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187 pages

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A detailed study of the development of the sexual imperative in the works of Sir Henry Rider Haggard

The Sexual Imperative in the Novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard is a detailed study of the development of the theme of the sexual imperative primarily through the prism of ten of Haggard’s novels, a largely unexplored area of his fiction, and also through some of his contemporary romances. Filling an important gap in Haggard scholarship, which has traditionally tended to focus on his early romances and their political and psychological resonances, the book contributes to wider current debates on Victorian and turn-of-the-century literature. This volume explores the relationship between Haggard’s fictional rendition of the sexual imperative and aspects of his personal history, proposing that his preoccupation with the subject constitutes, in significant part, an outworking of deeply personal sexual and emotional issues. Relating Haggard’s fiction to the literary and social context in which he wrote, Richard Reeve contends that although Haggard’s treatment of this theme is not nearly as adventurous as that of some of his literary contemporaries, his repeated consideration of what he regarded as the most important human driver lends his fiction a strength and integrity which has not been fully recognized.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chapter One: The Sexual Imperative; Chapter Two: The Origins of Haggard’s Fictional Writing; Chapter Three: The Early Novels (1884-1895): Youthful Anger; Chapter Four: The New Woman, Female Self-Sacrifice and Spirituality (1887-1901); Chapter Five: Spiritual Love and Sexual Renunciation (1899-1908); Chapter Six: The Final Fiction: Spiritual Consolation and the Dictates of the Sexual Imperative (1909-1930); Chapter Seven: Summation: A Personal Odyssey; Appendix: Plot Summaries; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

Women

Modern history

Literary criticism

20th century

Woman

The Women

Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Sexualité

sexualité

Sexualité

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Publié par	Anthem Press
Date de parution	15 février 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783087655
Langue	English

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The Sexual Imperative in the Novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard
The Sexual Imperative in the Novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard
Richard Reeve
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Reeve, Richard, 1948– author.Title: The sexual imperative in the novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard / Richard Reeve.Description: London ; New York, NY : Anthem Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017059990 | ISBN 9781783087631 (hardback)Subjects: LCSH: Haggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider), 1856–1925 – Criticism and interpretation. | Sexual ethics in literature. | Sex in literature.Classification: LCC PR4732 .R44 2018 | DDC 823/.8—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059990

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-763-1 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-763-3 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
FOR MONIQUE
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction Chapter One The Sexual Imperative Chapter Two The Origins of Haggard’s Fictional Writing Chapter Three The Early Novels (1884–95): Youthful Anger Chapter Four The New Woman, Female Self-Sacrifice and Spirituality (1887–1901) Chapter Five Spiritual Love and Sexual Renunciation (1899–1908) Chapter Six The Final Fiction: Spiritual Consolation and the Dictates of the Sexual Imperative (1909–30) Chapter Seven Summation: A Personal Odyssey

Appendix: Plot Summaries

Notes

Bibliography

Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to record my sincere thanks to John Holmes and Andrew Nash for their unfailing encouragement and advice during the conception and gestation of this book; to Stephen Coan for his kind suggestions on some South African aspects of my research; and to Adrian Poole for his advice on initiating the doctorate that spawned the book. I am grateful also to Nada Cheyne for kindly agreeing that I might use quotations from Haggard’s letters and his Rough Diary; to Robert Langenfeld for allowing me to draw, in Chapter Four, on material from my article ‘H. Rider Haggard and the New Woman: A Difference in the Genre in Jess and Beatrice ’, published in English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 , 59.2 (2016): 153–74, and to Oxford University Press for their permission to draw, in Chapter Two, on material from my article ‘Henry Rider Haggard’s Debt to Anthony Trollope: Dr Therne and Dr Thorne’, published in Notes and Queries , 261.2 (June 2016): 274–78.
Finally, I acknowledge with affection the encouragement, practical advice and forbearance of my family as the book gradually took shape.
INTRODUCTION
Criticism of Rider Haggard’s fiction has traditionally tended to focus heavily upon his early romances published between 1885 and 1892, especially King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887) and, at least in recent years, to centre on their political and psychological resonances. In the last twenty years, very few books dedicated solely to Haggard have been produced, criticism of his work being vested mainly in chapters in wider books and in journal articles. Commentators, including Sigmund Freud, have recognized the psychosexual aspects of some of the earlier romances and have observed particularly that She derives in part from its author’s personal emotional geography. Wendy Katz has proposed that Haggard’s works ‘are in fact a giant repository of his own attitudes’. 1 These convincing readings of a pervasive but, at least sometimes, unconscious outworking of personal issues, often sexual ones, in the plots, settings and imagery of some of Haggard’s romances are well argued. However, there has been no detailed exploration of the more obvious, and plainly conscious, treatment in virtually all his novels of emotional and sexual relationships that have their origin in his own experiences – and the connection in this respect between Haggard’s novels and his romances.
While Haggard himself makes no direct reference to any link between his personal experiences and his fiction, he does acknowledge that his most familiar romance hero Allan Quatermain is ‘only myself set in a variety of imagined situations, thinking my thoughts and looking at life through my eyes’. 2 And, in a passage in She , Haggard makes some significant observations on the relationship between the imagination, or fiction, and fact. The explorer Holly has just described seeing the tomb of two young lovers, with its carved epitaph, ‘Wedded in Death’, and has imagined for them a background suggestive of that of Haggard and his first love, Lilly Jackson. Haggard continues:

Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of fact […] besides who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul’s thought. 3
Holly’s apology for the intrusion of dream upon fact is of course a clever inversion by Haggard of the point he really wants to make – that in his fiction he sometimes represents personal fact. And in his novels, where the focus on the theme of the sexual imperative is at its most unrelieved, the frequent intervention of the narrator, whose views seem to embody those of Haggard towards his personal experiences, passing moral judgement on the characters, is a clear indication of a deep personal interest on the part of the author in the issues his books present. Lilias Haggard, in her biography of her father, does not directly consider the relationship between his life and his fiction, but she does comment that ‘the deep emotional experiences, his loves and his tragedies […] remained active, insistent, his daily companions, until the hour of his death’. 4 Haggard’s nephew Godfrey, in the foreword to Lilias’s book, records of his uncle that ‘his novels were his principal outlet. He gave expression in his writing to the thoughts that overflowed his mind’. 5 By ‘novels’, Godfrey here is almost certainly referring to all of Haggard’s fictional work. And, writing in this family biography, Godfrey is in all probability giving voice to a view that was generally held by the family. There is little doubt that both Haggard and his close relatives were very well aware of the connection between his fiction and what he had experienced personally. Although, perhaps more exactly, the connection was between Haggard’s fiction and his recollection and interpretation of what he had experienced. Sir John Kotze, a judge for whom Haggard worked in the Transvaal and with whom he maintained a long friendship, writes of Haggard in his autobiography:

His was an extraordinary mind. He was emotional and much given to romancing. His imagination impelled him into a world of fancy which for the time had complete hold of his sense, and hence he described as fact what was mere fiction. 6
Kotze’s fascinating side-lighting of Haggard’s deeply emotional nature further reinforces the argument that he tended to fictionalize his personal experiences.
Haggard’s novels have received comparatively little attention, certainly not over the last thirty years. In 1960 Morton Cohen observed the personal elements in Dawn and The Witch’s Head , claiming that Haggard used the latter as ‘a device by which he can compensate psychologically for the blows he had to suffer in earlier years’. 7 Some twenty years later D. S. Higgins covered the novels chronologically in his biography of Haggard 8 but, while he acknowledges the autobiographical resonances in some of them, he does not consider in any detail the relationship between them. More recently, Lindy Stiebel has noted, without further exploration and without differentiating between the novels and romances, that many of Haggard’s male protagonists ‘yearn eternally after their irrevocably lost first love’, and she has connected this observation with Haggard’s lifelong love for Lilly Jackson. 9 Norman Etherington writes that Haggard used his novels ‘to relive vicariously the sufferings of his early disappointments in love’ but considers that ‘when he dealt with problems special to himself […] his books were pedestrian’. 10 And in an earlier article, Etherington contends that Haggard’s first five novels are interesting primarily ‘because of their suppression of the elemental themes unleashed in [his] romances’. 11 Although Etherington observes that ‘there was a gradual convergence between the themes of the later romances and the obsessive concerns of Haggard’s realistic novels’, he considers that these themes render these romances inferior to the early romances in which ‘Haggard marches virtuous men into the wilderness where they reveal hidden impulses and confront the awesome mysteries of their deepest inner selves’. 12 While, then, Etherington identifies the personal element in some of Haggard’s novels, he considers only seven of them in total, and these briefly, and he does not pursue and document the detail of the connection between the fact of Haggard’s own experiences and the fictional representations in his books. And while he notes a thematic similarity between the novels and some of Haggard’s later romances, he fails to obs