"Gladstone bags, shooting boots, and Bryant & May's matches": Empire, Commerce, and the Imperial Romance in the Graphic's Serialization of H. Rider Haggard's She

Abstract

By 1980s, critical consensus cast Haggard's fiction, and romance revival more generally, uncomplicated expression of a crudely jingoist, racist, and misogynist imperialism (see Bristow 127-46, Gilbert and Gubar 5-46, Katz, and Showalter 78-89). According to this consensus, Haggard and other late-Victorian imperialists also disavowed commercial aspects of empire, its material reality (Katz 108). The of romance, scholars suggested, uncritically absorbed genre's prejudices: for Wendy Katz, Haggard's were the passive watchers of their (130). A more sophisticated has developed since early 1990s, critics have explored tensions underlying late-Victorian romance and imperial discourse more broadly. Haggard's work has enjoyed at least a partial rehabilitation, attention has turned to his novels' complex and ambivalent representation of imperialism (see Arata, Chrisman, and Gold). However, critical discussions of Haggard's representation of imperial commerce have not yet challenged contention that his novels fraudulently idealized British Empire and effaced its material, money-making aspects. Anne McClintock, for example, reads King Solomon's Mines (1885) enacting a disavowal or repression of black productive power (232-57). There has been little of representation of imperial capitalism in Haggard's other novels, including She--a work that, although less obviously engaged in debate about commercial nature of empire, interrogates imperial commerce in interestingly self-reflexive ways. Moreover, recent emphasis on formal fissures of imperialist discourse, in Haggard's work and in romance genre, is sometimes problematic. As Robert Young has noted, such locates ambivalence of imperial discourse not at time of its original articulation and reception but with present day historian or interpreter (152). The original publication and reception of She is strikingly absent, for example, in Barri Gold's recent reading, which announces desire to read against grain and urges that as readers we should create space for our own counterintuitive and potentially subversive interpretations (324-25). The present essay rehistoricizes She and argues that novel's original serial publication illuminates uneasy relationship between romance, commerce, and empire at fin de siecle. At heart of this relationship was a paradox: champions of romance revival offered imperial adventure an antidote to effete world of high capitalism, yet romance form itself was complicit in commodifying empire. For Haggard and his cheerleader, classical scholar, critic, and folklorist Andrew Lang, romance offered a primitive, rejuvenating release from sterility of civilized life: Haggard polemically claimed that romance appeal[ed], not to a class, or a nation, or even to an age, but to all time and humanity at large (About Fiction 180). Lang also championed romance's appeal to a universal, primitive human nature, and he derided reader of realist fiction bald, toothless, highly 'cultured', and addicted to tales of introspective analysis (Realism and Romance 689). Haggard's protagonists are manly heroes, for whom empire represents a revitalizing escape from a commercial, effeminate home life. In Allan Quatermain (1887), Curtis articulates squirearchy's sense of dispossession in industrial Britain and its hankering after a conservative feudal past. Traveling into Central Africa, Curtis and his fellow heroes find this past incarnated in Zu-Vendi, whom he vows to protect from corrupting knowledge of telegraphs, steam, newspapers, [and] universal suffrage (282). Haggard's novels are an attempt to retreat from world of daily newspapers and offer a different kind of literary pabulum: what a fellow-romancer, Robert Louis Stevenson, hailed the real art . …