought it was going to zag, so I won’t be around to reply to any comments this evening. I’ll be back again tomorrow. Play nice, now, or I’ll send the ferrets after you.
