Rider Haggard & the Sexual Imperative

Richard Reeve. The Sexual Imperative in the Novels of Sir Henry Rider Haggard. London: Anthem Press, 2018. ix + 203 pp. $115.00 £70.00

"SEXUAL PASSION is the most powerful lever with which to stir the mind of man," Haggard wrote in 1887, a logic which generated a very large number of both his best-selling and his less profitable novels. Haggard is known for braiding unconscious sexual urges and imperialist desire in his novels, most famously through the devastating sexual allure of Ayesha, the two-thousand-year-old heroine of She. The novelist's personal life had its unusual moments too; at one time he slept with a sarcophagus and Egyptian mummy in his bedroom (until its presence became too unsettling), reflecting the intriguing overlap of fin-de-siècle colonial and sexual fantasies. Haggard's sexualized imagination has duly furnished studies examining race, the New Woman, psychoanalytical undercurrents, sexualized landscape, imperialist discourse, and masochism in his works.

Reeve's monograph takes a biographical approach to Haggard's work, examining in particular ten of the lesser-known novels for the way they rework in an "obvious, and plainly conscious" manner Haggard's earlier sexual and romantic experiences (1). In so doing, Reeve steers well clear of the unconscious and even imperialism, despite their centrality to Haggard's fictional imagination. The book's title, with its references to "Sir" Henry and the "Sexual Imperative" (which is never explicitly defined), betrays the fact that this is a work of literary criticism beholden to an older paradigm. Reeve was educated at King Edward's School in Bath and Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1960s, a time when public-school boys devoured Haggard's books as a matter of course. After a career in the British Diplomatic Service, Reeve has returned with impressive thoroughness to what I presume was his youthful literary love. In spite of its limitations, the book's strength lies in an encyclopedic, if somewhat laborious, presentation of Haggard's lesser-known works and biographical sources.

The Sexual Imperative takes some time to delve into any actual sex. We must traverse a lengthy discussion of the distinction between novels and romance, a full description of the anti-vaccination novel Doctor Therne, Haggard's writing about agriculture, and his relationship with his parents before achieving our goal. Reeve is quite coy about discussing wider issues of sexuality. He fails to mention the homoerotic relationships between Haggard's male heroes, for example, in favor of exploring "sinful" heterosexual liaisons versus "spiritual" love. Even though many of Haggard's heroes seem ambivalent towards women, Reeve does not consider anything other than a strictly heterosexual sexuality. The mummy in the bedroom does not merit a mention, although Haggard's necrophiliac fascinations might have generated some interesting observations on this front. Instead, Reeve sees the novels as reenactments of Haggard's personal betrayals by and relationships with women, a point made by others. However, The Sexual Imperative offers more detail in relation to this theme than Haggard's biographers.

Chapter two outlines these influential personal experiences. Haggard was scarred by what he considered to be the betrayal by his first love, Lilly Jackson, who married another man after Haggard left for colonial service in South Africa, dealing what he described as a "crushing blow." Haggard did not entirely abandon her, sheltering the syphilis-ravaged Lilly in her dying years. Lilly's actions fueled Haggard's fictional "themes of sexual betrayal and a lost first love" (31). A parade of female betrayers and sexually predatory sirens appears in the next half-century of fiction, ranging from Dawn (1884) to Belshazzar (1930). Haggard also had an affair with a white married woman in South Africa in the 1870s, resulting in an infant who died. His subsequent marriage to the heiress Louisa Margiston, meanwhile, produced a son who also tragically died as a child, leaving Haggard emotionally scarred and his fiction dotted with child deaths.

Chapter three moves to a discussion of Dawn, The Witch's Head, Colonel Quaritch V.C and Joan Haste, which are "the most transparently angry of Haggard's early novels" with their focus on sexual jealousy and violence. As Reeve insists, "virtually all the characters in Dawn act as they do out of sexual passion" (41, 42). This chapter links biographical details to the vengeful nature of female characters, including those of King Solomon's Mines and She. This chapter helpfully compares similarities between different novels, including the diverse punishments meted out to sexually transgressive females (being paralyzed, drowned, shriveled, poisoned, etcetera). Reeve notes a darkening of tone in later novels such as Ayesha, the Return of She: "Ayesha in She dies to reappear. She is as indestructible as the sexual urge itself, and no amount of punishment will prevent her from re-offending" (65).

Haggard was concerned that his novel Beatrice had inadvertently encouraged lewd behavior, complaining that "a gentleman and a lady had practiced the sleep-walking scene" as a prelude to love-making. We encounter Haggard's "post-orgasmic" depiction of Beatrice's breasts in chapter four of The Sexual Imperative (85). Although this imagery occurs as Beatrice recounts a dream and Beatrice also appears later in a scene of sexualized sleepwalking, Reeve does not dwell on the unconscious elements of her actions. The close examination of Jess and Beatrice is thorough, concluding that Haggard evaluated "the nature of his own marriage" through these texts in his apparent equivocation over whether "he ought to have married" Agnes Barber, his secretary and sister-in-law, instead of Louisa (97).

Chapter five discusses celibacy and sexual renunciation in the context of spiritualism, focusing on Stella Fregelius and The Way of the Spirit. The mysterious Stella of Stella Fregelius tells the aptly-named Morris Monk, "with your flesh I have nothing to do" and promises him a "spiritual marriage" after death. Infatuated, Monk tries to contact Stella after her death. I was intrigued by Reeve's notion of "sexual love in the afterlife" and would have appreciated a more systematic account (105), especially as Haggard has been charged (by Patrick Brantlinger, for example) with creating necrophiliac fantasies in his earlier works. Monk's fear of women and lack of sexual passion may, of course, suggest a less than straightforwardly heterosexual orientation. Such a possibility, along with the Gothic elements of Stella Fregelius, remain unobserved in Reeve's book, representing a missed opportunity. Chapter six considers "spiritual consolation" in Love Eternal, in which a couple feel that they were lovers in a previous incarnation, and Mary of Marion Isle. However, the range of Haggard's last works indicates as much a continuation of the theme of vengeful women as that of spiritual consolation, where, for example, Asika in The Yellow God "takes a new husband every year, consigning the old one to death because she can never find the right man" (130).

Although Reeve quotes many critical texts as context, he does not adequately engage with a broader sense of feminist theory, psychoanalytical readings, or postcolonial critique—all of which are crucial to a well-informed critical discussion of Haggard's depiction of sexuality. The critical quotations fail to consolidate or clarify the author's own position, acting instead as a kind of background. Reeve adopts a very narrow definition of "novel" that excludes anything that might be considered a "romance," a justifiable enough stance but one that needs to be clarified at the very beginning. Chapter one opens with this statement: "Ten of Haggard's eleven novels consider the impact of potentially destructive sexual and emotional urges, primarily upon the male" (5). Since Haggard wrote considerably more than eleven novels in the modern sense of the word (around fifty-five), the reader is thrown for a loop. In the second chapter, Reeve explains that Haggard's publishers only classed as novels those with mainly, but not exclusively, British settings and a somewhat more realistic or sensation novel format (such as Dawn and The Witch's Head). The vast majority of Haggard's work falls under the romance genre based on quest and adventure. Unfortunately, this distinction was used inconsistently, even by Haggard. Reeve's focus is ostensibly the "novels" (although he appears to have read virtually all of Haggard's fiction), whereby the useful plot summaries in the appendix, for example, cover only the "novels" and none of the "romances."

I would have wished for this book to offer a more incisive argument and to read less like a report, since given its subject matter, some liveliness might be called for. Ultimately, Reeve argues that Haggard's fiction "represents a morally valid, if self-indulgent, attempt to explore and document what he regarded as the prime human driver," that is, the sexual imperative (9). Quite what the "sexual imperative" might be is left to the reader's imagination. I make no attempt to judge whether it is "morally valid" to discuss sex, but more worryingly, it is unclear from Reeve's book exactly what we should take away from a consideration of Haggard's obsessive recycling of sexually vengeful women, other than a biographical link (which we already knew). I was unconvinced that because Haggard claimed that sex is "at the root of being" we should necessarily absolve him of accusations of churning out money-spinning pot-boilers on sexual themes (164). These are not mutually exclusive positions.

Although scholars will be already familiar with biographical work by Norman Etherington, Morton Cohen, and of course Haggard's own The Days of My Life, most are likely to know only a fraction of Haggard's numerous novels. Reeve's book builds on critical work by offering details on a great many of Haggard's lesser-known novels, which will be useful for those seeking further information on these texts.