Personal and National Trauma in H. Rider Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter

IN 1890, HAGGARD decided to write a romantic history of the downfall of Montezuma, a subject that would afford scope to explore a facet of colonisation whilst developing the untrodden field of ancient Aztec archaeology. To gather materials and local detail for the book, Haggard and his wife, Louisa, travelled to Mexico to visit John Gladwyn Jebb. Haggard and Jebb had planned a trip to the ruined cities in the Palenque region, as well as a search for Montezuma’s (or Guatemoc’s) “buried treasure.” Indeed, Haggard’s own excitement at Jebb’s supposed knowledge of the whereabouts of the Aztec gold was a driving force in the expedition. Under Jebb’s influence, Haggard had become an investor in Mexican copper mines “and was an eager audience to Jebb’s tales of adventure in central America.”¹

Tragedy struck the trip, however, and Haggard would come to regret his taste for gold-hunting. On 8 February 1891, days after their arrival, Haggard and his wife received the devastating news of the sudden death of their nine-year-old son, Jock, from measles, and, because of the distance, they were unable to attend his funeral. They stayed on in Mexico City for another month, Haggard travelling through harsh interior jungle in the state of Chiapas, to see another of Jebb’s reckless and romantic entrepreneurial failures, a silver mine, but they saw less of the archaeology than intended. He collected natural specimens and shipped plants back to his home in Ditchingham.²

One wonders what was passing through Haggard’s mind as he strove to maintain a professionalism whilst grieving—perhaps in a distant and disconnected way—for his son. Haggard was hit hard by the loss of Jock and forbade any mention of his name at Ditchingham.³ Pocock cites Days of My Life where Haggard recounts that on hearing of the death “in truth I descended into hell…. He was my darling, for him I would gladly have laid down my life…. I did not know until then what a man can endure and live.”⁴ D. S. Higgins describes the Aztec novel as “a nightmarish distortion of his own life, or rather his unbalanced recollection of it.”⁵ Haggard’s tragedy and personal trauma resonate symbolically within this story of loss, rage, impotence, violence, and death. His exciting search for buried treasure with Jebb becomes an uncontrollable release of grief, guilt, and desire that refuses to remain buried within the archaeohistorical narrative. Haggard’s treasure quest becomes reinvested in the Spanish search for gold following the conquest, and the Spaniards’ torture of Wingfield and Guatemoc to discover its whereabouts seems a sublimated punishment for Haggard’s own compulsive desire for discovery that took him away from his son when he was most needed. The burial in the narrative of a solid gold replica of Montezuma’s head stands as a potent symbol of the text’s concealment and repression of mental trauma.

In April 1892, Haggard’s father died—another episode provoking deep reflection—and in December 1892, their daughter, Lilias, was born (a name he connected to his lost love, Lilly Jackson, whom he was forbidden to marry). The lily is a symbol of purity, renewal and motherhood (the goddess Hera’s breast milk is said to have created the flower), as well as a male symbol of erotic sexuality (as the lotus). Haggard’s life at that period was full of “unbearable feelings of loss and guilt”—Lilias later suggesting that he was troubled by “the psychological obsession that his child’s life had paid the price of the father’s sin.”⁶ Haggard had all of Jock’s belongings stored away and kept, though no one spoke of him: Lilias noting how “Jock’s pathetic little shade, an unquiet ghost, begging to be laid, dwelt on in the house—speaking though silent, ever present though never acknowledged, a shadow which lay on all the household.”⁷

An Intersection of Personal & National Trauma

Montezuma’s Daughter is one of the darkest of Haggard’s novels. On 26 November 1893...