Embracing the Corpse: Discursive Recycling in H. Rider Haggard's She

Embracing the Corpse: Discursive Recycling in H. Rider Haggard's She Barri J. Gold University of Chicago IN SPITE OF POPULAR as well as critical belief that the corpse is essentially repulsive, the appeal of fiction which documents the posthumous adventures of some of the more renowned corpses—from Shelley's monster to Rice's Lestat—suggests that the corpse fascinates even as it disgusts. This tension is particularly prominent in H. Rider Haggard's 1887 tale of adventure, She—a novel truly fascinated with the corpse, yet horrified by its own fascination. She's investment in the erotic, culinary, and narrative potential of the corpse remains striking, even where it struggles to relegate such investment to the "primitive" or "savage," which in a rather disingenuous effort to deny complicity, Haggard claims merely to document. Haggard's ambivalent relation to corpses is, however, only one instance of the tension that characterizes his novel. In spite of what seem like elaborate efforts to suppress them, subtexts arise which exceed the premises and intentions of the dominant narrative—disturbing, contradicting , critiquing. For instance, Haggard's novel generally supports English patriarchy and imperialism. Still, at certain moments, the narrative betrays itself by revealing the power and importance of the mother, the mythic character of European scientific superiority, and the violence of English imperial and patriarchal practice. Moreover, such counter-stories, as we shall see, frequently arise in the presence of themes associated with the abject: birth, corpses, waste.1 My argument traces the novel's dual fascination with birth and death along several lines: the rhetorical contortions of Haggard's framing 305 ELT 38:3 1995 narrative, in which he struggles to imagine a kind of patriarchal parthenogenesis ; the sometimes violent return of the excised mother; the alternatives to procreation which Ayesha's science offers; the alternative meanings that attach to birth under her philosophy; and the pleasure and potential which arise from the dead. As this list suggests, this essay focuses primarily on the unwitting side of the novel's narrative tension—on the threat to narrative closure, the return of the suppressed, and the production of unsanctioned pleasures, rather than on the dominant narrative whose excess these represent. This reading strategy is suggested in the novel itself. Within She and within this essay, the corpse provides a figure for those moments of tension, anxiety, abjection, that tell stories and promote (reading) practices undoubtedly not originally intended. Reproducing Meaning In spite of the overarching feminine promised by the title She, and in spite of Haggard's occasional self-congratulatory protofeminist forays, his novel is at best ambivalent about women, at worst, virulently misogynistic.2 Ludwig Holly, in particular, embodies this misogyny. Still, to have a son one requires at least one woman, a mother. Unfortunately for Holly, the confines of Haggard's Oxbridge offer no new technologies of reproduction. Babies must be gotten through the familiar mechanisms of human sexual reproduction. Haggard compensates, however, for this lack of reproductive technology by erecting a narrative screen around the mother's role in order to establish normative human reproduction as the happy and exclusive province of father and son. To this end, Holly is endowed with a fortuitous initial lack of family. He is then offered what will prove a highly desirable family situation; his friend Vincey gives him a son, requesting that Holly "be a father to the boy."3 This dual fathering is made possible by the death of Leo's mother, which is simultaneous with his birth—a detail repeated on several occasions within the framing narrative: "He is five years old," says Vincey, "He cost me his mother's life."4 This seems a fair price in Holly's (and it seems Haggard's) estimation, for the occurrence is echoed in Holly's preparations for and ultimate acquisition of the boy. Indeed, Holly's fatherhood is finally predicated on the forcible exclusion of no fewer than three female caretakers: he "would have no woman to lord it over me about the child and steal his affections."5 306 GOLD : RIDER HAGGARD Once mom is thus repeatedly disposed of, Leo finds not just one father, but a whole community of men...