Manhood and Misogyny in the Imperialist Romance

Manhood and Misogyny in the Imperialist Romance Richard F. Patteson Mississippi State University I have wrought my simple plan If I give one hour of joy To the boy who's half a man, Or the man who's half a boy. —Arthur Conan Doyle, Epigraph to The Lost World Female characters appear in all genres of popular literature, but the roles they are assigned seldom present women in a very favorable light. With the exception of the sentimental romance or "love story" — a form specifically aimed at a female audience — women do not usually figure as protagonists. Instead their function is to support, or to foil, the actions of male heroes in a variety ofways. We are familiar with stereotypes such as the schoolmarm and the saloon girl in the western, as well as the murder victim, the helpful secretary, and the gun moll in detective fiction. One kind offormulaic literature, however, that, while not so familiar to readers today, was wildly popular in its time and is perhaps more revealing than any of the others in its portrayal of women. The imperialist romance,1 which flourished between 1880 and 1920 (but continued long afterward), is essentially an adventure story involving the exploration by Europeans of previously uncharted regions. In the typical imperialist romance, first popularized by H. Rider Haggard, a band of white men enters a primitive region and ultimately establishes a degree of influence among the natives. The Europeans' goals are usually ambivalent: the intention to convert the heathen or establish a benevolent order is frequently associated with an equally strong desire for wealth and power. Often the white men stumble upon ruins of an ancient civilization (presumed to be white), and just as often, they encounter two native factions — one "barbarous," the other willing to be "civilized " by the European visitors. The popularity of the imperialist 1. For a more complete analysis of this genre, see my article, "King Solomon's Mines: Imperialism and Narrative Structure," in The Journal of Narrative Technique , VIII, 2 (Spring 1978), 112-123. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW romance began to decline after World War I, but its basic features survived in much pulp fiction of the twenties and thirties and even found its way into science fiction by way of Edgar Rice Burroughs. This type of story is essentially what Northrop Frye means by "kidnapped romance" — that is, "romance formulas used to reflect certain ascendant religious or social ideals." The imperialist romance is an important object for study precisely because it was the dominant popular literary form of an immensely powerful ruling class, one whose deeds and attitudes continue to influence our lives in countless ways even today. Frye goes on to say that "unconsciously acquired social mythology, the mythology ofprejudice and conditioning, is clearly . . . something to be outgrown; it is therapeutic to recognize and reject it."2 Ideas such as these have been explored by other critics as well. John G. Cawelti, for instance, claims that all formulaic stories, to a degree, "affirm existing interests and attitudes by presenting an imaginary world that is aligned with these interests and attitudes."3 In his structural study of western films Will Wright comes to much the same conclusion: "The ordering concepts by which an individual acts will be reflected in the myths of his society, and it is through the formal structure of the myths that these concepts are symbolized and understood by the people who know and enjoy the myth."4 And Martin Green, surveying the whole range of adventure tales from Robinson Crusoe to the present, finds that adventure literature in general (not just what I am calling the imperialist romance) "charged England's will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule."5 The object of my analysis here, however, is something more 2.Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study ofthe Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 29-30 and 170. Frye's work is of course fundamental to the study ofthe social significance ofliterary archetypes, as is that of Leslie Fiedler, who focuses his attention primarily on American literature per se. See especially Fiedler's chapter, "The Revenge on...