• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
(Hager Ben Driss, University of Tunis)
The dark continent is neither dark nor unexplorable
. Itis still unexplored because we’ve been made to believethat it was too dark to be explorable. And because theywant to make us believe that what interests us is thewhite continent, with its monuments to lack.Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa’Let him who comes follow the map, and climb thesnow of Sheba’s left breast till he comes to the nipple.Henry Rider Haggard,
King Solomon’s Mines
 
 
Rider Haggard’s texts are representative of the prevailing ethos inadult romance. Richard F. Patterson even associates the beginning of the‘imperialist romance’ with
 King Solomon’s Mines
(1885). All hisadventure stories meet the norms of a real romance as listed by NorthropFrye –the quest, the struggle and the triumph of the hero. But theHaggardian romance does not acquire power from the repetition of theseelements; it is rather energized by an economic politics of self-emulation. Haggard’s tendency of duplicating his heroes, reproducingthe same figure of the native woman, and fixing his plots in similar spaces can be viewed as the weak part of his works, usually dismissed assub-literary productions. However, redundancy in Haggard’s works is to be read as a strategy of both instilling and installing a certain ideology.Haggard’s obsession with female (white and black) sexuality and hisconflation of woman and colonized land are the central themes of hisromances. All his stories evolve around subduing the land/female andalleviating colonial/sexual anxieties.Colonial literature is described as a dense intertextual milieu(Boehmer). The same images and metaphors migrate from one narrativeto another. In the case of Haggard’s texts, this intertexuality istransformed into an
intra-textuality
where the same characters andthemes stroll around his fiction. The aim of this paper, then, is to showhow a set of colonial and masculinist attitudes shape Haggard’s texts andhow these attitudes can be traced in other colonial narratives. The point behind this reading is not cataloging themes, but exposing textualstrategies of stereotyping, classifying and categorizing perpetuated inlater narratives and surviving in recent literary works.
 
Though it is difficult to fail to notice the fertile gendered imageryrelated to the colonized land in colonial literature, R. Hyam raises adissenting voice in
 Empire and Sexuality
:
Militant feminism operates to humourless rules, and likes to see a heavy doseof moral outrage in all historical reconstructions. If Victorian men found beauty and sensuous appeal in a seemingly exotic East, especially incomparison with the plainness and dourness of Africa, feminists will notallow it to be recorded without complaining that it perpetuates ‘the male mythabout Asian women’. (18)
The fact that Hyam is against a feminist reading of colonial texts doesnot exempt their writers from a colonial strategy of eroticising the land.It is worth noticing as well that a topographical reading, as the oneformulated here, is more of a psychoanalytical, textual decoding than aspecific feminist analysis.Freud’s dream based on his reading of Haggard’s
She
(1887) and
The Heart of the World 
(1895) is quite significant here. He saw himself dissecting his “pelvis and legs” then “making a journey through achanging landscape… over the slippery ground” and ending trying tocross a chasm. He “awoke in a mental fright” (
 Interpretation of Dreams
65). He stepped out of his dream with the conclusion that the female psychology and woman in general are a Dark Continent. According toFreud
The relation of our typical dreams to fairy-tales and other fiction and poetry isneither sporadic nor accidental. Sometimes the penetrating insight of the poethas analytically recognised the process of transformation of which the poet isotherwise the instrument, and has followed it up in the reverse direction; thatis to say, has traced a poem to a dream. (
 Interpretation of Dreams
141)
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...