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  • They-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed: Arsake, Rhadopis, and Tabubue; Ihweret and Charikleia
  • Steve Vinson (bio)

The genesis of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha, the “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed” of his 1887 She: A History of Adventure, has been a mystery for over a century.1 The problem has provoked almost endless speculation among Haggard scholars and devotees, and has often appeared insoluble in terms of the history of English literature generally or of Victorian fiction specifically.2 As one of Haggard’s biographers, Norman Etherington, puts it: “Ayesha’s longevity amounting to immortality, her towering intellect, and her ability to reveal genuine tenderness as well as implacable passion have no close equivalents either in African legends or English literature.”3 In his autobiography, Haggard wrote that he had begun with one simple idea: “an immortal woman inspired by an immortal love.”4 But Haggard also acknowledged writing She in “a white heat” and in less than six weeks, which has suggested to many a sudden irruption of ideas and images, whose actual sources Haggard may not have been completely aware of as he composed the novel.5

I suggest here that—although Haggard surely drew inspiration from many quarters—Ayesha owes major aspects of her layered personality to five female characters from two ancient compositions: a Greek-language novel from the Roman period, Heliodorus’s Aithiopika, or “Ethiopian Story,” and an Egyptian-language ghost story from the Ptolemaic period, conventionally called “The First Tale of Setne Khaemwas” or “First Setne.” Apart from the parallels between the tales discussed below, the conclusion that Haggard adapted “First Setne” in She gains plausibility from the fact that Haggard transparently borrowed elements of “First Setne” for two of his later works. The case for Haggard’s knowledge of the Aithiopika is circumstantial, but the novel was far from unknown in the nineteenth century, and the parallels [End Page 289] between She and the Aithiopika are in fact closer than those between She and “First Setne.”

Of the characters discussed here, three—Rhadopis and Arsake from the Aithiopika and Tabubue from “First Setne”—are femmes fatales who doom the men who come into their power. The others, Charikleia from the Aithiopika and Ihweret from “First Setne,” are virtuous women who represent loyalty, constancy, and the triumph of love. Although the Aithiopika contributes more than “First Setne” to the structure of She, the final meaning of She is more tightly bound up with the themes that it shares with “First Setne,” and Tabubue appears to be the most fundamental of these characters to Ayesha’s personality. Tabubue’s sexual power may have moved Haggard to identify her with the femmes fatales of the Aithiopika, but her special allure, her connection to magic and her moral ambiguity set her apart from the highly sexual but absolutely evil Rhadopis and Arsake.

My core claim is that the most important aspect that the characters of “First Setne” and the Aithiopika all share, which fundamentally informs the ways in which they combine to generate the character of Ayesha, is the relationship that each has to Graeco-Roman Egypt’s most revered goddess, Isis. Topoi linked to Isis in antiquity—magic, power, immortality, love, sex, loyalty, knowledge, truth, and the claim of the past upon the present—are central to She. Moreover, especially in the Graeco-Roman period, Isis presented a double aspect: simultaneously benign and attractive, as well as threatening and vengeful. This duality strongly informs the relationship between Ihweret and Tabubue in “First Setne,” and I suggest that Ayesha’s dramatic power and her lasting interest owe not a little to her real roots in this tradition.6

Others have touched upon Ayesha’s Isis-ness in a very general way, and as we shall see, Haggard himself explicitly directed attention to these aspects of his character in his sequels to She. However, attention is seldom paid in contemporary literary scholarship to the questions of what Haggard may have known about the realities of Egyptian culture and religion, what ancient sources he may have known, and how that knowledge may have affected the structure and meaning of his work.7 Because Ayesha is typically treated as an emblem...

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