Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes

Two: Romance; or, Melodrama and the Adventure of History

63 two Romance; or, Melodrama and the Adventure of History I shall tell you truths that seem like romances,—and facts that sound like fables,—moreover, I shall have to assure you that miracles do happen whenever God chooses, in spite of all human denial of their possibility. Do you remember Whately’s clever skit—‘Historical Doubts of Napoleon I.’?—showing how easy it was to logically prove that Napoleon never existed?—That ought to enlighten people as to the very precise and convincing manner in which we can, if we choose, argue away what is nevertheless an incontestable fact. —Marie Corelli, Ardath (1889) Despite dickens’s and collins’s experimentation with melodrama’s providential plotting in their reactions to the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, as well as Collins’s designation of The Moonstone as a romance,1 discussions of melodrama have been less prevalent in relation to the imperial romance, a genre that came to prominence in the decades after the publication of The Moonstone. Yet just as critics have examined the imperial romance through its ties to discourses of masculinity as well as circles of male writers, the imperial romance is also clearly connected to melodrama, a genre known for its representations of women and excessive emotion.2 This chapter explores the melodramatic features of the imperial romance by examining two works written on the boundaries of the imperial romance genre of the late nineteenth Melodrama as Plot 64 century: Jess: A Novel (1887), by noted adventure writer H. Rider Haggard , and Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self (1889), by Marie Corelli, the popular author recognized for writing the first late-Victorian best seller. As a novel and a story, respectively, neither of these two works could comfortably be called imperial romances in the manner of Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1886/1887). Yet both Jess and Ardath, steeped in the melodramatic mode, explore melodrama’s proximity to the late-Victorian imperial romance. Both works demonstrate how the 1880s “revival” of the romance drew upon melodrama’s obsession with providential plotting and British imperial destiny. I use imperial romance here to designate late-Victorian adventure stories that often involve English characters on quests to faraway lands (in Africa, the Caribbean, or the Middle East) and may include tales of romantic love. Such stories frequently focus on male protagonists, unexplored territories, and historical settings and include a range of perilous conflicts and circumstances, often involving a quest. Critics of the rise of the late-Victorian romance have accounted for the gender politics and imperial politics of the genre and have designated many of the works by Haggard and Stevenson as “male” romances.3 Elaine Showalter claims that the romance revival was “intended to reclaim the kingdom of the English novel for male writers, male readers, and men’s stories” in the face of the formidable reputation of George Eliot.4 This reclamation was in part inflected by imperialist ideology , because such fiction was “the primer of empire.”5 Joseph Bristow points out that Haggard’s She “was a product of the close bonds between men that held the conservative literary world tightly together.”6 Stephen Arata refines the notion of the romance revival as an aggressive male revolution by contending that the “celebrations of empire” found in romances of the period, and specifically She, were “edgy, defensive” because they attempted to “compensate for perceived losses” in relation to imperialism, masculinity, and English literature.7 Despite these various configurations of the imperial romance in relation to masculinity , however, contemporary critics did note connections between these works and the ostensibly feminine melodramatic mode. Critic Augustus Moore, for instance, commented that Haggard’s “method of storytelling” in She was “the method of the modern melodrama,” and Moore drew connections between She and spectacles of the Adelphi and Drury Lane.8 Romance; or, Melodrama and the Adventure of History 65 Characteristics of both Jess and Ardath place the close relations between melodrama and imperial romance into even greater relief. Though set in the rugged South African territory of the Transvaal in the 1880s, Jess concerns not a quest but an attempt to protect Englishness in contemporary South Africa, and the novel’s setting is occasionally fantastic but often far too familiar to allow for the escapism found in Haggard’s other works. Haggard himself suggested, late in life, that Jess was an attempt to challenge his growing...