Re-imagining the 'Dark Continent' in fin de siècle Literature 9780748647163

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Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Volumes available in the series: In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres Saverio Tomaiuolo 978 0 7486 4115 4 Hbk

Forthcoming volumes: Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf Susan Bernstein 978 0 7486 4065 2 Hbk

Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism Deaglán Ó Donghaile 978 0 7486 4067 6 Hbk

Walter Pater, Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy Kate Hext 978 0 7486 4625 8 Hbk

William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 Anna Vaninskaya 978 0 7486 4149 9 Hbk 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain Nicholas Freeman 978 0 7486 4056 0 Hbk Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 Christine Ferguson 978 0 7486 3965 6 Hbk

Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices Helen Groth 978 0 7486 6948 6 Hbk Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat’s Fiction Tatiana Kontou 978 0 7486 4007 2 Hbk Jane Morris and the Burden of History Wendy Parkins 978 0 7486 4127 7 Hbk British India and Victorian Culture Máire ni Fhlathúin 978 0 7486 4068 3 Hbk

Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Phenomenal Urban Multiplicity Julian Wolfreys 978 0 7486 4040 9 Hbk Re-Imagining ‘The Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Robbie McLaughlan 978 0 7486 4715 6 Hbk Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www. euppublishing.com/series/ecve Also Available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Julian Wolfreys. ISSN: 2044–2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic

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Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Robbie McLaughlan

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© Robbie McLaughlan, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4715 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4716 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7231 8 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 7232 5 (Amazon ebook) The right of Robbie McLaughlan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Series Editor’s Preface

vii

Introduction I.

Militibus Christi

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. II.

1

Imperial Agents Missionary Literature The Fetish Hegel, Freud and The Double The Witchdoctor Rider Haggard

15 24 40 51 61 78

Behind the Black Velvet Curtain

7. 8. 9.

Maps Olive Schreiner Haggard and Freud

III.

Preaching to the Nerves

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Victorian Mesmerism Imperial Invisibility Olive Skins Dark Spaces Filthy Places

99 123 148

165 184 195 203 215

Conclusion

229

Index

235

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Acknowledgements

In a project so concerned with cartography, to thank everyone who has played a part in bringing this book to publication would risk replicating the work of Borges’s cartographers. I thank Andrew Radford, whose generosity at every stage of this project allowed it to come into being. I thank my parents, Gerry and Kate McLaughlan, for their love and support. I thank my brother, Jamie McLaughlan, who remains the biggest little boy I know. I would like to dedicate this book to them. I thank Donald Mackenzie for the many discussions of Joseph Conrad and Olive Schreiner, and for benefiting me by his erudition. I thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Alexander and Dixon Scholarship (Bryce Bequest) to the University of Glasgow, the support of which allowed me to undertake this project. I thank the archives who so generously allowed me to consult their materials: Special Collections at the School of African and Oriental Studies and at the University of Glasgow, the British Library, and the National Library of Scotland. Particular acknowledgment is due to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, for kindly allowing me to consult materials from its collection and to include an extract from an unpublished H. Rider Haggard manuscript from its holdings in this book. Grateful thanks and acknowledgment are also due to A. P. Watt on behalf of Nada Cheyne for granting the rights to reproduce this material. I thank Jackie Jones, James Dale and Jenny Daly at Edinburgh University Press for their guidance in bringing this book to publication. I thank Julian Wolfreys, whose expertise in the nineteenth century has been an education, and his friendship, an even more important one. I thank Maria-Daniella Dick for everything.

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Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assumption of various, often contradictory, habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the so-called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from

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convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half-century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread or not read at all, in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

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Introduction

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

In 1864 the Scottish historian and African explorer, William Winwood Reade, writes that ‘Africa, the cradle of civilisation, is now the last refuge of romance’.1 This continent ‘within a continent’ had defied the attempts of white men to cross its wide expanse, with the ‘footprints’ and ‘skeletons’ of those having failed ‘scattered around its skirts’ as a visual memorial to African impenetrability.2 There is more than an air of Don Quixote about William Reade. Having left for Africa in 1862 to undertake a study of gorillas, Reade, it would appear, found himself entranced by the continental interior and bewitched by the romance of its emptiness. Savage Africa betrays the mesmeric wanderlust for Central Africa and the imaginary possibilities that it supplied. Reade was a rather hapless explorer and hopeless cartographer; his botched attempts to penetrate the vast void of the African interior resulted in contemporary geographers and cultural commentators painting him as a comic figure of fun, a perception that was exacerbated by the fantastical speculations that he offered to British zoology as fact in Savage Africa. In an enterprise that features a history of the slave trade and a detailed survey of the behavioural habits of gorillas, Reade includes a chapter entitled ‘Monsters and Fabulous Animals’, in which he investigates the existence of unicorns and tailed men: ‘[o]f all the animals which have been classed as fabulous, the unicorn is the most remarkable, since to this very day it is impossible for a careful writer to make a positive assertion respecting its existence’.3 The gallant Reade provides a comprehensive delineation of the animal’s tail, ‘black, short’, its physical stature, as ‘large as a fine horse’, and the ‘beautiful horn five palms long’.4 The lack of definitive unicorn evidence is attributed to its misfortune of coinhabiting the African landscape with the most ‘barbarous people in the

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world’, who ‘perhaps eat them like other animals’.5 Reade received this first-hand description on ‘good authority’ from a Portuguese missionary: A missionary who was my companion, and who had spent some time in that province, having been told that they had found this renowned animal, did all that he could to get one. The natives brought him a very young one, but it was so delicate that it died in a few days.6

The missionary’s testimony convinces Reade as to the unicorn’s existence as the timid unicorn has ‘concealed himself in those vast forestwastes of Central Africa which are uninhabited and unexplored’.7 The immense interior was simply designated as the ‘Unexplored Countries’ on cartographical representations of the continent. Explorers and mapmakers struggled desperately to chart the terrain during their topographical wanderings, in which they routinely encountered European missionaries living in remote isolation. Although it superficially resembles a Swiftian satire, Reade’s fantastical text throws into sharp relief the ways in which Africa has been perceived and calibrated in literature throughout European history. ‘The eyes of the world’, declared Reade ‘are turned upon its central regions – a white blot on the page of science – the terra incognita of this age of steam.’8 Mid-nineteenth-century maps of Africa showed a considerable emptiness in the continental interior, an absence that posed a challenge both to the broad Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic knowledge and to the specific imperative of cartography to map the terrestrial world with ever-increasing detail and accuracy. Reade simply glosses over the gaps in empirical understanding with imagined projections and creative conjectures marked by a spurious scientific rigour, a methodology and rhetoric that exemplify how colonial discourse depicted and controlled this blank space on the world map. Re-Imagining explicates the differences between colonial discourse, by those embroiled or incriminated in the imperial endeavour, and evangelical writing, as well as the effect that this blank topography had upon the aesthetic and political sensibilities of those associated with the British metropolitan centre. What Reade in Savage Africa exposes, however, is the acute unease generated in the colonial psyche by these deficits in Victorian claims to encyclopedic awareness and panoptic vision. Reade believes that lurking in the void are unicorns and tailed men partly because the blankness offers him the possibility that such wonders could be there; it is an unblemished canvas upon which to project unspoken wishes. However, it is also a complex response to the threatening aura of the blankness. Reade dissipates any collective social concerns about what might be lurking in the darkness by populating it with his arcane, freakish and uncanny presences. Reade’s

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singular study, where fantasy becomes meshed with fact, can easily be dismissed as the meanderings of a confused mind. However, it is entirely representative of the way in which colonial discourse regulated threatening geographies by mesmerising a metropolitan population with details that nourished essentialising perspectives. Imperialism disseminated via colonial discourse a network of specious myths consumed and absorbed by a curious domestic audience. Colonial strategists, therefore, invite comparison with the sinister figure of Wells’s eponymous protagonist: In spite of their increased intelligence, and the tendency of their animal instincts to reawaken, they had certain Fixed Ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds, which absolutely bounded their imaginations. They were really hypnotised, had been told certain things were impossible, and certain things were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute.9

This rendering of Moreau, and the hypnotic influence that he wields over the beast-folk, illustrates well how colonial discourse confronted and processed images of Africa for an intrigued yet uneasy public. Moreau’s ruthless exploitation of the indigenous Kanakas – they were useful as ancillaries in establishing his Island and then considered superfluous after the Beast People had been ‘civilised’ – is a tale in miniature for the countless horrors of European imperialism. Furthermore, Moreau understands that to cultivate unwavering obedience he must constrict their imaginative and ideological powers through the implantation of hypnotic strategies. ‘In our growing science of hypnotism’, Moureau boasts to Prendick, ‘we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas.’10 Although evoking the familiar language of evangelical missions abroad, Moreau’s civilising mission is all the more sinister because it reproduces the callous logic of material colonialism. Prendick records how Moreau, having created the ‘horrible caricatures of my Maker’s image’, inculcates fear in the Island’s wretched creatures by the mesmeric, ritualistic and tyrannical implementation of the Law.11 Moreau uses the Law to cultivate a fearful obedience among his hybrid subjects in Wells’s perversion of the Genesis tale, through which Moreau convinces his creations that both their historical origins and future remain dependent upon his benevolence. In The Wretched of the Earth (1967), Frantz Fanon recasts the colonisers in the menacing guise of Dr Moreau. Fanon disclosed that Western colonialism identified the figure of the native intellectual as possessing great cultural significance within indigenous societies. For

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Fanon, colonialism is ‘not simply content to impose its rules upon the present and the future of a dominated country’; neither is it satisfied in ‘holding people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content’.12 Instead, by way of a ‘perverted logic’, colonialism ‘turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures it and destroys it’.13 Fanon’s psychiatric education and intellectual background imbue his searching analysis of the ‘unconscious plane’ of colonialism, where colonial strategists driven by national and commercial interests epitomise a bad ‘mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide’, and in doing so licences their own ‘evil instincts’.14 Colonialism desires complete subjugation through a totalising interference; it attempts to order and, therefore, modify, marshal and police every facet of an individual’s life in the pursuit of total domination. This, Fanon speculates, was achievable by manipulating precolonial history to cultivate a slavish dependence on the invading colonial overlords, or in the parlance of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, ‘to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness’.15 The effect consciously desired by the colonisers ‘was to drive into the native’s head’ the devastating consequences of abandoning the fold: ‘they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality’.16 The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica substantiates the myth that Fanon identified as lying at the ideological heart of colonialism: that Africa was ‘so far as its native inhabitants are concerned a continent practically without a history, and possessing no records from which such a history might be reconstructed’.17 This project is in part a response to Fanon’s view of colonialism as a process capable of complete physical, spiritual and intellectual subjugation. As this book will demonstrate, via the work of Sigmund Freud, memories or residual traces of precolonial history cannot be fully effaced from the collective cultural and historical cartography of a people. Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o’s personal account of life under colonialism exposes how Fanon may have informed his diagnosis of colonial strategy, but also how this theory breaks down when considering the historical legacy of colonialism. ‘The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom.’18 Ngu˜gı˜ avers that language was a weapon of ‘spiritual subjugation’ used in the ritual humiliation of Gı˜ku˜yu˜ schoolchildren within the colonial education system. For Ngu˜gı˜, the imposition of a foreign tongue deliberately undermined a people’s culture and indicated a colonial desire to conquer and police ‘the mental universe of the colonised’.19 The details of Ngu˜gı˜’s own biographical experiences as a Gı˜ku˜yu˜ child collapse

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the concept of a Fanonian total colonialism. This new language of the coloniser ‘could never completely break the native languages as spoken’, but could effectively dominate language through writing.20 Ngu˜gı˜ construes language as encoding people’s values and as such the basis of their identity and, in turn, their culture. Ngu˜gı˜ privileges a sort of linguistic Rosetta Stone: the ‘collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history’, holding within each utterance the architectural blueprints capable of organising society.21 He describes how the African peasantry, excluded from the colonial school system, kept the languages of Africa alive: ‘the peasantry had no complexes about their languages and the cultures they carried!’ Ngu˜gı˜ reveals that the vestiges of precolonial culture survived the tyranny of colonialism through an African tradition of oral story-telling.22 In her study of Freudian psychoanalysis in the era of African nationalism, Ranjanna Khanna remarks that ‘[p]sychoanalysis is a colonial discipline’.23 Khanna provides a compelling, if brief, history of Freud’s interest in the new sciences of archaeology and anthropology, and traces how psychoanalytic theory was adopted in Europe and the colonies in the period of decolonisation. In contrast, Re-Imagining argues for nineteenth-century cartographical exploration in Central Africa to be recognised as a crucial influence on the development of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. This book is not an attempt to explicate the nineteenth century through Freudian psychoanalysis, but, instead, will trace how the colonial experience had an uncanny influence upon early psychoanalytical theory. It explores the colonial residue attached to key psychoanalytical terms, and show how the exploration and mapping of Central Africa can be detected in the semantic accretions of Freud’s diagnostic vocabulary. It will argue that several key psychoanalytic terms can be etymologically traced back to a Central African landscape epistemologically ‘opened up’ to European imagination by intrepid missionary cartographers. European missionaries were often the first to venture into the most remote geographies of the continental interior and, as such, facilitated a different form of cultural contact between white outsiders and a native population. It was a difficult life, toiling in remote evangelical outposts, and despite the best efforts of a detached church hierarchy to publicise the glory of missionary work in the field, conversion rates in Central Africa often proved to be negligible, meaning that Christians were usually the mistrusted minority group in any Central African community. Instead, what became increasingly important to the respective heads of missionary work throughout all of the religious denominations was the public perception of crusading white men shedding light

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on a primordial darkness. By the late nineteenth century, again, as will be shown, many religious organisations had grown entirely dependent upon the money generated at home for work abroad in the colonies. The propaganda peddled by an organisational elite from within the evangelical orders resembles Freud’s coveting of the support of Carl Gustav Jung, a Teutonic ‘missionary’, to aid the ‘conversion’ of a scientific community sceptical of psychoanalysis as a Jewish cabal.24 In developing the public image of his nascent discipline, Freud packaged and deployed the Aryan Jung as a cross between Wagner’s Siegfried and a rugged colonial explorer. Jung, the son of a Christian pastor, ensured that Freud’s project would not fall victim to anti-Semitism. He offered Freud the security of knowing that his creation would survive, and indeed thrive, after his death. The fraught relationship between the architects of evangelical ideology and those implementing it on the frontline of missionary work undercuts an erroneous image of missionaries as a constituent part in the larger imperial enterprise. Given the frequency of squabbling between members of the same church, it is seems illogical that the first generation of postcolonial studies continued to understand nineteenthcentury evangelical societies as mere appendages of a larger imperial machine, when evidence exists that highlights the peculiarly problematic relationship between church and state. This is not a reinterpretation of the missionary movement as a benevolent force, but rather an attempt to explain the largely unacknowledged significance and impact of evangelism as a philosophy upon British culture. The missionary enterprise was not synonymous with a form of political imperialism, and, as such, should not be misconstrued in such terms. Anthony Hope’s novella, The God in the Car (1895), loosely based on the career of Cecil Rhodes, dismantles this synonymic association through the voice of Lord Semingham, which provides a contemporary account of the way in which exponents of mercantile self-interest perceived missionaries and highlights the disparate motivations behind colonialism and evangelicalism: ‘Everything’s going on very well’, called Semingham from the foot of the table. ‘They’ve killed a missionary.’ ‘How dreadful!’ lisped his wife. ‘Regrettable in itself, but the first step towards empire’, explained Semingham with a smile. ‘It’s to stop things of that kind that we are going there’, Mr Belford pronounced; the speech was evidently meant to be repeated, and to rank as authoritative. ‘Of course’, chuckled Semingham.25

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Semingham appears to ratify a popular misconception of the missionary movement as a precursory step towards commercial exploitation and political subjugation, when, conversely, his flippant and facile tone demonstrates a crass disregard for human dignity and, as such, imbues his remarks about the pacifying power of Christianity with an undermining horror. Semingham’s misplaced belief that evangelical work was ‘the first step towards empire’ reflects the way in which David Livingstone, the poster boy for Central African missionary work, wedded together colonial expansionism and cartographical exploration. However, Part II reimagines the cultic figure of Livingstone as more of a cartographer than a Christian proselytiser, and examines the role of missionaries in the cartographic mapping of Central Africa. I propose that nineteenth-century maps of Africa can be interpreted as the site and scene of imperial wish fulfilment. This book addresses both the imaginative and projective force of cartography to gauge mapping as a fraught process rather than as a completed artefact. The desire for representational precision is haunted by nagging fears about the ‘unreadable’ African terrain; in order to compensate for a lack of formal rigour, cartographers glossed over deficits in empirical knowledge by colouring in the vast African interior with a fantasised environment, over which ran myriad outlandish tribes and creatures. David Punter charts the cultural importance and influence of maps on Western modernity, claiming that maps have ‘historically moved through four phases’, the last of which are the ‘discovery map’, constantly expanding as new territories are explored, and the map of modernity, a form that dissolves the medieval mappa mundi by revealing the world to be interlinked in ways that can penetrate ‘upwards and outwards towards a deeper concept’ of ‘space’.26 Yet the nineteenthcentury maps of Central Africa reveal an intermediate stage in Punter’s four-step progressive history. As will be shown in Part II, some Victorian maps incorporated a speculative anthropology and ethnography that displayed a desire for a deeper, more comprehensive, understanding of a locale and its indigenes. This form of map-making is far more intricate than what Punter designates as ‘discovery maps’. The missionary movement pioneered a form of discursive and geographical cartography that fused anthropological findings with geographical data, in the representation of African tribal territories. When such mapping strategies were replicated in relation to the modern metropolis by Booth, the evangelical orders of the late nineteenth century inadvertently anticipated several of the theories mapped out by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913) and Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930). This cultural pre-empting of

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Freud becomes most arresting when we measure missionary reflections on profound urban malaise against Freud’s diagnostic portrayal of modern civilisation teetering on the brink of barbaric collapse. Punter construes Max Nordau’s oft-quoted assertion that ‘[o]ne epoch of history is unmistakably in decline, and another is announcing its approach’ as symbolic of modernity’s imperious effacement of the stratified past, beckoning us forward towards an uncertain future.27 However, Freudian psychoanalytical theory will be employed to disrupt this vision of twentieth-century modernity as a clean break from nineteenth-century culture. It is impossible to argue for Freud as a figure belonging exclusively to either the nineteenth or twentieth century, for Freud greatly complicates and disturbs Nordau’s view of history as a series of periodic epochs. Psychoanalysis was one of the many maps that facilitated the evolution towards twentieth-century Western modernity.28 A great deal of Freud’s therapeutic terminology and practice were reworked throughout the course of his life, as new breakthroughs forced him and his followers to adapt this burgeoning uncanny science in accordance with the drumbeat of intellectual and technological progress. Unlike other psychoanalytic historiographies, my project concentrates on a literary archaeology to map the emergence of a literary and cultural modernity in fin de siècle populist fiction. Freud, as the epigraph to this introduction testifies, not only turned to literature as a source of inspiration, but established a radical reconfiguration of literary texts as unconscious dreamscapes; Freud’s attempts at literary criticism amount to the first examples of psychoanalytic criticism. Writing, for Freud, resembles the psychic mechanism and topography of the individual, where unconscious desires remain repressed at a textual level beneath a superficial understanding of the narrative. The role of the perceptive literary critic, for Freud, was the decoding of latent meaning within a textual symbology. This accounts for a famous episode in The Interpretations of Dreams (1913) in which Freud offers to loan a patient his copy of Rider Haggard’s She because ‘my own mortal works have not yet been written’.29 Re-Imagining, then, is a critical investigation into the late-nineteenth-century moment, examining how the fiction of the period encrypts certain ideological mechanisms and how an emergent cultural and literary modernism can be traced in the literature produced. Many of the qualities associated with a later literary modernism – hybridity, exile, displacement and so forth – are manifest in a subgenre of sensation fiction referred to throughout this book as mesmeric fiction; this genre developed a singular proto-psychoanalytic discourse dealing with many of the concerns that would later be taken up by Freudian psychoanalysis, such as the

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return of the repressed, the double and the uncanny. These psychosexual dramas play out against the familiar backdrop of a metropolitan cityscape threatened by a repressed Central African colonialism that returns to haunt the city’s respectable bourgeois characters. Part III charts how the effects of the cartographical endeavour and the difficulties that it posed to those wishing to explore and chart Africa’s continental interior can be found transplanted back into the urban terrain of the fin de siècle city. British involvement in far-off places prompted a redrawing of the geographic and ethnographic maps of London, as unprecedented numbers descended upon dockside locations to create replica dark spaces that required policing by the home missionary movement. London was delineated in a discourse that was profoundly influenced by, and reminiscent of, the missionary experience in Central Africa. In describing streets labyrinthine in their complexity, the home missionary movement fostered a perception that, within the modern metropolis, pockets of migrant detritus and squalor were threatening to contaminate, even devour, more genteel, salubrious districts. Exploration of these unmapped inner city and suburban hinterlands required the penetration of ‘courts reeking with poisonous and malodorous gases’, and because ‘sun’ never blessed these maligned spaces, new technologies of travel had to be invented as home missionaries groped their way ‘along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin’.30 The blurring of cartographies that separated the cosily domestic from the colonial extends to the rhetoric used to depict these migrant ghettoes and enclaves. Andrew Mearns recounts that a missionary, upon entering a tenement home, was shocked to find ‘the children running about naked and covered with dirt’.31 The urban yahoo was terrifying because of its proximity to the paragons of bourgeois respectability, rendering the threat posed by a fear of contagion more acute as these new maps emerged with infectious rapidity. Again, the thoroughly undomesticated – both personally and patriotically – traits of this eerie urban topography and its strange inhabitants found an echo in the scandalous events that took place therein. W. T. Stead referred to the trafficking of women into the sex trade in a language that invited comparisons with the despised Arab slave traders who operated along the west coast of Africa, with Stead’s investigative reportage into the miserable plight of child prostitutes carrying the arresting headline ‘The London Slave-Market’.32 This terrain had the power simultaneously to repel and excite the readers of middlebrow magazines in late Victorian England. Rider Haggard’s most famous characters, Allan Quatermain, Holly and Vincey, each derive an unmistakably homosocial pleasure from their Central African

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adventures, a frisson that is echoed in the escapades of Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray and the protagonists who feature in mesmeric fiction. In William Booth’s 1890 bestselling account of slum-life, the missionary experience in Central Africa resonates powerfully. In quoting heavily from Stanley’s expedition in the ‘Lost Continent’ in his opening gambit, Booth immediately questions cartography as a form of colonial control and tacit violence: he demonstrates the subversive anxiety that cartographic blankness can generate. ‘As there is a darkest Africa’, he rhetorically asks, ‘is there not also a darkest England?’33 Londoners, for Booth, live under a ‘foul and fetid breath’ as ‘poisonous as that of the African swamp’; consequently, diseases like malaria, once synonymous with Central Africa, are ‘almost as chronic [. . .] as on the Equator’.34 The social bohemianism and parasitic sojourns of Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray into London’s East End mask the pustular foundations upon which these debauched pleasure grounds were built: As in Africa streams intersect the forest in every direction, so the gin-shop stands at every corner with its River of Water of Death flowing seventeen hours out of twenty-four for the destruction of the people. A population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady, these are the denizens of Darkest England amidst whom my life has been spent, and to whose rescue I now summon all that is best in the manhood and womanhood of our land.35

Booth depicts how the influence of colonial cartography haunted late Victorian and early-twentieth-century literary culture. Map-making was presented throughout the nineteenth century as an index and yardstick of British cultural superiority over the rest of the globe; however, cartographic representations of the world represented the continental interior of Africa in terms of a topographical void, revealing a flaw or gap in Victorian claims to encyclopedic authority. Re-Imagining ‘The Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature maps the effects of this epistemological blankness in the literature produced, and its impact upon the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis. I have restricted my critical attention solely to Central Africa and to the evangelical orders that sought to map the forbidding terrain and convert the ‘heathen’ natives. Recent histories of colonialism display a logic that has effectively reworked the colonial dyads of the nineteenth century, with postcolonial studies reversing the familiar binaries of black/white, good/bad, civilised/uncivilised and Christian/heathen, as well as a collective guilt that manifests itself in the way that more tangled aspects of colonialism have been wilfully misconstrued, sidelined or categorised. The chronicle of missionary involvement in Africa is a notable example of an historical voice that has fallen prey

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to the new binaries fashioned in the wake of postcolonial scholarship. Re-Imagining does not intend either to glorify or to vilify evangelism as a social and religious credo; rather it sheds light upon a small but significant part of European colonial history that has so far been unjustly neglected.

Notes 1. William Winwood Reade, Savage Africa: Being The Narrative of a Tour in Equatorial, Southwestern, and Northwestern Africa. With Notes on The Habits of the Gorilla; On the Existence of Unicorns and Tailed Men; On the Slave-Trade; on the Origin, Character, and Capabilities of the Negro, and On the Future Civilisation of Western Africa (London: Smith, Elder, 1864), p. 384. On Reade’s projected ‘redemption’ of Africa see Ben Grant, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 99–100. 2. Reade, 1864: p. 348. 3. Ibid., p. 374. 4. Ibid., pp. 374–5. 5. Ibid., p. 374. 6. Ibid., p. 374. 7. Ibid., p. 374. 8. Ibid., p. 384. 9. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London: William Heineman, 1896), p. 127. 10. Ibid., p. 112. 11. Ibid., p. 156. 12. Frantz Fanon, ‘On National Discourse’, in Postcolonial Criticism, ed. by Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton and Willy Maley (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), pp. 91–111 (p. 94). 13. Ibid., p. 94. 14. Ibid., p. 94. 15. Ibid., p. 94. 16. Ibid., p. 94. 17. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910). 18. Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), p. 9. 19. Ngu˜gı˜, 2003: p. 16. 20. Ibid., p. 17. 21. Ibid., p. 15. 22. Ibid., p. 23. 23. Ranjanna Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 6. 24. See Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 204–5. 25. Anthony Hope, The God in the Car (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1908), p. 19.

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26. David Punter, Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 140–3; see also Denis Cosgrove, Mapping (London: Reaktion, 1999); and Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins, Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory (London: Routledge, 2010). 27. Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), p. 5. 28. David Punter maps out definitions of modernity and reveals them to be loaded with polysemic possibilities. Throughout this book modernity should be taken as an assumption of the modern moment’s sense of cultural and political difference from that which has preceded it. Of special significance to my work is Punter’s third definition of modernity, in which he identifies the role that a grasp of foreignness plays. See Punter (p. 9). 29. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Part II), The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. V (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 339–621 (p. 453). 30. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor (1883), in The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900, ed. by Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 27–32 (p. 28). See also Hilary M. Carey (ed.), Empires of Religion (London: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 1–21. 31. Mearns, 2000: p. 29. 32. W. T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ (1885), in The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900, ed. by Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 32–8 (p. 38). 33. William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), in The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900, ed. by Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 45–9 (p. 46). 34. Booth, 2000: p. 48. 35. Ibid., p. 48.

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I

Militibus Christi I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that, in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation. This is the work which I know God has called me to; and sure I am that His blessing attends it. (John Wesley) When the white man arrived, he had the Bible and we had the land; now, we have the Bible and he has the land. (Anon.)

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Chapter 1

Imperial Agents

Colonial chroniclers have largely overlooked the importance of evangelical missionaries and the precise role that they played in the formation and consolidation of empire. In the recent critical histories published over the past two decades, the missionary enterprise, if featuring at all, has been reduced to short chapters, as in Ronald Hyam’s Britain’s Imperial Century, or identified as a pacifying force within the broader colonial machine. Commentators have seized upon numerous contemporary reports that painted the missionaries as laughable buffoons, relegating them to the margins and footnotes of nineteenth-century cultural history. Sydney Smith voiced this idea in an article published in the Edinburgh Review in 1808, when referring to missionaries stationed in Bengal as ‘little detachments of maniacs’.1 As the nineteenth century progressed, such negative attitudes evolved and solidified, so that by the fin de siècle missionaries were routinely lampooned in penny weeklies. More recently, Edward Said and, perhaps more importantly, Homi Bhabha have both been guilty of misconstruing missionaries as cultural imperialists complicit in the erosion of precolonial history. Bhabha often relies upon anecdotal evidence in The Location of Culture to validate and justify his critique of the missionary enterprise.2 Missionaries have been charged with waging a deleterious campaign upon indigenous communities, as evinced by the anonymous quotation at the start of this part. This chapter will demonstrate several of the complexities and radical divergences in the relationship between evangelical orders and the imperial endeavour. In being too quick to pass judgement on the agents of evangelical philanthropy, both Victorian cultural commentators and recent postcolonial scholars arrive at the same conclusion, that the missionary project was a monolithic movement united by a crisply codified and rigid ideology. In reality, missionary societies were factitious organisations that consciously incorporated discordant voices and

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conflicting beliefs. For example, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the London Missionary Society (LMS) were inherently paradoxical, unstable and contradictory associations. They worked for a single divine sovereign power, yet were democratic in their make-up to the point of unruliness. They were happy to trade in pernicious stereotypes, yet were among the first to include non-white/non-Western subjects among their number. Often perceived as exclusively male, over eighty-five per cent of the volunteers operating at home and abroad in the colonies were female. It is impossible to conclude that missionaries were either harmless dupes or dangerous agents of empire simply because they could be both or neither. Attempts were made to monitor and marshal them, but more often than not missionaries located in Central Africa were left to their own devices and trusted to determine their own conversion strategies. Anna Johnston remains the only literary scholar to interrogate the literary output of various missionary societies in a searching academic fashion. However, her admirable book charts the emergence of missionary writing as a genre between the years 1800 and 1860, stopping well short of the fin de siècle, the period during which the influence of the missionary output was most keenly felt and fiercely debated.3 This book intends to develop the work of Anna Johnston and addresses a canon of nineteenth-century missionary literature that has not so much been ignored by cultural historians and postcolonial theorists alike, but rather is an oeuvre that has never before been construed or viewed as key to the development of the British Empire. Fundamental to any scrutiny of this relationship between the missionary movement and the colonial project is an etymological analysis and definition of the term ‘imperialism’. From the sixteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, ‘imperialism’ was simply a byword for ruthless colonisation. Brian Stanley charts the semantic accretions acquired by the term from its conception in 1840s France, where it ‘denoted the desire to restore to France the glories of national greatness which were hers under the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’.4 Its associations with the feared and mistrusted Napoleon meant that the word translated across the Channel as signifying ‘not his country’s overseas possessions, but a style of domestic politics in France characterised by militarism, bombast, and scant respect for constitutional liberties’.5 Amongst the English ruling elite ‘imperialism’ began to be used exclusively in reference to Napoleon’s predatory and bellicose encroachment upon British territories. Therefore, it was perceived as repugnant and profoundly un-English. However, over subsequent decades, and most notably after Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, its usage in English evolved to shed these Francophobic and pejorative resonances. As Brian Stanley

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reflects, it ‘was not long [. . .] before distinctions began to be drawn between a false imperialism modelled on continental despotism and a true imperialism based on principles of morality, civilisation and colonial self-government’.6 By the late nineteenth century the term ‘imperialism’ had acquired more positive connotations; it was a lexicographical symbol of British national, ethnic and, crucially, cultural prestige and superiority. The meaning of the term has largely fossilised since, to employ Eric Hobsbawm’s description, ‘the age of Empire’.7 Edward Said interprets imperialism as ‘the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory’, distinguishing between colonialism ‘which is almost always a consequence of imperialism’ and the ‘implanting of settlements on distant territory’.8 Consequently, neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple fact of geographical acquisition, but a project impelled by colonial hierarchies that perpetuate a spurious myth about non-Western people requiring domination, thus partially explaining the late-nineteenth-century fascination with comparative ethnography and narrow racial taxonomies – ‘inferior’, ‘savage’, ‘barbaric’, ‘uncivilised’ and ‘backward’. European imperialism continues to cast a long shadow over the African continent, according to Said: ‘[i]n our time, direct colonialism has largely ended’, but imperialism ‘lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices’.9 James A. Snead elaborates this notion of culture when he observes that our modern specification of the term ‘only arises early in this century, after a 500–year period of English usage as a noun of process rather than identification’.10 Prior to this, ‘culture’ was used in reference to the tending of crops and animals as opposed to the literature, music and art employed by social groups to specify, celebrate and memorialise themselves. The spectral influence of Foucault upon Snead can be detected in his pessimistic quoting of Swift: ‘happiness [. . .] is a perpetual Possession of being well deceived’, and in his assertion that, while defining themselves against other ethnic groups, Europeans were also engaged in the establishment of their own ‘culture as separate from African culture’.11 Snead discusses Hegel as a marked influence upon the history of European thinking about Africa, in which black culture is rendered ‘the antitype, ever on the threshold’, caught in ‘historylessness’.12 The political and cultural fate of postcolonial nations is the direct result of organisations such as the CMS and LMS who, according to leftist critics, entered into a dubious pact with the state. For Said, the missionary movement has been implicated in crimes of empire because to colonise was to create an identification of interests that could be ‘commercial, communicational, religious, military, cultural’.13 Said

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defines ‘interests’ as the economic and commercial motivation behind the British programme of colonial expansionism. This is not the same, however, as imperialism, which functions as both the driving force and consequence of colonial intervention. Imperialism infects the local community in which the colonial interests are situated, and then, if you believe Said, drifts like an unstoppable cloud, engulfing all that stands in its way. Foreign interests and the money extracted from them became the core motivation behind overseas development for the colonial ruling class; the cultural imperialism that ensued in the wake of this expansion served to boost potential profits. The state held an interest in imperialism only as long as money could be made. Said cites Abdul Latif Tibawi’s British Interests in Palestine when he declares that these ‘missions openly joined the expansion of Europe’.14 He mistakenly lumps the Protestant missionaries in with the other bureaucratic and commercial institutions that appeared after European intervention in colonial spaces: Add to these the trading societies, geographical exploration funds, translation funds, the implantation of Oriental schools, missions, consular offices, factories, and sometimes large European communities, and the notion of an ‘interest’ will acquire a good deal of sense. Thereafter interests were defended with much zeal and expense.15

This logic is endorsed by the historian Jeffrey Cox, who also believes that ‘British missionaries were deeply implicated in imperialism’.16 The following quotation taken from Cox’s account of the missionary enterprise is crucial to my argument: ‘Most (but not all) of them were in political terms supporters of the expansion of British rule, although they were characteristically outspoken about the need for a humanitarian version of British rules.’17 Here Cox seems to recognise that the missionary movement was not one humourless ideological mass following a single codified doctrine, but was in fact polyvalent and eager to assimilate dissident difference amongst its rank and file. Attempts were made towards the end of the century to introduce prescribed methods for travel, packing, conversion, building, and so forth, but for the most part missionaries abroad were trusted to operate as they saw fit. Cox, in his influential chronicle of missions, provides no detailed footnote evidence to underpin his conclusion that ‘most but not all’ were exponents of empire. It is this type of investigative approach that has compounded the existing misconception of missionaries as stolid imperial infantrymen, which this book strenuously contests. The criticisms by Said, Tibawi and Cox, who in their writing posit the missionary enterprise as a harbinger of Western cultural imperialism, may indeed be valid with regard to

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the colonial experience in India, the South Seas or even Coastal/South Africa, but unravel completely when considered in a Central African context. As James Stewart argues in the evocatively titled Dawn in the Dark Continent (1902), ‘[t]o Christianise the African continent is a large piece of work. Trade, commerce, administration, or government cannot do it, and will not do it.’18 Missionaries positioned in makeshift Central African stations were often days, if not weeks, away from wellestablished centres of colonial control. In a later section, Bhabha’s work on mimicry as the site of a double articulation will be discussed, with regard to encounters between whites and non-whites. Like Said, Bhabha views Christianity as an imperial tool employed in the pacification of indigenous tribes, but once again his research is grounded in an Indian experience. They both present colonial strategy as fixed, a set system of subjugation to breed native enslavement that can be rolled out across the globe. In an interview Bhabha refers to those involved in the conversion of the colonial subjects as proponents of a ‘muscular Christianity’.19 This was certainly the case in regions where Britain held key commercial interests, again in places like India and South Africa; and it is this ideological and practical rigidity that may have contributed to the failure of the imperial endeavour. Colonialism as the active ‘implanting of settlements on distant territory’ was a subsidiary of a wider capitalist ideology.20 Said’s reading of colonialism echoes Marx’s famous maxim anticipating a globalised economy in which international territories are desired as a source of new material and, crucially, as places of market expansion: ‘[t]he need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.’21 In turn, the missionaries followed an entirely different ideology from that of the governing technocratic elite, that of Christianity, and shrewdly retained their own preoccupation with capitalist/colonial expansion in terms of a spiritual economy. They were effectively functioning freelance and, as such, did not arrive with the immediate and obvious weight of British militarism behind them. Central Africa was not a straightforward outpost of the British Empire. National interests began and ended at the continental periphery. Therefore, missionaries were forced to devise innovative methods to bolster the promulgation of the Gospel in adverse and unforgiving conditions. They participated in highly complex cultural negotiations with indigenous tribes. Christianity and capitalism may have converged throughout the history of empire, but they were, and remain, two distinct ideologies. Missionaries and their movement as a whole adapted

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and evolved, and this is why Christianity remains in Africa long after the Europeans have left. Just as religion under capitalist economics enforces subservience and oppression according to Marxist commentators, religion, for Freud, forcibly fixes individuals into a ‘state of psychical infantilism’ by ‘drawing them into a mass-delusion’.22 This state of psychical infantilism, and its importance, will feature when discussing the stratagems deployed by evangelical editors to groom their readership. According to Ross Forman, adventure writing tried to reconfigure and concentrate empire upon the individual. As Forman remarks, ‘“Boys” and “girls” adventure novels such as these, mass-marketed and given away to children at school, reinvented Empire around issues of personal heroism.’23 This was accomplished by dwelling upon and emphasising key terms; Forman identifies ‘grit’, ‘pluck’, and ‘courage’ as being particularly prominent, in order to implicate ‘their audience in Britain’s greatness by remaking the readers according to their hero’s models’.24 This sort of covert ruse deployed by the proponents of imperial romance had its origins in missionary fiction, which was crafted as a potent weapon to garner financial and practical support for the evangelical mission abroad. Of course, it is unwise to divorce the missionary enterprise from the imperial machine, but it is also imprudent to categorise missionary societies as mere appendages of a state apparatus when they were semiautonomous organisations that claimed to follow the promptings of a celestial sovereign.25 Postcolonial scholars have become so exercised by the manner in which Christianity was repackaged and employed in colonial subjugation that they have effectively overlooked the most urgent question: who was using whom? ‘The Empire of Christ’, according to Cox, ‘could never be identified with the Empire of Britain in the long run’, because this Empire of Christ was a ‘multiracial, multinational empire that not only transcended the provisional [. . .] boundaries of the British Empire, but transcended the boundaries of time itself.’26 Furthermore, the missionary movement was not interested in expanding British political sway in the geographies in which it operated. Although Britain was a predominantly Christian country, empire evolved to become an almost secular entity. The profound importance of Protestantism upon the British national psyche and its effect on the literature produced since Defoe and Swift has been documented extensively by Ian Watt in his famous, but dated, study of early modern fiction, The Rise of the Novel.27 The British tradition of Protestant missions originated in the Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, which galvanised the effort to proselytise by promoting the policies of social activism, bibliocentrism and conversionism.28 Protestant

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campaigners helped to shape and then justify an era of unprecedented commercial and economic modernisation in Britain, which saw an interest in business and trade overspill beyond immediate national borders in the creation of a global market place. However, British expansion abroad was not ‘Protestant’ in the same way as the Spanish empire was Catholic. The Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal resemble the imperial schematic vision that Bhabha and Said explicate in reference to the British missionary movement, in which state and church become synonyms with each other. Missionaries for Catholic Spain operated on behalf of the Spanish head of state, who was the proxy representative on earth of a divine monarch. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonial experiment missionaries were working for both God and state interests. Ronald Hyam argues vigorously against the continued perception of missionaries as willing agents for Anglo-Saxon expansion, because ‘British missionaries – by and large – did not influence governments to act, nor try to do so’.29 Hyam acknowledges the impossibility of accounting for every single individual in societies that numbered in their tens of thousands; however, unlike Cox’s earlier statement that missionaries were ardent political supporters of the Empire, Hyam states that missionaries ‘were mostly not politically-minded; their interests were not coterminous with the expansionist enterprise’.30 Missionaries were much more than simply individuals on a spiritual quest to proselytise and, as Part II reveals, were often adroit cartographers, diligent and determined engineers, and lexicographers. They pioneered exploration into some of the world’s most remote, inhospitable regions, and although keen to convert individuals encountered on their travels, they were not engaged in the ruthless acquisition of territory for Queen and country. In contrast to prevalent historical perceptions of the missionary as either a wandering imbecile or a pernicious bureaucrat, all missionaries undertook their work out of an obligation to God, and some were inspired to further an empirical understanding of the world. Although perhaps not a poster boy for the missionary movement in the eyes of postcolonial critics, David Livingstone succeeded in charting areas of the African terrain that, until he did so, remained blank spaces on the colonial map. Ronald Hyam reinforces this argument when he writes that, if there was a missionary frontier, it was precisely because missionaries were ‘often the first whites seen in remote places’ and not because they were ‘heralds of British imperial rule’.31 David Livingstone, and the subsequent cult of Livingstonia, ensured that missionary activity would receive a great deal of attention in the popular press of mid-Victorian Britain, but as the century progressed a new missionary frontier began to emerge. Surprisingly, this was not a battle waged in foreign lands

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but, rather, a concerted effort to tap the home market, thus safeguarding and extending a continued evangelical endeavour. This crusade was realised in the pages of middlebrow magazines produced by evangelical Christian orders, targeting the hearts and minds of British children in an increasingly secularised and highly competitive marketplace.

Notes 1. Sydney Smith, ‘Indian Missions’, Edinburgh Review (April 1808), p. 151. 2. In the chapter ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, Bhabha cites a single letter from a missionary working in India as evidence of the latent brutality lying at the heart of the entire missionary endeavour. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 143–74 (p. 151). 3. Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1880–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4. Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1990), p. 35. See also Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). 5. Stanley, 1990: p. 35. 6. Ibid., p. 35. 7. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Random House, 1989), p. 56. 8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 8. 9. Ibid., p. 8. 10. James A. Snead, ‘Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture’, in Black Literature and Theory, ed. by Henry Louis Gates Jr (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 59–80 (p. 62). 11. Ibid., p. 62. 12. Cited in Snead, 1990: p. 63. 13. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). 14. Abdul Latif Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine, 1800–1901 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 5. 15. Said, 2003: p. 100. 16. Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. 13. 17. Ibid., p. 13. 18. James Stewart, Dawn in the Dark Continent; or, Africa and its Missions: The Duff Missionary Lectures for 1902 (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1903), p. 28. See also John Mackenzie, ‘“Making Black Scotsmen and Scotswomen?” Scottish Missionaries and the Eastern Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century’, in Carey (ed.), Empires of Religion, pp. 113–36. 19. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Translator Translated (Interview with Homi Bhabha)’, Artform, Vol. 33, no. 7 (April, 1995), pp. 80–4 (p. 82). 20. Said, 2003: p. 9.

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21. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 6. 22. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey Vol. XXI (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 64–149 (pp. 84–5). Hereafter: Freud, 1961a. 23. Ross G. Forman, ‘Empire’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. by G. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 91–113 (p. 101). 24. Ibid., p. 101. 25. In 1841 the CMS elected Henry Venn to the position of General Secretary and, in doing so, inadvertently heralded a new ideological driving force that would transform the manner in which missionary organisations were governed. Venn advocated the establishment of overseas churches free from Western interference. He called for the creation of churches that were ‘self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending’. Instead of white ministers responsible for the running of the church and the imposition of a white system of hierarchical control, Venn believed that indigenous peoples should oversee and improve the individual missionary stations. Venn perceived the ‘Mission’ as ‘the scaffolding’, while ‘the Native Church is the edifice’. Cited from W. R. Shenk, Henry Venn: Missionary and Statesman (New York: Orbis, 1983), p. 46. 26. Cox 2008: p. 14. 27. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). 28. For a more detailed account of eighteenth-century Protestant revivalism see Steve Maughan, ‘“Might do Good”: The Major English Denominations and Organisation for the Support of Foreign Missions in the Nineteenth Century’, in Missionary Encounters: Sources and Issues, ed. by Robert Bickers and Rosemary Seton (London: Curzon Press, 1996), pp. 11–38. 29. Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 96. See also Morag Bell, Geography and Imperialism 1829–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Thomas Sterling, Exploration of Africa (London: Cassell, 1964); Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 30. Hyam, 2002: p. 96. 31. Ibid., p. 96.

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Chapter 2

Missionary Literature

Technological advancements made in the production and operation of the printing press meant that, by the close of the nineteenth century, the publishing output of the peripheral, ‘dilettantish’ Christian organisations surpassed that of the mainstream publishing houses. The evangelical movement was able to recruit from the most affluent, discerning and educated members of society, which in turn allowed them to create a series of bespoke publications that catered for every demographic. Missionary committees were responsible for a prodigious literary output that included books, periodicals, tracts and magazines, with a circulation divided into various publications to cover all sections of the reading public. Magazines appeared that were aimed primarily at the ‘educated, popular, labouring, or youthful reader’, with the combined estimated output of the CMS, the largest and most prolific missionary society, numbering around 216,000 units a month, a formidable amount even by today’s standards.1 By the eve of the new century, the CMS alone had a distributed literary output of 7.5 million magazines and papers. The little work that has been carried out thus far on missionary literary history has tended to dwell upon the CMS largely because it was the richest and most fruitful of all the missionary societies. However, this study concentrates on the literature of the London Missionary Society, an organisation that wielded an ideological clout far greater that its congregational numbers would suggest. It is important to note that these organisations were not competing against each other but were interdenominational and drew support from a bewilderingly diverse array of religious groups: Anglicans, High-Church Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, Anglo-Catholics and non-conformists. The English Protestant missionary movement was a broad and inclusive church; it was this disparate make-up that enabled the directors to galvanise widespread moral and financial backing. Bucking the populist trend of penny weeklies or monthlies, missionary magazines were priced at

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one-halfpenny and published every month.2 The Juvenile Missionary Magazine3 produced by the LMS boasted a monthly readership of around 38,000; with The United Presbyterian Magazine, which was sold mainly in Scotland, commanding a similar audience of around 42,000 a month. This remarkable publishing phenomenon had its roots in the decisionmaking and policy formation of church hierarchies in the 1840s, which understood that success would depend on a sturdy foundation of domestic endorsement. Mission stations were by nature very expensive to run. It was practically impossible for missionaries in the field to cultivate commercial interests that would permit their outposts to become selfsustaining projects. In places like Central Africa opportunities to earn money were restricted by the very small market places where missionaries were stationed and the arduous terrain in which they laboured.4 This led society secretaries and chairmen to raise revenue and stimulate domestic support through initiatives such as visiting lecture tours by missionaries returning from abroad, gala celebrations, collections and appeals advertised in their publications.5 Missionary societies certified these schemes nationwide, but interest was beginning to concentrate on those urban areas experiencing unprecedented and rapid growth. As the century progressed, evangelical philanthropy evolved into an increasingly London-based movement. Nonetheless, missionary societies quickly became reliant upon magazines that catered to an adolescent audience as a reliable and steady source of income. When the institutional hierarchies decided in the late 1870s that a steam ship was required to replace the outdated but much revered John Williams, magazine editors instigated an aggressive fundraising campaign. In order to maximise profits, the various missionary magazines began to incorporate and emulate aspects of popular culture and entertainment. Readers were regularly invited to comment on all facets of the magazine, including the precise content of articles, design and layout, and were routinely asked how it could be improved. Missionary editors, in employing these qualitative research techniques, inadvertently created a forerunner of the ‘focus group’, in which consumer opinion shaped the product offered by those selling it. Jeffrey Cox is wrong to assert that the ‘missionary societies appear to have regarded their periodicals as instruments of propaganda rather than sources of income’.6 Evidence gleaned from a scrupulous reading of the Juvenile and other contemporary reports contradicts this argument. As Stewart proposes in his survey of missionary literature, ‘the extensive production and distribution of really interesting missionary literature has a double influence. It creates and maintains interest, and secures financial

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support.’7 By 1882 church hierarchies were not only dependent upon the revenues earned through magazine sales, but actively sought the supplementary income garnered through advertised competitions and appeals. When the target of five thousand pounds was not met through the 1881 Christmas appeal, Robert Robinson, the then editor, made a series of frantic petitions in the Juvenile until the total was reached in June the following year. Readers were subjected to a torrent of insistent, forceful and manipulative marketing tactics in a desperate attempt to cover the financial shortcomings of the LMS, which was running up expenses both at home and abroad. The following appeared in the June edition under the inspiriting caption ‘Hopes Fulfilled!’: I thank you all, and thank you very, VERY much. I asked somewhat doubtingly for five thousand pounds, and you have raised and sent in £5,054! This is a grand result, and while thanking you, I also say ‘The Lord be praised’. He has furnished the opportunity, the means and the will to do all that has been done. But I am especially glad that [. . .] so many of you have secured another valuable book for your Missionary Library – as many as 14,000 have won the prize! I am greatly cheered as I remember that during the past fourteen years more than 52,000 pounds sterling have thus been raised, and over a hundred thousand volumes secured by our young friends, not a few of whom, I trust, will be the life-long friends of missions, and some will become devoted missionaries; so we may at once again joyfully sing – ‘Let us, with a gladsome mind, Praise the Lord, for He is kind.’8

This extract encapsulates the subterfuge employed by the editors of missionary magazines. Robinson adopts a tone of paternalistic selfrighteousness in his editorial addresses in order to strengthen the emotional investment and intimacy between reader and magazine. These publications supplied missionary societies with an opportunity to communicate directly with – and even groom – the future custodians of Empire. Robinson’s effusive thank you note doubles as a covert introduction to colonial bureaucracy, reminding readers of the decisive role they play within the organisation and, therefore, consolidating their commitment to the entire enterprise.9 Missionary magazines refined these sophisticated ploys as a means of indoctrinating readers for life, positioning them as enduring and stalwart ‘friends of missions’ who may in turn ‘become devoted missionaries’. Young readers were in effect being placed under a hypnotic influence that would hopefully survive the transition from early adolescence to adulthood. Psalms and poetry were woven into the magazine’s discursive fabric to perpetuate the mesmeric state into which readers were unwittingly coerced. This was bolstered by the adoption of Kantian pedagogy that fused religious piety

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with bourgeois thrift, self-discipline and unstinting industry.10 Editors fostered a Protestant work ethic and gilt-edged it by demonstrating the immediacy and closeness of the relationship between the individual and God. The scrutiny of the magazine itself became a moment of prayer, in which the reader would be lost in solitary reflection – a hinterland of consciousness – and acutely susceptible to the impartation of doctrine through catechism. The word ‘prayer’ functions as a homophone signifying both the process of entering into communication with God, and also a moment of vulnerability. The mode of prayer is preyed upon by canny editors who were eager to underscore the virtues of obedience and financial loyalty to the missionary endeavour. Kantian pedagogy is filtered through a series of axioms that comprise a short piece entitled Good Rules for Boys: Hold integrity sacred. Observe good manners. Endure trials patiently. Be prompt in all things. Make few acquaintances. Yield not to discouragements. Dare to do right; fear to do wrong. Watch carefully over your passions. Fight life’s battle bravely, manfully. Consider well, then decide positively. Sacrifice money rather than principle. Use all your leisure time for improvement. Attend carefully to the details of your business. Never forget that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.11

By composing the poem so that every line increases in length, the momentum cascades downwards upon the final two lines, and in doing so a heightened sense of poignancy and emotional resonance is created. The tone remains characteristically soft and soothing, a stylistic contrivance that features in almost every example of missionary literature, as if further to enunciate how reading fosters intimacy and fervent identification. This tender fatherly cadence – gentle, measured yet undeniably authoritative – emerges as a key attribute of the genre, and one that is mimicked by the imperial romance writers of the fin de siècle. More vital than refusing to yield to setbacks, and fighting ‘life’s battle bravely, manfully’, is the immense value of attending ‘to the details of your business’ and fearing God’s righteous wrath. Furthermore, the meaning expressed through the coupling of commercial acumen with a fear of divine anger is one that, if adhered to, will create a prototype for material success and disabused wisdom. Such an approach displays a Hegelian logic that was fundamental in the doctrinal literature

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published by missionary magazines. For Hegel, an individual is born outside an already existent and established world, a culture that must be appropriated in order to flourish. This has the effect of prompting the individual to participate more fully in a cultural community, which Hegel designates as the state. The individual and the state coexist in a federation of interdependence, while the state survives – and thrives – through the individual’s responsible and sober participation. Mission directors understood this Hegelian maxim. Again, postcolonial scholarship remains myopically focused upon the missionary figure as an unapologetic mouthpiece for cultural imperialism. This fails to acknowledge the cynical manner in which the colonial machine manipulated evangelical orders to extend its own political agenda abroad. Missionary societies tirelessly campaigned for a new form of humanitarian colonialism that displaced money as the driving force for expansion with spirituality. Those who did not aspire to a life of missionary self-abnegation could still influence the conversion of the heathen in a bureaucratic or commercial occupation. This whispered symbiosis, between state and soldier of Christ, resonates as a constant undertone throughout this type of literature, often appearing in a nuanced form of biblical catechism. Good Rules for Boys concludes with the invocation of Psalm 111, which once again contains the crux of compliance through the conception of fear, while simultaneously highlighting the rich rewards of spiritual (and therefore cultural) participation: ‘He hath given meat unto them that fear him: he will ever be mindful of his covenant./He hath shewed his people the power of his works, that he may give them the heritage of the heathen.’12 Axiomatic or devotional poetry demands that it be committed to memory and internalised. In this respect these shadowy editorial figures and their seemingly soft paternalistic tones begin to mirror the Freudian super-ego in all of its obscene dimensions. Having had all erotic impulses towards the figure of the mother thwarted by the father, the child internalises this external threat of punishment in the creation of the super-ego. The all seeing and all knowing super-ego constantly torments the ego in the same way that the father generates unease through an assumption of omniscience. The editors of the Juvenile hoped that, by combining axioms and moral guides clothed in the guise of catechisms, they would eventually succeed in shaping a generation of fiercely committed missionaries, bureaucrats, governors or protectors responsible for the conversion of the ‘benighted’ and the promulgation of Gospel ‘truth’. The editors were, essentially, inviting the itinerant traders and merchants back into the temple, but with an unequivocal certainty that, by doing so, they could sell Christianity to the savage. This mode of aggressive marketing was frequently camouflaged within

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strangely surreal and illogical fictional fragments or vignettes. In an article from January 1880 entitled ‘The Missionary Clock’, the author presents to his audience an extended, and clumsily contrived, allegory casting the missionary movement as a timepiece in the form of a dialogue between two young female readers. The sanctimonious Ruth informs her companion that the clock-face maps ‘the heathen world’, with the scattered mission stations represented by the ‘figures on its face’.13 Ruth goes on to explain that the ‘missionaries and teachers are the wheels; the Directors are the regulator; and the gold, silver, and copper given by the people are the weights which keep the wheels in motion’.14 This stratagem to solicit financial and practical aid from a callow and largely unformed audience develops throughout the short tale to highlight the key role that the Juvenile readership plays in the missionary schema. The hands of the clock symbolise the numerous juvenile missionary magazines keeping readers up-to-date with all the latest news from the colonial field, causing Ruth to lament, ‘[s]ometimes, the clock has lost time, and the Directors have been afraid it would stop. This has been the case when funds have got low.’15 The clock motif functions as a timely reminder to readers to donate even more cash to the evangelical campaign, ‘[for] some of my money, then, has helped to keep it going. I have put a pennyweight upon it every month. I wish every Sunday scholar did the same; and then, I am sure, the clock would never stop’. However, it can also be construed as a moral compass, replacing geographical north with a heavenly beyond.16 It encapsulates the unfaltering belief held by evangelical Christians that they are morally bound to this august enterprise, and obligated to make both a financial and spiritual investment to ensure long-term success. The tale’s closing paragraph implies that readers should not simply donate to the lofty missionary cause through a sense of Christian goodwill – rather they are obliged to contribute by heavenly decree: Let us not only give our money, but be thankful to God for putting it into the hearts of good men to make this clock; and let us pray to God that it may continue to go till all the heathen are converted to the Saviour; and then it will strike the most beautiful sounds ever heard; angels will listen, and all the families of the earth will exult and say, The whole earth is full of the Redeemer’s glory! Amen, and Amen.17

In ‘A Speech by a Penny’ the author completely detaches the tale from any realist premise in presenting the story of a coin dropped inside a missionary box. The anthropomorphised voice of the penny provides sober and pragmatic advice on how to start a missionary collection fund, while also tacitly cultivating a mindset among readers that enough is never enough. This talking penny informs the reader that the little

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box in which it had been dropped ‘looked so nice’ and was ‘prettily coloured’ with ‘pictures all around it, and something to read too’.18 The penny then recounts a harrowing tale of existential suffering, experienced and barely endured, arising from being the first and only penny dropped into the box. It begs readers to never leave a penny, depicted as a sociable ‘thing’ by disposition, alone in a collection tin feeling ‘dreadfully lonely’.19 The author stresses a capitalist credo – the relentless acquisition of wealth – through a narrative in which tireless fund-raising converges with religious zeal so as to buttress the Empire of Christ and not as part of the broader colonial project. Capitalist enterprise is purged of its grubby connotations of squalid self-interest by an assurance that this noble work is prosecuted to further and glorify a divine message. The ‘Speech’ invokes the parable of Noah and the flood, to emphasise that, just like civilisation and the animals, the future of evangelicalism rests upon two of every type of coin slotted into the box: If Aunt Mary gives you half-a-crown, coax Uncle John or Aunt Eliza to give it a companion. And do that for every sixpenny, fourpenny, threepenny, and penny-piece that you get. See that every fresh arrival gets its fellow, and this will help you wonderfully to fill your box. Noah’s ark was soon filled, because there were went in two of every sort.20

Once more, a vocational pedagogy is discernible towards the tale’s dénouement, stressing the importance of taxonomical groups while reaffirming the adolescent readership’s key role within a hierarchical structure where God is true sovereign: Of course, we are a very mixed society. Sometimes (but very seldom) we have a member of the Royal family amongst us. A sovereign or a half-sovereign is treated, I assure you, with great respect. A half-crown is looked upon as a very dignified individual, and even shillings are regarded as persons of rank. Somehow two-shilling-pieces are not much respected in the box. We have a feeling that they take the place of half-crowns. Nor do we think much of threepenny and fourpenny-pieces. We would rather see a sixpence. But of course they look down upon the public generally, which consists of copper [. . .] the heathen do not need England’s money but England’s Gospel, and that money helps to print Bibles and to send the preachers.21

This pedagogical inflexion can be found in countless submissions published by the Juvenile.22 The magazines, at times, read like handbooks providing practical information on the challenges and rewards of missionary existence. These ‘how to do’ sections reveal the missionary hierarchy’s plans for the next frontier in its campaign. From the 1880s onwards, China was identified as a key future battleground in the quest for hearts and minds,

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coinciding with the inclusion of relevant data on the terrain, manners and mores of the indigenous population. Entire issues were dedicated to mainland China with articles explaining the relevance of the Opium Wars, ancient dynastic history and arcane tribal customs, while also containing basic exercises in Chinese vocabulary. Missionary magazines imparted vital knowledge to the future defenders of Christianity from a very early age by punctiliously tailoring their literary output. Increasing attention was devoted to the exploits of missionaries in the target areas, with the favoured few coming under pressure to send home rousing reports of their daily exertions or forensic observations concerning local flora and fauna. It quickly became apparent that editorial demands for exact ethnographic information were not being sufficiently met by missionaries positioned overseas. The editors of the Juvenile had to confront an unavoidable and unfortunate truth: life as a missionary was, more often than not, a tough, cheerless affair of grinding labour in very challenging circumstances. Isolated in the seemingly measureless terrain of Central Africa, missionaries had first of all to establish a secure station and then slowly develop relationships with the local community. For a great number of the indigenous population, missionaries were their first contacts with the Western world. Missionaries were vastly outnumbered and as such had to engage in precarious and tentative cultural negotiations with tribes whose dialects had never been seriously studied or documented. Simply living among the native populace provided no guarantee that individuals would welcome Christian teachings, let alone conversion. In truth, since Robert Moffat, a hardy Scottish Presbyterian, had founded a mission station in Kuruman, Bechualand, the LMS had achieved very little in this region. Conversion rates remained negligible, with Moffat and his successors growing increasingly frustrated at the painfully slow progress that was being made. However, such narratives of strife, monotony and thwarted endeavour did not make satisfactory copy for the editors of missionary magazines. Missionaries ‘found themselves required as a condition of their employment to send regular and publishable accounts of their inspiring deeds. If the reports were not inspiring or upbeat, they were edited and rewritten by the staff to make them so.’23 An examination of the writings of Dr Southon, a qualified medic and earnest missionary working in Central Africa, illustrates the sheer extent of this process of editorial intrusion and amputation. Dr E. J. Southon’s Hints for Missionaries Proceeding to Central Africa (1880) demonstrates the malleable and trusting ethos adopted by the LMS when instructing would be missionaries. With undogmatic assurance, Southon supplies an array of practical tips on packing, travelling

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and decorum, derived from his own missionary career in Central Africa. Southon’s hints are couched in conversational and personal terms; the counsel offered is only ‘my opinion’, and he concedes that it is extremely ‘difficult’ to ‘say what provisions ought to be taken’ as ‘I can only point out some things generally included in a list which I think unnecessary’.24 Such tentativeness of address and ambiguity debunk a myth that missionaries were dispatched across the globe to follow inflexible rules set by implacable ideologues who downplayed any instance of cultural negotiation. Furthermore, Southon’s manual overturns a constructed portrayal of missionary work as a blissful vocation. In his tips, Southon underlines the importance of preparing oneself psychologically for the grievous hardships and trails ahead. He encourages potential recruits not to waste the precious time spent in transit, but to remain committed to mastering the dialectal intricacies of Swahili, as well as ‘routes, countries, peoples, and customs’ and, most of all, to become ‘accustomed with other spheres of labour beside that which you expect to call your own’.25 Handbooks produced by Southon and his ilk divulge complex, troubling counter-narratives that undermine the Juvenile’s glossy and glib portraits of missionary life. While Southon’s handbook was delivered to raw recruits, the Juvenile included a serialised account of his travels to the mission station in Central Africa: essentially, an extended and largely fictitious repackaging of the arduous journey Southon chronicles in his short book. The two could not be more different. Contrast the following examples relaying the preparation required for the trip between Zanzibar and Central Africa. They appear to communicate the same information and articulate a similar attitude towards the indigenous population. However, where Southon is permitted to express himself free from editorial meddling, as in the first extract, a more exact image of missionary–native relations emerges: At Zanzibar the first care of the leader will be his men. Already the agent will have secured some, and in all probability selected the chiefs or head men. My advice is, get thoroughly acquainted with the latter and every day have them about you. The work of unpacking, of repacking, and stowing the goods will require men. Get your chiefs to do this. Pay them liberally and treat them kindly. Know their names and call them by them; in fact, do anything you can to create a good impression, for depend upon it, the success of the expedition is largely dependant upon the interest these men take in it. If they have confidence in, and are fond of, their leader, there is no hardship too great and no work too laborious for them to secure the end he desires.26

Compare the extract from Hints for Missionaries Proceeding to Central Africa with an article published in April 1880 by the Juvenile entitled ‘The Africa Journey: How It Was Accomplished by E. J. Southon’:

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Such a bustle and scene of confusion you never saw as there was when the men came in with their loads; for every one was glad to get his particular load off his head as soon as possible; and of course, as they were all loaded, and almost every one needed some one else to help him put the load down, you may imagine what it was like. Some were selfish, and after their own loads had been disposed of, refused to help the others who were not yet unloaded. But the majority of them were good natured, and helped one another very readily.27

The first extract voices a typical bourgeois attitude that describes the men as working class individuals who happen to be black. This empathetic depiction stands in stark contrast to the one provided by the Juvenile, which conforms to a familiar ethnic stereotype of the African Negro as selfish, lazy, unreliable and shiftless. The marked difference between the two accounts in terms of tone, texture and perspective cannot be explained away by acknowledging the Juvenile’s primarily adolescent audience. One is anchored in the cautious, watchful pragmatism that can only be won through direct experience. On the other hand, the Juvenile article bears all the hallmarks of an authorial standpoint far removed from the frontline of missionary work, and trammelled by the expressive regulations synonymous with narrow propaganda. After a typically pat account of the suffering and subsequent death of a missionary, Dr Mullens, the editor’s attention immediately skips to the plumage and dizzying variety of indigenous birds, concluding with an aside that could have been lifted from a recruitment pamphlet or poster: ‘[d]on’t you wish you had been there? Well, I pray God that some of you who read these lines may grow up and become missionaries. Then you will see beautiful sights like these.’28 A real discordance emerged between the heroic image of the fearless missionary galloping from village to village with a bible in one hand and a shotgun in the other, and the desperate fragility of diurnal life in Central Africa.29 In a similar manner to the cartographers who were unable to produce a comprehensive topographical diagram of the continental interior, the editors of magazines such as the Juvenile employed a fusion of censorship and imaginative fancy in order to compensate for empirical shortcomings. The letters and journal entries sent home for publication by field-workers and volunteers were subjected to a sedulous screening process, often undergoing extensive redrafts by editorial staff eager to wean out any reports that contradicted a portrayal of crusading verve and visionary triumph. A further example demonstrates the extent of editorial censorship: the ghostly absence of female influence or reportage within the magazines, given that women then comprised the majority of volunteers at home

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and abroad. To counteract the impending crisis caused by a lack of male participation, young men were identified as the key demographic and were lured into missionary work by being mesmerised with heady tales of exotic adventure. Careful cultural negotiation between Westerners and non-Westerners was replaced by stirring vignettes centred upon the mass conversion of entire tribes through selfless acts of male bravery. The multifaceted daily grind of a missionary as farmer, builder, carpenter, and so forth, was displaced by an entirely factitious image of the courageous hunter and Miles Christi. This gave rise to a new literary subgenre that became known as Missionary Romance Heroism, the defining tropes of which can be found in the unfeasible animation of a serialised ‘letter’ of February 1891, supposedly posted from South Africa. A local village, plagued by two relentless lions, finds salvation in the form of two genteel-sounding missionaries, Wright and Mr Truscott: The whole crowd of natives came up and commenced blazing away, but none of them hit her, although they were not more than ten paces distant. Thinking she must be riddled and quite dead, Mr. S. Wood and I walked up to her. When we were within two or three paces of her she raised her head and growled. I had my gun in readiness, and shot her through the head. And now dogs and natives came up, rejoicing over the fallen enemy. Every abuse they could think of the natives poured on her. The skin belonged to Mr. Truscott, as he was first to hit her.30

It is difficult not to read this extract as a reactionary response from an ideological elite within an organisation that, by the fin de siècle, had become almost exclusively dependent upon female volunteers. Such an example as Conrad’s, in Heart of Darkness, with its attempted subversion and perversion of the gender status quo in the figures of the aunts and the African mistress, generally accepts that the imperial endeavour was formed by a pre-existing gender ideology; what is interesting in the example of the missionary magazines is that they suggest that the imperial endeavour itself formed gender ideology, rather than being formed by it. The sort of machismo on offer in this description of the lioness’s mauled body titillated adolescent readers during their formative years and instilled within them a sense of their own cultural superiority, a superiority that would, hopefully, lead to an upsurge in male applicants seeking a swashbuckling vocation. By the 1890s there were signs that, along with elaborate marketing campaigns based at home, this grooming process was working. One evangelical society found itself in the unusual position of rejecting seventy per cent of the candidates applying for positions.31 In contrast, sales of the Juvenile started to plummet in this period. It

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had always tried to cater for a wide age range, from the very young to those on the cusp of manhood and womanhood, and it relied upon being able to enthral new readers to replace those who had simply grown weary of its content and the often hectoring style. Numbers steadily dwindled from the mid-1880s onwards, with the editors growing more frantic in their appeals to readers, encouraging them to recruit new subscribers. The magazine now found itself competing in a market that offered a dazzling and unprecedented array of choice to consumers. Despite several makeovers – changes to font and cover design, and more photographs – the magazine looked dated and fustian in comparison to the popular penny weeklies. A competition inviting readers to draw from memory colonial maps was so poorly entered that the then editor begrudgingly issued the first prize but withheld second and third places because the maps submitted were so poor. The section in which editorial staff directly addressed the readers became a predictable begging letter, beseeching ‘young friends’ to harangue their peers. When another appeal to help raise finance to replace the John Williams steam ship failed – this despite numerous in-depth articles and pictures detailing its construction at Napiers shipyard on the Clyde throughout 1893 – the fate of the Juvenile was effectively sealed. Eventually, the Juvenile was scrapped and replaced by a fresh publication, News From Afar. Announcing its departure from the literary landscape in typically enigmatic fashion, the magazine is eerily anthropomorphised with the editors’ embitterment barely repressed beneath the infantile language: ‘[w]ith the January number I am to pass from childhood to youth.’32 The magazine is transformed into a threadbare remnant of childhood, having no place in the upwardly mobile lives of ambitious young men and women who have put away childish things. The authors of the magazine bemoan that ‘[t]hey won’t have anything to do with me. They make fun of my name, and tell me I am only fit for children.’33 The new magazine promised ‘to speak to young people as young people like to be spoken to’, and replace such patronisingly saccharine tales as ‘The Missionary Clock’ and ‘A Speech by A Penny’ with a fiction that reflected a pressing contemporary agenda.34 The Evangelical in-house publications could no longer cater to tastes that they had partially introduced. The anxiety surrounding the ability of missionary magazines to compete in the modern marketplace is articulated by an editor who reveals the dilemma behind the updated brand: ‘[m]y new name has given me a great deal of trouble. Many names I liked were already chosen by some other magazine.’35 James Stewart explains this precipitous decline in the popularity of missionary magazines in terms of the role played by editors themselves. While reading habits remained as diverse as ever, authors like Joseph

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Conrad and Ford Madox Ford cannily adapted the tropes of imperial romance and greatly amplified the expressive possibilities of mimetic realism. This innovative fiction only served to highlight how absurdly detached evangelical editors had become from popular literary taste. Stewart recognised that material sent back from the missionary front was ‘often of the plainest, some say of the poorest kind’, standing in stark contrast to rival publications on account of its lack of sufficient ‘literary care’.36 Stewart critiques missionary writing for being out of synch with modern literary appetites: ‘[w]e do not, with perhaps a few exceptions, put before the Church at home in an interesting and instructive way the realities of missionary life. Hence the missionary periodical has not kept pace with its competitors in quality and interest.’37 One exasperated reader and contributor to a LMS society report neatly summarises what he finds so off-putting about missionary literature: There are some missionary periodicals which I regularly read, out of a sense of duty to the great subject to which I have devoted my life’s thoughts, but the phraseology and mode of treatment lead me to take them medicinally; the subject-matter is not objected to, but the self-laudatory and narrow minded style which is calculated to render the ordinary reader hostile!38

However, the profound cultural importance of the various publications issued by the mainstream evangelical orders cannot be ignored. At the peak of their powers they projected a forceful and compelling voice with which to lobby government mandarins for a more humanitarian form of colonialism. Repulsed and saddened by what they construed as an insatiable appetite for tangible imperial spoils, the editors of missionary magazines exploited their position of authority to campaign strenuously on behalf of those unfortunates addicted to opium imported from China, for which they blamed the British government exclusively; they sought the complete abolition of the trafficking of human slaves that remained a grave problem in Africa; and clamoured for Western advances in medicine to be adopted in distant foreign outposts. Furthermore, these magazines were the childhood reading of a great many writers who would have a telling impact on the fin de siècle and literary modernism thereafter.

Notes 1. Maughan, 1996: pp. 2–21. 2. This remained the case for the Juvenile until it was renamed News From Afar with the price raised to one penny. ‘Then as I shall be larger and worth

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more, I am no longer to be sold at a halfpenny, but, like all other magazines and papers at my age and value, am to have stamped upon me Price One Penny.’ Juvenile, January 1894. 3. From here on the magazine shall be simply referred to as the Juvenile. 4. E. J. Southon in his Hints for Missionaries Proceeding to Central Africa, a text I will return to throughout this chapter and beyond, recommends that any missionary destined for the isolation of Central Africa should, at Zanzibar, purchase all necessary items that could be used for trading. These items included an array of textiles for clothing, beads for ornamentation and types of dried food. See E. J. Southon, Hints for Missionaries Proceeding to Central Africa (London: Yates & Alexander, 1880). 5. Steve Maughan documents the reluctance of certain missionaries to indulge in this sort of marketing: Revd A. H. Lash, returning from India, reported that in three months of CMS duty in 1875 he addressed approximately 30,000 people, and his diary shows he skipped from urban centre to urban centre speaking to crowds ranging from 100 to 1,500. This was a duty that missionaries often resented greatly, especially when arrangements went awry. Organising secretaries found that dealing with men whose recent experience was completely foreign to the peculiar demands of popular speaking and constant travel could lead to spectacular rows. The conclusion that A. M. Campbell, SPG Secretary on deputation in 1839, came to regarding a difficult missionary colleague was ‘A mad Missionary is as bad as a mad dog.’ (Maughan, 1996: pp. 24–5)

6. 7. 8. 9.

Cox, 2008: p. 115. Stewart, 1903: p. 348. Juvenile, June 1882. It also reiterates the profound significance of honesty. This catechism routinely appears dressed up in various guises, such as this vignette from November 1879, in which a young African girl approaches the missionary to return four six-pennies that she has won as a prize. When the missionary responds by saying that to his knowledge the girl owes him nothing: ‘I do’, she answered; ‘and I will tell you how. At the public examination you promised a sixpence to anyone in the class I was in, who would write the best specimen on a slate. I gave in my slate and got the sixpence; but you did not know then that another person wrote that specimen for me. Yesterday you were reading in the church (at morning week-day service) about Zaccheus, who said ‘If I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.’ ‘I took from you one sixpence and I bring you back four.’ (Juvenile, November 1879)

10. Immanuel Kant discusses in his lectures on pedagogy how society has a moral obligation to socialise children from an early age. Kant’s teleological notion of human nature – evolving towards an Enlightenment endpoint – inflects his work on pedagogy, in which he describes how a child must be cared for, disciplined and civilised by a social elite invested in the improvement of society. See Immanuel Kant, The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant, trans. by Edward Buchner (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, 1904).

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38 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Juvenile, December 1881. Psalm 111. Juvenile, January 1880. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Juvenile, January 1880. Juvenile, January 1882. Ibid. Juvenile, February 1882. Ibid. In a curious article published in May 1864, bibles are spoken of as ‘paper preachers’: We must send them paper preachers. Do you ask what these are? We answer, they are Christian tracts and books. These go forth as messengers of peace – bearers of good news – teachers of truth, to those who are ready to perish, telling them that the Son of God came from heaven, and that He is able and willing to save sinners. (Juvenile, May 1864)

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

The advantage of these ‘paper preachers’, according to the article, is that they ‘can go almost anywhere. They can enter the deepest forest, go up the longest rivers, cross the most dreary deserts, and climb the highest hills. They travel at little cost, can bear heat and cold, and live without food’ (ibid.). Although never seriously viewed as a viable and low-cost alternative to missionaries working in the field, societies conceived of ‘paper preachers’ as functioning in a similar manner to the missionary magazines. It was hoped that both would operate as viral mechanisms for conversion. An estimated readership was calculated on the number of copies sold each month and does not account for those who read each edition second-, third- or even fourth-hand. In reality the readership of the Juvenile could have been somewhere in the region of 250,000 per month. Magazines would be passed around among friends and family. The covert messages enclosed within reached an even larger readership than official figures acknowledge. A similar thinking lay behind ‘paper preachers’. The article allegedly recalls an incident in Assam, India where ‘paper preachers’ apparently led to locals converting to Christianity without the aid or presence of a human missionary. Once again this highlights the foresight and sophisticated techniques employed by missionary organisations. They were quick to adopt ‘focus groups’ as a means of tailoring the content to the precise interests and needs of the targeted demographic, while also recognising the viral reading habits of this population. Cox, 2008: p. 116. Southon, 1880: p. 9. Ibid., pp. 18–19. Ibid., p. 21. Juvenile, April 1880. Ibid.

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29. As Jeffrey Cox observes: ‘[t]he manuscript accounts sent by missionary males were often prosaic accounts of institution building, although in an exotic setting. The editors of missionary magazines wanted heroic tales of encounters with heathen chiefs, savage lions, cannibals, or idol worshippers [. . .] Many missionaries learned to provide what their editors wanted’ (Cox, 2008: p. 116). 30. Juvenile, February 1891. In yet another example of censorship and rewriting of missionary history in Central Africa in the wake of Livingstonia, David J. Deane provides an altogether different account of Moffat’s life among the Bechuanas. His missionary history is a radical repackaging of Moffat’s arduous work in the region, ignoring the numerous letters sent home by Moffat wherein he vents his frustration at the ‘tiring work’ he was engaged in ‘without reward’. See David J. Deane, Robert Moffat: The Missionary Hero of Kuruman (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1880), p. 100. 31. That was the CMS. See Maughan, 1996: p. 20. 32. Juvenile, January 1894. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Juvenile, January 1894. 36. Stewart, 1903: p. 346. 37. Ibid. 38. These reports were drafted throughout the year on a diverse range of subjects and were written exclusively for the board of Directors and rarely published. This quotation is taken from the London Missionary Society’s Central African Report for 1902 (London: Mission House, 1902), p. 2.

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Chapter 3

The Fetish

‘It is highly likely’, according to Jeffrey Cox, that ‘the majority of people in nineteenth-century Britain who had any knowledge at all of one or more foreign cultures received their basic information about foreign peoples, and what is more important their basic images of foreign peoples, from missionary literature.’1 It is easy to forget that missionaries, who were often black Africa’s first point of contact with Western Europe, introduced the tribes living in the continental interior to an eclectic array of devotional texts and especially Anglophone authors. Contrary to the outdated and one-dimensional belief that a missionary’s myopic raison d’être was to bring spiritual illumination to ‘darkest Africa’, they also had to prove themselves as adept explorers, worthy cartographers, lexicographers and ethnographers. They were chiefly responsible for the manner in which ‘Africa’ was allegorically repackaged and processed in European metropolitan centres. It is here that I want to introduce a vital distinction between colonial discourse and missionary writing that emerges from the unique Central African experience. Traditionally, scholars alert to the architecture of colonial discourse have espoused a Foucauldian conception of the archive. Before embarking on a fresh literary project or cartographical campaign, writers and explorers would invariably consult, and pay tribute to, the work of esteemed precursors. In doing so they drew heavily upon a rich figurative repertoire, which had in turn derived from such seminal texts as the Arabian Nights. The apparently arcane, outlandish and inexplicable attained a degree of familiarity through the borrowings made from canonical texts dealing with colonial conflicts and landscapes. Consequently, new colonial narratives only served to consolidate and justify a pre-existing fund of homogenised allegories. This in part is what is meant when colonialist discourse critics point out that, travelling to the other regions of the world, Europeans were confronted with

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nothing as much as an image of themselves. As well as spoils, they brought back from their journeys writings, descriptions circumscribed by the way they understood the world.2

On the other hand, missionaries conceptualised Africa as a terrain that existed in a perpetual state of evolutionary flux, and their writing mirrored this sense of heterogeneity and dizzying multiplicity. Missionary exploration continually undermined established codes and conventions through its discovery of new communities with highly specific rituals, esoteric customs and obscure social exchanges; it sought to accommodate and register the hectic and threatening profusion with which it was confronted. Colonial discourse constituted a system of (re)cognition, an interpretative framework that propagated the illusion of European mastery through the maintenance of a structure underpinning alleged binary differences between the venturesome foreign interloper and indigenous tribes. For Homi Bhabha, the ‘objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin’.3 Imperialism’s vigour and longevity can be partially apprehended through its capacity to reproduce itself discursively in the formation of an interconnected textual field. Figurative devices and narrative tactics that corroborated this assumption of difference traversed horizontally along an abstract cartography that spanned the far reaches of the globe, and were systematically circulated within the imperial capitals. Abdul R. Jan Mohamed classifies the late nineteenth century as the ‘hegemonic’ phase of imperialism, in highlighting this systemic intertextual mode of colonisation.4 Consequently, racial stereotypes were insistently woven into the imaginative fabric of imperial romance plots. This synonymity partially repudiated all notions that implied cultural nuances of difference between variant civilisations and peoples. As an apparatus of state power, colonial discourse functioned by fashioning a space for a ‘subject people’ through the dissemination of knowledge that facilitated and validated surveillance. It is of little relevance to Bhabha whether Southon was constructing the black workers in terms of racial or caste categories. This potential duality is referred to by Bhabha as the ‘play’ within colonial discourse and is crucial to the exercise of imperial sway and the production of the colonised subject as a ‘social reality’ at once an ‘other’ and ‘yet entirely knowable and visible’.5 Said addresses this attempt to stabilise the play in colonial discourse when identifying the metaphorical devices that promote fixity as ‘radical realism’, where the threat of an indigenous populace is defused through the deployment of the eternal ‘copula is’, as in the African is ‘savage’ or is a ‘child’. For Bhabha, the

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stereotype ‘employs a system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism’.6 Thus Africans were taxonomically portrayed as indolent, feckless and simian, while Asiatics were mischievous and sly, demonstrating how imperial discourse handled alterity by attempting to homogenise it.7 The tendency to create horizontal metonymic connections that transcended nations and cultures was once again construed as a verification of Western Europe’s imperial vitality and prowess. For Bhabha, colonial discourse is dependent on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of ‘otherness’.8 Stereotyping became a relentless system of branding non-whites since, ‘stereotype impedes the circulation and articulation of the signifier of “race” as anything other than the fixity as racism’.9 However, within the discourse produced on Central Africa by the evangelical missionary orders, the stereotypical image is revealed as being contradictory and unsustainable: The real African is not the thoughtless, laughter-loving, untrainable savage, or typical savage, or typical Quashee of works of fiction, or the ‘half-child’ that so many, even of the present day, take him to be. Nor is he the wholly docile, teachable, and plastic creature of whom anything can be made when looked at with purely philanthropic eyes. In reality, he is quite a different sort of being, stronger and more difficult to shape, though light-hearted and goodhumoured generally. Neither is he the absolutely and irredeemably indolent creature who will only work when driven by the lash.10

Stewart’s stuttering of ‘typical’ stems from recognition of the sheer proliferation of stereotypes; it is symptomatic of a linguistic excess that acknowledges the impossibility of reliable ethnographic classification. Stewart goes on to enumerate what the African is not, while remaining wholly unable to assert what the African subject is. Stewart’s narrative, like the bulk of fin de siècle missionary writing, dismantles Edward Said’s copula by resisting, revising or problematising a single, prominent, stereotypical image of otherness for mass consumption. Missionary texts, in marked contrast to bureaucratic jargon or the forensic investigations of colonial medicine, evince a fraught perception of the chaotic heterogeneity and unkempt profusion of Central Africa. By the fin de siècle, even the more narrow-minded editors of missionary magazines struggled to sustain outmoded cultural clichés that perpetuated myths of native barbarity in the wake of so much empirical evidence to the contrary. Bhabha’s grasp of the racial stereotype and how it functions is grounded in a Freudian notion of fetishism that discloses the complexity and enigmatic ambivalence underpinning this mode of representation. The fetishised stereotype is predicated upon the dialogisms of ‘anxiety and defence’, containing within its structural make-up a series of double inscriptions: fear/desire, disavowal/recognition, metonymic aggressivity/

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metaphoric narcissism.11 Bhabha elaborates this idea with regard to the ‘myth of historical origination [. . .] produced in relation to the cultural stereotype’ – essentially the ambiguity and multiplicity produced through the rejection of difference – which he believes bears hallmark similarities to the primal scene.12 Bhabha construes the fetish as the codification of Freudian castration anxiety, with fetishism representing yet another ‘play’ or ‘vacillation’ between a wholeness and difference. For Freud, and also for Bhabha, the need for a fetishised object originates from an initial sense of lack. The absence of the maternal penis means that the structure of the fetish remains deeply ambivalent, since the child simultaneously recognises a lack while stifling this recognition in the creation of a fetish. This radical ambivalence is carried forth into Bhabha’s subtle scrutiny of the colonised subject as fetishised object. The child/ colonial master is torn between feelings of hostility and affection for the fetishised object/subject: Within discourse, the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor as substitution (masking absence and difference) and metonymy (which contiguously registers the perceived lack). The fetish or stereotype gives access to an ‘identity’ which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it. [. . .] For the scene of fetishism is also the scene of the reactivation and repetition of primal fantasy – the subject’s desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division, for the subject must be engendered to be engendered, to be spoken.13

However, Bhabha’s Freudian comprehension of the fetishised stereotype is complicated by the manner in which colonial subjects are fashioned in missionary narratives. The Freudian lack illuminates the conflating perceptions of native subjects in the standardising colonial discourse, but begins to unravel when pondered against a missionary backdrop. The coloniser looks upon the Central African colonial subject with confusion because he is always more than what has been imagined. That is to say, the colonial imagination in the nineteenth century continued to map Africa in writing as a misleading projection, a peculiar hybrid of fantasy and sober empiricism. The Central Africans are not revered or feared because of a recognised difference posited upon a grievous lack – white skin/black skin – but conversely they are apprehended as an indefinable, vague and amorphous entity. Central Africa is characterised in missionary writing as a region and people who defy orthodox descriptive mannerisms as well as the imposition of encyclopedic taxonomies. Africa may have been depicted as a ‘Dry and Thirsty Land’, but it was also rendered as an enticing expanse of organic plenitude, or a demonic geography of inscrutable recesses. Paradoxically,

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it was a terrain of both shattering desolation and thriving abundance; however, even in accounts of parched and pitiless vistas, there emerges a sense of darkly sinister, even intoxicating, excess. The anticipated aridity of a continental interior jarred against the discovery of waterfalls and great rivers that carved up the land, contributing to the perception of a place that did not stay still long enough for confident definition. An etymological study of the word ‘fetish’ reveals that it first entered the Western lexicon as an anthropological term in 1757 after Portuguese explorers used it to describe the amulets and the objects of enchantment found around the coast of Guinea. The etymological history of the word ‘fetish’ links it directly to Africa and the term has never fully cast off this semantic residue. Auguste Comte, having read Charles de Brosses’s Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches, employs ‘fetish’ in his theory of religious development, positing an evolutionary trajectory for spiritual and numinous intuitions. According to Comte, primitive man worshipped fetishes in the belief that they could exert a signal influence on his immediate locale. Comte charts the sequential steps by which fetishism transformed into polytheism, a process established by the ancient Greeks, who introduced complexity and abstraction into the ecclesiastical equation, and culminates in the final and most abstract belief system of all, monotheism. Comte’s theory of religious progression acquired an iconoclastic verve in the nineteenth century because it contended, provocatively, that fetishism and polytheism were the direct antecedents of Christianity.14 This undercut a popular perception, and one that had failed to diminish by the final decades of the century, of native religion as a degenerate, muddled or tainted form of Christianity. Comte identifies the objects of Western Christianity, the holy cross and consecrated host, as atavistic descendents of pagan ceremonial. The holy cross charged by faith is a symbolic object reminding Christians that Jesus died for the sins of mankind, acquiring a magisterial potency that differentiates such artefacts from the inanimate trinkets of quotidian life.15 The consecrated host is offered not as a symbolic but as a literal representation of the body of Christ. For Comte, fetishes are charged with a metaphysical vigour that transmutes them into formidable religious weapons.16 The signifier and the signified become indivisible from one another, as William Pietz avers: ‘The fetish is precisely not a material signifier referring beyond itself, but acts as a material space gathering an otherwise unconnected multiplicity into the unity of its enduring singularity.’17 In the first order of Comte’s historical trajectory, primitivism, the fetish is god, whereas in the second, idol worship, the idol merely epitomises a deity. ‘In fetishism’, according to Peter Logan, ‘object and god, signifier and signified are

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one and the same, fused in an unmediated anti-symbolic relationship.’18 Logan skilfully maps out how this semiotic ‘communion’ of signified and signifier results in the contradictory and modern understanding of the fetish as expressive of a nebulous quality, when in fact the fetish is ‘defined against representation as precisely that which is not a representation of meaning but rather meaning itself’.19 The translation of Das Kapital into English in 1886 supplied late Victorian audiences with a new designation of the fetish. Marx employs the example of a wooden table to highlight the transformation that occurs when inert objects are brought to life as commodities. As soon as the table ‘emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness’.20 Marx describes the table as possessing an animistic vigour that brings it to life before the eyes of the covetous consumer: It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.21

Furthermore, it seems stranger still that Freud would choose fetish to delineate a protective substitute safeguarding individuals against a perceived lack when, only a few years before, Havelock Ellis had understood the fetish as a complex symbol of sexual desire: The soldier’s red coat acts like a fetish on the servant girl because it is a symbol of the martial and virile character which appeals to her, and it may well be that in many cases this cannot be proved, and is often indeed scarcely susceptible of proof on account of the neutral character of the fetish.22

It remains possible to detect within Havelock Ellis’s usage a sense of the word’s original resonance. The red coat is an article that allows desire, always existent but not channelled, to find an outlet. The fetish reflects the young woman’s intemperate yearning for the smartly dressed officer, just as the ‘fetich’ object removed from a remote colonial outpost and transported back to Britain was construed as an extension of an indigenous or atavistic excess. The systematic study of colonial trophies and of copious museum archives remains a relatively recent scholarly approach to the intricate mechanisms of empire; however, such innovative methodologies have until now focused principally on Egypt. Students of material culture have paid insufficient attention to the colonial curios and other assorted loot brought back to London from Central African regions. Initially the weaponry, chairs and jewellery, despite exhibiting signs of great craftsmanship, were dismissed as offensively crude and expressive

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of a society stuck in the primeval slime. The elaborate chairs of the Mangbetu people of the Congo, with their intricately carved backrests, were entrancing partly because of the vivid tales that explorers told with regard to clan chiefs and native coronations. However, as more and more artefacts were displayed and debated at scientific gatherings in London, perceptions began to shift. Items such as divination bowls taken from what is now South Africa adumbrated complex narratives of a precolonial history that sharply contradicted popular preconceptions and prejudices. These bowls told the story of sophisticated societies respectful of rules consecrated by tradition and predicated on honour. Such bowls, which were carved out of a single piece of wood, belonged to warriors and epitomised the cult of the right hand, symbolising vaunting ambition and martial verve. Pots removed from the Congo forged a direct and disturbing link between these fetishes and colonial bodies. From the 1870s onwards, pots were exhibited that were decorated with distinct rainbow-like marks etched around the side: the entire circumference of the bowls was covered with these repeated semi-circles. Several European explorers and ethnographers noted that the same patterns were found scarred on the midriff of female tribe members, creating a tangible link that tied the artistic object to the communal body. The discovery of Benin Art after the sacking of Benin City in 1897 supplied unassailable proof of the highly developed techniques underpinning tribal aesthetic expression. In typically callous fashion, the Foreign Office auctioned the booty acquired to cover the expedition costs. Large numbers of ivories and brasses were snatched by soldiers serving in Benin and sold by officers upon arrival back in England. Not everything was auctioned off to fund the Benin expedition. In 1897 Admiral Rowson, commander of the Benin punitive expedition, presented Queen Victoria with Two Leopards, sculpted from three separate elephant tusks and bedecked with copper ‘spots’ delicately tapped into undercut depressions. The breathtaking skill and intricacy of such exhibits provided a vibrant riposte to those cultural commentators who denigrated Africa as a land largely divorced from and bereft of ‘high’ civilisation. An article published in the Juvenile of 1893 undercuts a mainstream perception of Central Africa as a comfortless site of cannibalistic savagery, by reminding the readership that a civilisation once existed there more magisterial and impressive than any found in Western Europe: When we think of the negro we ought to remember that there was a time when Africa, and not Europe, was the continent where the most clever and refined people lived, and that more than one black Pharaoh reigned over Egypt, then the richest and greatest country in the world.23

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The article covers the opening of an exhibition on Central Africa in Pall Mall by Captain Hore, who is elliptically introduced to the readers ‘as the father of the “boy” missionary’.24 It was an assemblage of ‘various curiosities, photos, diagrams, and models’ that were arranged to vouchsafe ‘a surprising and instructive picture of life in the region Captain Hore likes to call “Brightest Africa”’.25 This linguistic play is a conscious and direct challenge to the proponents of a Hegelian conviction that the innermost geographical recesses of Central Africa were the most barbaric:26 Captain Hore considers that the European traders, hunters, gold-diggers, and workers in the diamond mines, who have often been very bad men, have spoilt the South African negroes, and the Mohammedan Arabs have spoiled the tribes of North Africa. The people of the Tanganyika region, he thinks, could be more easily taught what is right, because they have not as yet had a bad example set them by people who ought to know better. I learned a great deal from the exhibition. For instance, I was very much surprised to learn that Queen Victoria has as many black subjects in Africa as she has white ones in the British Isles. This, of course, makes it clearly the duty of English people (including boys and girls) to send missionaries and Bibles to their heathen fellow-subjects.27

Hore’s exhibition and the permanent collection on show at the British Museum were instrumental in the arrangement and dissemination of startling new images of African tribal culture. They showcased the artistic capabilities of a continent that, up until then, was widely considered to be intellectually and morally deficient: ‘[a]nother thing that Mr Hore’s exhibition teaches is that all African tribes are not cruel and bloodthirsty cannibals, but many of them are peaceful farmers and herdsmen.’28 The undeniable beauty and ornate design of artefacts like the Benin Two Leopards had a profound impact upon modernist artists and writers, who attempted to incorporate the distinct colours, shapes and motifs of African art into their own experiments. In his impassioned critique of Conrad, Chinua Achebe quotes the British art historian Frank Willet, who records the key influence of African art on Gauguin, Vlaminck, Picasso and Matisse, stating that the ‘revolution of twentieth century art’ was in part impelled by the passing around of an African mask among artistic cliques.29 However, long before modernist painters found their inspiration in African indigenous art, several writers of the fin de siècle had begun to engage with Africa in two distinctly unique ways. The proponents of imperial romance, such as H. Rider Haggard, depicted the continental interior as an exotic playground in which questing protagonists escaped the emasculating repression and drab routines of metropolitan bourgeois existence. The tropes, verbal

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tics and figurations of missionary writing permeated the artistic imagination of fin de siècle Britain, and from the pages of magazines like the Juvenile an important representation of African religious ritual began to emerge. The Benin Two Leopards operates as a neat visual expression of a mode of Central African mystical belief that becomes a hallmark of belle époque literature: the double.

Notes 1. Cox, 2008: p. 114. 2. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 46–7. See also Leila Koivunen, Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-century British Travel Accounts (London: Routledge, 2009); and Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 3. Bhabha, 2004: p. 101. 4. A term he borrows from Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s theories on the mechanisms of ‘hegemony’ operate in a similar vein to Bakhtin’s ideas on discourse. For Gramsci hegemony is the locale for an infinitesimal conflict between varied ideologies. See Kyung-Won Lee, ‘Is the Glass Half-Empty or Half Full? Rethinking the Problems of Postcolonial Revisionism’, Cultural Critique, no. 36 (Spring 1997), pp. 89–117 (p. 97). 5. Bhabha, 2004: p. 101. 6. Ibid., p. 101. 7. As Said explains in Orientalism (2003: p. 94): A book on how to handle a fierce lion might then cause a series of books to be produced on such subjects as the fierceness of lions, the origins of the fierceness, and so forth. Similarly, as the focus of the text centres more narrowly on the subject – no longer lions but their fierceness – we might expect that the ways by which it is recommended that a lion’s fierceness be handled will actually increase its fierceness, force it to be fierce since that is what it is, and that is what in essence we know or can only know about it.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Bhabha, 2004: p. 94. Ibid., p. 108. Stewart, 1903: pp. 362–3. Bhabha, 2004: p. 107. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 107. Comte’s research is frequently overlooked and overshadowed by the work of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. This is all the more surprising given Comte’s profound influence upon that great political and social theorist of the nineteenth century, John Stewart Mill. See Robert Alun Jones, The Secret of the Totem: Religion and Society from McLennan to Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 15. The first definitions of the fetish in the OED are: 1. a. Originally, any of the objects used by the Negroes of the Guinea coast and the neighbouring

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16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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regions as amulets or means of enchantment, or regarded by them with superstitious dread. b. By writers on anthropology (following C. de Brosses, Le Culte des Dieux Fétiches, 1760) used in wider sense: an inanimate object worshipped by primitive peoples on account of its supposed inherent magical powers, or as being animated by a spirit. This is similar, but not identical, to an observation made by Derrida on the fetish object as commodity: ‘[t]he mystical character of the fetish, in the mark it leaves on the experience of the religious, is first of all a ghostly character.’ Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 148. William Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish, I’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 9 (Spring 1985), pp. 5–17 (p. 8). See also Jan Pieterse Nederveen, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Culture (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Peter Melville Logan, Victorian Fetishism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009), p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 163–4. Derrida refers to the table as transfigured into a ghostly actor when placed on the market stage, a ‘supernatural thing’ (Derrida, 1994: p. 150). Marx reveals how we have to see that which remains invisible to our eyes, and one ‘touches there on what one does not touch, one feels there where one does not feel, one even suffers there where suffering does not take place’ (cited in Derrida, 1994: p. 150). The ‘sensuously supersensible’ nature of Marx’s table contains, for Derrida, a sensuous excess that facilitates transcendence. Marx, 1990: pp. 163–4. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 144. Juvenile, August 1893. Ibid. Ibid. Hegelian teleology and Kantian pedagogy had infiltrated the ideological makeup of the missionary movement, shaping its perception of both African geography and the indigenes. Hegel famously carves up Africa in The Philosophy of History into the three taxonomic groupings of ‘European Africa’, ‘the region of the Nile’ (Asian Africa) and ‘Black Africa’; Georg Wilhelm Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York: Wiley, 1900), p. 91. It is only the latter that has been completely divorced from and starved of any contact or shared history with the classical empires of Asia and Europe. Black Africa, or ‘Africa proper’, was the terrain unknown to Western exploration, and therefore imperialism. It was a mysterious terrain, isolated geographically, waiting to be conquered and modified by the sharp eye and steady hand of the European cartographers: Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained – for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World – shut up; it is the land compressed within itself – the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night. Its isolated character originates,

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Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature not merely in its tropical nature, but essentially in its geographical condition. (Hegel, 1900: p. 91)

27. Juvenile, August 1893. 28. Ibid. 29. Frank Willet, cited in Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa, Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, from Postcolonial Criticism, ed. by Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton and Willy Maley (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), pp. 112–25 (p. 122). See also Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility, ed. by Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (London: Routledge, 2008); and V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

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Chapter 4

Hegel, Freud and The Double

The missionary enterprise was preoccupied with concepts and images of the double. Man was, after all, created in the double image of God. The whole raison d’être of the missionary campaign was to direct ‘heathen souls’ towards the path of Christian enlightenment. Missionary evangelism coveted the souls of the ‘savage’ population and through the conversion process manufactured spiritual others, a process that carries unholy connotations, in which man, who should be content to be a ‘lowly wise man’, undertakes the work of God.1 Early missionary and anthropological studies of African religion centred upon the prominent role of the double within the indigenous belief system. Hegel, in The Philosophy of History (1837), has been paradoxically praised for espousing the abolition of slavery while, simultaneously, deprecated for validating European colonial expansion: Slavery is unjust and for itself, for the essence of man is free; but he must first become mature before he can be free. Thus, it is more fitting and correct that slavery should be eliminated gradually than that it should be done away with all at once.2

The quotation typifies Hegel’s confused logic. On a cursory reading this appears as a diatribe against the ills of African slavery; it is, in fact, a condemnation of the African enslavement of Africans. Slavery, for Hegel, was a means of bringing Africans into contact with an ennobling European civilisation and, therefore, a means of their attaining knowledge. Robert Bernasconi’s learned analysis of the contemporary writing that shaped The Philosophy of History renders Hegel vulnerable to the charges of sensationalism and distortion. Bernasconi notes that ‘there is no clear evidence’ that Hegel had even read de Brosses’s Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches, yet Hegel’s work displays an obvious awareness of and intellectual debt to de Brosses.3 Hegel construed fetishism as symptomatic of African primitivism. Fetishism displayed a degree

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of conscious understanding of the self, the recognition that individuals possess mastery over external nature, and the beginnings of a dialectical relationship with the surrounding topography. Bernasconi concludes that, ‘Hegel’s modification of de Brosses’s argument about fetishism had the effect of making Africans the prime candidates for the civilising mission of colonialism.’4 However, James Snead’s research calls for an urgent re-evaluation of Hegel’s work on Africa. Snead identifies within Hegelian interpretations of African tribal culture the presence of a disruptive duality at play. He quotes at length several incriminating passages from The Philosophy of History, including Hegel’s belief that the negro ‘exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state’, to show how Western perceptions have been shaped by a skewed logic that posits African racial and cultural inferiority.5 Yet Snead adroitly remodels Hegel’s contentions to argue that Hegel was, inadvertently, ‘almost entirely correct in his reading of black culture’.6 Hegel, like most other Europeans, was ‘confused by the African’ and unable to situate them in the course of world history.7 Hegel delineated the continental interior as an ‘unhistorical’ territory completely isolated from the influence of European civilisation, and that what ‘we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit still involved in conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented [. . .] as on the threshold of the World’s history’.8 Hegel saw in the absence of any recognisable or valid institutions of control, such as church and state, that African society was ‘not yet at hand’ and a civilisation based on ‘immediacy’. Amazingly, it is in passages such as these, describing Africa as an earlier and coarser version of Western civilisation, that Snead reads Hegel’s ‘criticism as an insightful classification and taxonomy of the dominant tendencies of both cultures’.9 Snead attributes to Hegel the identification of an African primordial energy that fostered the impression of the native tribesman existing in an organic relationship with the natural milieu. The ‘strange form of self-consciousness’ with which the European is confronted in the formidable figure of the African is ‘unfixed in orientation towards transcendent goals and terrifyingly close to the cycles and rhythms of nature’.10 The lack of self-consciousness means that the Africans are immediate, alert and receptive to animistic promptings – for Snead they are ‘always there’ – and contrasted with the Europeans, who are not ‘there yet’.11 Europeans address this point by establishing social institutions that satisfy the Hegelian subsumption of development within stasis, replacing and supplanting the natural return in black culture. Snead proposes that it is only with financial hierarchies and the slick

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rhetoric of commerce that European culture has managed to deal with ‘repetition’ and natural cycles. Banking is founded upon the drumbeat of incremental advance, providing the illusion of continued growth and prosperity even when confronted with a steep decline in the economic cycle, and reveals the differing ways in which the European and black cultures process ‘repetition’: In black culture, repetition means that the thing circulates (exactly in the manner of any flow, including capital flows) there is an equilibrium. In European culture, repetition must be seen to be not just circulation and flow but accumulation and growth. In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick it up when you get back to it’. If there is a goal (Zweck) in such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually ‘cuts’ back to the start [. . .]12

European colonial regulation and dominance are anchored in the exploitation of societies founded upon an idea of the ‘cut’, as they are helpless to combat the militaristic or discursive onslaught of foreign nations. It is only in certain mental phenomena, explicated through the lens of psychoanalysis, that the ‘cut’ has been found to be alive in European culture. The trace of the ‘cut’ imbues the strange and arbitrary urges felt by individuals to repeat specific actions, impulses that Freud termed ‘repetition compulsion’. Freud viewed the ‘compulsion to repeat’ in the unconscious mind as ‘powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character’.13 Elsewhere Freud connected the seemingly unwilling acts of repetition (recollection of the primal scene, an unresolved ‘Oedipal complex’, and so forth) with the death drive. The relived trauma of the child’s separation becomes a mechanism or a coping strategy when confronted by parental absence. This point is elaborated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) when Freud shows the child learning to compensate for the mother’s absence by indulging in a series of repetitive gestures that give the child a sense of renewed confidence, even mastery, having learned to exert control over this painful separation. Watching his grandson play with a thread and bobbin, Freud interprets the child’s game as an attempt to come to terms with a protracted loss by continuously re-enacting the mother’s departure and arrival. This ‘compulsion to repeat’ bears functionary similarities to Snead’s concept of the ‘cut’. In obsessively acting out repressed memories, the individual highlights the fortuitous or random nature of repetition compulsion that aligns it with the sensuous immediacy and wild abandon of the native dance. The compulsion to repeat, if unconscious, gestures towards the significance of the double in the production of uncanny affect by blurring a sense of agency.

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Repetition gives the impression that an individual is compelled to act by a foreign force or another self. Julian Wolfreys in Victorian Hauntings notes that ‘the questioning of doubling is particularly bound up with a sense of the uncanny’.14 Wolfreys quotes Hélène Cixous to demonstrate that an uncanny resonance ‘persists in Freud’s writing which does not diminish with rereading’.15 For Cixous, it seems, one is compelled to reread the essay in an act that amounts to a form of repetition compulsion so that the text itself ‘transforms into a haunted fiction as well as a text haunted by the uncanny effects’ that literature can generate between ‘author and reader’.16 It is, for Cixous, in the act of (re)reading Freud’s famous essay that uncanny effect is established and extended. Cixous encapsulates how missionary magazines and their shadowy editors inadvertently produce a sense of the uncanny. In peddling and improvising around a standard stock of allegorical clichés about the African interior as the site of untamed savagery, replete with exotic flora and fauna, the tales often seemed indistinguishable from month to month and year to year. The February 1890 article entitled ‘Idolatory and Witchdoctors’ bears an uncanny resemblance to ‘African Wizards’ from March 1883. The familiarity of the published material was often exacerbated by the serialisation of articles that could run over several issues under the same heading. In appraising these recycled narratives of African quest, conflict and numinous experience, the audience was, like Cixous, exposed to reading as a locus of the uncanny. Freud illustrates the uncanny resonance produced in repetition by retelling a tale that includes the spectral presence of the female other: As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could no longer remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow streets at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street [. . .] I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another dètour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny.17

The uncanny, for Freud, has its origins in individual amnesia when the infantile reappears in our unconscious, when our relationship with the modern moment is called into question through this ghostly déjà vu. Consequently this vivid vignette, where Freud describes the sensations of bewilderment and unease registered in a strange, labyrinthine and exotic topography, conforms to a long tradition of missionary tales and Gothic romance of the late eighteenth century, except that the vast, repetitive terrain of the African desert replaces the ‘narrow streets’ of

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the ‘provincial town’ as the source of the traveller’s existential angst. The portrayal of Africa as the site of a forgotten, encrypted or partially submerged self inadvertently triggers an analogous set of misgivings by forcing the unconscious into a confrontation with a repressed primordial childhood that returns uncannily. Missionary tales in which the uncanny features against a colonial African backdrop adumbrates a unique literary vernacular. By refining this narrative style missionaries underscored the demonic quality of the austere terrain through which they travelled and the power of God to guide lost, despairing or beleaguered souls back to safety.18 A serialised tale first published in March 1883 documents the supposedly true story of a trader forlorn and abandoned by his companions in the desert. The author recounts that he became isolated with ‘no food, and no water’ and was ‘beginning to feel faint from hunger, very weary’.19 One of the defining facets of this ‘veldt fiction’ is how an already alien topography attains a brooding and uncanny intensity once cloaked in blackness. In the eerie silence of a night endured on the veldt, ‘[d]eep stillness reigned over him. The bright stars looked down upon him overhead. How very far off the stars looked in the dry clear atmosphere of the great interior Kalagadi desert!’20 He strives to combat the ‘strange loneliness’ that engulfs him by falling to his knees and singing, ‘Sun of my soul’: ‘THOU SAVIOUR DEAR,/It is not night if Thou be near;/O may no earth-born cloud arise/To hide Thee from Thy servant’s eyes.’21 Unlike the Freudian text, where uncanny sensation is in part fostered by foreign agency and the concept of difference leading to repetition, missionary writing articulates an image of the embattled or dislocated individual trying to transcend the gloomy ‘now’ by placing himself at God’s mercy. It is a suggestive and telling variation on the Freudian paradigm, proposing an opening of the self to paranormal or divine potencies so as to neutralise terrors synonymous with an uncanny and ostensibly measureless vacancy. The following morning, and after a short didactic lesson aimed at those readers who may have to traverse a forbidding desert expanse, the man awakens reinvigorated, emboldened and unexpectedly resolute. ‘Prayerfully placing himself in God’s hands’, he sets off across a terrain that is at once oddly familiar and profoundly unsettling in its contours: He felt sure he must have passed over it, without observing it, on the previous day. It was a road so seldom used that it had got overgrown with creepers and grass, and had become, in places, exceedingly indistinct. But in this lay his danger. If it was so indistinct that he could pass over it once without observing it, he would be very liable to pass over it a second time; all the more so, perhaps, because of his anxious state of mind. He must endeavour to keep

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himself cool and self-possessed. Where and when might he have passed over it, and in what direction did the road lie from where he now was, and how far off?22

The man is rescued from his situation after pleading and by relinquishing all responsibility over to the Almighty. God, in this schema, assumes the guise of an omnipotent puppet master who flexes celestial control over the lowly creations that he has forged in his own image. The tale implies that complete servility or unquestioning obedience will be rewarded with divine intervention. However, the narrative offers a problematic depiction of man as the mirror image of God who replicates or mimics His work as divine architect. The creation of spiritual others through conversion interrupts or complicates the direct link between the supreme sovereign and his subjects on earth, by placing the missionary figure as a mediator between the deity and the convert. Missionaries negotiated this theological discrepancy by recasting themselves in the role of beneficent surrogate fathers who bestowed upon the heathen populace a religious identity designed to reawaken a dormant love for the Christian God. They were soul-makers in the sense that Keats explicates in a letter dated 3 May 1819: ‘[t]here may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.’23 A tale published in February of 1881 echoes this Keatsian definition of soul-making. The narrator of ‘Little Ernest’ underlines the importance of parents in the religious development of children. The missionary, who was responsible for the conversion of Ernest’s parents, extols the parents of the boy for instructing him in the ways of God. It is, essentially, a eulogy to the Christian family structure. Ernest’s ardent faith is discernible in his eyes and features, which literally marks him out from non-believers. The missionary identifies Ernest by ‘his bright, mild and intelligent countenance’, a sharp contrast to the ‘poor, dark, heathen children, pretty-looking, but very ignorant, whom I saw ashore a few days afterwards’.24 In psychoanalytical terms this mimetic wish to create or refashion others becomes a defence mechanism that protects the ego from the pressures of the super-ego. Moreover, the phenomenon of doubling through imitation reflects a crucial moment in the psychosexual development of the child in the Oedipal stage when the child identifies with the same-sex parent and begins to mimic their actions. Freudian psychoanalytic theory posits that we are all shaped by a process of mimesis, that identity is partially formed through the uncanny repetition of our parents’ behavioural tics and verbal mannerisms.25 Doubling, therefore, is shown by Freudianism to lie at the centre

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of civilised culture and carries the possibility of uncanny reverberations. Culture is heimlich with its teleology, ‘mimetic narratives’, ‘its customs and coherence’, but cultural authority is simultaneously unheimlich; in order to be understood and revered as superior, it has to be ‘translated, disseminated, differentiated, interdisciplinary, intertextual, international, inter-racial’.26 Bhabha avers how the prestige of nineteenth-century colonial culture was predicated upon the vexed requirement for imitation and identification, which throws into sharper relief the issue of map-making. Bhabha turns the British middle-class sense of technological and intellectual kudos back upon itself to show how new sciences fostered uncanny doubles. For Bhabha it is of great significance that the filling up of blank spots in the encyclopedic cartography was instigated and then elaborated through colonial expansion.27 Yet the heimlich aspects of nineteenth-century progression cannot stifle the creation of unheimlich effect.28 Scholars of nineteenth-century fiction have traditionally construed the doubles that imbue Gothic texts as expressing a psychic desire to transcend the painfully starched and stultifying milieu of middle-class manners. Ralph Tymms refers to the double figure in his examination of literary psychology as ‘a figment of the mind, to which one attributes the promptings of the unconscious self, now dissociated from the conscious personality’.29 Albert Guérard interprets the double as ‘a personality we have attempted to disown’, with the function of ‘double literature’ to keep alive ‘a suppressed self’ threatened with annihilation by the watchdogs of bourgeois society.30 Discussions of the double are usually focused upon a repressed sexual self yearning for vagrant fantasy, epitomised by Dorian Gray’s libidinal pursuit of Sibyl, or some mystic return to a childhood freedom from constraint. However, for Guérard doubles also articulate the reclamation of an ‘illusory, original and fundamental self’.31 Carl Keppler in The Literature of the Second Self supplies a Jungian assessment of the psychic need to create a double or second self, which he defines as an aggregate or ‘cluster of rejected or inadmissible mental states’.32 It is ‘the self that has been left behind, or overlooked, or unrealised, or otherwise excluded from the first self’s conception [. . .] the self’ one ‘must come to terms with’, and drawing upon Jung, Keppler refers to the shadow ‘as the personified sum of all the inferior, less respectable, even criminal potentialities of one’s own psyche’.33 All these definitions provide varying perspectives on man’s need of a second self, but fail to supply a satisfactory explanation as to why it was that the double should be that preferred mode of expression. Why should this literary device then, popularised over the previous century, become so prevalent in the final years of the Victorian period? Could

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it be that from the 1850s onwards missionaries returned home from Central Africa with ethnographic studies of indigenous religion that were not polythetic in their design but rather anchored in this notion of the double? Freud was closest to acknowledging this debt. In his reading of Hoffman’s ‘The Sand-Man’, the eponymous figure terrifies because he implies a return to repressed psychic material; Freud challenges the narcissistic fantasies of immortality by calling up the spectral double via a process of self-duplication. The Sand-Man’s gruesome act of plucking out the eyes of children is another manifestation, for Freud, of castration anxiety, with Olympia, the robotic doll, standing in as a substitute against this fear.34 What we detect here is a return to the fetish. It is with the fetish and Freud’s delineation of the Sand-Man as castrating bogeyman that a Central African influence becomes discernible through the invocation of the evangelical missionaries’ arch nemesis – the witchdoctor.

Notes 1. This is Raphael’s response to Adam’s inquisitive interrogation of the architecture of Heaven: ‘be lowly wise:/Think only what concerns thee and thy being/Dream not of other worlds [. . .]’ John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Penguin, 2000), Bk.VIII; l. 173–5, pp. 173–5 (p. 171). 2. Hegel, 1900: p. 184. 3. Robert Bernasconi, ‘Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti’, from Hegel After Derrida, ed. by Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 41–64 (p. 44). 4. Ibid., p. 59. 5. Hegel, 1900: p. 93. 6. Snead, 1990: p. 64. 7. Ibid., p. 64. 8. Hegel, 1900: p. 99. 9. Snead, 1990: p. 63. 10. Ibid., p. 63. 11. Ibid., p. 64. 12. Snead, 1990: p. 67. This notion of incessant deferral carries a notable resonance in relation to the unsatisfactory endings offered by mesmeric fictions. Plausible conclusions are usually reliant upon the intrusion of technology, trains, telegrams, and so forth, which are also employed as a means of deferral. 13. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. XVII (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 217–52 (p. 238). 14. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny

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15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

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and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 14. See also Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Wolfreys, 2002: p. 14. Ibid., p. 14. Freud: 1955, p. 237. Freud apologises in the final chapter of Civilisation and its Discontents for making several digressions away from his central theoretical focus. Describing the text as a journey, Freud asks that he may be forgiven for ‘not having been a more skilful guide and for not having spared them empty stretches of road and troublesome détours’ (Freud, 1961a: p. 134). The uncanny sense that Cixous generates from her rereading of ‘The Uncanny’ seems to find due support in Freud’s acknowledgement that his writing style, with all its digressive détours, may in fact be responsible for this effect. The popularity and influence of this subgenre of missionary writing is evident in the unpublished Rider Haggard short story that is examined in the following chapter. Juvenile, March 1883. Ibid. Ibid. Juvenile, April 1883. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. by Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 250. Juvenile, February 1881. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen provides a detailed discussion of Freudian ethics, psychoanalysis and mimesis in The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, trans. by Douglas Brick et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Bhabha, 2004: p. 195. For a comprehensive discussion of the uncanny in Bhabha’s work see David Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). As Bhabha explains: The grand narratives of the nineteenth-century historicism on which its claims to universalism were founded – evolutionism, utilitarianism, evangelism – were also, in another textual and territorial time/space, the technologies of colonial and imperialist governance. It is the ‘rationalism’ of these ideologies of progress that increasingly comes to be eroded in the encounter with the contingency of cultural difference. (Bhabha, 2004: pp. 279–80)

29. Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1949), p. 82. See also Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (London: Palgrave, 2003). 30. Albert Guérard, The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Faulkner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 8. 31. Guérard, 1976: p. 2. 32. Carl Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972), p. 6; see also Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Wayne State: Wayne State University Press, 1970); Andrew J. Webber, The Doppelganger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Andrew Hock-Soon Ng, The

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Poetics of Shadows: The Double in Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008); and Caroline Rooney, The Androgyne and the Double in Literature, 1890–1940 (London: Routledge, 2002). 33. Keppler, 1972: pp. 12, 203. 34. Cixous, in Fictions and its Phantoms, takes exception to this idea of an endless substitution behind castration. ‘Even here, isn’t everything a repercussion, a discontinuous spreading of the echo, but of the echo as a displacement, and not in any way as a referent to some transcendental meaning?’ Cixous seems to identify within the uncanny an echo, or endless reverberation, that frustrates all attempts to impose concrete meaning. This is almost the direct opposite of how Central Africa defies taxonomical grouping in missionary writing, which, as mentioned earlier, is due to a perception of excessive meaning and not through a sense of lack. See Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’, trans. by Robert Denommé, New Literary History, Vol. 7, no. 3 (1976), pp. 525–48 (p. 536).

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Chapter 5

The Witchdoctor

Throughout the 1890s the Juvenile ran a serialised study of indigenous beliefs under the heading, ‘Heathen Worship’. It cut against the metonymic stereotypes arising out of hectic colonial expansion, reporting on the religious rituals that were uncovered in India, China, the South Pacific and Africa. There is ‘a great difference between one heathen people and another’, reported the Juvenile’s then editor, ‘[t]he things that they worship, and the way in which they worship, differ greatly, and we think that the readers of this Missionary Magazine will find a few papers on Heathen Worship helpful.’1 As the century drew to a close and advancements in printing technology progressed, the articles began to appear alongside ornate decorative drawings and, later, hazy photographs. Photography allowed the missionaries to capture images of each new tribe that they encountered or ‘discovered’. Nicolas Monti, in his collection of photographs taken in Africa between 1840 and 1918, conveys the mixture of awe and trepidation with which certain indigenous tribes greeted the camera.2 The use of photographic technology in the field of African exploration was responsible for a curious shift in the way missionaries were perceived. As Haggard illuminates in several imperial romances, missionaries were frequently coded from an African standpoint as shamans and sorcerers. The explorer Joseph Thomson documents how he would be typically received among African tribal elders when attempting to capture their portrait on camera. Furthermore, he also underscores the link between explorer, missionary and mesmerist that will be the main focus of the final part of this book, by recasting the European as white hierophant and someone not to be trusted: At most places my attempts had proved abortive, owing to the suspicious and superstitious notions of the people, who would just as soon have stood at the cannon’s mouth as face a camera. While the instrument was being erected they usually gathered round in crowds, open-mouthed with wonder

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and curiosity. But no longer did I slip the black cloth over my head for focussing purposes than they fled incontinently and neither bribery nor cajolery could avail to make them stand again. They were always thoroughly imbued with the idea that I was working witchcraft, and that my supposed charming would take some vital essence out of them. Hence not a few villages remained absolutely deserted as long as the camera continued on its legs.3

Nonetheless, the opening article of the Juvenile’s serialised study on indigenous religious observances and customs appears alongside a fullpage sketch of various ‘charms’ that are simultaneously elaborate and crudely basic. The title page accompanying the series jars optically and marks a key transition in the graphic design of the magazine, away from the florally pastoral towards a more Gothic visual vernacular. These two stylistic approaches appear discordantly above the first article of the New Year. Underneath a sprig of holly that festively frames the capital I, ‘In all ages, and in all lands’, is the bleak image of a skull lying on the desert earth surrounded by bones, ribs and legs, and in the background of this cheerless sandscape a smoky fire burns. However, the intention of the opening article is clear: it attempts to tie the sinister residual remnants depicted to the shadowy figure of the witchdoctor in the reader’s imagination. The word fetich, and the longer word fetichism, which came to us from Portuguese through the French, and came to the Portuguese from the Latin, are now well known. A fetich (pronounced fetish) is an object which men find already made, or make for themselves, and which, after passing through the hands of a priest, or charm-maker, or a medicine-man, is believed to possess divine power, and is worshipped. A fetich may be almost anything, a piece of wood, a bit of coloured cloth, a stone, especially a meteoric stone, some roots, twigs, reeds, the horn of a goat, a crocodile’s tooth, a few beads, a basket, a shell, or a number of these tied together, each one having its own special work to do.4

The extract describes how the medicine-man imbues inanimate charms with a recondite spiritual aura, transforming them into objects of veneration. Significantly, the coveting of ‘meteoric stone’ demonstrates a sense of the objects’ inherent value. The rock has seemingly acquired a cosmic energy even before it is handed over to the witchdoctor for blessing. These meteoric rocks problematise the supposition that native fetishes are ‘always some lifeless thing’, since they are shown to possess a cosmic intensity that marks them out from the assortment of teeth, horns and twigs presented. It is the numinous difference of the rocks that renders them desirable, and this understanding of difference undermines the editor’s rhetorical attempts to portray indigenous religion as offensively simplistic. This recognition of dissident difference further calls into

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question notions of Western superiority that were based upon a pride in acute empirical or scientific awareness. Again, the citation evidences the colonial connotations of the term ‘fetish’ in highlighting its importation into English via Portuguese. For Freud, the fetish embodies both castration and denial. It fossilises permanently the horror of castration in creating a memorial to this sensation within an individual’s memory, as well as supplying a mechanism to protect against the threat of castration – the fetish symbolises a moment of historical re-enactment. Therefore, in memorialising history, a repressed past could return to terrorise and torment at any time.5 The fetish enables communion with a past that is always in the circadian rhythms of Central African life, and it is only through the figure of the witchdoctor, priest or medicine-man that these worlds are brought into sharp focus. The fetish becomes the site of an uncanny double inscription, neither one nor the other, and stands between two divergent realms of felt experience, just as Olympia mediates between the human and automaton in an undecidable and ambivalent enunciatory space. The author of the piece observes that the fetish ‘may be a mere bone, or a stick, or a stone’, but that it is often ‘a figure’.6 In being associated with medicine-men, who interceded between the quotidian and mystical domains, fetishised figurines and trinkets became synonymous with the dead. According to the author this arises because: ‘(1) affection and respect [is directed towards] those who have gone, and (2) a belief in life after death’ exists; that deep ‘down in the hearts of men lies the thought or the feeling that though the body dies the soul lives on. It seems impossible to regard the dead as no longer existing.’7 The article states ambiguously that many ‘of the most degraded heathen tribes have the idea that the soul and the body are quite distinct’.8 Central African religion, according to the missionaries, posits a world that is dominated by revenants of the past. The influence of a missionary writing that surveyed indigenous manners and esoteric mores is apparent in the work of Adolphe Louis Cureau, who occupied various administrative posts within the French colonies of Central Africa, and engaged in an ethnographic project reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s District Commissioner in Things Fall Apart.9 Cureau, in his ‘study’ of the ceremonials of Savage Man in Central Africa (1915), observed that ‘[n]egro beliefs are founded upon a vague form of spiritualism in which man is supposed to consist of two substances, the physical body and a double which endows it with life’, which is ‘like the ka of the ancient Egyptians and the perisrit of modern spiritualists. To this double man owes his life and organic functions, and death means the separation of the two’.10 Cureau reiterates the earlier findings of the missionary explorers and amateur anthropologists that, ‘[t]he material

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or semi-material nature of the Negro’s double is again asserted by the persistence of its physical wants after death.’11 It too has sensual appetites that require satisfaction: They think that the soul is a kind of second self, one’s double as it were; that it goes away from the body during sleep or when one is faint, or in a fit, and comes back again when a man wakes up. In like manner, after death the soul is supposed to live on. It even comes back to earth sometimes and visits the living, appearing to them in dreams and visions. Besides which the soul is supposed to need food and other things, just as in life. That is why offerings of food are placed near graves. The new life beyond the tomb is simply a continuation of the life here.12

The missionaries delineate a world in which the living and deceased are seen to coexist in unity. The double appears to possess an eternal energy that has no need for sleep. Nightfall provides an opportunity for the double to disembark from the living body and savour transcendental or cosmic exploration. The double inhabits the shrouded spaces, flickering shadows or blind spots; using darkness as a portal through which to evade the clammy confines of the tangible for the spectral. Cureau presents his readership with an even more menacing portrait of African tribal mores, where the native population exists under the constant threat of attack from ghostly visitants: It is thought that the double may reappear on the earth after its separation from the body, for the Natives have a universal and unquestioned belief in ghosts, whose action upon the living is generally supposed to be noxious. Ghosts populate the dread mystery of darkness, taking a malicious delight in tormenting the former companions of their sublunary existence, causing nightmares and pulling the feet of sleeping men, or lying heavy on their chests, while they may also await belated travellers at some turn in the path, thrash them thoroughly, and sometimes carry them off into the realm of shadows.13

At the beginning of the extract, with Cureau’s cautious insertion of ‘[i]t is thought’, we are prompted to inspect the subsequent account as an index of native ignorance, irrational fear and backwardness. However, Cureau’s shift towards the more visceral phrasing, ‘thrash them thoroughly’, makes it difficult to discern if we are presented with solid empirical data or highly spiced subjective impressions. The ‘sublunary existence’ of the double, according to Cureau, induces grotesque and outlandish visions that torment the living nocturnally and always carry the danger of dragging the living ‘off into the realm of the shadows’.14 Cureau’s conception of the double is reminiscent of Hoffman’s SandMan. Both emerge out of the gloom to persecute those asleep, itself a sort of temporary death, with the robotic body of Olympia offering

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Nathanael relief from his childhood terror in a manner that is analogous to the witchdoctor’s grisly trinkets and fetishes. If we alter Freud’s formula, this conceptualisation of mortality as a linear continuation of life transmutes the African terrain into an uncanny hinterland. This radical reformulation of selfhood wherein the soul ‘is a kind of second self’, constantly embarking upon a process of departure and return, exemplifies the repetitive aspect of the uncanny. The double resists corporeal restriction; it complicates somatic inscriptions, and is thought to populate the surrounding earth long after the individual’s body has perished. This poses a problem for traditional Freudian psychoanalysis. Here the uncanny as experienced by the indigenous tribesmen of Central Africa is not produced through a designation of the uncanny as ‘something which is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch]’ that has ‘undergone repression and then returned from it’.15 This rival schema articulates the double as existing in tandem with the mundane and diurnal, and not induced by repression or a perceived lack. A double may be concealed from view but its presence and influence is never questioned or doubted: Europeans usually translate the word ‘Nganga’ by ‘fetish-doctor’ or ‘sorcerer’; but these terms do not adequately convey the extremely comprehensive meaning of the word, which comprises the notion of wise man, priest, magician, judge, and doctor. The Nganga’s sphere includes all mundane events which have hidden causes and exert an unknown influence upon mankind. It comprehends the secret forces of the material world, as well as everything bordering upon the psychic and psychological realms.16

In Cureau’s methodical assessment the witchdoctor is offered as a photographic negative of the psychoanalyst or at least someone who enjoys comparable kudos and mystique.17 Freud erroneously perceived the Orient as the antecedent of European modernity, and frequently used it throughout his work as a benchmark to demonstrate exactly how psychoanalysis epitomised a momentous milestone in the development of Western thought. Freud’s now (in)famous remark to Jung that that they were bringing the ‘plague’ to America – casting light on the residual remains of savage belief within the Western psyche – stands as partial testimony to this conviction. ‘Since almost all of us’, according to Freud, ‘still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation’.18 Africans appear in Freud’s research as spectres of a disordered, seemingly inscrutable past: ‘[m]ost likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him.’19

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In Totem and Taboo Freud expands his theory of haunting in relation to the ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’ races of the world. Comparative anthropology was still a fledgling, speculative science and Freud’s reliance upon incomplete or fragmentary evidence gleaned from spurious sources undermines the legitimacy of many of his core concepts. He fails to treat variance in race with the degree of nuance and sophistication that sexuality is afforded. In the first of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he lists, with cool clinical precision, a collection of erotic inclinations: homosexuality, paedophilia, masochism, sadism, necrophilia and others. Peter Gay avers that ‘Freud sounds critical and conventional, but plainly his heart was not censoriousness’.20 Freud provides an anatomy of these sexual drives ‘neutrally, even approvingly’, as they laid bare to him the ‘value of idealisation drive’ and highlighted that the ‘omnipotence of love shows itself perhaps nowhere more strongly than in aberrations as these’.21 The Freud who gauges libidinal drives reveals himself to be a psychological democrat through his humanistic conviction that all individuals share the same sexual drives and erotic lives. Such a ruminative and reflective stance is, for the main part, absent in Totem and Taboo, where Freud makes clear his deductions on sexual and emotional repression based upon seminal anthropological texts such as James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the dead return to vex the living in ghostly form, a phenomenon given the name of ‘projection’. It operates as a safeguard to the unconscious by shielding against any echoes of guilt and instigates recovery through a process of mourning. Freud claims to have accepted the presence of demons, ‘but not as something ultimate and psychologically unanalysable’, and believes himself to have got ‘behind the demons’ in explaining ‘them as projections of hostile feelings harboured by the survivors against the dead’.22 This sense of hostility originates from the manner in which taboos operate as an embodiment of obsessional neurosis, in turn founded upon a network of fundamental prohibitions that are ‘forcibly maintained by an irresistible fear’.23 Consequently, the ‘mechanism of compliance is fully internalised’ and becomes ingrained within personal behaviour.24 Freud suggests that for obsessional neurotics the first proscription placed upon them as a child ‘from a powerful internal force’ is not to touch your own genitals.25 Subsequently, this desire or tendency to touch becomes repressed, but the prohibition and the instinct persist to generate ambivalence. Freud believes that tribes of ‘primitive men’ have maintained an ‘ambivalent attitude towards their taboos’, and that in ‘their unconscious there is nothing they would like more than to violate them, but they are afraid to do so’.26 Freud, then, concludes that ‘the most ancient

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and important taboos’ are ‘not to kill the totemic animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totemic clan’.27 Cureau groups the native taboos that he encountered in Central Africa as hygienic taboos, ‘uncircumcised persons may not cohabit [. . .] pregnant women must abstain from the flesh of certain animals and from tainted meat’; ritual or religious taboos, ‘persons who have not been initiated are forbidden to look upon, touch, or invoke certain gods or amulets’; social taboos, where various tribes are prevented from looking at other tribes; and moral taboos, ‘such as prohibition of incestuous relations between near relatives’.28 These are identical to Freud’s observations, although Cureau’s addition of hygienic taboos gestures towards the contagious nature of ambivalence and temptation.29 Totem and Taboo lays bare the extent to which the colonial enterprise influenced early psychoanalytic theory and therapeutic technique. Freud calibrates and borrows from the religious intuitions of non-whites across the globe to devise remedies for the modern European psychical maladies. He is fascinated not so much with indigenous beliefs in ghosts or demons, but with how they might be exploited to address the debilitating and irrational fears of patients such as the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. A façade of scholarly curiosity is maintained throughout his work on ‘savages’, but this cannot conceal a latent mistrust and cynicism. He reinterprets the tribal community through the lens of ‘Darwin’s primal horde’, to reveal how within native clans an individual always emerges as the father figure, ‘who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up’.30 Unfortunately, Freud’s assessment of the primal horde fails fully to interrogate the witchdoctor or medicine-man as a sinister ‘tribal father’. In Totem and Taboo a reductive logic works for the purging of multiplicity in favour of the singular, the fixed and the definitive: The psychoanalysis of individual human beings [. . .] teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at the bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.31

Nevertheless, Freud does pinpoint a shared fear between Western and non-Western civilisations, that of darkness. For the people of Central Africa anxieties attached to an idea of threatening returns were effaced, as both the living and the dead were routinely brought into communication by the witchdoctor; in Europe the figure of the psychoanalyst occupies an equivalent position and carries out a similar operation. In 1919, long after his split from Freud, Jung published a paper that

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he had delivered to the Society for Psychical Research in the July of that year. Entitled ‘The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirit’, it outlines Jung’s assessment of spirits and souls in both ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ culture. Like Freud, Jung interprets spirits as unconscious projections that have managed to evade control through an association with the ego. This occurs because, as in dreams, the unconscious is unaware of the existence of ‘autonomous complexes’ that always first appear in projected form. The fact that these autonomous complexes remain undetected by the unconscious as the source of our dream material and as the cause of delusional hallucinations, such as ghosts or religious visions, proves for Jung that the unconscious ‘is not an indivisible unity but a divisible and more or less divided whole’. Jung arrives at this distinction by gauging the perceptions of primitive mankind and their relationship with the spirit world. He asserts that ‘[p]rimitive man [. . .] really lives in two worlds. Physical reality is at the same time spiritual reality’.32 Jung advances Freud’s hypothesis that we bear the marks of our savage history when comparing the different ways in which phantoms continue to haunt continental Africa and cosmopolitan Europe, and identifies at the centre of native belief in a turbulent spirit world the figure of the medicine-man. He observes that the key difference is ‘where the primitive speaks of ghosts, the European speaks of dreams and fantasies and neurotic symptoms, and attributes less importance to them than the primitive does’.33 Jung offers a vision of the European mind operating in an analogous fashion to its African counterpart, differentiated only by environmental and social conditions: ‘I am convinced that if a European had to go through the same exercises and ceremonies which the medicine-man performs in order to make the spirits visible, he would have the same experiences.’34 In both of these quotations, Jung goes even further than Freud in proposing the witchdoctor as an original version of the analyst. This is reinforced by the inclusion of a footnote recounting the story of a young African woman who fell seriously ill during his expedition in East Africa. Having diagnosed the patient as suffering from a ‘septic abortion’, Jung is ‘unable to treat her from our meager medical supplies, so her relatives sent for a nganga, a medicine man’.35 After circling around ‘snuffing the air’ in ‘ever-widening circles’, the medicine-man informs Jung that the girl is the only daughter of parents who died when she was young, and who are now living as spirits in the bamboo forest and returning every night ‘to make their daughter ill so that she could die and keep them company’.36 Jung, whose persistent belief in religious and spiritual phenomena strained his early relationship with Freud, betrays a degree of wide-eyed amazement at the girl’s recovery. ‘On the instructions of

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the medicine man a “ghost-trap”’ is laid, comprising a ‘little hut’ with a ‘clay figure of the girl’ placed inside along with some food, in the hope that the ghosts will be duped into thinking this rudimentary construction is actually their daughter’s dwelling and haunt there instead. Jung relates how it worked: ‘[t]o our boundless astonishment the girl recovered within two days. Was our diagnosis wrong? The puzzle remained unsolved.’37 Jung fails to offer any thoroughgoing psychological or clinical interpretation of the events. His acknowledgement that the tools at his disposal were insufficient to cure the sick girl, twinned with a refusal fully to analyse how her recovery was facilitated, gestures towards the miraculous healing powers that early psychoanalytic theory ascribed to the analyst.38 The frequency with which the medicine-man or witchdoctor reappears in the fiction produced by the LMS between 1860 and 1890 reflects an anxious and abiding fascination with this elliptical entity. The Central African shaman occupied an ambiguous position within many tribal communities and it was this uncertainty that induced fear among the exponents of evangelical philanthropy. The editors of the missionary magazines also sought to annul this threat through the creation of standardised depictions that were, paradoxically, either high-camp comic or diabolical. Consequently, such contradictory images of witchdoctors only served to heighten the potential misgivings that they could induce as uncanny figures. Different as each visual or descriptive strategy was, they all shared specific core facets. As J. Hillis Miller remarks in his chapter on Wuthering Heights dealing with uncanny effects produced by repetition: ‘[e]ach detail is in one way or another a track to be followed. It is a trace which asks to be retraced so that the something missing may be recovered.’39 In bridging the gap between the realms of the living and the dead, the quotidian and the metaphysical, the commonplace and the arcane, the witchdoctor could generate even greater existential unease. That uncanny effect: is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolises, and so on. It is this factor which contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices.40

Colonial discourse responded to the uncanny resonance produced by the witchdoctor’s ‘magical practices’ by attempting to undercut his position within tribal culture and stifle his mystical prestige. Colonial discourse and missionary writing appear to converge on the fraught subject of the witchdoctor. However it is important to acknowledge a subtle, yet

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crucial, difference in their respective constructions. Colonial chroniclers such as Cureau invariably depicted the witchdoctor as an unscrupulous charlatan or cunning trickster, while recognising that some were more ‘professional’ in their stage manipulation of occult potencies. Cureau robustly refuses to accredit the shaman with any authentic supernatural capacity, noting that it is through ‘[s]leight of hand, magical passes [. . .] grotesque compunction, an apparatus of rags and roughly carved images, a strange medley of marks traced upon the face and body, a crown of feathers perched upon the head, noisy instruments which are shaken like castanets’ that this figure secures hearts and minds.41 In a magisterially dismissive gesture typical of colonial discourse, where the native is always construed as a backward and inferior specimen prone to insular atavisms, Cureau declares that, if it were not for the ‘incurable folly of the vulgar herd’, the witchdoctor would not demand such reverence.42 He avers that: his frequent disappearance into some secret retreat where he is supposed to devote himself to magic arts and intercourse with supernatural powers are the distinguishing marks of the sorcerer in all ages, and are what endow the Nganga with authority and fame and so bright a halo that even failure itself cannot dim its gilding. In the eyes of the common people the Ngangas partake of the mystery and terror of the witchcraft to which they devote themselves, and that they are not always the strongest in their contests with the spirits who preside over the phenomena of Nature is not surprising; but it is their business to seek some new artifice by which they may conquer the hidden enemy.43

Even Jung who, to a certain extent, personifies a more carefully pondered approach to African tribal culture in his researches, betrays his colonialist credentials through his erroneous belief that the indigene is both eager exponent and hapless victim of a narrow primitivism: ‘[e]ven Christianity cannot save him (the colonial subject) from his corruption, for a highly developed religion like Christianity demands a highly developed psyche if its beneficial effects are to be felt.’44 Jung’s tone evokes the cool condescension of an evangelical missionary editor. In March 1883, juxtaposed against an article entitled ‘African Wizards’, was a pictorial representation of a witchdoctor labelled ‘A Wild Wizard at his Enchantments!’, in which an androgynous figure replete with a long flowing Mohawk haircut is delineated in a subservient posture, bending down meekly on both knees.45 This aura of androgyny is accentuated by the illustrator’s decision to decorate the wizard’s semi-naked body with an array of jewellery dangling from the neck, wrists and ankles. Furthermore, the confused nature of the scene is increased when analysing the background. The domicile of this figure is bedecked with a fabulous selection of pipes, figures, heads, skulls, herbs and potions.

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The artist’s intention was to erode the witchdoctor’s mystical potency by sketching him in this unmistakably comic manner as an absurd crossdresser, a gender-bending priest of high camp, not black magic. The essentially secular disposition of colonial discourse fixes the witchdoctor as a risible figure – a mere fairground huckster – but the missionaries were devoted to an enterprise of spiritual conversion. Numerous missionary reports and journal entries evoked the Central African expanse as a diabolical terrain: vague, shifting and amorphous. Even the measured, methodical secular eye of Cureau cannot refrain from cloaking his Central African milieu in ominously biblical terms when referring to it as a ‘pandemonium of spirits and ghosts’.46 Missionary writing was never able fully to subvert or exorcise the witchdoctor’s palpable threat as its ideological framework acknowledged the existence of demonic forces. This led to depictions of the native witchdoctor as an exaggerated darkling, a melding of arcane sage, healer and hierophant who elicits even from his most strident European detractors a tentative respect. This is borne out by an article that accompanies the illustration of the witchdoctor. The author remarks that this figure often ‘turns his knowledge to evil purposes’ and is capable of ‘gliding about through the streets of the town at night’,47 and ridicules the witchdoctor’s claim to possess supernatural authority over the weather: One of the readiest and most powerful spells by which to accomplish this end is to thrust the green branches of a certain bush into the fire, the proper charms being repeated at the same time. This is done by those who, travelling, wish to have the power, as they say they believe they have, to stop the soaking rain and tropical thunder-shower.48

This is a causal demonstration of the figure’s pernicious ability to manipulate the surrounding locale; a tendency, many missionaries averred, that was the product of an unholy alliance between the witchdoctor and the devil that could only be corrected through gospel ‘truth’: ‘[w]hat a blessing to this people has been the glorious Gospel, bringing them out of all this heathen darkness and making them “children of the light and of the day”; and now the cry must be, “All Africa for Christ”.’49 In the following quotation Cureau highlights the difference between colonial and missionary writing. Cureau’s reaction to a supernatural tale reported by missionaries provides a succinct survey of the conflicting ideological approaches employed by the two perspectives in relation to witchdoctors. Cureau queries and deplores the missionaries’ rapt attitude towards the ‘Ngangas’: I have been assured by the missionaries that some of these Ngangas, both male and female, are capable of producing psychical phenomena, and

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two or three cases of levitation and bilocation have been related to me. Unfortunately, such reports have come through at least two intermediaries before reaching me, and I think that the conditions under which the phenomena were observed left much to be desired.50

Cureau only knows ‘one of these strange cases which is vouched for by an eye-witness’, the case of ‘a sorcerer who applied a red-hot iron plate to his leg without causing a burn’51. However, Cureau states unequivocally that ‘no matter how much one may believe in the veracity of a person who relates such a tale, phenomena of this sort are so marvellous’, that the sceptical and forensic colonial imagination, ‘requires numerous proofs and experiments which should take place under conditions that put them beyond all criticism before they can be considered unquestionable’.52 In contrast, missionary writing employed a more complex strategy to undercut the witchdoctor’s position of local prestige. Conversion narratives published in missionary magazines frequently finessed a distinctive style and structure. An intimate, homely and pastoral tone was displaced by (melo)dramatic colonial standoffs between missionary and native magus. Traditional narratives of conversion followed a comforting, if implausible, trajectory according to which the miraculous mass proselytising of indigenous tribes could be achieved through the simplest acts. As missionary hierarchies became more aware of the grave difficulties facing Central African ‘soldiers of Christ’, the conversion narratives that filled the pages of the Juvenile began to alter in verbal texture. The ‘salvation’ of young children remained a straightforward enterprise and the spiritual cleansing of tribal chiefs still played upon their supposedly squalid self-interest. However, the witchdoctor and the respect/fear that he commanded remained an obdurate practical as well as formal problem. A telling example of this adversarial conversion narrative appears in an article entitled ‘Worshipping the Devil’. The editor claims that he has faithfully transcribed the testimony of the missionary involved in this remarkable confrontation. The editor evinces a blunt disregard for the complex religious observances of the Abeokuta people, preferring instead to construe their ceremonial customs through a distorted Christian lens. This tactic permits the editor to state confidently that one of the ‘idols worshipped by the people of Abeokuta is Eshu or the Devil’.53 The story intensifies when the witchdoctor spots an approaching missionary, flashes a cruel smile and stretches out across the footpath in obstruction. Within seconds a crowd of hundreds has formed around them to create a man-made auditorium for this standoff. ‘Such a chance of preaching the Gospel’ the editor writes, ‘no missionary would allow to pass by, and such a chance of speaking openly against

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idolatry could not failed to be used. Turning from the priest to a native woman, I asked, “Do you worship the Devil?”’54 The missionary is presented as galvanised by her reply of ‘I do’ and betrays no discernible sign of intimidation in the face of this throng who answer his interrogative questioning in unison. The missionary attempts to divest the witchdoctor’s fetish object of the fearful aura that it possesses, ‘[t]hat thing in the priest’s hand is dead, and powerless, and helpless. But not so the Devil’.55 The missionary comprehends how the fetishised object operates within the Abeokuta community, not as symbolic of a grievous deficiency, but rather a superabundance of unsettling diabolic vitality. Towards the climax of the tale fractures emerge in the narrative fabric, making it easier to discern editorial intervention. After courageously defeating his primitive assailant by forcing him to retreat or face the ignominious exposure of his corruption, the missionary allegedly pockets all the sacrificial cowries made to Eshu. The missionary then proceeds to tell the crowd what he knows about the Devil through the word of God: The priest moved away, and not a few of the people followed his example. But some listened, while I told them about sin and Satan, and while I afterwards spoke about the Saviour, and the way of salvation through Him. Then I went on my way.56

The editor retools an account of failed or imperfect conversion so as to imply an improbable evangelical victory. While the witchdoctor retreats, he is not altogether vanquished by the encounter, and a minority of villagers, rather cryptically referred to as ‘not a few’, stays behind after the confrontation to listen to the missionary’s instruction. By the close, however, the success of his proselytising remains unclear. The tale captures both the acute practical difficulties faced by missionaries stationed in Central Africa and the witchdoctor’s entrenched position among the indigenes, two themes that recur in an 1891 article entitled ‘Heroes of the Mission Field’. This account is a laudatory biographical overview of Alexander Mackay, a pioneering missionary to Uganda, and follows on from the series dramatising the follies of ‘Heathen Worship’. The article also delineates the story of Mtsea, who falls sick while labouring alongside Mackay on a 239 mile-long road linking Mwapwa, in what is now known as Uganda, and the coast. Mtsea is sent back along the road christened by locals as ‘the big road of the white man’.57 Mackay, who ‘taught the chiefs and king’s pages to read, and printed some lesson books with blocks he had cut’, struggles to make significant spiritual inroads in the community because of the ‘superstitions of the people’, who ‘believe that spirits enter into their sorcerers or wizards’.58 In a

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frantic bid to cure Mtsea, the King of the tribe sends for Mukusa,59 despite the protestations of Mackay, who reads extracts from the Bible to convince them of the native shaman’s wickedness. The King, who ‘wanted missionaries to work and not to teach’, ignores Mackay’s pleas and during this moment of crisis returns to the ancient religion of his forefathers: Mackay showed his hands, black and hard with working in iron, and said he had come to teach first, yet he had never refused to work. Evil triumphed, and Mukasa came and sang prophecies; but the cure which the mere presence of the sorcerer was to work did not take place, and Mukasa ran away in the night. [. . .] He (the King) said the Missionaries were mad, and Mackay more mad than others, because he had told them that it was only playing with religion to say he was a Christian one day, a Mohammedan the next, and the third day that he was going to follow his old religion.60

Despite his failure to cure Mtsea, the belief in the witchdoctor’s mystical prowess and his role as high priest of their religion remains undiminished. Although it mobilises a hackneyed rhetoric that frames native chieftains as fickle and boorish, the article goes some way to concede the daily privations and disappointments of Mackay, whose ‘black’ hands testify to his unstinting physical efforts and fierce dedication. Not only were missionaries engaged in an ongoing battle against native ‘heathenism’, but they were also routinely confronted with competing religious doctrine. Christianity was not the first creed to arrive in these remoter parts of Africa, accompanied and bolstered by commercial possibilities. Islam was the religion of the much loathed Arab slave traders and merchants who, although primarily based along the continental periphery, transacted lucrative trade deals with the more prominent chiefs. Ultimately, both religions are impotent against the primal appeal of an unfathomably ‘old religion’.

Notes 1. Juvenile, January 1890. 2. Nicolas Monti, Africa Then: Photographs 1840–1918 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987). See also James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 1997) and Robert Papstein, ‘Creating and Using Photographs as Historical Evidence’, History in Africa: A Journal of Method, no. 17 (1990), pp. 247–65. 3. Joseph Thomson, ‘Adventures in Rovuma’, in Good Words for 1882 (London: Isbister, 1882), p. 244. 4. Juvenile, January 1890.

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5. McClintock understands the fetish as symbolic of historical memory that plays out at an intensely personal level and not as simply reducible to personal or universal history. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995). 6. Juvenile, January 1890. 7. Juvenile, January 1890. 8. Ibid. 9. I am, of course, referring to the final page of Achebe’s novel. ‘He [the District Commissioner] had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.’ Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 151. 10. Adolphe Louis Cureau, Savage Man in Central Africa, trans. by E. Andrews (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915), p. 297. 11. Ibid., p. 297. 12. Cureau, 1915: p. 297. This extract serves as a vivid illustration of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘the paradox of co-existence’. They argue for a fresh conception of time in which it becomes impossible to state that the present is and the past was. Instead they view the present as is not, perpetually suspended in a never-ending state of becoming, and already outside of itself. The past is always present in the present. The past does not fade away to be usurped with a new present once it has ceased to be, but actually coexists in the modern moment. 13. Cureau, 1915: p. 298. 14. It is a nightmarish vision of living under the threat of darkness – of being engulfed by shadows – and a misgiving that was not unique to the indigenes of Central Africa. This fear of darkness was imported back into Britain and demanded that fin de siècle writers finesse new ways of depicting the dank, menacing enclaves within the modern metropolis. The double in fin de siècle Gothic fiction is frequently associated with gloomy recesses and ‘twilight zones’; even Bunbury in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is concocted to facilitate access to arcane pleasures that can only be savoured in ‘shrouded’ loci. This immersion in atavistic darkness accrued colonial connotations from the unique discourses of Central Africa. 15. Freud, 1955: p. 245. 16. Cureau, 1915: p. 303. 17. This is by no means an original criticism of Freudian theory. Deleuze and Guattari ceaselessly probed Freudian hypotheses for their traces of imperialist cant. From the beginning of psychoanalytic history Freud, the atheist, was accused of forging a new secular religion, although largely feared because of its perceived Jewishness. 18. Freud, 1955: p. 242. 19. The effect, for Freud, of this savage ancestry manifests itself within a Christian veneration of the dead. 20. Gay, 1989: p. 146. 21. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. VII (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 121–245 (p. 161). 22. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, The Standard Edition of the Complete

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. XIII (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 1–162 (p. 61). Ibid., p. 31. Harvie Ferguson, The Lure of Dreams (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 114. Ibid., p. 114. Freud, 1957: p. 31. Ibid., p. 32. Cureau, 1915: pp. 314–15. Harvie Ferguson notes that ‘[a]mbivalence and temptation are highly contagious and this makes taboo easily transmitted from one person to another; or from one object to another’ (Ferguson, 1996: pp. 114–15). Freud, 1957: p. 125. Ibid., p. 147. Carl Jung, ‘The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirit’, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. by R. F. C Hull, ed. by Gerhard Adler, Michael Fordham, Michael McGuire and Herbert Read (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), par. 582. Jung, 1970: par. 573. Ibid. Ibid., p. 304, n. 2. Ibid., p. 304, n. 2. Ibid., p. 304, n. 2. The case histories of Emmy von N. and Fräulein Elisapeth von R. demonstrate the remarkable healing power that Freud and his acolytes attributed to psychoanalysis; they were also pivotal cases in the therapeutic history of psychoanalysis as Freud turned his back on hypnosis in favour of free association. J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher, 1982), p. 60. Freud, 1955: p. 244. Cureau, 1915: pp. 304–5. Ibid., pp. 305–6. Ibid., pp. 305–6. Jung, 1970: para. 572. Juvenile, March 1883. Cureau, 1915: p. 299. Juvenile, March 1883. Ibid. Ibid. Cureau, 1915: p. 307. Ibid. I discuss the medical and colonial history of anaesthesia in Part III. However, Cureau’s remarks bring to mind the history of James Esdaile, an individual who occupies an unlikely position of prominence within the history of colonial medicine. Special Collections at Glasgow University hold several of Esdaile’s key publications. He was the son of a Church of Scotland Reverend and a graduate of Edinburgh University. Esdaile remained a deeply religious man during his time as Head of the Native Hospital at Hooghly, Bengal, but also throughout his entire adult life. Religion, forensic medicine, early psychiatry and mesmerism all converge in James

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Esdaile’s research. A divisive figure at home and in colonial India, Esdaile claimed to have ‘performed several thousand operations on mesmerised patients’, and was opposed to the use of chemical anaesthesia. However, more controversial was the importance Esdaile attributed to indigenous beliefs and mesmeric observances. Waltraud Ernst notes that the search for indigenous drugs to add to the increasing Western pharmacopoeia and to be exploited by pharmaceutical manufacturers ‘was encouraged, provided their efficacy could be scientifically established and their cost compared with European medicines. This was not a relationship where indigenous communities and colonialists came together to share medical knowledge. It was a parasitic one-way exchange.’ Colonialists arrived with their immaculate handbooks stating with precision hygienic routines that must be adhered to. Anxieties arose relating to the concentrated proximity in which colonialists were living alongside natives that were not simply germaphobic paranoia, but the expression of a fear that Western empiricism was in some way endangered by primordial native knowledge. In an unusual reversal of imperial bureaucratic procedure, physicians were not charged with pedagogical responsibility. The white physician/native healer relationship was not teleological. Instead, the colonialist cannily manipulated the ability to heal by using it as a powerful weapon designed to enforce discipline. Medical science, according to Ernst, ‘was the major yardstick for medical practice in the colony’ because it was intrinsically bound to the civilising mission. The ubiquitous belief amongst the colonialists pertaining to the superiority of Western medicine helped to legitimise their presence by systematically denigrating indigenous treatments. European physicians were not interested in a porous relationship based upon knowledge transfer, but in adopting, unofficially, certain local practices. These native techniques were then re-appropriated having passed through a process of fastidious scrutiny. Waltraud Ernst, ‘Colonial Psychiatry, Magic and Religion. The Case of Mesmerism in British India’, History of Psychiatry, Vol. 15, no. 57 (2004), pp. 54–76. See Derek Forrest, Hypnotism: A History (London: Penguin, 2000). Cureau, 1915: p. 307. Juvenile, September 1883. Ibid. Ibid. Juvenile, September 1883. Juvenile, January 1891. Ibid. The name contains interesting echoes of both Haggard’s witchdoctors Menzi and Hokosa and perhaps evidence of Haggard’s own reading or study of Juvenile’s missionary fiction. Juvenile, January 1891.

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Chapter 6

Rider Haggard

The Days of My Life (1926) ‘Now I was not more superstitious than other people’, remarks Allan Quatermain in Allan’s Wife (1889), ‘but somehow old Indaba-zimbi impressed me. Also I knew his extraordinary influence over every class of native, and bethought me that he might be useful in that way.’1 Quatermain’s grudging yet sincere respect for the supernatural gifts of his companion, confidante and protector, Indaba-zimbi, mirrors that of his creator Rider Haggard. Haggard’s time as a colonial administrator in South Africa, under the tutelage and charge of Sir Henry Bulwer, had instilled in him an ethnographic fascination with, and admiration for, the indigenous tribes of southern Africa. The daily experiences and the diverse people he encountered would have a decisive effect on the literature he produced upon his return to England. Africa was to Haggard, what India was to Kipling and the South Sea Islands were to Stevenson: it afforded an inexhaustible wellspring of inspiration and a vivid backdrop to so many of his adventure romances, and its hypnotic allure is even detectable in some of the tales not primarily set in the continent. In his 1926 autobiography, The Days of My Life, Haggard recalls an early encounter with an African witchdoctor: ‘I saw a curious sight the other day, a witch dance. I cannot attempt to describe it, it is a weird sort of thing.’2 Haggard’s inability to articulate or depict the scene with which he is confronted exemplifies the shortcomings of colonial discourse and a teasing quality always present in his oeuvre. This imbues his narratives with a loaded ambiguity, and undermines Haggard’s subtle, searching criticisms of the imperial enterprise. As a young boy his curiosity and imagination were piqued by missionary tales of colonial exploration, but when finally brought into visceral proximity with a native witchdoctor he finds that he can only label it vaguely, or evasively, as ‘a weird sort of thing’. Furthermore, Haggard provides a

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harrowing account of how British soldiers were instructed to deal with these monitory figures: The Chief Interpreter of the Colony told me that he was in Zululand some years ago and saw one of these witch-findings. ‘There’, he said, ‘were collected some five thousand armed warriors in a circle, in the midst of which the witches [I should have said the witch-doctors] danced. Everyone was livid with fear, and with reason, for now and again one of these creatures would come crooning up to one of them and touch him, whereupon he was promptly put out of the world by a regiment of the king’s guard.’3

Despite the coolly detached rendering of this murderous incident, Haggard struggled with the casual brutalities and the woeful shortsightedness that, for him, epitomised the British military campaign in South Africa. His autobiography denounces the intolerant arrogance of Theophilus Shepstone, whose paranoid resolve to undermine the much feared and admired Cetewayo ultimately contributed to the second Boer War. Haggard’s encounters with African witchdoctors lent a peculiar verve and urgency to several of his unjustly neglected romances. He reflects that, in those fictions, ‘the reader may find a true account of the doings of these awful witch-doctors’.4 He echoes Allan Quatermain when wondering if witchdoctors were ‘merely frauds or whether they possess [. . .] some share of occult power’ as he had known them ‘to do the strangest things, especially in the ways of discovering cattle or other property’.5 Haggard’s multifaceted view of the witchdoctor as both sly fraudster and tenaciously resilient magus is hardly surprising given his own ambivalent position as both a colonial bureaucrat and fledgling artist. However, as with his hero Quatermain, Haggard’s stubborn belief in the witchdoctor’s supernatural capability repeatedly stifles the underlying doubt, scepticism and scorn. Like so many other literary luminaries and public intellectuals of the fin de siècle, Haggard manifested a keen interest in psychical research. However, unlike his contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle and his great friend Andrew Lang, who would in 1911 become its president, Haggard in his lifetime was never a fully paid-up member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Yet his familiarity with the London literary scene brought him into close contact with those who were, such as Sir Oliver Lodge, William James and the Besants. The SPR was an assemblage of some of the epoch’s most unique, probing and fiercely iconoclastic minds, all committed to interrogating psychical phenomena through the application of a more stringent empirical rationale. Its journal provided access to a richly diverse and receptive audience for the era’s greatest thinkers to test out their hypotheses, with Freud’s first

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publication in English printed by the SPR in 1912.6 Although his most celebrated novels exhibit an acute preoccupation with recondite, paranormal and preternatural agencies – especially King Solomon’s Mines (1885), She (1887) and Allan Quatermain (1887) – the tragic death of his son Jock in 1891 of ‘a perforating ulcer after an attack of measles’ marks a notable fault-line in Haggard’s studies.7 In a quirk of eerie coincidence, sadly prophetic, Allan Quatermain begins after the eponymous protagonist has just interred his own son Harry: Poor Harry to go so soon! Just when his life was opening to him. He was doing so well at the hospital, he had passed his last examination with honours, and I was proud of them, much prouder than he was, I think. And then he must go to that smallpox hospital. He wrote to me that he was not afraid of smallpox and wanted to gain the experience; and now the disease has killed him, and I, old and grey and withered, am left to mourn over him, without a chick or child to comfort me. I might have saved him, too – I have money enough for both of us, and much more than enough – King Solomon’s Mines provided me with that; but I said, ‘No, let the boy earn his living, let him labour that he may enjoy rest’. But the rest has come to him before the labour. Oh, my boy, my boy!8

The prominence of witchdoctors and indigenous lore in Haggard’s fiction increases markedly after the death of his son, for Jock’s untimely demise reawakens in Haggard a fascination with African spiritualism, revenants and reincarnation.9 Haggard adroitly weaves into the imaginative fabric of the tales composed after Jock’s death a complex repackaging of Central African superstition that makes negotiation with the deceased possible. In this period of bewildering advance – shaped by a drive towards technological and objective knowledge that steadily effaced a sense of the anagogic in nature – Haggard repeatedly depicts landscapes in which the deceased inhabit a recondite realm separated from, yet blurring into, that of the living. Communication and interaction require the presence of some mediating figure – in his tales a witchdoctor, who would be lampooned and mocked by white sceptics but rarely exposed as a complete swindler, invariably fulfilled this task. Again, Haggard’s ghostly presences are not a manifestation of guilt felt by the living – the Freudian ‘projection’ – but represent a Central African scheme in which the dead seem to touch tangible contours with spectral fingertips. Haggard observes that ‘the natives have, or had, some almost telegraphic method of conveying news of important events of which the nature is quite unknown to us white men’.10 The final two sections of this chapter shift focus from Haggard’s canonical works and prioritise instead the unfairly neglected novellas and short stories to

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survey the double, as well as the potency of the fetish and epic colonial standoffs between white missionaries and native witchdoctors.

The Wizard (1896) According to Gerald Monsman, The Wizard is ‘[p]ossibly the finest “romancette” or “romancella” by Haggard, somehow disregarded from the time of its publication in 1896 to the present.’11 Monsman’s affirmative reaction seems all the more curious given The Wizard’s queasy amalgam of xenophobic animus and eugenic enthusiasm. Haggard’s corpus, although vulnerable to charges of racist paranoia, also vouchsafes ambivalent spaces and lacunae that invite more nuanced interpretations. Monsman, in his introduction to The Wizard, adumbrates a reason why this deeply vexed yet intriguing text seems so conspicuously out of kilter with the rest of the Haggard canon. Monsman remarks that this ‘native tale of the fantastic and occult’ was first sold ‘for one shilling in October 1896 in J. W. Arrowsmith’s Christmas Annual’.12 This biographical sliver reveals Haggard as one of the most commercial authors of the era not just in terms of sales but in his hard-headed and methodically conceived approach to composition. The partial inspiration for King Solomon’s Mines was a wager between himself and his brother during a train journey spent debating the tremendous popular success of Treasure Island. Haggard’s prodigious output was in part a result of his business acumen and savoir faire, as well as his capacity to craft novels that catered to the tastes of a mainstream readership. While Edward Said was wrong to relegate Haggard to a second tier of belle époque adventure romancers – what Said refers to as the ranks of ‘lesser writers’ – it is equally misguided to promote Haggard to the ranks of great literary artists.13 The essence of Haggard’s art – at least as much occupation as vocation – is captured by his thought-provoking reference to Walter Besant in The Days of My Life. For Besant the romance genre constitutes a rather restricted and limited literary repertoire: only ‘one bag of tricks’.14 This apparently dismissive remark prompts us to code the author as a sorcerer, who by a subtle alchemy shapes the nebulous patterns of imagination into tangible, printed matter. Yet for Haggard, Besant’s judgement also positions the aspiring novelist as a fusion of stage magician and music-hall mesmerist. In later life, as detailed in his autobiography, Haggard regarded his non-literary work – studies covering agrarian reform in England and the agricultural potential of South Africa – with immense and justifiable pride. He also averred that ‘no one has ever written a really first-class romance dwelling solely [. . .]

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upon the utterly alien life of another world or planet with which human beings cannot possibly have any touch’.15 The Wizard may appear on a cursory inspection as little more than a reductive, humourless colonial narrative of spiritual ‘conversion’. Yet by deploying and refining missionary tropes, Haggard fashions a text that consistently unsettles our generic and sentimental expectations. Thomas Owen is a noxious blend of chauvinistic conceit and messianic delusion precisely because Haggard, in writing for the Christmas Annual, was targeting an adolescent readership familiar with, and largely appreciative of, the stylistic mannerisms synonymous with the Juvenile magazine. The ease with which Haggard aped the inimitable narrative tics of missionary fiction suggests that he must have grown up reading the CMS and LMS publications assiduously. Indeed, the initial evocation of the Amasuka in Haggard’s novella invites comparison with numerous ethnographic surveys published in the missionary press. The tribesmen are figured as ‘awful people’, ‘vigorous in mind and body’ and ‘warriors from generation to generation, but superstition-ridden and cruel’.16 The barely repressed homoeroticism of ‘vigorous in mind and body’, adumbrates the Amasuka’s libidinal gusto, and triggers the familiar yet confusing images of trepidation and lust in the coloniser’s gaze. Thomas Owen is himself mesmerised by what he construes as the sybaritic excesses of Central African tribal life. Owen is enticed to this region by anecdotes relating to the Amasuka that ‘echoed in his brain like the catch of tune’.17 Owen is only equipped to undertake this gruelling placement in an atavistic foreign hinterland after serving his apprenticeship in the dank spaces of inner city squalor and rural deprivation. The narrative implies these biographical and geographical blanks when ‘we’ are informed that Owen has changed ‘somewhat since we last saw him’.18 Haggard deliberately collapses conventions of temporal and spatial orientation throughout the tale. The Central African terrain – ‘some months’ journey ‘by boat and ox-waggon from the coast’ – situates the narrative in an elliptical locale of dissolving borders and multiplied perceptions where the miraculous seems wedded to the mundane.19 The effect that this unsettling, enigmatic cartography has on Owen is profound. His transformation, or perhaps rebirth, sees Owen alter from an evangelical missionary into a white witchdoctor. The ‘hot African sun has bronzed’ his skin; his face is ‘thinner’, and his eyes are charged with a spirituality that makes them ‘shine still more strangely’.20 Owen’s ‘strange’ eyes, then, align him directly with Hokosa, who possesses a ‘spiritual face and terrible calm eyes’, suggesting that he can now maintain a mesmeric hold over vulnerable people – Svengali-like powers to convert and control.21 Hokosa assumes that Owen must be a white

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wizard: ‘“Where then is your spear, Messenger?” “Here”, said Owen, presenting to his eyes a crucifix of ivory, most beautifully carved. “I perceive that you are of a family of wizards”, said the man, and fell back.’22 This apparitional encounter plays out in the uncanny shadows of Central Africa. Owen and Hokosa are depicted as ghostly doubles of each other. The rebirth of Owen as a white witchdoctor permits access to this intricately textured hauntography where the living and dead coexist. Upon waking one night after slowly labouring over ‘a translation of passages from the Gospel of St. John in to the language of Amasuka’ – an act of literary doubling – Owen stares with ‘empty eyes’ into the ‘blackness of the night’ and discovers a mysterious dance of shadows: Now it was as he sat thus that a great agony of doubt took possession of his soul. The strength which hitherto had supported him seemed to be withdrawn, and he was left, as John had said, ‘quite alone’. Strange voices seemed to whisper in his ears, reproaching and reviling him; temptations long ago trampled under foot rose again in might, alluring him.23

If, as Julian Wolfreys posits, ‘to tell a story is to always invoke ghosts, to open up a space through which something other returns’, then this Central African hauntography is the site of myriad spectral inscriptions.24 In this eerie milieu the uncanny is generated by ghastly intimations of limitless multiplicity and the ineffable. Haggard remarks concerning the strangely alluring Hokosa that ‘all’ he did ‘cannot be described, because it is indescribable’.25 If the Freudian uncanny breeds mingled sensations of fear, terror and anxiety, Haggard’s version in this narrative signifies a horrified immobility, as well as a strangulated incapacity to utter one’s felt experience. ‘For an instant’, Owen ‘was dismayed; there was something terrifying in this numberless multitude of warriors, and the thought of the task that he had undertaken crushed his spirit.’26 Haggard presents Central Africa as an environment of temporal indeterminacy and spiritual paralysis. Hokosa, desperately seeking inspiration to thwart the troublesome Owen, coerces his mistress Noma to offer her earthly body as a portal to the world of unseen spirits. Noma is instructed to sit ‘as a corpse sits’ and ‘for a little while you shall die’, which in turn will allow Hokosa to fill her ‘body with the soul of him who sleeps beneath’.27 Initially repulsed by the idea, Noma is mollified by Hokosa’s tactics that appeal to her vanity and desire for power. She declares a love for ‘all things strange’ and that she will be proud to claim that her ‘breast has held the spirit of a king’.28 Hokosa lulls Noma into a trance that is not a trance. Bound by her wrists and ankles, he places Noma into a kind of mesmeric sleep: ‘he knelt before, staring into her

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face with his solemn eyes and muttering: “[o]bey and sleep”’.29 This arcane transaction can be measured against some of the therapeutic techniques employed in Freudian analysis. Hokosa positioned at the head of his wife bears prophetic resemblance to a ghoulish analyst, with Noma dutifully playing the part of the analysand. She is placed into a hypnotic hinterland of consciousness, neither dead to the sublunary world nor fully alive. It is in this no-man’s-land of being that the barely concealed apparitions haunting the earth become manifest in her physical form. Haggard’s narrator describes how a ‘change came over the girl’s lovely face, the last awful change of death’.30 However, neither Noma nor the King with whom she attempts to converse are dead, but simply waiting to return. For Jacques Derrida it is impossible to predict the revenant’s return, yet Hokosa is cast as a nefarious conductor capable of collapsing the fragile partitions between the living and the deceased. Derrida attests that ‘a spectre is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.’31 The dead monarch of Denmark is replaced in Haggard’s scheme with the dead King of the Amasuka, Umsuka, with Haggard seemingly contradicting Derrida’s assertion that the habits of the spirit world cannot be regulated: The Witch of Endor repeated no formula, but she raised the dead; and so did Hokosa the wizard. But he buried his face in the grey dust of the grave, he blew with his lips into the dust, he clutched at the dust with his hands, and when he raised his face again, lo! It was grey like the dust. Now began the marvel; for, though the woman before him remained a corpse, from the lips of that corpse a voice issued, and its sound was horrible, for the accent and tone of it were masculine, and the instrument through which it spoke – Noma’s throat – was feminine. Yet it could be recognised as the voice of Umsuka the dead king. 32

The effect that this experience has upon Noma is marked. As the conduit and facilitator, or as I would contend the analyst, Hokosa is largely unaffected by this search for spectral transcendence; Noma, on the other hand, is oppressed by the revenants long after Hokosa’s conversion to Christianity, and after she has been released from his mesmeric sway.33 Just as Derrida illuminates that manner in which the modern moment is continually haunted by the stratified past, Noma embodies Freud’s understanding of repression as a psychic mechanism. Repression posits a temporal formula where past, present and future are all inextricably woven together. An individual may be successful in repressing or killing off a traumatic memory or an instinctual impulse; however, its powerful residue will survive in some manner of external articulation. ‘The process of repression’, according to Freud, ‘is not to be regarded as an event which takes place once, the results of which are

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permanent, as when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead; repression demands a persistent expenditure of force.’34 Haggard’s own repressed feelings attached to the death of his beloved son continued to exert a persistent force upon his life and publications, as reflected by the ghostly apparitions that came to populate the psychic terrain of his African romances.35 The Wizard contains the haunting traces of Allan’s Wife written seven years earlier and, rather crucially, two years before the death of Jock. The trauma of losing his son partially accounts for a dark obsession lying at the heart of The Wizard linked to rebirth and resurrection. For whatever reason, Haggard sought imaginatively to revisit and excavate several narrative layers of Allan’s Wife when drafting The Wizard. Like Owen, Allan is also depicted as a white ghost accompanied throughout the text by the benevolent Indabazimbi, who possesses a mesmeric prowess beyond the comprehension of the fiercely pragmatic white men. Allan, the son of a missionary stationed in Africa, learns from his enigmatic companion that ‘[y]ou white men are very clever, but you don’t quite know everything. There are men in the world who can make people believe they see things which they do not see.’36 This leads Allan to conclude that Indaba-zimbi is able to mesmerise a ‘whole crowd of onlookers’ and he is struck by a sense that this ‘man had some occult power’.37 Similarly, Allan’s Wife contains a moment when Indaba-zimbi is thought to bring Allan back from the dead in a scene that directly mirrors that of Noma’s death in The Wizard, but Allan’s demise is portrayed as an instance of camp pantomime. Indaba-zimbi’s whispering of ‘roll over like one dead’38 in the ear of the prostrate Allan is replaced by Hokosa’s deathly ‘[o]bey and sleep’.39 Allan pretends to play dead in order to escape peril: Then slowly and with the greatest dignity I gradually arose, stretched my arms, yawned like one awaking from heavy sleep, turned and looked upon them unconcernedly. While I did so, I noticed that old Indaba-zimbi was almost fainting from exhaustion. Beads of perspiration stood upon his brow, his limbs trembled, and his breast heaved.40

Most obvious of all is Haggard’s repetition of the distinctive trial by lightning scene in both tales. Monsman notes in relation to this thematic repetition that ‘the dramatic contest of the trial by lightning previously played out in Allan’s Wife is here repeated in the contest between the wizard Hokosa and the missionary Owen’, but that ‘Haggard’s descriptive powers are so inventive this recycled situation does not in the least trouble the enthusiastic reader’.41 Monsman’s problematic analysis is founded upon an imagined ‘enthusiastic reader’ and fails to interrogate why Haggard felt compelled to borrow from his previous work. In

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the same way that Freud’s essay, for Hélène Cixous, accrues a greater uncanniness with every rereading, the repetition of this scene in The Wizard imbues the already claustrophobic and highly charged narrative with a more pronounced mystical emphasis. In both episodes Haggard lampoons the witchdoctor’s occult threat by measuring indigenous magic against the European’s empirical awareness. Both duels play out above a bed of ironstone, whose electro-conductive properties are known only to Allan and Owen. Allan alerts Indaba-zimbi to this fact and entreats him to stand far away from the ‘bed of iron ore’ disguised beneath a thin veil of grass.42 Allan registers an array of fetish charms employed by rival witchdoctors so as to divert the lightning from their respective paths, ‘(for) they were dressed in all the paraphernalia of their craft, snakeskins, fish bladders, and I know not what beside, while round their necks hung circlets of baboons’ teeth and bones from human hands’.43 The camp theatricality of the Quatermain tale is displaced by the menacing intensity that sees Owen having to defeat Hokosa to save his own life: Now Hokosa stepped forward from where he stood at the head of the company of wizards. His dress, like that of his companions, was simple, but in its way striking. On his shoulders he wore a cloak of shining snakeskin; about his loins was a short kilt of the same material; and round his forehead, arms and knees were fillets of snakeskin. At his side hung his pouch of medicines, and in his hand he held no spear, but a wand of ivory, whereof the top was roughly carved so as to resemble the head of a cobra reared up to strike.44

Hokosa targets Owen’s perceived cowardice and his ridiculous attire of white robes that mark him out visually from the ornately garbed Amasukan witchdoctors and warriors. ‘Let him go forth and stand by his piece of wood’, cries Hokosa to the assembled throng, before directly impugning Owen’s masculinity: ‘[c]ome out, little White Man, and we will show you how we manage the lightnings.’45 As in Allan’s Wife, it is Owen’s dilettante passion for geology that rescues him from the spells of the native shaman. However, the conclusion is elliptical as to whether Owen’s preservation was secured through scientific savvy or divine intervention. Either Owen’s overweening sense of supremacy is exposed by our knowledge of his deception, an undermining which deftly questions the validity of the evangelical mandate, or Haggard is presenting a Miltonic battle between heaven and hell, an apocalyptic scenario underpinned by the remark that the witchdoctors resemble ‘devils in an inferno’.46 In what reads like an uncanny moment lifted directly from the pages of the Juvenile’s series on Central African Worship, a ‘meteor stone’ resembling a human form ‘which for generations the People of

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Fire had worshipped as a god, lay upon the plain in fused and shattered fragments’.47 Haggard’s distinctive contribution to the Christian Annual retains a riddling and subversive ambiguity that cannot be suppressed by editorial orthodoxy. The narrative’s cryptic, suggestive denouement indicates that, even within the published work of the most zealous colonial chroniclers, destabilising lacunae exist and invite oppositional or multifaceted interpretations. By the fin de siècle it became increasingly difficult for even ardent champions of colonial capitalism not to articulate mutterings of discomfort with regard to specific facets of European expansionism, especially in light of W. T. Stead’s damning reportage from the Congo, which provided first-hand testimony of atrocities perpetrated by Leopold’s troops.48 The ghosts in The Wizard attain a new and sobering resonance for modern readers: they not only imply the brutality that was becoming the hallmark of overseas ‘adventure’, but also function as harbingers of empire’s demise.

‘Little Flower’ (1920) Although published in 1920 as part of his Smith and the Pharaohs collection, this short text ill accords in tone and texture with the rest of the collection: its narrative trajectory harks back to the fiction Haggard published during the 1880s and 1890s. The inclusion of ‘The Blue Curtains’ in the collection lends support to my contention, as Andrew Lang makes reference to the story in a letter to Haggard dated 28 March 1883.49 The ambiguity surrounding the publication date of ‘Little Flower’ accentuates the mysterious aura that enfolds this enigmatic text and the arcane, ghostly events that are recorded therein. The Sisans are introduced as a sparse but belligerent people, who have evaded Christian conversion by remaining staunchly loyal to the talismanic figure of Menzi, the tribe’s witchdoctor. The minority of Christian Sisans with whom Thomas Bull engages are depicted as ‘pleasant-spoken but rather depressed folk, clad in much-worn European clothes that somehow became very ill’.50 This implies that, in attempting to impose Westernised Christianity upon the people of Central Africa, the missionaries are, in fact, involved in a paradoxical and illogical endeavour. Haggard sketches the pathos of a bizarre cultural misalignment: the indigenes are compelled to ‘wear’ not only shop-soiled European dress but also threadbare European conventions and political structures. A contemporary readership may have found the Sisans’ wretched garb a source of sardonic comedy, but Bhabha’s theory

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of mimicry posits that Haggard’s delineation of this European costume also carries an unsettling charge for a colonial audience. Bhabha proposes that such a readership requires and actively seeks the return of its own narcissistic gaze in order to validate expansionist policies and, in the process, reaffirm a sense of European mastery.51 Ultimately, mimicry is a tool that fractures a crisply codified image of the coloniser. Bhabha refers to the menace of mimicry, the inherent ability to provide a screen for the projection of a double vision: a scene that was at once recognisable but different to the coloniser. From a Freudian perspective, ‘projection’ is understood as a psychical defence mechanism expelling feelings or wishes that an individual judges as hazardous – too repulsive, too obscene, too shameful. The coloniser, then, transfers these neurotic impulses onto the figure of the colonised subject much in the same way that the anti-Semite externally projects similar vexed sensations onto the Jew. Therefore, Haggard’s mimic men, the Sisans, exert a destabilising impact upon a seemingly solid and secure imperial framework. In this story a duplicitous, evasive quality consistently works to disrupt and complicate the surface texture of events. Haggard deploys a familiar trope found in much imperial romance of the period: that of adumbrating empire in terms of an austere classical register that was designed to perpetuate a myth of British political prestige as a modern manifestation of the noblest antiquity. The river flowing through the village is sketched as a dark and sinister artery splitting the community, with the English translation of the ‘River of Death’ literally evoking parallels with Hades. However, Haggard, freed from the peculiar editorial constraints that he was under while drafting The Wizard, problematises the marked tendency of missionary fiction to foreground Christian soldiers as either venturesome heroes or serenely altruistic martyrs. In ‘Little Flower’ Thomas Bull appears as a flawed comic figure, intellectually wanting and absurdly inflexible. As the narrator avers, ‘[m]issionaries, however good, may not always be wise folk’, dragging ‘women and young children into the most impossible places of the earth, there to suffer many things, not exclusive, occasionally, of martyrdom’.52 The ostensibly benevolent nature of the ‘enlightenment’ project is further undermined through Haggard’s acerbic portrayal of the white Christian bureaucrats as financially obsessed yet morally parsimonious, a total reversal of the conception promoted by Bull’s smug superiors. The rebuilding of the derelict church is funded entirely by Dorcas’s own personal wealth and establishes the specious motivation behind the church hierarchy’s selection of the Bull family to undertake the arduous posting. ‘Little Flower’ is a text multiform and hybridised in narrative

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inflection. Although missionary organisations employed skilled linguistic scholars to translate the Bible into the languages of new tribes as they were discovered, the ‘word of God’ remained directly associated with the coloniser’s tongue, creating the expectation that spiritual salvation was dependent upon an individual’s proficiency in English. Therefore, English vocabulary and grammar books were tools devised to silence or stifle dissenting or seditious voices, replacing rich diversity with drab uniformity and thus key weapons in the imposition of foreign rule. Haggard repeatedly deploys Zulu terms so as to mock and embarrass the colonial presence; the Reverend is nicknamed Inkunzi not merely because it is the literal translation of his name, but because of his actual physical resemblance to a bull. Dorcas’s droll mispronunciation of the Sisas as ‘the Sneezers’ exposes European arrogance, ignorance and petty parochialism to withering critique.53 For Haggard, the Zulu language provides ample space for soaring rhetoric, sonorous cadences and emotional complexity. Tabitha becomes so immersed in Sisan culture – adapting and transcribing a compendium of Zulu metaphors into English – that her mother worries about her ability to speak in ‘their own poetic and metaphorical fashion’.54 Tabitha is presented as a hybrid product of this uncertain colonial environment: She who ought to be at Christian school now talked more Zulu than she did English, and was beginning to look at things from the Zulu point of view and to use their idioms and metaphors even when speaking in her own tongue.55

The authority and influence Tabitha wields over the heathen ‘flock’ earns her the title and mock-position of Inkosikazi, or ‘infant chieftainess’. She is transmuted into a figure responsible for mediating between two divided and discordant factions within tribal society. The Bull clan and the Sisan tribe are both enthralled by Tabitha and exist under her mesmeric sway. This striking and ironic reversal, in which her elders become her rapt minions, casts Tabitha as an infant Ayesha. Furthermore, Haggard inverts a key thematic component of the missionary genre and colonial discourse as a whole: infanticide. When a snake bites the Little Flower, Haggard divulges a fierce disregard for those who spearhead the ‘civilising’ mission. Haggard’s keen and abiding interest in spiritualism finds an expressive outlet in this scene. The two communities descend upon the modest summerhouse in order to save Tabitha, who is near death; yet, instead of being galvanised into a cooperative alliance by the desperate plight of his daughter, the Reverend Bull initially refuses Menzi’s offer of help: ‘I have made up my mind [. . .] If she dies it is so decreed, and the spells and filth of a heathen cannot save her.’56 For Haggard, who lost his only son, Bull’s stubborn

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dogmatism would have appeared repugnant. He struggled throughout his life to square his adherence to conventional Christianity with an interest in the occult. On one level he remained committed to one of the fundamentals of Christianity, life after death, while at the same time longing for a reunion with his son on earth.57 Bull’s obstinate rejection of Menzi’s aid jars violently against the image of a devoted Haggard who spared no expense in providing the best medical care for his ailing son. Yet he was absent in Mexico at the time of Jock’s death and failed even to return to Ditchingham for the funeral. However, Menzi does possess the facility and recondite learning to save the Little Flower, and the witchdoctor eventually resuscitates her. Haggard, in the tale, offers the characters of Menzi and Tabitha, respectively, as embodiments of a genuinely caring morality that transcends Bull’s colonial squabbling and narrow-mindedness. In doing so, both Tabitha and Menzi are the only figures in this tale adhering to a fundamental tenet of Christianity: love thy neighbour. The watchful, judicious Menzi notices the inherent and glaring contradiction between what Bull preaches and what he practices, and the native shaman is unable to reconcile Christian codes with pathologically unchristian behaviour: I see that you hate me, Teacher [. . .] and though here I do not find the gentleness in you preach, I do not wonder; it is quite natural. [. . .] But you are Little Flower’s father – strange that she should have grown from such a seed – and though we fight, for that reason I cannot hate you.58

Tabitha is the ‘Little Flower’ that has blossomed in a unique climate of cultural miscegenation. The narrative vouchsafes an intricately realised ideology of cultural dialogue and hybridisation, which cuts against the critical commonplace of Haggard as the unsmiling custodian of sabre-rattling imperialism. Menzi eulogises at one point, ‘[a]ll spirits, black and white, love flowers’, and he presents Tabitha with a ‘carved walking stick of black and white umzimbeet wood’, a gift implying that the enduring stability of any imperial structure is reliant upon a sincere commitment to cross-cultural ‘conversation’.59 The title of the short story mirrors this principle. One possible source for the title is William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake’s elaborate strategy of weaving into his poetic text a series of ‘blind spots’ – his continuous reliance upon paradoxical statements – allowed him the opportunity radically to critique institutionalised religion: ‘[p]risons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.’60 Haggard inherited from Blake the idea that ‘[t]o create a little flower is the labour of ages’, using the figure of Tabitha to promote a shift in the collective attitude towards the imperial campaign.61 Furthermore, in Catholicism the sobriquet of

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St Thérèse of Lisieux is the Little Flower. The fame of St Thérèse, who was also the patron saint of African Missions, spread quickly around Western Europe after her death in 1897 and her autobiography was widely read in homes of all religious denominations.62 The novella’s denouement foregrounds the death of Menzi, caused when a splinter from the church bell strikes him directly in the chest during a storm of apocalyptic devastation, flooding the village and inducing a landslide that destroys the newly erected church. The flood provides a final validation of Central Africa as the unrivalled and exemplary haunted terrain of late Victorian imperial romance. Through the Derridean notion of sous rature, the spectres of history are shown to be ubiquitous across the map of Haggard’s fiction. The flood violently embodies the whispered implication made throughout the story regarding the impossibility of full erasure. It conceals the traces of indigenous precolonial history and the history of Christian intervention in the territory beneath its waters. However, the sheer force of the water is incapable of washing away the tattered fragments of the past: ‘[a]s the tower collapsed the clock sounded the first stroke of the hour, then suddenly became silent for ever and vanished beneath the waters, a mass of broken metal.’63 Beneath the turbid waters remain the indelible splinters and shards of history that have been written across the region, shadowing the modern moment and conditioning the future. From the ruins of the church, a new one will be built whose materials bespeak the tangled chronicles of Menzi, Bull and Tabitha. Thomas Bull refuses to yield to Menzi’s beneficent request to reconsider constructing the family home on the spot where those accused of witchcraft were executed in the past. Menzi warns Bull that ‘this place is haunted by the spirits of the dead, and those who live here will be haunted also’.64 Bull, acutely aware that the site also housed the earlier, ill-fated missionary station, understands this spectral topology but appears entirely unmoved by Menzi’s ominous warnings. ‘The dead’, he declares, ‘are always with us, and what better company could we have than the dust of our sainted predecessor.’65 It is an ending that steadfastly refuses to conform to imperial orthodoxy and the missionary genre’s system of values. Although Menzi does eventually submit to Christian teaching, this ‘conversion’ arises out of his devotion to the Little Flower, a potent emotion he refers to as ‘a rope to tie us together, Little Flower’.66 Haggard slyly subverts the conventions of a traditional Christian baptism to fashion a peculiar scene in which a spiritual transfusion takes place between Menzi and Tabitha. The ambiguity of this circulatory transfusion carries an occult menace, which is exacerbated by the riddling and oracular language Haggard employs at the finale. After Menzi

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endows Tabitha with his spirit, thus ensuring her safety and protection throughout the remainder of her life, she in turn ‘made a certain Sign upon the brow of that old witch doctor, uttering also certain words that she had often heard used in church at baptisms’.67

Notes 1. Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife and Other Tales (London: Spencer Blackett, 1889), p. 44. 2. Henry Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life: An Autobiography, ed. by C. J. Longman, Vol. I (London: Longmans, Green, 1926), p. 56. 3. Haggard, 1926: p. 56. 4. Ibid., p. 56. 5. Ibid., p. 56. 6. Freud published ‘A Note on the Unconscious’ in the ‘Proceedings’ of the SPR in 1912. Roger Luckhurst explicates the signal importance of the SPR in Freud’s clinical career. In The Invention of Telepathy, Luckhurst recounts how James Strachey’s first contact with Freud’s ideas came through the investigations of Frederic Myers, a founding member of the organisation. See Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 269. 7. Allan Quatermain is ‘inscribed’ to Arthur John Rider Haggard. 8. Henry Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain (London: Longmans, Green, 1904), p. 1. In The Days of My Life Haggard goes to painful lengths to preserve an image of himself as a stoic introspective. There is only a very cryptic reference to the great love of his early life, Lilly Jackson, while he skips over the intriguing, and much debated, misdemeanours of his youth. On the whole, the autobiography presents a version of Haggard as a nineteenth-century mind uncomfortable in the new century. However, the death of Jock coincides with the usually reserved Haggard letting his mask of trenchant masculinity slip to reveal a more eloquent persona: The boy was beloved by everyone who knew him, and in turn loved all about him, but especially his mother and myself. How much I, to whom all my children are so dear, loved, or rather love, him I cannot tell. He was my darling; for him I would gladly have laid down my life.

Henry Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life: An Autobiography, ed. by C. J. Longman, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, 1926), p. 42. 9. Haggard recounts the death of Jock in The Days of My Life with a grim sense of foreboding and inevitability. ‘It is strange’, he reflects, ‘but when I went to Mexico I knew almost without doubt, that in this world he and I would never see each other more. Only I thought it was I who was doomed to die’ (Haggard, 1926: Vol. II, p. 42). Freud dismisses the premonitory value of dreams as a remnant of classical antiquity influenced by Aristotlean thought. To a certain extent Freud acknowledges the residual prophetic quality of dreams, believing that through the symbolism and a free associative response to dreams the unconscious desires of individuals

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10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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could be decoded, a process that would yield an effect upon the future wellbeing of the analysand. For Freud no detail in dreams is accidental and this hints at the impossibility of producing a complete dream analysis. Freud adapted his dream theory to produce a set system of ‘dream symbols’ that could, to a limited degree, be exploited in the deciphering process. Consequently, dreams that were predictive could be treated as representing tangible unconscious desires. Interestingly, Freud admitted that as it stood psychoanalysis had yet to discover an effective explanation for premonitions, but remained convinced that such a discovery was inevitable. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1953: p. 453. Haggard, 1926: Vol. I, p. 119. Gerald Monsman’s research on Rider Haggard stands as the only serious attempt to interpret his work in a rigorously theoretical manner. See H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political & Literary Contexts of His African Romances (Greensboro, NC: University of North Carolina, 2006), p. 179. Ibid., p. 179. Said, 1994: p. 188. Haggard, 1926: Vol. II, pp. 89–90. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 90. Henry Rider Haggard, The Wizard (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1896), p. 9. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., pp. 2–3. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 2–3. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 24. Wolfreys’ thesis is supported by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, who similarly identify literature as the site par excellence of ghostly ‘hauntings’: ‘[l]iterature has always been a more accommodating place for ghosts, perhaps because fiction itself shares their simulacral qualities: like writing, ghosts are associated with a certain secondariness or belatedness.’ Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, ‘Introduction: A Future for Haunting’, in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis History, ed. by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 8. Haggard, 1896: p. 107. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 107. Derrida, 1994: p. 11. Haggard, 1896: p. 107. Derrida employs the example of Hamlet to illustrate how ghosts and the spectral are not simply confined to the historical past, but are actually demonstrative of how time is made up of past, present and future contractions. As Derrida notes, ‘Hamlet already began with the expected return of the dead king’. He is both ‘a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself again and again’ (Derrida,

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33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature 1994: p. 10). Prince Hamlet and the audience anticipate the return of the King from the outset of the play. Noma confronts Hokosa the convert later on in the novel: ‘I hate you, though through your witchcraft your will yet has the mastery of mine. I demand of you now that you should loose that bond, for I do not desire to become a Christian’ (Haggard, 1896: p. 161). Sigmund Freud, ‘Repression’, in Papers On Metapsychology, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. XIV (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 141–58 (p. 151). The death of Jock was not the only tragedy to occur in Haggard’s life. His first love Mary Elizabeth ‘Lilly’ Jackson declined Haggard’s romantic entreaties before his first assignment to South Africa. Instead, she married a stockbroker who was forced to flee for Africa after being charged with embezzlement. Although now married himself, Haggard took Lilly and her three sons under his wing, setting them up in a house on the Suffolk coast. Eventually, Lilly’s husband asked her to join him in South Africa and, despite Haggard’s best efforts, Lilly set out on an ill-fated journey that would culminate in her contracting syphilis from her spouse. In 1907 she returned home to England very ill and once again fell under the care of Haggard, who nursed her until she finally passed away in April 1909 with Haggard by her side. Haggard, 1889: p. 94. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., pp. 93–4. Haggard, 1896: p. 105. Haggard, 1889: pp. 93–4. Monsman, 2006: p. 181. Haggard, 1889: p. 30. Ibid., p. 30. Haggard, 1896: p. 50. Adding to the scene’s menace is Hokosa’s unspoken dialogue with Noma that occurs beyond the vision of Haggard’s narrator. The narrator records that ‘[h]e was talking to the girl, not with words, but in some secret language that he and she understood alone’ (Haggard, 1896: p. 52). Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 94. King Leopold’s vicious and chaotic campaign ran from the late nineteenth century until 1908. Adam Hochschild, in his trenchant history of Belgian involvement in the region, devotes an entire chapter to the problems of estimating a final death toll that ranges from 2 million to 10 million. Leopold’s pillaging of Congo for rubber and ivory – aided by that great cartographer and explorer, Stanley – was subsequently revealed by Sir Roger Casement, who took photographs of Congolese women and children amputated at the wrist. Marcus Dorman, in A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State (1905), records a conversation through an interpreter that he held with a young male amputee: When was this done? During the rubber war when the boy was an infant.

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Who did it? The soldiers who came from Bofiji. Why did they come? Because the natives had not collected rubber.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Marcus Dorman, A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State (Teddington: Echo Library, 2007), p. 46. For a more stringent chronicle of Leopold’s intervention in the Congo see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: Macmillan, 1999). The letter is one of the first between the two friends. Lang, who was working at Harper’s, was unable to accept the tale for publication without the permission of his ‘American Editor’ (Haggard, 1926: p. 227). Henry Rider Haggard, ‘Little Flower’, from Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Tales (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1920), p. 162. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha describes mimicry as ‘the sign of a double articulation’, a system that appropriates and expresses difference through ‘a process of disavowal’ (Bhabha, 2004: p. 122). Haggard, 1920: p. 176. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., pp. 205–6. Ibid., p. 214. Haggard’s Christian faith and his paradoxical desire for an earthly reunion with his son are articulated in a moving passage from his memoirs. Haggard had the words ‘I shall go to him’ carved upon his cross: Now that I am growing old [. . .] these words are full of comfort and meaning to me. Soon, after all these long years of separation, I shall go to him and put my faith to proof. If it be true, as I believe, then surely my spirit will find his spirit, though it must search from world to world. If, with all earth’s suffering millions, I am deluded, then let the same everlasting darkness be our bed and canopy. (Haggard, 1926: Vol. II, pp. 43–4)

58. Haggard, 1920: p. 216. 59. Ibid., p. 161. Haggard appears to have acquired a similar item while serving in South Africa. ‘Between the intervals of work I took walks with a dear old bulldog I had, named Caesar, who appears in “Dawn”, and a tall Kaffir stick made of the black and white umzimbeet wood, which I still have, that reminded me of Africa’ (Haggard, 1926: Vol. I, p. 241). 60. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 8. 61. Ibid. 62. This further complicates attempts to date the novella. St Thérèse was beatified in April 1923 and canonised by Pope XI in May 1925, the same year that Smith and the Pharaohs was published. This would suggest that it was written towards the end of Haggard’s life, especially considering the fame and publicity surrounding the speed of her canonisation, only 28 years after her death. However, without access to the original manuscript, it remains impossible to assert or disprove that this was a tale composed much earlier and subsequently reworked for publication. 63. Haggard, 1920: p. 225.

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Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., pp. 227–8.

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II

Behind the Black Velvet Curtain Sometimes I worked with just a background of a rock or a tree or black velvet, and just had to imagine the whole thing. (Fay Wray) I am lying here in the dark waiting for death. (Kurtz)

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Chapter 7

Maps

According to J. B. Harley, ‘[a]s much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapons of imperialism.’1 Before lands were officially occupied through militaristic conflict or aggressive exploration, imperialism claimed new geographies on paper, allowing Harley to conclude that ‘maps anticipated empire’.2 This declaration was anticipated, in turn, by Derrida in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, his response to Levinas’s idea that the ethical relationship between the self and the figure of the other requires the invention of a new language that does away with the verb ‘to be’. Levinas argued against the assumption that the other was an object of knowledge, stressing that this assumption constitutes an act of violence. For Derrida, however, ‘[v]iolence appears with articulation.’3 Central Africa was a location where the colonial violence was exerted only partially, as it had already been articulated through discursive and especially cartographic representation, with its unique melding of the archival, the recalled, the fabricated and the meditated. Geography, for Said, was ‘the material underpinning for knowledge of the Orient’, with all the ‘latent and unchanging characteristics of the Orient [. . .] rooted in, its geography’.4 Colonial cartography was the cornerstone upon which the entire imperial system was founded. Said cites Lord Curzon’s 1912 speech to the Geographical Society in which Curzon identifies the valuable role played by the society in facilitating an ever-accelerating programme of Western expansionism. Curzon registers geography as ‘the handmaid of history’ and a ‘sister science to economics and politics’, a subject that demands an exhaustive knowledge of ‘geology, zoology, ethnology, chemistry, physics, and almost all of the kindred sciences’.5 This substitutes as an apposite metaphor for the demands placed upon a nineteenth-century missionary working in the field. All of the disciplines enumerated by Curzon, including, crucially, economics and political science, can be found synthesised and embodied in the larger than life colonial hero-figure of Livingstone.

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The effect of Livingstonia upon both the national consciousness and cartographical depictions of Africa cannot be underestimated. Livingstone was a conscientious and adept map-maker, whereas, in contrast, Richard Burton’s unfeigned disdain for the technicalities of map-making resulted in John Hanning Speke assuming all such responsibilities. Livingstone epitomised a Calvinist ethos that wedded unflagging entrepreneurial industry with civil advancement, while identifying Central Africa as a geography largely bereft of commercial traffic. In a letter to the Duke of Argyll and the Cambridge Professor of Geography, Adam Sedgwick, Livingstone revealed an ulterior motive to his ill-fated expedition along the Zambezi in 1858: I take a practical mining geologist from the School of Mines to tell us of the Mineral Resources of the country, then an economic botanist to give a full report on the vegetable productions [. . .] everything which may be useful in commerce. An artist to give the scenery, a naval officer to tell of the capacity of the river communications and a moral agent to lay the foundation of knowing that aim fully. All this machinery has for its ostensible object the development of African trade and promotion of civilisation but what I have to tell to none but such as you in whom I have full confidence is that I hope it may result in an English colony in the healthy heartlands of Central Africa.6

The cult of celebrity effectively created a superhuman aura around Livingstone, which inadvertently exacerbated collective cultural misgivings about this stubbornly encrypted terrain. His one-man mission to ‘open up’ Africa through the installation of countless trade routes and commercial outposts failed to a large degree, compounding pervasive myths of African impenetrability. Livingstone was literally swallowed up and lost in the black abyss of Central Africa in 1873. His disappearance, and subsequent discovery by the now infamous Henry Morton Stanley, was a national obsession, and his perishing on the shores of Lake Bangweolo only succeeded in aggravating public discomfort at the British government’s continued entanglement in this remote region. H. G. Wells recounts in his autobiography how his schoolmaster entertained middle-class children with news of Livingstone and Stanley from the Illustrated London News: ‘at times he would get excited by his morning paper and then [. . .] we would follow the search for Livingstone by Stanley in Darkest Africa’.7 Indeed, Patrick Brantlinger surveys the phenomenon of Livingstonia by highlighting the novelistic tropes imbedded within ethnographic narratives of African exploration. Brantlinger indicates how these pseudo-scientific titles were treated and consumed in a similar manner to the imperial romances that they would later inspire. He outlines the compelling aspects of their ‘quest romances in which the hero-authors struggle through an ostensible goal’.8 The

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words embossed as the epitaph upon the tomb in Westminster Abbey of Victorian Britain’s greatest colonial hero unwittingly fuelled this African unease. Even in death Livingstone continued to shape British mainstream perceptions of the forbidding African interior: ‘[a]ll I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on everyone [. . .] who will help to heal this open sore of the world.’ This ‘open sore’ was an allegorical reference to Livingstone’s lifelong hatred of slavery and his desire to have the pernicious practice completely abolished; however by the fin de siècle, it became a vivid metaphor for the terrain itself. Central Africa approximated to a moral and geographical wound festering in a stifling heat.9 The cartographical history of Africa differs significantly from that of other colonial sites. After Vasco da Gama discovered a sea route around the Cape of Good Hope in 1462 and established India as a veritable horn of Amalthea, a long-established commercial involvement in India meant that European industrialists and mandarins began to look upon it with a proprietorial relish. Topographical delineations of India were being produced from the 1760s onwards, impressive in both their accuracy and detail. That the Indian subcontinent had been so sedulously mapped by the 1850s reflects this region’s core strategic importance in the production of goods for a rapidly expanding global market. The figure of Pinecoffin in Kipling’s ‘Pig’ forcibly illustrates, and also sardonically undermines, the bureaucratic investment in colonial map-making. ‘Pinecoffin made a coloured Pig-population map, and collected observations on the longevity of Pig (a) in the submontane tracts of the Himalayas, and (b) in the Rechna Doab.’10 Colonial map-makers instigated a topographical project that was geared towards bewildering (and so subjugating) an indigenous population by literally creating around tribal communities a new and unfamiliar environment. Lindy Stiebel writes that a ‘map is a source of power through knowledge; it is the imposition of order on the unknown but suspected disorder of the blank page’.11 Therefore, nineteenth-century topographers assumed the guise of Adam in Eden, (re)christening everything encountered in a Western lexicon. Colonial topography eradicated indigenous place names steeped in a rich linguistic and cultural history, replacing them with a dizzying array of coordinates and signifiers designed to reconnect the coloniser with terrain that had been left behind. Analogously, this also provoked confusion within the colonised mindset. English topographers altered the spelling of familiar towns, landmarks and rivers to a phonetic transcription. Just as the purveyors of imperial romance sought to neutralise the threatening multiplicity of colonial spaces by translating it

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into a reassuringly familiar lexicon, those engaged in the pictorial and cartographical representation of Africa often mobilised comparable strategies. The Victorian artist Thomas Baines (1820–75) was lauded for his paintings of the landscape of South-West Africa, yet Baines’s magisterial vistas expose the paradoxes within specific colonial representations of Africa. In his Lion and Dead Quagga, Zululand, 1874, the viewer’s gaze is immediately drawn to the violent scene unravelling in the centre of the painting, where the lions can be seen devouring the Quagga while the vultures circle menacingly overhead. Although the speciation included may mark the panorama as African, there is an uncanny familiarity to the background landscape framing this encounter. From the dry sandy grass enveloping the small pond to the exotic flourishes of the palm trees at the foot of the small hill, the foreground is unmistakably African. However the backdrop resembles the resplendent setting for a popular mode of eighteenth-century pastoral portraiture. By rendering the alien, wild fastnesses in an orthodox visual iconography, Baines provides a comforting and impressive vision of a country that has yet to be thoroughly mapped. It is an august, even Edenic, vista that invites detailed comparison with the fecund hinterland depicted in Olive Schreiner’s fiction. Topographical strategies afforded ample opportunities to proclaim patriotic fervour. The renaming of an English settlement in Madras as Fort Saint George, for example, dissipates a biting sense of cultural estrangement by crafting a commanding ‘rival geography’ through the mythologising of Albion. These maps bear in their exact details the coloniser’s imperious gaze translated and transposed into fixities of print. As Said establishes with reference to Curzon, colonial cartography was inextricably bound up in the economic, martial and political aspirations of the ruling elite: In your narratives, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an active point of energy that made sense not just of colonising activities but of exotic geographies and people.12

In many Victorian maps of Africa the continental margins were pockmarked with crucial topographical symbols. Northern and Southern territories stretched out into the realm of the ‘Unexplored Countries’, but beyond the topography of Egypt and the Sudan, and the British colony of South Africa, the heartlands possessed a form without soothing definition. European cartographic expeditions were able to chart with comparative ease the coastal regions, but inner Africa posed severe theoretical, logistical and practical problems. The northern and sub-Saharan

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regions were generally considered to be populated by an Arabian hybrid mix whose ancestors stretched back to the classical civilisations of antiquity. In the south, the Cape Colony had long been established as a key strategic and commercial outpost, with the eastern and western regions deemed gateways into a seemingly measureless interior with its inhospitable climate and bellicose native tribes. Within the European popular imagination this terrain remained hazy and unclear. Factual data smudged into the fictitious in cartographic representations, as empirical deficits were papered over by whimsical and wayward projections. Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow describe how this epistemological blankness possessed a bewitching allure for the European creative sensibility: ‘[t]he map of Africa itself carries enchantment’ for it is ‘never merely geographical’ but the backdrop where ‘writers project upon it personal imagery expressing mystery and threat, and their fascination with both’.13 For both Jonathan Swift and James Joyce, this European impetus to ‘colour in’ the vacant patches of the African map with a host of fabricated creatures and grandiose topographical features epitomised a ferocious appetite for ‘new’ information: In the Middle Ages, the compiler of an atlas would not lose his composure when he found himself at a loss. He would write over the unknown area the words: Hic sunt leones. The idea of solitude, the terror of strange beasts, the unknown were enough for him. Our culture has an entirely different goal: we are avid for details. For this reason our literary jargon speaks nothing else than colour, atmosphere, atavism: whence the restless search for what is new and strange, the accumulation of details that have been observed or read, the parading of common culture.14

Swift echoes and satirises this concept: ‘So Geographers in Afric-maps,/ With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps;/And o’er unhabitable Downs/Place Elephants for want of Towns.’15 The African map may have been ‘full’, but as Swift implies, this plentitude sprang from the cartographer’s overactive imagination rather than from the verifiable results of systematic survey. A historical tradition emerged that depicted continental Africa as a site of the human unconscious, long before Freud, discernible in such texts as Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642). Browne speaks of the ‘Cosmography of the self’ and declares, we ‘carry within us the wonders, we seake without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature.’16 Furthermore, in 1804 the German writer Jean Paul identified psychic drives as the wellspring of creative imagination, a discovery articulated through a comparison with the vast uncharted expanse of Central Africa: ‘[t]he unconsciousness is really the largest realm in our minds, and just on

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account of this unconsciousness, the inner Africa, whose unknown boundaries may extend far away.’17 In 1896 the Church Missionary Society published an Atlas that attempted, in part, to resolve contemporary concerns relating to this terra incognita by crafting a comprehensive ethnographical map of the various races and tribes so far encountered. Delineating Central Africa in terms of a void, a ‘blank space’ that future studies must ‘fill up’,18 an extract taken from a 1778 African Association statement demonstrates the stark position that this region occupied within the imperial imagination: Africa stands alone in a geographical view! Penetrated by no inland seas; nor overspread with extensive lakes, like those of North America; nor having, in common with other continents, rivers running from the centre to the extremities; but, on the contrary, its regions separated from each other by the least practicable of all boundaries, and deserts of such formidable extent as to threaten all those who traverse them with the most horrible of all deaths, that arising from thirst!19

It was this notion of the terrain as a limitless but inscrutable geographical palimpsest that resulted in the configuration of Africa as the ‘Dark Continent’. Early postcolonial studies extracted critical mileage from this designation as Christian Europe’s shadowy and nebulous twin; however, it is to some degree a misnomer. The CMS describes Africa as a thirsty land, a motif subsequently embellished by missionaries based in Central African stations and by all subsequent editors of the Juvenile, who ‘corroborated’ dubious facts and figures designed to mollify the target audience. Over a century later in a serialised story entitled ‘Africa: A Dry and Thirsty Land’, the Reverend J. Hepburn appears both to play upon and perpetuate a myth that dismissed Central Africa as an agrarian wasteland. To the missionaries it was also a savagely animistic terrain that could not be contained, diluted or domesticated by aesthetic framing. Later Haggard tales and the proponents of mesmeric fiction would mobilise this already factually bankrupt myth in the rendering of venerable mystic realms and the fluid border-zones of the modern metropolis. Hepburn depicts the frantic attempts of a wagon driver to retrace his steps when lost in the nothingness of the desert, and with darkness encroaching, the landscape appears to be diabolically mutating: ‘[i]t was a road so seldom used that it had got overgrown with creepers and grass, and had become, in places, exceedingly indistinct. But in this lay his danger.’20 The only way to tame the demonic ‘danger’ of a landscape in ceaseless flux was to deploy maps as mechanisms of rational power. The fastidious attention to detail of the CMS Atlas – especially in its

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anthropological and taxonomical charts – carries greater resonance when measured against the cartographic campaign instigated by the obsessive bureaucrats in Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). Classifications of Central African tribes vouchsafe a Victorian ethnography based not so much upon sober scientific scrutiny, but rather superstitious dread and mythic embellishment. Missionaries and Christian organisations frequently adopted a quasi-forensic register in their depictions of the numerous tribes. This originated partly as a response to the grave threat posed by secular materialism and evolutionary science, and partly as a consequence of their role in Central Africa as explorers and evangelists. This often bizarre melding of ethnographic ‘exactitude’ and diluted Darwinism is evident in a published tale that ostensibly records the physical and mental traits of ‘Negritic’ races. Facially, they are reported as possessing a ‘flat nose broad at the base’ with ‘thick everted lips’, a ‘prognathous (projecting) under jaw’ and ‘large black rolling eyes with yellowish corners’.21 This stereotypical simian imagery is elaborated in the descriptions of the African temperament that is ‘sensuous, indolent and unintellectual’, while ‘passionate and cruel’, because the Negritic ‘mental faculties generally arrested after puberty’.22 Missionary theology differentiated between African and Indian paganism on the grounds of monotheism and polytheism, with the latter pertaining to the religions of Rome, Greece and India. In reference to the monotheistic religions of Africa, a chapter entitled ‘The Pagan Continent’ chronicles a belief in ‘one Supreme God’, but one who does not ‘busy Himself with the affairs of men’.23 Instead this crude evangelical orthodoxy portrays indigenes as living in a nightmarish milieu of the undead, ‘full of tremors and escaping things that fly’.24 ‘They (the Africans) regard themselves as living in the midst of an invisible world of spiritual beings, by whom they are in danger of being constantly influenced for evil rather than good.’25 It is this rendering of Central Africa as the locus of atavistic and primordial prurience that reinvigorated the Gothic tradition within the literary landscape of fin de siècle Britain. For Brantlinger the steeply declining fortunes of the British Empire and the palpable unease this generated found expression in the ‘Imperial Gothic’. He interprets the tendency in the literature of this period to infuse science – or more accurately corrupt pseudo-sciences – with a ‘Darwinian ideology of imperialism’ as allaying such nagging anxieties.26 For Brantlinger the Imperial Gothic is categorised by its ability to articulate misgivings surrounding ‘individual regression’ and the ‘invasion of civilisation by the forces of barbarism or demonism’, as well as the ‘diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the modern world’.27 His hypothesis is predicated upon the notion that by the fin de

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siècle there were no further territories to conquer, stoking worries that the British Empire might crumble owing to prolonged contact with the tainted heathen and less evolved global populations. This is all founded upon a rather unsteady assertion. Even though the blankness of Africa had been converted into a series of ill-fitting nation-states, the landscape retained a residual mystique that appealed to the popular imagination. The Berlin Conference of 1884–5 is often erroneously judged as the launching mechanism that effected the partitioning of Africa, when it was, in fact, initially convened to regulate European commercial interests and solve bitter political rivalries. In this regard it ultimately failed. However, the conference did inadvertently give limited definition to cartographical studies that routinely referred to Central Africa as the ‘Unexplored Countries’. This fashioning of the immense interior as a landscape of absence permeates the collective unconscious of the West and conditioned in varying degrees all subsequent aesthetic evocations.28 In his African travelogue In Search of a Character (1961), Graham Greene reflected that, to him, ‘Africa will always be the Africa in the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent in the shape of the human heart’.29 Conrad echoes this nostalgic sentiment in A Personal Record (1912), where he muses on the provenance of his abiding fascination with Central Africa. He recalls a moment in which a version of his younger self stares at a map hanging on the wall: It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself, with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now. ‘When I grow up I shall go there.’ And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter of a century or so an opportunity offered to go there – as if the sin of childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go there: there being the region of Stanley Falls, which in ’68 was the blankest of blank spaces on the earth’s figured surface.30

By 1900 the British Empire coloured over a quarter of the globe pinkyred – a visual expression of political and military triumph – with India lying at the heart of the vast colonial enterprise. The supernatural monsters and spectres that feature in late Victorian boys’ own romances and memoirs are the shadowy manifestations of the imperialist unconscious. Not coincidentally, the ‘blankness’ of African maps was one of the primary means of justifying British exploration. For those who endorsed colonisation of the continental interior, the emptiness of the maps was translated into a metaphor of darkness that symbolically tied together

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Enlightenment notions of primitivism and degeneracy with Victorian racial stereotypes. Cartography was both an index of this darkness and an effectual, pragmatic means by which to overcome it. The symbolic association of cartographic blankness with epistemological darkness helped to license the British imperial mission of irradiating and redeeming the African interior by the light of a painstaking, rational clarity. As Harley notes, ‘[s]urveyors marched alongside soldiers, initially mapping for reconnaissance, then for general information, and eventually as tools of pacification, civilisation, and exploitation in the defined colonies.’31 The colonialists validated maps and charts as a means of rationalising the bloodthirsty bravado implicit in particular facets of the imperial enterprise. ‘As communicators of an imperial message’, maps ‘have been used as an aggressive complement to the rhetoric of speeches, newspapers, and written texts, or to the histories and popular songs extolling the virtues of empire.’32 Colonial cartographers, as re-imagined by Conrad, were cast as empirical knights of the Empire engaged in the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge: Regions unknown! My imagination could depict to itself there worthy, adventurous and devoted men, nibbling at the edges, attacking from the north and south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there, and sometimes swallowed up by the mystery their hearts were so persistently set on unveiling.33

To Conrad and his literary acolytes, Africa promised an access point into the chthonic realm of the human unconscious. This was an elaborately fabricated psychogeography, no more plausible a location than the turbulent Island of Dr Moreau or Dante’s Inferno.34 Franco Moretti opines that ‘colonial romances have no bifurcations: no well-lit inns, or brilliant officers, or picturesque castles that may induce one to wander from the prescribed path’.35 For Moretti, the African milieu is vapid and one-dimensional – the black velvet curtain – conveying the fundamental message that all ‘Africans are animals’.36 That it is an entirely predictable and hackneyed setting permits writers to peddle a succession of tired motifs: In these stories – as in their archetypal image: the expedition that moves slowly, in single file, towards the horizon – there is only a linear movement: forwards, or backwards. There are no deviations, no alternatives to the prescribed path, but only obstacles – and therefore antagonists. Friends and foes. On one side the white man, their guide, Western technology, a discoloured map [. . .] On the other lions, heat, vegetation, elephants, flies, rain, illness – and natives. All mixed up, and at the bottom all interchangeable in their function as obstacles: all equally unknowable and threatening.37

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On the face of it the ‘expedition’ does appear to be propelled by the simple linear movement of ‘forwards’ or ‘backwards’, but it also navigates a more complex subterranean space. Moretti’s identification of a teleological aspect embedded within the generic DNA of imperial romance is an idea that reappears time and again in critical studies of Victorian adventure fiction.38 What is more striking, however, is that Africa does not simply ‘exist’, waiting to be codified and calibrated by European explorers. The role of the colonial map-maker was not only to traverse the terrain documenting geographical irregularities, but to assume the burden of a diligent amateur ethnographer, even to play the role of analyst charged with looking behind the black velvet curtain. Moretti’s assertion that there ‘are no deviations, no alternatives’ is indicative of a brand of literary criticism that is too quick to dismiss adventure fiction as unsuitable for sober theoretical scrutiny. Imperial romance is captivated by figurations of the strange or shocking ‘alternative’; explorers, after all, have embarked upon this alternative lifestyle, obsessed with ‘deviation’ in all its permutations. The missionary tale recounting the plight of a desperate man lost in the desert at night illuminates the genre’s infatuation with the arresting notion of a ‘wrong turn’ or a descent into existential anguish, and explorers, cartographers and missionaries resemble the Freudian analyst in their shared fascination with the idea and consequences of transgression. This alignment of cartographers with psychoanalysts finds an echo in the work of Cixous, who inadvertently offers a more intuitive and complex link between tales of African adventure and psychoanalysis than Moretti. In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous accuses Freud of a form of gender apartheid and of perpetuating a myth relating to the impregnability of the female unconscious. For Cixous, this demonstrates how the same binary systems that underpinned imperial rapacity also structured gender hierarchies: ‘[a]s soon as they begin to speak at the same time as they’re taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous.’39 Freud’s imaginary mapping of female sexuality, the clumsy manner in which he grafts the anthropographic figure of Oedipus upon this psychic terrain, operates as a means of repressing femininity in the same way that colonial cartography was used to control the recondite, the mutinous and the oppositional. Psychoanalysis is no different from all the other human sciences, in that ‘it reproduces the masculine view’, and in doing so constitutes a denigration of the questing female subjectivity.40 Her riposte to Freud is that: ‘[t]he Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable.’41 The female unconscious remains largely

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untapped and unmapped by psychoanalytical theory only because women have ‘been made to believe that it was too dark’ to be traversed and because men, in wanting to buttress this gender apartheid, insist that ‘what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack’.42 Bourgeois homosociality is cited as both the root and cause of feminine repression, and this homosocial anopsia underwrites both psychoanalytic inquiry and the gaze of the male colonial cartographer and explorer. Moretti, in his succinct chapter on colonial romance, catalogues several European novels set in a Central African milieu, one of which is Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863). Verne’s novel exploits numerous tropes borrowed from missionary heroism and tales of exploration that subsequently became staple ingredients of fin de siècle adventure writing. Verne’s fantastical tale meshes together aspects of early science fiction with a highly individualised mode of colonial discourse. The key protagonists – an English inventor, his manservant Joe and a long-suffering Scottish sceptic – anticipate Haggard’s most memorable characterisations. Nevertheless, while sailing towards the entry point of East Africa, Joe prefaces the central narrative with a vignette speculating upon the feasibility of space travel. In doing so Verne subtly aligns the geography of Central Africa with outer space in order to prepare his audience for their imminent, and allegorical, ‘departure’ into the realm of the outlandish. The reader is encouraged to share the passengers’ perspective who, despite finding Joe’s story impishly witty, ‘more than half believed him’.43 Verne operates and locates his tale within this site of ‘half belief’. Five Weeks in a Balloon is founded upon an intricately woven network of beguiling ‘half-truths’ that permit Verne to recalibrate prominent stereotypes and cultural clichés by imbuing them with theurgical resonance. Verne drolly improvises around the unresolved scientific problems of the day to create a bizarre, yet plausible, narrative structure. As the balloon drifts away from the coast, it becomes increasingly challenging to differentiate between established empirical data and wildly embellished fabrication or hearsay. Fictitious maps melt into factual ones to produce a multifaceted generic and ideological hybrid that delights in subverting sentimental expectations. Verne refines the tale’s fantastic components by amplifying the lunar imagery when the balloon, itself initially confused with the moon, travels towards ‘the country of the Moon’. The narrative trajectory drifts away from a logic founded upon a firm rationalist faith in scientific observation and towards the mystical void of Central Africa, and Verne prompts us to measure Dr Ferguson’s myopic and misguided zeal for empiricism against the bewildering diversity of native mysticism:

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‘My Friends’, said the doctor, ‘here is where OUR passage of the African Continent really commences; up to this time we have been following traces of our predecessors. Henceforth we are to launch ourselves upon the unknown. We shall not lack the courage, shall we?’

Five Weeks in a Balloon has often been cited as unambiguous proof of Verne’s support for the European expansionist enterprise in Africa. Peter Aberger reveals how as a twenty-year-old in 1864, Verne never fully forgot the youthful ideals of the Republic, but his belief in egalitarianism did not extend so far as to assimilate non-Caucasians into this high-minded credo. Aberger portrays a Verne who deplored slavery while refusing to ‘consider black as the white man’s equals’.44 For Aberger, the message that emerges from Verne’s published writings on African manners and mores is resoundingly clear: ‘such barbarism and savagery justify the intervention of the white man [. . .] in bringing his civilisation’.45 Verne is castigated for specifying the humanity of black Africa solely in relation to white civilisation: ‘[t]he tribes in the interior of the continent possess it [humanity] in the least degree since they are farthest removed from the white man’s influence.’46 What this disparaging judgement tends to overlook is that Verne’s novel both finesses and contributes to a wider, more intricate perception of Central Africa as a psychogeography of uncharted centres. In structuring his novel around a cluster of half-truths embellished with the outlandish, Verne transcended actual geographical parameters to forge both an imagined people and a tangible milieu. Verne fashioned a wilfully perverse and multifaceted vision of black Central Africa so as gleefully to undercut not only narrow racial categories but also the regnant realism that sought to promote these categories in mainstream literary culture. By doing so, the charge of racism levelled at Verne, from scholars such as Aberger, is undermined, as Verne’s narrative arc foregrounds the wild absurdity of established racial containers. It is a setting where Morpheus governs all.47 The landscape traversed in Five Weeks in a Balloon is entirely interchangeable with the lunar terrain of All Around the Moon (1873): ‘Another wonder almost in front of us!’ cried Ardan. ‘I see a vast lake black as pitch and round as a crater; it is surrounded by such lofty mountains that their shadows reach clear across, rendering the interior quite invisible!’48

This is the space behind the black curtain upon which reductive stereotypes were projected, a demonic abyss that unnerved the evangelical crusaders through its capacity literally to mutate before their eyes – a nightmarish site of absence, where the signified and signifier are irreconcilably detached. From an august panoptic perspective, which symbolises

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the lofty pedestal of European scientific self-regard, the ignoble creatures below offer an atavistic glimpse of primordial provenance. However, these are not the craven simian brutes long associated with the imagistic excesses of imperial romance, but anthropomorphic figures threatening to invade and engulf: Some of the natives had really climbed the baobab, and now they were seen rising on all sides, winding along the boughs like reptiles, and advancing slowly but surely, all the time plainly discernible, not merely to the eye but to the nostrils, by the horrible odours of the rancid grease with which they bedaub their bodies.

The strong sense of bodily disgust is crucial at this juncture, and is reminiscent of Gulliver’s appalled fascination with the Yahoos. Verne’s creatures are devoid of recognisably human characteristics and appear as reptilian–human theriomorphic entities. Verne’s paranoid rendering of these fetid and malodorous figures reflects an oft-repeated missionary and bureaucratic unease at living in close proximity to indigenous tribes. The opening gambit to Kipling’s short story ‘Beyond the Pale’ replicates this by rendering the profoundly ‘unhygienic’ colonial urban space of Amir Nath’s Gully, a ghettoised sprawl difficult to map and perilous to traverse ‘where each man’s house is as guarded and unknowable as the grave’.49 In a grotesque irony that Verne’s text fails to register, the balloon employed by the intrepid explorers emits ‘filth’ of its own: a toxic trace of pollution across the Central African sky. This carbon taint is the obvious by-product of European scientific innovation: a grubby, sooty show of middle-class mastery over nature. The ‘horrible odours’ associated with Verne’s African creatures adumbrate a humanity stripped and liberated of all the mannered artifice and accoutrements treasured by a European highbrow elite.50 This exaggerated revulsion at ‘bedaubed’ colonial bodies reverberates through the imperial romances of Haggard and Kipling, who both fashion strange androgynous figures so as to neutralise the danger posed by their visceral sexuality. A similar anxiety will find expression later in the century through the paranoid devotion to cleanliness explored by George Du Maurier in Trilby (1894), as well as Lessingham’s abhorrence at Marjorie’s plight of being forced into filthy rags in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). The extract above reveals the obvious simile, ‘like reptiles’, as a superficial gesture failing to mask an underpinning feature of this fantasised racism: the move from simile to metaphor. This allegorical shift is reiterated when Dr Ferguson informs the group that ‘[i]t has been asserted that these natives have tails, like mere quadrupeds; but it was soon discovered that these appendages belonged to the skins of animals that were for clothing.’

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Verne’s disconcerting African interior with its anthropomorphised creatures is a perilous place to be stranded alone. Having journeyed for days through the void, the travellers are stricken by ‘desert sickness’, a malady induced by the ‘impossible monotony of the arid blue sky and the vast yellow expanse of the desert-sand’, which produced ‘a sensation of terror’ – a feeling caused by perpetual introspection. The triumvirate survives within this enervating and arduous terrain by upholding fussy bourgeois niceties, quasi-feudal hierarchies and regulations. They tirelessly perform socially sanctioned roles: Dr Ferguson is the stoical epitome of Victorian scientific savoir faire; Kennedy the dignified Scottish sceptic; Joe the fiercely loyal retainer. By wearing these social and public masks, each character believes he has secured a ‘magical’ protection from the atavistic abyss. Ferguson’s desert sickness can be construed as a moment where the ego and the super-ego risk disastrous usurpation by the id. For Freud, man was an inherently bellicose creature whose monstrous impulses were becoming more difficult to manage and police by the dual front of the individual super-ego and the state’s cultural conditioning. This unresolved tension further explains the fin de siècle obsession with split selves that rise to prominence through a failure to monitor an identity constantly threatening to unravel. When Dr Ferguson finds himself abandoned in an unforgiving expanse, where he can no longer stage his own socially ascribed selfhood, the consequences prove almost fatal: Once in rapid motion, he felt his spirits greatly cheered, when suddenly a vertigo came over him; he seemed to be poised on the edge of an abyss; his knees bent under him; the vast solitude struck terror to his heart; he found himself at the minute mathematical point, the centre of an infinite circumference, that is to say – a nothing! The balloon had disappeared entirely into the deepening gloom [. . .] He called aloud. Not even an echo replied, and his voice died out in the empty vastness of surrounding space, like a pebble cast into a bottomless gulf; then down he sank, fainting, on the sand, alone, amid the eternal silence of the desert.

Existential emptiness and geographical sterility combine here to produce a Gothic shudder. Dr Ferguson – precariously ‘poised’ on ‘the edge of an abyss’ – recalls Derrida’s notes that the act of writing is, for him, the terrifying experience of standing on the edge of a cliff and staring into the ‘gulf’. Dr Ferguson is struck by a ‘terror’ at finding himself trapped within the ‘centre of an infinite circumference’ which for Derrida is the moment of nothingness or undecidability. The act of writing is both terrifying and necessary as writing bears the responsibility of revealing the aporia, the locus where the logic of Western metaphysics is shown to break down. When he is finally rescued from the ‘bottomless’ chasm

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and resuscitated by Joe, the narration continues defiantly. The group, reunited, once again assume the familiar social and public roles and attempt to repress all memory of their isolated introspection; yet the recollection can never be fully erased and leaves a lasting, indelible trace on the psychic surface. Kennedy’s attempted suicide in the following chapter testifies to the hazards of finding yourself alone ‘amid the eternal silence of the desert’, and the group’s adoption of an inhibited reticence towards the source of their desert sickness implies a form of amnesia where recollections are stifled and repressed, but not altogether lost. Verne’s text ultimately suggests that maps are ‘memories’ more than ‘records’, with the dual function of being the sites of wish fulfilment and for practising this kind of amnesia. Marlow in Heart of Darkness articulates this association when revealing that his obsession with Africa began when he was ‘a little chap’.51 In a curiously mimetic gesture Conrad displaces the there of fond childhood reminiscence into the here of his most acclaimed novella by having Marlow repeat a similar back story. Marlow describes how he would ‘look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia’ and ‘lose himself in the glories of exploration’.52 His idle reverie exposes a biting social fear attached to African cartographic and commercial campaigns, that of losing one’s sense of coherent or unitary selfhood when confronted by an inhospitable, uncertain expanse. Marlow, like his creator, was mesmerised by the concept of blankness as well as the bewitching possibilities it could offer,and Conrad’s mimetic gesture blurs the generic boundaries between fact and fiction, sedentary author and questing protagonist. Marlow recalls a lost time when ‘there were many blank spaces on the earth’, and when the African void held a particularly mesmeric appeal: ‘when I saw one that looked particularly inviting [. . .] I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there’.53 Both Conrad and Marlow reveal how early- and midnineteenth-century maps of Africa could enthral and entrance, but fail to show the debilitating personal and social effects of ‘entry’ into this seemingly infinite circumference. Prior to writing Heart of Darkness, Conrad suffered a well-documented mental breakdown between 1897 and 1898.54 In his biography of Conrad, Fredrick Karl emphasises this idea of a descent into an underworld: Conrad was forced into ‘his own kind of darkness’, and ‘down not only into memory but into the very chaos and extravagance of the unconscious [...] Stalled, depressed, ill, he had touched bottom and had, in his own way, found his subject matter.’55 Conrad’s fraught odyssey into this chthonic domain was a sort of psychological rite of passage, allowing him to compose his novella, thus perpetuating the inexorable

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link between a psychological and a tangible Africa. In preparation for his Dantean expedition, Marlow is sent to the Doctor to have the dimensions of his head measured with calipers, ‘I always ask leave, in the interest of science, to measure the crania of those going out there.’56 When a perplexed Marlow enquires whether this process is repeated upon return to the trading post, the Doctor replies: ‘Oh, I never see them [. . .] and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know’. He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. ‘So you are going out there. Famous. Interesting too’. He gave me a searching glance, and made another note. ‘Ever any madness in your family?’ he asked, in a matter-of-fact tone [. . .] ‘It would be’, he said, without taking notice of my irritation, ‘interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot, but . . .’57

Similarly, Jung, in a less forensic fashion, calibrated the psychological effect that this topography had upon visiting Europeans. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) Jung evokes the terms of Conrad’s protagonist when recording his peregrinations throughout the Dark Continent. Jung evokes the mountainous terrain that he is crossing as ‘covered with dense jungle’ and a geography in which the ‘inhabitants grew blacker; their bodies clumsier and more massive’.58 Jung, like Marlow, is both terrified and excited by this expanse and its capacity to reconnect a questing European sensibility with a forgotten and unexplored past. Again, having journeyed from the ‘coastal strip’ – the last tattered vestige of civil society – Jung carefully chronicles his odyssey into the heartless heartland of Africa. ‘I was enchanted by the sight – it was a picture of something alien and outside my experience, but on the other hand a most intense sentiment du déjà vu.’59 This region is simultaneously alien and strangely familiar: ‘I had the feeling that I had already experienced this moment and had always known this world which was separated from me only by distance in time.’60 Central Africa facilitates, in Jung, a transcendental experience that reconnects him to the enigmatic and repressed recesses of childhood. ‘It was as if I were this moment returning to the land of my youth, and as if I knew that dark-skinned man who had been waiting for me for five thousand years.’61 Jung travels back in time and space to confront a cluster of archetypes that for him constitutes the collective unconscious: the primal inherited patterns and unconscious source of human civilisation. ‘The collective unconscious’, for Jung, ‘appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents.’62 It functions in an analogous fashion to Freud’s conception of the unconscious as explicated in Civilisation and its Discontents, where humanity’s sense of guilt is, rather incredibly,

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revealed to have its provenance in the cannibalistic consumption of the Primal Father. The killing of the Primal Father obeyed an erotic impulse causing ‘human beings to unite in a closely-knit group’ that can only be maintained ‘through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt’.63 For Freud, ‘[w]hat began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group.’64 The primordial origins of guilt are further explicated by Freud when suggesting that, if: civilisation is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then – as a result of the inborn conflict arising from the ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between the trends of love and death – there is inextricably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate.65

The biting anxieties of the psyche are ‘eternal’: ‘perpetual’ would seem to offer a better fit here, in that, although the same tensions play out again and again, they are not wholly inherited or passed down like DNA strands but freshly acquired and endlessly replayed, having emerged from the psychosexual development of childhood. However, Jung departs from Freudian psychoanalytic theory by going further to stress the significance of a shared primordial legacy: ‘the collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual’.66 Jung insists, therefore, that all of mythology could be taken as a projection of the collective unconscious, and as such a study of this unconscious can be achieved in one of two ways: ‘either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual’.67 Famously, Marlow portrays his voyage as a ‘traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings’:68 There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect [. . .] When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality – the reality, I tell you – fades. The inner truth is hidden – luckily, luckily.69

Consequently, this atavistic adventure causes Marlow and Jung each to experience and construct the terrain as a dreamscape, slipping from and abandoning the tangible terrain into a richly metaphorical psychogeography. As the Eldorado sails further along the Congo, Marlow observes that nowhere ‘did we stop long enough to get a particularised

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impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.’70 Jung echoes this notion in his journal when writing, ‘[i]n my tiredness I no longer knew whether I had been transported from reality into a dream, or from a dream to reality.’71 In a 1911 letter to his then friend, Freud pleads ‘[j]ust don’t stay in the tropical colonies too long; you must reign at home.’72 Freud appears in the letter to recognise the inherent danger in prising open the Pandora’s box of colonial exploration, and warns Jung not to get lost in the infinite circumference of brooding introspection that almost destroys Dr Ferguson in Verne’s narrative. Freud’s warning also embodies latent European anxieties pertaining to Africa as a psychogeographical space that elicits savage returns. Africa invited and tempted the imagination of white Europeans and, as Rebecca Stott argues, challenged them to ‘explore and penetrate this foreign territory’, even though such mesmeric opportunities carried the constant peril that a failure to resist could lead to an ‘absorption into otherness’.73 In sharp contrast to Verne’s protagonists, who require the acute strain of social prohibition in order to defend a stable sense of selfhood, Jung in Memories celebrates the untrammelled and bracing freedom such dark isolation affords. Initially appearing reluctant to heed the admonishments of his friend, Jung chronicles with an obvious relish how this mysterious dreamscape emancipates his psyche from a stifling European modernity.74 ‘Thousands of miles lay between me and Europe, mother of all demons. The demons could not reach me here – there were no telegrams, no telephone calls, no letters, no visitors. My liberated psychic forces poured blissfully back to the primeval expanses.’75 Conrad echoes and reinforces this portrayal of Europe when Marlow explains that all of ‘Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’.76 This depiction of Europe as the ‘mother of all demons’, subverts the cultural cliché that sought to propagate a sense of innate African barbarity. On the other hand, Jung has been chastised as a stalwart defender of imperialist expansion. In Memories he justifies a European presence in Africa by deploying a logic inherited from the zealous proponents of evangelical discourse. He detects in the ‘eyes of primitives’ an ‘inexpressible longing for light’, and strives to rationalise the delight with which the dawn is greeted every day: ‘the longing for light is the longing of consciousness’.77 However, Jung’s research on African geography and tribal custom reveals a curious paradox that undermines his apparent status as an ardent champion of Empire. Such a paradox can be construed through the lens of Derrida’s pharmakon: it is both the disease and cure, simultaneously assuming responsibility for the august ‘civilising mission’

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while eroding indigenous mores. Jung inherits from the missionaries of Central Africa a complex mixture of nagging unease and rapt reverence during encounters with local witchdoctors or shamen. Dominique Mannoni in Prospero and Caliban (1956) asks whether Europeans projected upon ‘colonial peoples the obscurities of their own unconscious – obscurities they would rather not penetrate’.78 Jung deploys plaintive terms when evoking his encounter with a local laibon, revealing his sorrow at the systematic erosion of native culture. He refers to the laibon as the ‘living disintegration of an undermined, outmoded, unrestorable world’.79 In doing so, Jung registered a scalding truth of colonial expansionist policy that would come to dominate late Victorian depictions of Central Africa: One time we had a palaver with the laibon, the old medicine man. He appeared in a splendid cloak made of the skins of blue monkeys – a valuable article of display. When I asked him about his dreams, he answered with tears in his eyes, ‘In old days the laibons had dreams, and knew whether there is war or sickness or whether rain comes and where the herds should be driven.’ His grandfather, too, had still dreamed. But since the whites were in Africa, he said, no one had dreams anymore. Dreams were no longer needed because now the English knew everything!80

Within this specific milieu ‘the medicine man had lost his raison d’être’, and throughout Memories Jung appears painfully divided between an unspoken wish to align himself with these ‘splendid’ figures who embodied a prelapsarian rapport with natural rhythms, and a European bourgeois teleology that demanded the promulgation of a supposedly ‘humane’, ‘enlightened’ and ‘progressive’ polity. However, Jung understood that dreaming was an exertion of control and ownership. While staring out into the imagined abyss of his African dreamscape and remarking the figure of a native hunter, he writes in his journal, ‘I could not guess what string within myself was plucked at the sight of this dark hunter. I knew only that this world had been mine for countless millennia.’81 To ‘dream’ was to stake a claim of possession over both the imagined and the immense physical vista. As Marlow utters wistfully, ‘[t]he dreams of men’ are ‘the seed of commonwealth, the germs of empire.’82 Jung relegates the laibon to the status of an archetype, the pre-existing conceptual matrix that imbues and enriches key religious concepts. By implying that colonised Africans do not ‘dream’ any more ‘because now the English knew everything’, Jung seems to contradict himself by denying the existence of a universal collective unconscious. His notion of universalism only extends to incorporate a white European tradition. Africa, for Jung, was a dreamscape and portal to be exploited in the exploration of the Western psyche. Yet he also understood dreaming as

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an avenue to transcendental emancipation, which reconfigures dreams as a psychic act of defiance that thwarts an ideological order demanding total indoctrination. This idea resonates profoundly in both the life and literary career of Olive Schreiner.

Notes 1. J. B. Harley, ‘Maps, Knowledge and Power’, in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environment, ed. by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277–312 (p. 28). 2. Ibid., p. 282. 3. Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 97–192 (p. 185). 4. Said, 2003: p. 216. 5. Curzon, cited in Said, 2003: pp. 215–16. 6. Adam Sedgwick, The Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, ed. by John Willis Clark and Thomas McKenny Hughes, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), p. 357. 7. H. G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (London: V. Gollancz, 1934), p. 91. 8. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 180–1. 9. This figuration of Central Africa in the clinical discourse of pathology invites comparison with the research of Susan Sontag. In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag highlights the link between repressed desire and the metaphors used in the description of illness, ‘[w]ith the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease – because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.’ Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. 46. Furthermore, in her diaries Sontag articulates her struggle with cancer: ‘I feel my body has let me down [. . .] and my mind too [. . .] I’m responsible for my cancer. I lived as a coward, repressing my desire, my rage.’ See Cathy Galvin, ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, Sunday Times Magazine (25 May 2008), p. 23. In my argument the perceived moral depravation of Central Africa and Livingstone’s portrayal of the slave trade as a cancerous blight consequently led to its personification in the rhetoric of illness. To a certain extent, the barely repressed fear and desire provoked by Central Africa manifest themselves in such depictions. 10. Rudyard Kipling, ‘Pig’, from Plain Tales from the Hills (Calcutta and London: Thacker, Spink, 1888), p. 191. 11. Lindy Stiebel, Imagining Africa: Landscape in H. Rider Haggard’s African Romance (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 13. 12. Edward Said, ‘Preface’, to Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1994), xxiii–xxiv.

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13. Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1987), p. 135. 14. ‘The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, “Here are lions”’. W. B. Yeats, ‘Village Ghosts’ in The Celtic Twilight (1893), from James Joyce, ‘The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance’, in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. by Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 187–90 (p. 189). 15. Jonathan Swift, ‘On Poetry: A Rhapsody’, in Collected Poems of Jonathan Swift, Vol. II, ed. by Joseph Horrell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 746. 16. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici: A Letter To A Friend, Christian Morals, Urn-Burial, and Other Papers (London: Ticknor & Fields, 1862), p. 32. 17. Cited in Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1979), p. 133. 18. Anon., The Church Missionary Society Atlas (London: Church Missionary Society, 1896), p. 13. 19. CMS Atlas, 1896: p. 14. 20. Juvenile, February 1883. 21. CMS Atlas, 1896: p. 13. 22. Ibid., p. 13. 23. Ibid., p. 18. 24. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Dawn’, in Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. by J. McGowan (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1997), p. 211. 25. CMS Atlas, 1896: p. 18. 26. Brantlinger, 1988: p. 240. 27. Ibid., p. 227. 28. Here, and throughout, I am using the Jungian definition of collective unconscious: While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious, but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired but owe their existence exclusively to heredity.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works, Vol. IX (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), para. 88. Graham Greene, In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (Oxford: Bodley Head, 1962), p. 123. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1916), p. 47. Harley, 1988: p. 282. Ibid., p. 282. Joseph Conrad, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, in Last Essays (London: J. M. Dent, 1926), pp. 19–20. Many of the narratives concerning Central Africa in this period, both fictitious and factual, stress their impeccable epistemological credentials through prefaces or forewords that account for how the work was undertaken. A staple feature of the early European novel was the inclusion of an

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35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature introduction or prologue retelling the alleged back story of the manuscript submitted for publication. It is perhaps no coincidence that this was primarily used in association with novels lampooning or manipulating the fledgling genre of travel writing, or highly spiced tales of exotic escapades. The fantastical voyages of Gulliver and other such intrepid protagonists were anchored down by an empirical weight designed to counterbalance the absurdist or outlandish elements. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1990), p. 58. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 58. See, for example, Norman Etherington’s description of the expedition undertaken by Holly and Vincey in Haggard’s She with regard to Jung’s layered personality theory. Norman Etherington, ‘Rider Haggard and Imperialism, and the Layered Personality’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 22 (Autumn 1978), pp. 71–87. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, Vol. 1 (Summer 1976), pp. 875–93 (p. 878). Ibid., p. 884. Ibid., p. 884. Ibid., p. 885. I prefer, and have used throughout, the translation that can be accessed at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3526/pg3526.html (last accessed 23 May 2012), which is the William Lackland translation. Peter Aberger, ‘The Portrayal of Blacks in Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires’, The French Review, Vol. 53, no. 2 (December 1979), pp. 199–206 (p. 201). Ibid., pp. 201–2. Ibid., p. 202. The Greek god of dreams; he lay on an ebony bed in a dimly lit cave, surrounded by poppies. He appears to humans in their dreams in the shape of a man, but is responsible for shaping dreams, or giving shape to the beings which inhabit dreams. Once again I am using the translation available at http://www.gutenberg. org/files/16457/16457–h/16457–h.htm (last accessed 23 May 2012). Kipling, 1888: p. 153. Conrad highlights the polluting trace of European imperialism in Youth: ‘[a]nd on the lustre of the great calm waters the Judea glided imperceptibly, enveloped in languid and unclean vapours, in a lazy cloud that drifted to leeward, light and slow: a pestiferous cloud defiling the splendour of sea and sky.’ Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative (London: J. M. Dent, 1917), pp. 20–1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 11. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 11. Conrad frequently referred to these intermittent bouts of chronic depression as a voyage into a personal living hell. In a letter to Norman Douglas in 1910 he writes, ‘I feel like a man returned from hell and look upon the

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55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

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very world of the living with dread.’ Joseph Conrad, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. by Laurence Davis and Gene M. Moore, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 345. Fredrick Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 441. See also John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (New York: Pantheon, 2007). Conrad, 1973: p. 16. Ibid., p. 17. Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston (London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 252. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 239. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche’, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. by R. F. C Hull, ed. by Gerhard Adler, Michael Fordham, Michael McGuire and Herbert Read, Vol. VIII (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), para. 325. Freud, 1963: p. 133. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 133. Jung, 1992: para. 342. Ibid., para. 342. Conrad, 1973: p. 48. Ibid., p. 48. Conrad, 1973: p. 21. Jung, 1963: p. 242. Freud to Jung, 12 May 1911, The Freud–Jung Letters, ed. by William McGuire (London: Hogarth and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 422. Rebecca Stott, ‘The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction’, Feminist Review, no. 32 (Summer 1989), pp. 69–89 (p. 77). The word initially needs to be stressed here, because at the end of his travels Jung aligns himself with Freud. He notes that throughout the trip his dreams ‘stubbornly followed the tactic of ignoring Africa’. This led him to conclude that his African odyssey was not ‘something real’, but a ‘symptomatic or symbolic act’. However, he does provide the narrative to a dream that included a dark figure: His face appeared cautiously familiar to me, but I had to reflect a long time before I could determine where I had met him before. Finally it came to me: he had been my barber in Chattanooga, Tennessee! An American Negro. In the dream he was holding a tremendous, red-hot curling iron to my head, intending to give me Negro hair. I could already feel the painful heat and awoke with a sense of terror. I took this dream as a warning from the unconscious; it was saying that the primitive was a danger to me. At that time I was obviously all too close to ‘going back’. I was suffering from an attack of sandfly fever which probably reduced my psychic resistance. In order to represent a Negro threatening me, my unconscious had invoked a twelve-year old memory of my Negro barber

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75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

Ibid., p. 247. Conrad, 1973: p. 71. Jung, 1963: p. 252. Dominique-Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonisation (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 21. See also Graham Macphee and Prem Poddar (eds), Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (New York/Oxford: Bergahn Books, 2007), pp. 1–21. Jung, 1963: p. 249. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., p. 239. Conrad, 1973: p. 7.

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Chapter 8

Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner occupies an unusual position within the colonial romance genre. Her status as a female writer immediately sets her apart from the overwhelming majority of those who were keen to exploit African territories as a vivid setting for their fictions in the fin de siècle. Elaine Showalter surveys the discouraging and misogynistic literary scene in which Schreiner participated: Finally, male writers needed to find a place for themselves in Eliot’s wake, to remake the high Victorian novel in masculine terms, to lead a revolt of man against Queen George. The revival of ‘romance’ in the 1880s was a men’s literary revolution intended to reclaim the kingdom of the English novel for male writers, male readers, and men’s stories.1

Mark Sanders elaborates this perception of a stale, male late Victorian aesthetic hegemony, stating that ‘when Olive Schreiner contemplated participation in intellectual life, she found it not only dominated by men in fact, but also imagined as a male sociality’.2 However, by the time of her death in 1920, Olive Schreiner had infiltrated the upper echelons of these varied clubs, cliques and coteries. Having grown up in South Africa, Schreiner was aged twenty-six years old when she arrived at Southampton in 1881 and had already encountered a pernicious patriarchy. Her father, Gottlob Schreiner, was a Lutheran minister of such ferocious renown that he features in the Juvenile Magazine of December 1883 in a short story entitled ‘In Kimberly Gaol’. Although raised in the devout Lutheran faith of her father, the adolescent Olive Schreiner rejected the biblical edicts of her childhood and abandoned the family homestead in Kimberly. Furthermore, unlike Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope, R. L. Stevenson or Conan Doyle, Schreiner spent most of her childhood in Africa; after disavowing family ties, she worked as a governess in several schools while saving for her passage ‘home’ to England. Schreiner’s resolve initially to publish The Story of an African

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Farm (1883) under the male pseudonym of Ralph Iron was perhaps an attempt to secure a niche within what Showalter construes as a stifling, male-dominated literati. It also reinforces the mysteriously elusive and slippery aspects of her oeuvre: her abiding fascination with radical generic experimentation tailoring a rhetorical address that distils the estranging otherness of her childhood haunts. In the Preface to The Story of an African Farm she avers: It has been suggested by a kind of critic that he would better have liked the little book if it had been a history of wild adventure; of cattle driven into inaccessible ‘kranzes’ by Bushmen; ‘of encounters with ravening lions, and hairbreadth escapes’. This could not be. Such works are best written in Piccadilly or in the Strand: there the gifts of the creative imagination, untrammelled by contact with any fact, may spread their wings.3

A bullish advocate of trade unions and an outspoken contributor to acrimonious debates surrounding the ‘woman question’, Schreiner’s myriad political allegiances and artistic commitments frequently came across as deeply conflicted, even confused. It is this tendency towards sophisticated scepticism and radical ambivalence that is crucial to gauging the full complexities of her unique artistic vision. In a collection of essays entitled Thoughts on South Africa (1923), Schreiner appears to negate an earlier statement pronouncing that works of imperial romance are ‘best written in Piccadilly or in the Strand’, when positing that a sober distance ‘is essential for a keen, salient survey’ of rival or arcane geographies.4 Within the textual traces and folds of Schreiner’s corpus is a nagging sense of ideological unease, mirroring her status as an assiduous chronicler of the colonial periphery for a largely metropolitan middle class. Although Schreiner was partially endorsed by the rarefied intellectual set in which she moved, she remained politically detached from this clannish and claustrophobic locale.5 Her tales cannily encrypt her own felt sensations as well as those of her key protagonists. She is the spider cartographer, constantly spinning gossamer threads between locations, bodies and lives.6 Moreover, this obsessive mapping of personal and topographical hinterlands was not simply a source of inspiration or authorial procedure, but a psychological mechanism designed to safeguard her fragile sense of spiritual equilibrium. Schreiner simultaneously adhered to, while slyly subverting, an accepted symbolic cache of signifiers used in literary depictions of African territories, facilitating psychic exploration, but in a manner less obviously exploitative than that of Conrad or Jung. Jed Esty remarks that a summary of African Farm to ‘new readers’ requires ‘an entire glossary of generic categories’.7 For Esty, ‘it is one part South African

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plaasroman [. . .] one part new Woman fiction, one part Dickensian farce’, while also being, ‘one part Victorian melodrama [. . .] one part allegorical tale, one part satire of provincial manners [. . .] one part spiritual autobiography, and one part neo-Transcendentalist novel of ideas’.8 To this weighty list, he simply adds the genre of Bildungsroman. Esty’s taxonomical approach vouchsafes a plethora of generic coordinates for uninitiated readers to navigate Schreiner’s imaginary worlds. The effect, it would seem, of Schreiner’s lifelong interest in map-making is that it can itself be found percolating down into current critical interpretations of her oeuvre. Olive Schreiner was a paradoxical half-presence haunting the fringes of a metropolitan literary landscape. She acknowledges her own nebulous role in reference to the émigré who occupies ‘a two-fold position’: ‘half he is outsider; half he is lover’.9 Subjectivity within Schreiner’s corpus oscillates violently along an axis of avowal and disavowal; her split authorial persona is the battleground on which the competing psychic forces of Eros and death-drive vie for supremacy. Throughout her adult life Schreiner ebbed and flowed between England and the South African veldt’s solemn monotony, feeling the pull of one as she felt the push of the other. An insatiable compulsion to repeat the odyssey between imperial centre and colonial outpost instigated a series of divisions within her identity and the divorcing of self from body, making Schreiner an example of the phenomenon R. D. Laing would later term that of the unembodied self.10 Mark Sanders, in his genealogy of nineteenth-century artistic life, prefers the Foucauldian ‘disembodied’, when discussing how fin de siècle female writers mobilised narratives of ‘intellectual “disembodiment”’. He declares that ‘women can be seen as having been aided by the possibility of presenting the life of the mind as disembodied, of detaching [. . .] mind from body, intellectual from sexual life’.11 Sanders implies that this fracturing within the psyche of a female artist occurred before she sought to enter intellectual life. Foucault, in discussing the institutionalised homoeroticism of ancient Greece, proposes that the genesis of ‘philosophy’ was finalised by the problematisation of desire in terms of ‘an opposition of body and soul, and the subordination of body to soul’.12 Sanders finesses Foucault’s thesis in order to ask ‘can this figuring of intellectual life work for women?’13 Sanders is correct in his assertion that Schreiner, already entered into a highly competitive artistic environment, was exhibiting signs of a division between mind and body; however, this study will trace a trajectory back to her childhood experiences to demonstrate that this was a latent fissure, and reveal how the geographical distance between the imperial metropolis and the forlorn colonial periphery became inscribed upon

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Schreiner’s psychology and conditioned the way in which she processed her stark, comfortless African surroundings. Although more pronounced in adulthood, the effects of her real and fantasised traversals between South Africa and England are made manifest during a clipped vignette retold by her husband in The Life of Olive Schreiner (1924), in which Cronwright Schreiner includes a conversation between a six-year-old Olive and a family friend. The dialogue details the fortunes of a visitor who, upon departing the family home in Healdtown, was challenged to try and find his hat. A child, described as ‘ethereal, quick, quaint’, was the obvious culprit.14 Instead of showing annoyance at the child’s impish prank, the visitor was amazed by the intellectual dexterity on display; when the six-year-old Olive was eventually cajoled to disclosure, she replied, ‘[b]ut they [the rest of the family] don’t know where it is, and if I forget my personal identity, I shan’t know where it is, and shan’t be able to tell them, and you won’t be able to find your hat.’15 This intellectual adroitness and acuity seems all the more notable given that Schreiner was raised upon a narrow diet of Christian doctrine and missionary travel writing. An initial study of Schreiner’s literary tropes and motifs seems to validate orthodox depictions of the vast interior as an unknowable hinterland. She recalls that, even as an adult, Africa remained ‘the land of Livingstone’, and how, ‘[s]ome of us remember on hot Sunday afternoons, as little children, when no more worldly book than missionary travels was allowed us, how we sat on our stools and looked into the sunshine and dreamed of that land.’16 Having been denied a formal education by her parents and receiving only haphazard, patchy tuition from various missionary instructors, Cronwright records that her only substantial and consistent schooling ‘was the Bible [. . .] she could repeat long passages from early memory’.17 Cronwright paints the portrait of a solitary child imbued with prodigious imaginative gifts, who when denied easy access to a library constructs compelling tales of fantastical adventure. For Schreiner dreaming was a means of transcendental navigation and an escape from the grievous constraints of her austere upbringing. Cronwright’s biography shies away from resolutely classifying his wife as prone to debilitating and prolonged bouts of depression, preferring instead to gesture towards her apparent eccentricity and behavioural quirks. It is through telling extracts from Schreiner’s correspondence and diaries – in which she speaks from beyond the grave – that Cronwright relates the brittleness of her subjectivity. These moments of posthumous articulation reaffirm her social position as a revenant that shadows the text by interjecting or ventriloquising several of Cronwright’s conclusions.18 In a journal entry dated 17 July 1873, Schreiner declares: ‘I am

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down – down – down. I feel as though I could not do anything and I don’t believe I ever will do anything in the world. I am a queer mixture of good and bad. I don’t know what to make of myself.’19 A deliberate or unwitting semantic ambiguity attends ‘I don’t know what to make of myself’. Does this statement imply the extent and severity of her psychic ‘descent’? Or does it point towards Schreiner’s complex perception of her own ‘identity’ as a perplexing succession of social and public masks; ‘self’ as a product of carefully rehearsed artifice – something ‘made’ and ‘improvised’ rather than ‘inherited’? Unlike Conrad, who locates a fruitful artistic stimulus in his ‘descent’, utilising traumatic personal experience so as to craft a more shattering vision of Central Africa, Schreiner suffers a terrible creative paralysis; ensnared in the conflicting binaries of ‘good and bad’, her personal identity seems to unravel. Schreiner repeatedly registered her transformation, or bitter dissolution, and sought to salvage a unifying mechanism by which her unembodied and divided self could be reconstructed. Laing believed that many ‘writers and artists who are relatively isolated from the other succeed in establishing a creative relationship with things in the world, which are made to embody the figures of their phantasy’.20 Schreiner’s figure of redemptive release came in the form of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Having read Emerson, she confesses in a journal entry dated 8 April 1874, that ‘I don’t hate myself quite so much as I used to, there’s something good in old Olive after all. I am reading Emerson and it’s giving me more strength than anything has ever done.’21 Schreiner identified Emerson as a generous spiritual and intellectual guide, who could be utilised to reformulate her diminished and demoralised literary persona, while simultaneously finding in his theories on ‘Self-Reliance’ and ‘Nature’ a manifesto relevant to her own writing project: She had not read any of Emerson before 1874, when she bought the Essays in Cape Town. She told [Havelock] Ellis in 1884 that, when she bought Emerson, she was in a state of great depression and thinking of suicide, but that he lifted her into a higher atmosphere and seemed the expression of her highest self, and that, for many years afterwards, she always turned to Emerson in depression; she would like the one on ‘Self-Reliance’, and up to the day of her death she could repeat passages from the Essays, being particularly fond of the passage beginning, ‘Embosomed in wonder and beauty as we are.’22

Emerson’s essays offered Schreiner cathartic and purgative possibilities by pointing towards a ‘mask’ through which she could view her surroundings with a new intensity, while retaining a measure of watchful detachment, even anonymity. Such maxims as, ‘I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me’, and, ‘[t]o be

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great is to be misunderstood’, had a profound effect upon her.23 She metamorphosed into the Emersonian ‘transparent eyeball’, securing both a mystical largesse and calm authority of cadence through his inimitable first person perspective and robust style: I am the lover of the uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets and villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds something as beautiful as his own nature.24

Schreiner, energised through her punctilious scrutiny of Emerson’s oeuvre, renders the African contours as charged with an omnipotent spiritual potency; in doing so, she inadvertently secures a means by which to rectify the painful process of cultural dislocation that she has undergone. Through the transcendentalist movement Schreiner was impelled towards a more visceral and uncompromising attachment to the comfortless grandeur of this terrain. In a short essay entitled ‘The Psychology of the Boer’, she gauges the full significance of this organic union between soul and soil. Schreiner, who always admired and identified with the Boers, implies a numinous bond between the Boers and their adopted homestead. This revelatory investment in space and place is amplified in an 1886 letter. After highlighting the parched immensity of the African plains that ‘stretch as far as you can see’ and where you rarely encounter any ‘living creature higher in the scale than an ant’, Schreiner observes, ‘when one is in contact with that vast, dry, bright nature, one is conscious of oneself [. . .] and of something else’; this something else, according to Schreiner, ‘formed those religions in which there is one, sole, almighty God’.25 Here she is not merely exploiting a residual Romanticism to imbue her physical space with a magisterial aura; rather, she audaciously displaces or usurps ‘God’ as the ‘almighty’ author of providential patterning, recasting herself in that role via Emerson’s crusading aesthetic. South Africa existed for Schreiner as a densely textured mix of halfremembered and half-realised emotion, fugitive experience and vivid dream. ‘There is a certain knowledge’, avers Schreiner, ‘of a land which is only to be gained by one born into it, or brought into long-continued personal contact with it.’26 This epitomises Schreiner’s paradoxical outlook – the articulation of a double bind emerging from a perennial, unappeasable feeling of exile. To be qualified to chart the primal mystery of Africa, according to Schreiner, an aspiring author must sedulously maintain ‘distance for a salient survey’, but also cultivate an organic connection with the animistic earth.27 Africa is then rendered in terms of a Derridean hauntology, a contradictory location that is

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neither realised nor non-realised; this geographical half-actuality is an endlessly entrancing purgatory where phantasmic encounters occur. It is possible to map the linguistic history of the French term hantise, the etymological root for Derrida’s hauntology. In verb form hantise is used in a similar manner as ‘haunting’ in English, with the added inflexion of a ‘return of the revenants (literally the specters), their comings and goings with the caveat that the act of return is originary, it begins by coming back’.28 As a noun it signifies a site inhabited and defined by ghosts, but in adjectival form hantise denotes an undetectable passage or movement between place and time. An uncomfortable transference engenders misgiving through a profound imbalance of the modern moment: time, for Derrida, appears ‘out of joint’.29 In this domain of temporal disjunction, the spectral presence of Schreiner’s six-year-old self reappears when surveying this eerie ‘bush’ in which ‘it is particularly easy to lose yourself’.30 Schreiner is brought face to face with spirits not only from recent colonial history but also from a fathomlessly remote antiquity. Into focus drift the wraithlike figures of ‘several Europeans’ who perished in the name of hectic imperial expansion, as well as the decimated animal population who, for those ‘who have not yet reached middle life’, can be imagined grazing on the plain when they ‘were alive’.31 At night, in a trope redolent of both imperial romance and the fin de siècle Gothic tradition, these vaporous entities reappear to take over the earth. The spectral resonance of the following vignette is made more pronounced by a narrator who stresses the tale’s universality. It is a partially recalled, or semi-fictitious, account of a wagon procession through the bush at night, as told from the standpoint of a callow and impressionable Schreiner: as the wagon moves along, the dark outlines of the bushes on either side seem to move too; now a great clump comes nearer and nearer like a vast animal; then as you peer into the dark, they seem like great ruined castles coming to topple over you; and you creep closer down behind the wagon-chest. Against the dark sky to the right of the ridge of the hill, are the gaunt forms of aloes standing like a row of men keeping watch. You remembered all the stories you had heard of Kaffir wars and men shot down and stabbed, as they passed along hill-sides; and then a will-o’-the-wisp comes out from some dried-up torrent bed, and far before you dances in and out among the bushes, now in sight and now gone.32

Derrida argues that the fractured or ephemeral temporality, characteristic of hauntology, deconstructs or erodes the totalising facets of ontology, teleology and epistemology. Hauntology incites anticipation for a single return or a series of repetitions; Africa in Schreiner’s work is a land with ghosts in the soil, already disrupting notions of a temporality.

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Schreiner documents a journey made in the company of an English woman from the coastal point of Port Elizabeth into the austere interior towards Grahamstown in the north, and the subsequent psychological effect the geographical blankness has upon the highly strung English woman: All day we had travelled up through the bush, and at noon came out on a height where, before us, as far as the eye could reach, over hill and dale, without sign of habitation or break, stretched the bush. She [the English woman] began to sob; and, in reply to our questionings, could only reply almost inarticulately: ‘Oh! It’s so terrible! There’s so much of it! There’s so much!’33

This topographical palimpsest is paradoxically marked by ‘terrible’ excess (‘There’s so much!’) as well as eerie absence (‘without sign of habitation’). The complex combination of sensory overload and unnerving vacancy threatens to devour the European traveller. As with Dr Ferguson in Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon, Schreiner’s traumatised companion registers the geographical void – the seemingly ‘infinite circumference’ – as a remorseless stripping away of civilised surfaces and ontological security. Even the English woman’s once self-assured rhetoric becomes a broken language of inarticulate ‘reply’ as she undertakes a perilous process of introspection. In sharp contrast to Schreiner, who had managed to combat existential anguish by committing herself to an instinctual investment in the arid soil, the English woman divines the unbridgeable gulf between the glib taxonomic certainties of imperial discourse and the sharp sense of disempowerment when brought into tangible contact with this unforgiving expanse. Her exclamation, ‘Oh!’, indicates a European inability to verbalise the estranging sensation of looking north into the dark interior. She is the imperfect and acutely vulnerable product of a philosophical tradition that glossed over empirical deficits with imagined projections. When placed in such a situation the English woman has no other option other than to continue to describe the vastness in terms of a ghastly superabundance: ‘[t]here’s so much of it! There’s so much!’ For Schreiner it ‘is this “so much” for which the South African yearns when he leaves his native land’.34 In the gigantic interior, as imagined and directly apprehended, Schreiner finds a liberating landscape that cannot be diluted or domesticated through restrictive geographical tropes and demarcations. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that she feels oppressed and suffocated amid ‘the arts of Florence and Venice’ and in the ‘crowded drawing rooms’ of London and Paris; she longs instead to be reunited with the African earth under the ‘still Karoo nights [. . .] alone under the stars’. Schreiner appears to echo Jung and

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Conrad, or perhaps similarly recognises the inherently rapacious, predatory and profligate nature of the imperial enterprise, when she concludes ‘Europe cannot satisfy us’.35 In her collection of preternatural short stories, Dreams (1891), the terrain melts soporifically into an array of fantastical, grotesque and proto-surrealist dreamscapes. She is transformed into the vaporous and transcendental omnipresent ‘I’ of Walt Whitman combined with the sotto voce stylistic mannerisms of Emily Dickinson. Schreiner fashions her own imagined Africa as an endless desert abyss with the power to facilitate transcendental escape. The narrative personae imbuing Dreams and the shifting perspectives of An African Farm imply Dickinson’s poetic conceit that ‘It’s prudenter – to dream’,36 which also reverberates with the Emerson’s credo of ‘[o]ur minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.’37 Schreiner’s multifaceted rendering of the colonial periphery invites comparison with the geographical and psychic ‘New World’ mapped by nineteenth-century American authors, while the inclusion of a posed photograph in African Farm’s inside cover gestures to Walt Whitman, who pioneered and popularised the fashion of inserting photographs or daguerreotypes of the author as visual prefaces to texts. Like Whitman, Schreiner seeks to forge a unique and trenchant vernacular for an environment that relentlessly subverts the cultural politics of space and place. ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’, from her collection Dreams (1890), epitomises Schreiner’s deft manipulation of setting throughout the collection. The opening gambit ‘[a]s I travelled across an African plain the sun shone down hotly’ resists locating the tale within a specific or immediately recognisable spatial geography.38 Instead, it is simply set on ‘an African plain’, infusing the narrative with a mysterious ethereality. In these dream sequences the external physical terrain is transmuted into bizarre animistic vistas: transitory time collides with malleable spaces to form intricately plotted geometries. The female protagonist falls asleep under the shaded protection of a mimosa tree: I thought I stood on the border of a great desert, and the sand blew about everywhere. And I thought I saw two great figures like beasts of burden of the desert, and one lay upon the sand with its neck stretched out, and one stood by it. And I looked curiously at the one that lay upon the ground, for it had a great burden on its back, and the sand was thick about it, so that it seemed to have piled over it for centuries.39

It becomes apparent that one of the ‘great figures’ in this portentous text is a woman of antiquity enigmatically subjugated by the ‘Age-ofdomination-of-muscular-force’: she ‘stooped low to give suck to her

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young’ and is suddenly enmeshed by the ‘broad band of Inevitable Necessity’.40 The other is the ‘oldest, oldest man living’ who for centuries has sat beside her, looking out across the desert, waiting for her to move. In this psychogeography Schreiner finds herself empowered to forge a singular aesthetic register. The time frame shifts, indeed time itself is allegorically represented by specific characters within the story; then there is a sudden and hypnagogic proclamation that the epoch of ‘muscular-forces’ has been stabbed to death by the coming age-of-nervousforce using the knife of ‘Mechanical Invention’.41 Schreiner’s narrative trajectory overturns generic expectation by aping an Old Testament existential parable that is both oracular and elusive. The penultimate dream sequence includes a plague of locusts as well as a mighty and impassable river that must be crossed, inviting detailed comparisons with the travails of Moses in Egypt. Her encrypted dreamscapes depend upon the wilful smudging of shapes, colours, textures and meanings, both enacting and mirroring the radical discontinuities and incongruities synonymous with rapt reverie. This imagined Africa is a kaleidoscopic panorama that eschews settled aesthetic conceits for recondite, random thought-adventure and vague subconscious prompting. Also resonating ominously throughout Dreams is Schreiner’s misanthropic dissection of modern bourgeois manners within belle époque Britain. In ‘The Sunlight Lay Across My Bed’, the final story in the collection, we are invited to gauge the unearthly stillness and awesome scale of the African plains against the confines of metropolitan London, the ceaseless flux of which the protagonist registers before she falls asleep: In the dark one night I lay upon my bed. I heard the policeman’s feet beat on the pavement; I heard the wheels of carriages roll home from houses of entertainment; I heard a woman’s laugh below my window – and then I fell asleep. And in the dark I dreamt a dream. I dreamt God took my soul to Hell.42

The Dantean echoes that reverberate throughout Heart of Darkness are discernible in Schreiner’s elliptical tale, as is Conrad’s deep mistrust and revulsion at European exploitative indulgence.43 Schreiner’s story unfolds as the protagonist is guided by the Virgilian figure of God through several circles of Hell, the most disturbing of which evokes the crushing of grapes and human bodies by a gigantic wine-press. She renders the dystopic process with a haunted eloquence. The tangible metropolis is refracted confusingly as a labyrinthine underworld, in which the protagonist is transformed. The ambiguous ‘I’ attends a feast that soon spirals out of control, as the topers become intoxicated upon a wine made from the blood of family and friends:

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Men, when they had drunk till they could no longer, threw what was left in their glasses up to the roof, and let it fall back in cascades. Women dyed their children’s garments in the wine, and fed them on it till their tiny mouths were red. Sometimes, as the dancers whirled, they overturned a vessel, and their garments were besplattered. Children sat upon the floor with great bowls of wine, and swam rose-leaves on it, for boats. They put their hands in the wine and blew large red bubbles.44

This symphony of carnal indulgence reaches a raucous and weird crescendo when the ‘pleasure house’ in which this orgiastic revel takes place is finally razed to the ground. In this feverish and oppositional text it is the merciful return of daylight that discloses the full extent of a colonial debauch: ‘[i]n the streets below, men and women streamed past by the hundred; I heard the beat of their feet on the pavement.’45 The rhythmic pulse of feet on pavement reminds the protagonist of the numberless sacrificial victims whose lifeblood sustains the imperial machine. The bustling city that presents itself as the epicentre of a highly sophisticated and progressive polity is corroded from within by moral turpitude and spiritual sterility. Schreiner acerbically punctures and reverses conventional depictions of Africa as the site of deranged or libidinal excess by exposing the inherent cruelty and grotesque chaos of the metropolitan everyday: Men on their way to business; servants on errands; boys hurrying to school; weary professors pacing slowly the old street; prostitutes, men and women, dragging their feet after last night’s debauch; artists with quick, impatient footsteps; tradesman for orders; children to seek for bread. I heard the stream beat by. And at the alley’s mouth, at the street corner, a broken barrel-organ was playing; sometimes it quavered and almost stopped, then went on again, like a broken human voice.46

Whereas the African plain operates as an unmappable dreamscape, a site of ecstatic multiplied perception, the metropolitan centre is riddled with a cancerous iniquity. A ruthlessly repressive class hierarchy is marked on the faceless servants running errands while ‘weary professors’ seem out of kilter with a locale that has no especial need for academic learning or other rarefied cultural attainment.47 Although boys hurry to school, girls remain poignantly absent. However, Schreiner shows these same girls, a few years older, as prostitutes returning ‘after last night’s debauch’. The ferocious encroachment of imperial capitalism has deprived these anaemic figures of any singular selfhood or proud utterance. Instead, it is a ‘broken-barrel organ’ that ironically sings ‘like a broken human voice’. This unsettling passage throws into bolder relief Schreiner’s other writings on the glaring discrepancies and casual brutalities of metropolitan modernity. In ‘The Psychology of the Boer’ she

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charts perceived parallels between European centres in an address to an imaginary Oom and Tante, ‘from Ratcliffe Highway with its drunken sailors and hopeless women, to Monte Carlo with its princes and prostitutes’. She concludes that there ‘rises up no picture of life more healthful and full of promise for the future, more satisfying to the whole nature of man on earth, than yours is in the wide plains of South Africa’.48 Schreiner retools the terms of Victorian topography to buttress her depiction of Africa as a prelapsarian and idyllic equivalent. She ironically assumes panoptic prestige and encourages the reader to imagine industrialised European modernity as a miniscule series of ‘ant-heaps’, home to ‘millions of existences’ spread out over an infinite terrain. Schreiner elaborates this conceit to show how ‘[m]ost of us in our human ant-heaps are unable to lift ourselves out of them.’49 This is because ‘we mistake the handful of dust we have accumulated round us, and which we call our cities and civilisation, for the universe; and the noise we make in gathering it we think is the sound of eternity’.50 London is repackaged not as the focal point of a lofty expansionist endeavour but as its blackened heart. This allegorical and subversive remapping of London as the seedbed of moral desiccation rigorously reconfigures ‘darkest’ Africa as a hinterland of bright, prodigally fecund enclaves. In contrast, Esty argues that ‘[t]he land is dry and unforgiving, the livestock bare-ribbed, and the crops scant.’51 For Esty, South Africa is synonymous with stunted agrarian development, thwarted personal ambition and blighted romantic hopes; a dispiriting symbol of the ‘not yet’ status of imperialism. He proceeds to juxtapose an ostensibly moribund milieu against the eternal childhood of African Farm’s core characters. So the barren earth and meagre crops are aligned with Waldo, who ‘does not grow up at all, for despite the outward elongation of his limbs, Waldo remains a pious ragamuffin, an ageless, curly-haired cherub of Germanic intellection’.52 Esty’s thesis, however, is crucially undermined by the intrinsically contradictory nature of Schreiner’s most acclaimed fiction. He explains Schreiner’s baffling capacity to depict the terrain as a land of both overflowing ripeness and desolate sterility, by suggesting that ‘there is in African Farm a brief romance of colonial innocence based on a vision of virgin land and unalienated labour, of colonialism without the contradictions of European capitalism’.53 He proffers a new historicist account of African Farm anchored in Hannah Arendt’s definition of colonial high imperialism, in which state entrepreneurship was steadily eclipsed by the dynamics of international capitalism.54 Arendt discusses South Africa’s rapid economic growth instigated by the opening of the Kimberley diamond mines, which coincided chronologically with Schreiner’s drafting of African Farm. While not disputing

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that within South Africa the ‘so-called laws of capitalism were actually allowed to create realities’ largely unregulated or impeded by national government policy, both Esty and Arendt fail sufficiently to account for how the striking duality of aridity/fertility plays out textually.55 Schreiner was well positioned and acutely alert to the grave repercussions of a burgeoning commercial modernity and chronicles how it was inscribed upon her natal home. This dyad inadvertently reinforces the argument that Schreiner constructed Africa as a prelapsarian paragon, while portraying a spiritual and arcane precolonial heritage. Esty’s dismissal of Waldo as an emotionally stunted ‘pious ragamuffin’ neglects to acknowledge the radically anti-colonial potential of Schreiner’s text. She pre-empts Fanon in grasping the importance of a potent precolonial past that thwarts the cultural hegemony of the foreign interlopers: ‘because they [a native population] realise that they are in danger of losing their lives and thus becoming lost to their people, these men [. . .] relentlessly determine to renew contact with the oldest and most precolonial springs of life’.56 Waldo actually facilitates this renewed contact with a rich and variegated precolonial history. As Deborah Shapple persuasively posits, ‘Waldo emerges within the narrative aesthetic and ethnological discourses as a model home-grown artist whose grotesque wood carvings represent a form of primitive resistance to European capitalism, in what has come to be considered the first South African novel.’57 Esty’s new historicism ironically blinds him to the fact that Waldo’s carvings are allegorical maps fusing the modern moment with the largely misconstrued annals of a precolonial African identity. Whereas the colonising trespasser experienced Africa monochromatically, Schreiner’s ambivalent colonial selfhood enabled her to shape a vibrant, energising cartography of the stratified past. As this chapter shows, the apparent emptiness of African maps was translated into a metaphor of darkness symbolically tying together Enlightenment notions of atavistic barbarity with Victorian racial taxonomies. Cartography was both a yardstick of this darkness and a means by which to counteract it. The moral and physical blackness of sub-Saharan Africa was pictorially constructed as blankness, with the geography bearing anthropomorphic analogies to the tribesmen who populated this vast continent. This anthropomorphising of maps may be interpreted as a pseudo-scientific attempt to dispel the threat posed by the strange or unfamiliar.58 The Indian subcontinent, and not just its inhabitants, was also rendered exotically effete, and the evangelical Christian mission constructed Africa as a ‘thirsty’ land. This grafting of human traits onto maps can be traced back to the Phoenicians, who generated anthropographic maps by configuring the deity’s body over the

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area to be sketched.59 These differ from a Christian tradition of mappae mundi, or to borrow from David Punter, ‘divine maps’, which produced cartographic representations of a ‘world’ that replicated God’s sovereign power by situating Jerusalem at the centre. Schreiner employs a familiar narrative tactic of imperial romance – that of feminising African landmarks and sites of archaeological interest – to demonstrate how an ancient matriarchal heritage irradiates this partially mapped expanse. Moreover, in her essay ‘South Africa’, she indulges her readership’s tendency to conceive of the continent in terms of eerie absence, stating that ‘[t]o grasp our unique condition clearly, it will be well to take a blank map of South Africa.’60 Schreiner then ascribes a coloured line to each of the immigrant communities and indigenous tribes populating the country to create a vivid ethnographic chart. Different lines interconnect and criss-cross with such frequency that an ambivalent cartography of integration is sketched out using human bodies as indices and referents: But should we wish to make our map truly representative of the complexities of the South Africa problem, it will be necessary to go further, and across this intermingled mass of colours to draw intervals, at all angles, and in all directions, lines of ink, which shall cut up the surfaces into squares and spaces of different sizes. If these lines be truly drawn they will be found to bear no relation to the proportions of the colour beneath them; they will run straight through masses of colour, cutting them into parts [. . .] it will be impossible to trace the slightest connection between the lines and the colouring.61

Schreiner’s ethnographic map of Africa cleverly modifies another longstanding colonial tradition, that of map-making as the precursory step to parasitic exploration. Here the defining lines of cartography end up indistinguishable in a representation that blurs racial designations. In using individuals as referents to structure her chart, Schreiner acknowledges a symbiotic relationship between ‘bodies of land’ and the human form. African Farm attests the vital importance of this relationship. Schreiner complicates popular cartographical depictions of Africa as vacant space, by repeatedly using the human body as a blank canvas upon which to project deep-seated colonial anxieties. Once again Schreiner’s enthusiasm for Ralph Waldo Emerson, both his theories and literary persona, imbues the narrative fabric and its incisive portrayal of a ‘body politic’. The pseudonym under which the novel was published in 1883, Ralph Iron, reiterates the connection between Emerson’s corpus, the human body and the palpable external terrain. Deborah Shapple argues that Schreiner’s decision to adopt this pseudonym ‘strengthens the novel’s connection to the iron-rich South African soil and the iron stones of the

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kopje’.62 Furthermore, Sanders considers that ‘[i]t is through the names Ralph Iron and Waldo and the stimulating Stranger that Emerson’s name emerges as a cryptogram for Schreiner’s authorial persona.’63 Alongside African Farm, perhaps her most autobiographical work, a second guiding narrative begins to emerge that Schreiner scholars can employ to chart the points of convergence between these two cartographies – the textual and the intensely personal. This approach was first introduced and then encouraged by her husband Cronwright. He maintains that Schreiner wrote herself into the novel as the prudent, watchful and domesticated figure of Em. However, Em is also an abbreviation of Emerson, which bolsters Sanders’s thesis that an Emersonian precept emerges from African Farm in cryptogrammic form, analogous to the manner in which colonial unease was codified geometrically in both geographical and anthropographic maps of the era. Arguably the most famous, eagerly debated and iconic scene in the novel is Blenkins’s torture of Waldo in a makeshift dungeon. A gruesome map begins to unfold across the back of the colonial child, which mirrors the malevolence of map-making as a form of colonial violence. John Kucich interprets the beating of Waldo by Bonaparte Blenkins in psychoanalytical terms that reflect Schreiner’s pre-oedipal sadomasochistic fantasy. He proposes that the beating includes many of the components that Freud would later associate with oedipal fantasy – most notably ‘punishment for sexual transgression, a wish to transform the father’s sadism into love, eroticisation of punishment, and guilt over various forms of desire for both mother and father’.64 Kucich explicates the violence inflicted upon Waldo in terms of a father/son masochistic role-play scenario: ‘Blenkins ties Waldo up, he demands Waldo’s “submission”, and speaks of himself as a “father” who has to “check and correct” Waldo.’65 This, he argues, is entirely consistent with an oedipal script in which ‘Blenkins accuses Waldo of forbidden desire for the dried fruits, stored in an inaccessible attic, that belong to the woman Blenkins himself desires sexually’.66 Ultimately, for Kucich, this scene dramatises failed oedipal sadomasochism. Kucich discovers in the eyes and muted emotional response of Waldo an abstract detachment from the brutality that refuses to gratify or validate Blenkins’s sadistic drives. The scene enacts a savage miscommunication wherein Blenkins believes that he is paternally punishing Waldo, whereas he is in fact confirming for Waldo the ‘narcissistic traumas of abandonment and neglect he associates with a cruel and unresponsive deity’.67 However, the true motive behind the beating is not a yearning to enact a lurid pre-oedipal sadomasochism, but the coloniser’s ambition to inscribe upon the body of the colonised child a map of lofty Western

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authority. The name Bonaparte Blenkins ironically alludes both to European military imperialism and a dubious history of disavowed ‘Englishness’. Blenkins effortlessly resumes his imperialist pose during a conversation with Otto, when he sketches out a bogus family history in bragging of ancestral connections with both Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington. On one level Blenkins is an enslaved and crassly opportunistic product of the dominant order through his implied Irish ancestry; he apes the mannerisms of an imperial overlord, indulging a grandiose fantasy of power, patronage and privilege. However this argument fails to account for how Blenkins’s mimicry is in fact a strategic double bluff. Tant Sannie, who emerges as a canny interpreter of physiognomy, grasps the nature of Blenkins’s often crude imposture. She remarks that ‘all Englishmen are ugly; but was there ever such a red-rag-nosed thing with broken boots and crooked eyes before?’68 His pronouncements of Irish ancestry are even less plausible than his elaborate genealogical boasts. Blenkins re-enacts and perpetuates a form of colonial abuse of which he was once a luckless victim. Otto pleads with him to reconsider his national identity in the face of an incandescent Tant Sannie, ‘[i]t is the English that she hates’, and prompts him to declare: ‘I am Irish every inch of me – father Irish, mother Irish. I’ve not a drop of English blood in my veins.’69 This contrived utterance is undermined and exposed as a stratagem by Schreiner’s use of repetition. Immediately thereafter he fabricates another absurd fantasy, this time of familial bliss, wherein his dynastic dreams of colonial mastery are revealed through the figure of his unborn son. Blenkins will do and say whatever it takes to infiltrate the farm’s nucleus in his unflagging pursuit of material wealth and comfort; this squalid self-interest also infuses his morbid fascination with Tant Sannie’s young niece. Blenkins acts out the process of coloniser mimicking colonised in order to affirm his authoritative control, and he employs mimicry as a camouflage to move deeper into the makeshift community. As Bhabha proposes, via Lacan: The effect of mimicry is camouflage [. . .] It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare.70

Instead of generating a ‘profound and disturbing’ effect on colonial kudos, Blenkins’s inversion of mimicry’s subversive potential reappropriates this oppositional gusto to the coloniser’s advantage. For Bhabha, mimicry is ‘the sign of the inappropriate [. . .] a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both “normalised”

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knowledges and disciplinary powers’.71 Ultimately, Blenkins’s elaborate and long-winded story-telling does not overturn imperial discourses. His yarns and faltering attempts at pithy wisdom mark him out linguistically from the measured cadences of the other colonised characters. Despite his colourful protestations, Blenkins is a mongrel product of British imperialism whose increasingly febrile manoeuvres throw into sharp relief Schreiner’s unfeigned disgust at its surreptitious policies and covert cruelty. Contrastingly, Blenkins positions Waldo as a bestial, degraded and undisciplined creature: ‘[h]orses that kick must have their legs tied’, he admonishes.72 Bart Moore-Gilbert observes that the ‘novel recurrently stresses that he has black curls on his head’, and that like ‘the local Africans he too is “ugly”’.73 The ritual beating of Waldo does not signify a condign paternal punishment, casting Blenkins and Waldo in a father/son dyad. Waldo’s childlike body emblematises the sinister side of a colonial discourse that was content to devastate both the indigenous communities and the variegated topography of Africa. He took out his pen-knife, and slit the shirt down from the shoulder to the waist. ‘Now’, said Bonaparte, ‘I hope the Lord will bless and sanctify to you what I am going to do to you.’ The first cut ran from the shoulder across the middle of the back; the second fell exactly in the same place. A shudder passed through the boy’s frame.74

The clinical precision of the second blow, which falls ‘exactly in the same place’, epitomises the Victorian cartographer’s devotion to detail. Blenkins literally carves upon Waldo’s body a grim chart of imagined colonial dominance and superiority; ‘He [Blenkins] would have to count the sheep himself that day; the boy was literally cut up.’75 Although Blenkins clearly derives satisfaction from the cartography of torture – ‘[h]e bent over him, and carefully scratched open one of the cuts with the nail of his forefinger, examining with much interest his last night’s work’ – the mutilation stops short of libidinal gratification and results in Waldo inadvertently eroding Blenkins’s smug self-regard.76 Kucich’s observation that ‘Waldo remains strangely abstracted during this scene’ implies the determination of the colonial subject to thwart the coloniser, who would normally expect his victim to return his gaze and so confirm his superiority.77 Blenkins discovers an unconquerable facet of the silent Waldo’s psyche that threatens to overturn his colonial superiority by instilling within his imperial mindset destructive self-doubt. Blenkins resorts to begging for a whimper of validation, ‘You don’t seem to have found your tongue yet.’78 Waldo’s defiant and doggedly stubborn silence becomes a surprising weapon of resistance to the imposition of control,

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even as Waldo’s body is transformed into a map of Central Africa, and so makes Blenkins fearful and uneasy. When looking directly into Waldo’s eyes, Blenkins locates a primal menace that fails to satisfy his ‘narcissistic demand of colonial authority’. Instead of the colonial subject’s broken gaze or cowed demeanour, he is faced with a darkly inscrutable presence that threatens to corrode his sense of extrovert virility: The boy looked up at him – not sullenly, not angrily. There was a wild, fitful terror in the eyes. Bonaparte made haste to go out and shut the door, and leave him alone in the darkness. He himself was afraid of that look.79

Schreiner consistently presents the deluded Blenkins as lacking any instinctual rapport with the austere African terrain. In striking contrast to Tant Sannie, who not only survives but actually thrives in what he construes as a bleakly inhospitable country, Blenkins struggles to adapt to the quotidian rigours and frugality of farm life. All the Boer women in the novel, with the notable exception of Lyndall, are distinguished by their considerable corpulence, an index not of grotesque excess but of confident integration. They are not fat but fertile. Schreiner’s fictional South Africa becomes for them a prelapsarian cornucopia of natural ripeness and abundance and this plenitude is mirrored in the fleshy female protagonists. Mystical integration with, and belonging to, the soil grants access to or insight into an experiential realm beyond the rationality of European explorers. Tant Sannie ‘never felt sure how far the spirit world might overlap with this world of sense, and as a rule, prudently abstained from doing anything which might offend unseen auditors’.80 The overlapping of ‘the world of sense’ with a recondite dimension of unseen or animistic potencies also reveals how Schreiner understands gender relations in African Farm. During a conversation with Waldo on top of the mercurial kopje, Lyndall declares a deep interest in fashioning sociological maps: And sometimes what is more amusing still than tracing the likeness between man and man, is to trace the analogy between the progress of and development of the individual and of the whole nation; or again, between a single nation and the entire human race [. . .] It is the most amusing thing I know of; but of course, being a woman, I have not often time for such amusements. [. . .] It takes a great deal of time and thought always to look perfectly exquisite, even for a pretty woman.81

However, this sociological map ultimately resembles the intricately plotted ethnographic chart that features in Thoughts with its busy, crisscrossing lines and fluid boundaries, rendering it a congealed blur too. Schreiner, in this citation, presents a complication of the ‘body politic’

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motif, with gender and national partitions literally drawn up and defined by those who constitute the collective. The final slyly sardonic clause riffs upon the belligerence of contemporary misogyny. Throughout the novel Schreiner subtly reconfigures ‘exquisite’ femininity to embrace the plump frames of her Boer woman who preside over, regulate and run domestic life. Contrary to the popular depiction of Africa as a barren wasteland, Schreiner reveals a submerged fund of spiritual solace and sustenance in the veldt’s apparent aridity. For Jung and Conrad, Africa provided a partial means of reconnection with their primordial past, an atavistic landscape strewn with the archetypes of the collective unconscious; however, for Schreiner this expanse offers a site in which to experiment with, improvise around and transgress constricting gender roles. Tant Sannie and Em evince an unrivalled authority, and a marked return to androgyny. Gregory’s cross-dressing is not, as Kucich claims, ‘an exploration of androgyny or of enlightened masculinity, or even homosexuality’.82 Gregory and Bonaparte Blenkins are the figures of imperial aspiration in the novel, and like his precursor, Gregory is depicted as a marginalised and equivocal presence.83 That is, until he is transmuted by his ‘womanhood’, a change instigated by retreating alone into the African veldt. The same perception of estranging otherness and isolation, which so terrifies Verne’s Dr Ferguson, Freud in his letters to Jung, and Schreiner’s travelling companion in Thoughts, is recalled, only to be overhauled, during Gregory’s transformation. Having walked into the blossoming veldt, ‘Gregory sprang down into its red bed. It was a safe place, and quiet’; while lying under the blue sky he begins to feel, but not fear, the dissipation of his socially constructed self, prompting him to ask aloud, ‘Am I, am I Gregory Nazianzen Rose?’84 After receiving no reply or reverberating echo to confirm his identity, Gregory is free to smudge the defining lines of sexuality and metamorphose into Lyndall’s attentive nurse: He drew from his breast pocket a little sixpenny looking-glass, and hung it on one of the roots that stuck out from the bank. Then he dressed himself in one of the old-fashioned gowns and a great pinked-out collar. Then he took out a razor. Tuft by tuft the soft brown beard fell down into the sand, and the little ants took it to line their nests with. Then the glass showed a face surrounded by a frilled cap, white as a woman’s, with a little mouth, a very short upper lip, and a receding chin.85

Gregory’s fragile mask of masculinity is literally consumed by the wet soil and he is, in turn, reconfigured as a Lady Lazarus. This is not simply a subversion of established gender roles, but rather a rebirth as his sainted namesake Gregory of Nazianzus. Gregory’s face now seems

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‘white as a woman’s’, yet, through this new third sex, he also acquires a pious demeanour and a more humane perspective. St Gregory was an advocate of the doctrine of apocatastasis, the belief that, after the Last Judgement, heaven, earth and hell will be brought into harmony. In releasing this dormant aspect of Gregory’s personality, Schreiner implies that southern Africa, far from seeming an unregenerate or life-denying expanse, is a locus of multiplied perception, even spiritual ecstasy. After Gregory has undergone this mystical initiation into ‘womanhood’, the soil preserves and fossilises his former self as the ants recycle tufts of his beard as nest lining. Schreiner’s rapt, incantatory cadences not only signal the redemptive power of story-telling, but also affirm the legitimacy of Gregory’s reinvention. As Cronwright reveals in his biography, cross-dressing was a favourite pastime of the young Olive Schreiner and one for which she was severely reprimanded: She liked as a child to go about without any clothing. That was, she told Ellis, what she was most punished for. At a little later age she was fond of wearing boys’ clothes and would have done so when grown up had her figure been adapted to male costume.86

In the first section of ‘Times and Season’, Schreiner articulates her intention to create a map that will span a lifetime. Her project commences in the ‘year of infancy, where from the shadowy background of forgetfulness start out pictures of startling clearness’; these images are ‘disconnected, but brightly coloured, and indelibly printed in the mind’.87 Although time has the ability to obfuscate, it cannot erase, ‘as the colours of those baby-pictures are permanent’.88 These images are then abstractly logged as the coordinates of childhood sensation with the effect that ‘the pictures become continuous and connected’, enabling her navigation along these coloured lines of history and to never forget. Her husband alludes to this process when recounting a twenty-one day journey Schreiner made to Witteberg aged six years old: Olive’s childish memory goes back earlier than this long journey and was largely and powerfully a vivid record of mental states and emotions and of scenes visually impressed upon her memory [. . .] She remembered concrete incidents too, but she retained a much stronger, more intensely vivid memory of the other kind, as though states and emotions and visualisations had been indelibly photographed on the tablets of her mind. I suppose this was a result of her powerful imagination.89

Cronwright’s construction of Schreiner’s memory in terms of photographic imagery will prove pertinent when Freud’s short essay ‘A Note

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upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’ (1925) is discussed in the following chapter (as it proves Freud’s central conjecture), but it also partially accounts for the panoramic quality of African Farm. Throughout the novel, characters and objects emerge into focus as they journey over the vast terrain towards the farmstead. Schreiner consciously places the farm at the very heart of the plot; so although the narrative perspective is restlessly shifting, the farm’s fixed topographical coordinates provide the necessary stability and counterbalance. Although individuals do venture beyond the ‘panoptic gaze’ of the farm, the reader is immediately informed of any crucial changes through a series of lengthy confessional scenes staged in the kitchen. This coherent, even rigid, standpoint implies a permanency through time, which is not, as J. M. Coetzee opines, symptomatic of the colonial farm being conspicuously out of place: Whereas in the peasant model the farm is naturalised by being integrated with the land, and in turn historicises the land by making the land a page on which generations write their story, Schreiner’s farm is an unnatural and arbitrary imposition on a doggedly ahistorical landscape.90

It is not Schreiner’s intention to show the farm ‘integrated with the land’, but more precisely to reveal the spiritual unity that her characters share with the African soil. It is Schreiner, and not the inanimate farm, who harmonised with the gigantic expanse, and who plotted an abstract cartography to safeguard and celebrate this precious organic synergy. The modest farmstead will remain positioned at the centre of the lives of those who embody and affirm its history. Waldo discovers during his Emersonian quest that the buildings, although isolated geographically, provide a transcendental port from which he can embark upon enabling thought-adventures. Detached and severed from the farm, Waldo finds that ‘[m]y body was strong and well to work, but my brain was dead.’91 As the narrator declares towards the novel’s conclusion: So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth. Our fathers had their dream; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.92

Notes 1. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 2001), pp. 78–9. 2. Mark Sanders, ‘Towards a Genealogy of Intellectual Life: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm’, A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2000), pp. 77–97 (p. 77).

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3. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (London: Hutchison, 1882), viii. 4. Olive Schreiner, ‘South Africa’, in Thoughts on South Africa (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923), p. 28. 5. The publication of An African Farm brought overnight popularity to Schreiner. Amongst many others who coveted her presence at dinner, both Wilde and Conan Doyle sent invitations requesting an opportunity to meet the now acclaimed novelist. 6. This image is borrowed from an observation made by Gilles Deleuze when discussing the narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu. See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Proust Roundtable’, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 29–61. 7. Jed Esty, ‘The Colonial Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe’, Victorian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Social, Political, and Cultural Studies, Vol. 49 (Spring 2007), pp. 407–30 (p. 407). 8. Ibid., p. 407. 9. Schreiner, 1923: p. 30. 10. As Laing explains: In this position (that of the unembodied self) the individual experiences his self as being more or less divorced or detached from his body. The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual’s own being.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 69. Sanders, 2000: p. 79. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 79. S. C. Cronwright Schreiner, The Life of Olive Schreiner (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), p. 66. Hereafter referred to as Cronwright. Ibid., p. 66. Schreiner, 1923: p. 46. S. C. Schreiner, 1924: p. 68. Laing determined that a schizoid condition could be induced by a continued infliction of pressure from family, peers or contemporaries. Again, Cronwright refuses explicitly to describe the exact nature of the trauma Schreiner incurred as a result of her repudiation of orthodox religion, simply recording that she felt abandoned and fiercely ostracised afterwards. Laing believed the effect upon an ‘individual whose abiding mode of beingin-the-world is of a split nature’ is to experience ‘a world that threatens his being from all sides, and from which there is no exit. [. . .] For them the world is a prison without bars, a concentration camp without barbed wire’ (Laing, 1969: p. 79). S. C. Schreiner, 1924: p. 93. Laing, 1969: p. 89. S. C. Schreiner, 1924: p. 98. Ibid., p. 98.

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23. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Alfred Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr, Vol. II (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 25–51 (p. 30). 24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Alfred Ferguson and Robert Spiller, Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 2–46 (p. 10). 25. Cited in John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 121. 26. Schreiner, 1923: p. 29. 27. Ibid., p. 29. 28. Derrida, 1994: p. 10. 29. Ibid., p. 49. 30. Schreiner, 1923: p. 34. 31. Ibid., p. 45. 32. Ibid., pp. 35–6. 33. Ibid., p. 50. 34. Ibid., p. 50. 35. Ibid., p. 50. 36. Emily Dickinson, ‘We were dreaming – it’s good we are dreaming’, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by T. Johnson (London: Faber, 1970), DXXXI. 37. Emerson, 1979: pp. 46–7. 38. Olive Schreiner, Dreams (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1917), p. 55. 39. Ibid., p. 56. 40. Ibid., p. 58. 41. Ibid., p. 60. 42. Ibid., p. 109. 43. The Dantean influence is compounded by phrases such as ‘[a]nd I looked where I trod’. While being led by Virgil and then Beatrice, Dante in La Divina Commedia is constantly looking at the ground in an attempt to trace his journey: ‘[t]hen, with my eyes bent down with shame, fearing/lest my words had displeased him,/I kept from speaking till we had reached the river.’ Dante Alighieri, Inferno: The Divine Comedy, trans. by J. D. Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), canto III, ll. 80–3. 44. Schreiner, 1917: pp. 125–6. 45. Ibid., pp. 158–9. 46. Ibid., p. 159. 47. As the laibon said, ‘[d]reams were no longer needed because now the English knew everything!’ 48. Schreiner, 1923: p. 269. 49. Ibid., p. 287. 50. Ibid., p. 287. 51. Esty, 2007: p. 412. 52. Ibid., p. 411. 53. Ibid., p. 412. 54. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Shocken Books, 2004). 55. Esty, 2007: p. 408.

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56. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (Hamondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 169. 57. Deborah Shapple, ‘Artful Tales of Origination in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 59, no. 1 (June 2004), pp. 53–77 (p. 80). This claim of Shapple’s to reclassify African Farm reinforces my earlier point that Schreiner should not be read as an English writer, but in a similar tradition to the nineteenth-century American writers. 58. For example, Skull Island in Australia’s Northern Territory is part of the Sir Edward Pellew group of islands. 59. Although not an original coinage, in anthropological terms it relates to the geographical distribution of ethnic groups. I wish to use ‘anthropographic’ in a very particular way throughout this book. The term should be understood in reference to a specific sort of cartographic methodology in which maps and geographical spaces are drawn up or described in terms of human figurativism. Winwood Reade provides a pertinent example: ‘[l]ook at the map of Africa. Does it not resemble a woman with a huge burden on her back, and with her face turned toward America? Ethiopia is stretching out her hands unto God?’ (Reade, 1864: p. 383). 60. Schreiner, 1923: p. 51. 61. Ibid., p. 52. 62. Shapple, 2004: p. 85. 63. Sanders, 2000: p. 82. 64. Kucich, 2007: p. 92. 65. Ibid., p. 92. 66. Ibid., p. 92. 67. Ibid., p. 92. 68. Schreiner, 1882: p. 24. 69. Ibid., p. 23. 70. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Line and Light’, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1977), pp. 99–104. 71. Bhabha, 2004: pp. 122–3. 72. Schreiner, 1882: p. 117. 73. Bart Moore-Gilbert, ‘Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm: Reconciling Feminism and Anti-Imperialism’, Women: A Cultural Review, Vol. 14, no. 1. (2003), pp. 85–103 (p. 93). 74. Schreiner, 1882: p. 117. 75. Ibid., p. 119. 76. Ibid., p. 119. 77. Bhabha understands mimicry in terms of an economy of desire: A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence, which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority. It is a desire that reverses ‘in part’ the colonial appropriation by now producing a partial vision of the coloniser’s presence; a gaze of otherness, that shares the acuity of the genealogical gaze which, as Foucault describes it, liberates marginal elements and shatters the unity of man’s being through which he extends his sovereignty. (Bhabha, 2004: pp. 126–7)

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Schreiner, 1882: p. 118. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 212. Kucich, 2007: p. 95. The name Gregory Nazianzen Rose also serves to mark him as an outsider. The overtly English surname of Rose immediately ties him to images of old Albion. Schreiner, 1882: p. 305. Ibid., p. 306. S. C. Schreiner, 1924: p. 68. Schreiner, 1882: p. 130. Ibid., p. 130. S. C. Schreiner, 1924: p. 65. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Farm Novel and “Plaasroman” in South Africa’, English in Africa, Vol. 13 (1986), pp. 1–19 (p. 4). Schreiner, 1882: p. 285. Ibid., p. 333.

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Chapter 9

Haggard and Freud

Schreiner could boast of a rapidly growing fan base that included Oscar Wilde and Rider Haggard. After being introduced to her in 1885 – a meeting brought about, unsurprisingly, by Andrew Lang – Haggard sent Schreiner a copy of his first novel Dawn, inscribing in his messy hand that her book had ‘made a great impression upon’ him.1 Bruce Mazlish draws attention to the biographical points of convergence in the lives of Haggard and Freud, going so far as to claim that Freud shared ‘special ties with Haggard’.2 Mazlish cites as evidence the fact that both men were born in 1856 and were contemporaries sharing ‘the same Victorian world’.3 Both, according to Mazlish, ‘held idealised views of women’ with ‘an intense interest in sex’, compensating for the largely sexless marriages that both had settled into after the birth of their children. Most interesting for consideration for this argument is his final observation, that both men ‘were interested in archaeology and in the play of civilisation against savage passion as well as the decline of ancient civilisations’.4 Mazlish overstates the biographical and literary links between the two figures, yet suggestive intersections can still be gauged. Mazlish’s article reflects a small but significant area of Haggard scholarship that has recently interrogated the more acclaimed texts in Haggard’s substantial oeuvre through the lens of Freudian theory. Although differently engaged in the project of European advancement and committed to mapping and mining divergent fields, Haggard and Freud both confront in their work the dislocating otherness of atavistic passions. The remainder of this chapter specifies how and why Haggard plays a relevant and intriguing part in the history of psychoanalysis. This approach departs from the familiar and overworked critical terrain of She and King Solomon’s Mines to examine an as yet unpublished Haggard short story, unearthed in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. Notwithstanding the critical shortcomings of Mazlish’s essay, he is correct to link Haggard and Freud via a lifelong fascination with earth

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sciences and, perhaps more accurately in terms of Haggard, the archaeological dig. Haggard and Freud were, to varying degrees, imaginative excavators. In ‘Excavation and Memory’ (1923), Walter Benjamin provides a thought-provoking ‘bridge’ between the literary genre of imperial romance and the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis: ‘[h]e who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.’5 Freud frequently casts the role of the analyst as a rugged yet cerebral explorer. In ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896), Freud exploits an extended archaeological metaphor to articulate the partially submerged causes of hysterical behaviour. According to Richard Armstrong, Freud merges the figures of the analyst and navigator by way of the German term Forscher, which connotes an explorer/researcher.6 ‘Imagine that an explorer [Forscher] arrives at a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions.’7 The explorer/analyst is faced with the following quandary. He – it is always a he – could simply interrogate the village population to construct a picture of the history and meaning of these ‘archaeological remains’.8 Alternatively, the inquisitive and intrepid explorer ‘may have picks, shovels and spades with him’ and he may endeavour to exhume the remains, ‘clear away the rubbish’, and ‘uncover what is buried’.9 Freud was preoccupied with salvaging the dark half from the layers of primordial history, but doing this required his transformation into a psychic time-voyager. Peter Gay portrays the curious décor of Freud’s office in Berggasse 19 as ‘a little world reflecting deliberate choices’.10 Freud bedecked his office with colonial artefacts to create an impression for his patients that they were embarking on an odyssey back through time. The analyst’s couch was covered with a rich red Persian rug, surrounded by a forest of intriguing sculptures, statues and figurines from his various travels. One of his most famous patients, the Wolf Man, found the experience of entering Freud’s room a bewitching one, describing it as cloaked in a ‘feeling of sacred peace and quiet’, reminding him not of a doctor’s office but, ‘rather an archaeologist’s study’, with all ‘kinds of statuettes and other unusual objects, which even the layman recognised as archaeological finds from ancient Egypt. Here and there on the wall were stone plaques representing various scenes of a long vanished epoch.’11 Freud was undoubtedly aware of the new forms of cartographical experimentation that had emerged in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. As part of the attempt to conceptualise and contain vast continental landmasses like Central Africa through mapping, the new science of geology in turn gave rise to geological maps that penetrated

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beneath the surface layer to reveal immeasurable depths. A worldview began to evolve at the fin de siècle in which an individual apprehended their environment both horizontally through the urban, rural and colonial landscapes, and along a vertical axis through the establishment of underground railways that ran alongside the sewer network, as well as in the ancient archaeological curios ‘rescued’ and displayed in the British Museum. Armstrong wittily reads Freud’s peculiar fascination with archaeology as a symptom of his ‘spade envy’, identifying the German archaeologist Emanuel Löwy as his alternative ego, ‘a kind of fantasy figure for an alternative life Freud could vicariously experience’.12 Haggard’s fiction offered Freud the opportunity to indulge his fantasies of intrepid exploration in which he assumed the role of an Allan Quatermain type; endowed with an archaeologist’s expertise, he had as well the big game hunter’s unfeigned relish for perilous confrontation. Freud, in a letter to Fliess, remarks: ‘I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by nature nothing but a conquistador, an adventurer [. . .] with all the inquisitiveness, daring and tenacity capable of such a man.’13 Meanwhile, in a letter to his friend, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, Freud declares that, ‘I have sacrificed a great deal for my collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities’ and claims to have read more archaeology than psychology.14 Freud’s admiration for such historical figures as Hannibal and Alexander the Great epitomises the complex psychological effects of colonialism upon colonised people. Freud was a secular Jew living in imperial Austria (although Austria did not possess any overseas colonies, it did lay claim over several Slavic nations), who was naturally attracted to the bold heroes of imperial history. For Armstrong, the freedom to dig, unearth, estimate and value is synonymous with political prestige and military sway: For the stones are made to speak by those with the power to do so; that is, those who can erect temples [. . .] and triumphal arches, and those who can recover and reconstruct them. In the nineteenth century at least, only empires excavated empires.15

Freud’s intellectual passion for archaeology overlaps with, and nourishes, his investigations into childhood experience. Contemporary archaeological discourse that was influenced by Darwinian evolutionism interpreted humanity’s primordial past in terms of a ‘childhood’ of the human race. Fledgling ethnographers such as James Frazer, Andrew Lang and E. B. Tylor sought to explain the behavioural patterns and customs of modern social groups through the sedulous comparative scrutiny of ‘primitive man’ in Africa. Throughout the period notions of

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primitive passion, degeneration and barbarity bleed into theorisations of childhood. With its origins in missionary writing, and then in competing for the same readership as juvenile periodicals sponsored by evangelical philanthropists, it is unsurprising that imperial romance, more than any other late-Victorian literary genre, should reassess the tropes, imagery and symbolism of childhood (Haggard’s famous inscription to King Solomon’s Mines acts as a clear case in point). Daniel Bivona explains this infatuation with the ‘unformed self’ in terms of an epistemological crisis and a feverish revolt against the social and cultural formations of modernity.16 Childhood – in the sense that Haggard and Lang would have comprehended it – Bivona defines as a dilution or grievous loss of one’s ‘primitiveness’, ‘a rupture with the past which condemns one to return to the primitive world of the present to recover one’s bearings’.17 Furthermore, Bivona’s contention echoes Schreiner’s conception of biography as a highly subjective and revelatory mapping of history. If Haggard and Lang desire a reconnection with their primordial heritage, they must embark on a ‘historical return’ that, in the process, interrogates the relationship between ‘the past one thinks one has surmounted and the present which enables one to reconstruct the past’.18 Degenerationist discourses of the period are the manifestation of a collective bourgeois anxiety that the residual remnants of a savage past were detectable in modern manners. In a letter to Fleiss dated 12 December 1887, Freud asks his old friend if he can ‘imagine what “enopsychic myths” are? The latest product of my mental labour. The dim inner perception of one’s own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and beyond.’19 Freud’s psychomythology connects the shadowy ancestral past, the animated modern moment and the nebulous future of mental operations and uncovers, via the spade, the tattered vestiges of personal and collective prehistory. In his essay ‘A Note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’, Freud offers a diagnostic definition of the unconscious. The pad at the centre of Freud’s study is an invention marketed at children as an erasable version of the chalk-board, in which a layer of wax sits beneath a thin celluloid film upon which a child writes with a stylus. The Writing-Pad earns its mystic status owing to the fact that any writing can be easily deleted by pulling on a simple mechanism. The key point for Freud, and later Derrida, is that the layer of wax retains an impression of all words composed on the surface. ‘We need not be disturbed’, according to Freud, ‘by the fact that in the Mystic Pad no use is made of the permanent traces of the notes that have been received; it is enough that they are present.’20 Beneath the pad’s surface the wax retains the spectral traces of every etching made

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upon the celluloid film. The pad cannot reproduce at any given moment past scribbles, ‘it would be a mystic pad indeed’, but Freud is piqued and intrigued by the fact that they survive, no matter how faintly, in the waxy layer underneath the film. This he stretches out as a means of illustrating how the unconscious works. For Freud it is not ‘too far-fetched to compare the celluloid and waxed paper cover system with [. . .] the wax slab with the unconscious behind them, and the appearance of the writing with the flickering up and passing away of consciousness in the process of perception’.21 Freud’s metaphorical tactic illuminates complex questions about Victorian construction of Africa as geographical palimpsest, as the locus of perpetual childhood or the original primal scene of the savage inscriptions upon contemporary selfhood. Developing this one step further, adventure narratives of African exploration become highly suggestive tales of initiatory ordeal, in which ‘civilised Englishmen must go in order to complete themselves’.22 From a Freudian perspective, this use of African sites as scenes of masculine initiation is peculiarly problematic. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is an outcome of the period between 1892 and 1897, when Freud was engaged in his own self-analysis. It is this confessional and autobiographical aspect to Freud’s ‘little dream book’ that has proven one of the most engaging and contentious aspects of the text. Jung berated Freud for refusing fully to probe the libidinal tensions prevalent in several of the dreams that he offered for consideration in his book, and for not subjecting his own dream content to the same oedipal scrutiny as that used on his patients. In deploying a quasi-pyschoanalytic discourse, Bivona’s description of the ‘motherless Vincey’ re-establishing a connection with his genealogical origins in the maternal ‘arena of tropical fertility’ in Haggard’s She inadvertently identifies a tension in this image or construction of Central Africa as the site of male initiation.23 In The Days of My Life, Haggard appears to understand the significance of dreams at a time when Freud’s theories of the unconscious were becoming difficult to ignore. Instead of offering a dilettante psychoanalytic reading of his dreams, Haggard, the old believer in paranormal promptings, turns to psychical phenomena as an interpretative tool.24 What is important, however, is that, like the wax layer in the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’, instances of dreaming in Haggard’s fiction clearly exhibit traces of his African experiences. Unlike Schreiner, who diligently drafted her most famous novel while living in South Africa and was rebuked by Lang for not offering a sufficiently exotic account of the continent, all of Haggard’s tales were composed outside of Africa. Norman Etherington suggests that Haggard deliberately spurned the ‘real’ Africa

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that he knew well, ‘the Africa of disease, squalor, and stinking corruption’, in favour of an entirely romanticised construct.25 Furthermore, Stiebel posits that this dislocation encouraged a nostalgic yearning for the continent, fostering ‘a more exotic landscape of the imagination enhanced by the desire that separation engenders’.26 If, as Bivona repeatedly states, Africa vouchsafed a site in which the English quest-romancer was able to reconnect with the savage and bestial impulses that have been repressed throughout civilised history, then an unresolved infantile conflict must have persisted in Haggard’s unconscious. Such a conflict may explain why Allan Quatermain embarks on an endless procession of arrivals and departures to and from Africa, whereas Leo Vincey and Horace Holly appear to find a measure of contentment at the close of She. ‘Haggard’s whites are all stock European types’, according to Etherington, compelled to undergo a series of ‘punishing tests’, progressively more exacting and ‘marked’ by dramatic ‘changes of terrain’.27 Etherington construes the trials faced by Haggard’s whites in King Solomon’s Mines and She using Jung’s theory of layered personality, where Jung diagnoses selfhood as structured over three layers: present consciousness, historic past and, finally, prehistoric/racial past. Etherington also employs Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious to show how Haggard’s work is best suited to the application of Jungian theory. Etherington is right to assess both novels as a series of conflicts and trials, but this actually marks Haggard’s novels as ripe for Freudian analysis. Therefore, Holly and Vincey’s ordeals represent the procession of conflict that all males must overcome on their way towards attaining ‘healthy’ heterosexuality.28 Jung’s uncertain definition of the collective unconscious as comprising a system of symbolic archetypes, sometimes attached to ancestral precursors or primitive man, may, on first reading, offer a more productive mode for gauging Haggard’s narratives. For Jung, Haggard’s romances were a means to prove his psychological hypotheses. Etherington includes in his article Jung’s appreciative response to Haggard’s corpus: An exciting narrative that is apparently quite devoid of psychological intentions is just what interests the psychologist most of all. Such a tale is constructed against a background of psychological assumptions, and the more unconscious the author is of them, the more the background reveals itself in unalloyed purity to the discerning eye.29

Jung interprets Haggard’s famous quip on drafting She in the ‘white heat’ of six weeks as an example of unconscious writing that bypasses the repressive scrutiny of conscious life. Henry Miller was equally struck by the ostensibly breathless rapidity of Haggard’s composition process.

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He finds an intriguing ‘duality’ in the work of a man ‘who is so reticent and reserved, English to the core’, but who reveals in ‘his “romances” a hidden nature, a hidden being, a hidden lore which is amazing’.30 Access to his hidden being is granted through his ‘method of writing’ his romances at ‘full speed’ while ‘hardly stopping to think’, thus enabling him ‘to tap his unconscious with freedom and depth’.31 What marks Haggard’s oeuvre out as better suited to a form of Freudian scrutiny – and simultaneously marks how Freud can be analysed through Africa – is the way in which Freud employed this author’s fiction during his personal process of self-analysis. In a much quoted section from The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recommends She to one of his patients, Louise N., referring to it as a ‘strange book full of hidden meaning’ and concerned with ‘the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions’.32 When his interlocutor repeatedly asks for one of his publications, Freud replies ‘my own mortal works have not yet been written’.33 What emerges from this episode is that, for the literary Freud, Haggard’s novel implies a blueprint for his own future psychoanalytical investigation. Freud creates the impression that his unwritten work already exists in a ghostly form and is simply awaiting expression. It is a spectral canon that already exists but has yet to find a polished or coherent form in the present. Freud’s unwritten texts constitute a series of revenants waiting off-stage for a triumphant articulation. Freud reflects that Haggard’s distinctive narrative cadences leave a ghostly trace across his day, inspiring a dream in which he is instructed by Brücke, his old university mentor, to carry out a dissection of his own pelvis, construed by Freud as a symbol for his self-analysis. She incites in Freud a historical return of sorts: to his student days at the University in Vienna, where he had researched under the tutelage of Brücke and Breuer, spurning traditional neurological assessment in favour of Charcot’s work on hypnosis. The unconscious mind, as understood by Freud, once again invites comparisons with Derrida’s conception of the revenant. Similarly to both Prince Hamlet and the audience, the analyst positions himself offstage waiting for the ghostly return of the repressed memories and impulses that have been expelled under pressure from the all-knowing super-ego. Bivona contends with compelling gusto that the ending of She is ‘novelistically unsatisfactory because it is an act of repression’ carried out against a ‘sexualised mother’.34 However, in his eagerness to demonstrate what seems now a formulaic and predictable oedipal assessment of Ayesha as the mother of civilisation, Bivona fails to address how She’s other ‘gaps’, ‘blind spots’ or instances of deferred knowledge illuminate vital points of convergence between the writings of Haggard and those of Freud. Blank spaces, arguably, play a more prominent part and appear more

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frequently in Freud’s oeuvre. Psychoanalysis was an ongoing and incomplete project that underwent constant modification, and as such Freud, amongst others, incessantly gestures towards the gaps in the analyst’s knowledge. Like Hegel’s truncated division of Africa, Freud demarcates the human psyche in a triad topography: id, ego and super-ego. He readily acknowledged that, although he had succeeded in mapping the human unconscious, blank spaces remained within his schematic vision. These sites of deferral committed Freud to a perpetual process of psychical investigation. Written as a general introduction to psychoanalysis, Freud’s essay ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ allegorises the ‘sexual life of adult women’ as representing a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.35 My own quasi-archaeological discovery of an unpublished short story belonging to Haggard found in the Berg Collection, New York, represents a blind, or blank, spot in the Haggard archive. Just as Freud connects the mysterious realm of female sexuality to the great blankness of Africa, this hitherto ‘lost’ text of Haggard’s is suitably obsessed with the geography of the Dark Continent. Entitled ‘Saved by Lightning’, this short manuscript could have been lifted directly from the pages of the Juvenile.36 Written in the top-right corner of each page are interchangeably the names Cordingley and Tarrant, which may or may not be the names of the two central characters. The tale is a first-person recollection of a dramatic and rather fortuitous escape from lions that attack in the middle of the night. Haggard pre-empts the thrilling narrative in the opening gambit by staging a reconstruction of the environmental conditions that trigger a flush of anxiety in the survivor’s mind. Uneasy about the impending encroachment of nightfall, the narrator chastises his brash nephew for trying to coerce him into riding through the veldt when visibility is so poor. Upset by his nephew’s heedlessness, the narrator bemoans that ‘[t]hose who have no experience have no sympathy’, making it impossible for callow or naive readers to grasp the potentially fatal consequences of youthful impetuosity because ‘they can’t sympathise with what they have never felt’.37 The reader eagerly anticipates the old man’s story and especially the reasons for his reluctance to ride on in the gloom. Haggard depicts the old man as disturbed by the uncanny similarities between two experiences of nightfall. His nephew cannot comprehend that: A man may get so hit in his nerves that to put himself in the same circumstance and surroundings as those in which something awful once happened to him, will be almost as bad for him as to go through it all again.38

After his nephew’s departure, the old man and his friend settle in for the night at a colonial guesthouse where they enjoy a pile of roasted mealies

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before retiring in front of the fire for a ‘tot’ of ‘squareface’ (gin) and to smoke their pipes.39 Given that the manuscript is undated, it is impossible to infer whether this scene anticipates or reworks a similar episode included in another of Haggard’s tales. In The Ivory Child (1916) Allan is visited by a mystic band of Central African witchdoctors who entreat him to follow them home. Naturally obstinate and dogmatic, Allan is only prevailed upon to follow the mysterious clique after they have plied him with blue tobacco, which induces in him a narco-transcendental state. Allan describes the alluringly transgressive substance as a ‘pale, blue smoke’ drifting up from the bottom of a bowl with ‘a very sweet odour not unlike that of the tuberoses gardeners grow in hot-houses, but more searching’.40 In the relative privacy and comfort of his drawing room, Allan indulges his taste for the blue tobacco.41 For Allan, Miss Holmes – an intertextual pun referencing the drug use of a Mr Sherlock Holmes – and the other dinner party guests, the effect of inhaling the hallucinogenic fumes, which according to Allan penetrate the ‘inmost recesses of my being’, is an African thought-adventure.42 Freud’s allegorical parallel of female sexuality with Africa is recalled when Miss Holmes groggily asserts that she has ‘been in another world’: ‘I have traveled a great way. I found myself in a small place made of stone. It was dark in the place, the fire in that bowl lit it up’.43 It is in a similarly soporific setting that the old man of ‘Saved by Lightning’ begins his dramatic narrative. This blurred consciousness finds echoes in the old man’s account of an Africa both remembered from the past and experienced in the modern moment. He depicts the expanse in hauntographical terms when recounting a terrain that was once awash with waves of animal life. He remembers ‘creeping out the wagon just after dawn’ and ‘seeing the whole veldt one moving mass of game for as far as the eye can see. It looked as though every buck in the Transvaal had got together on that plain’.44 He adds that he ‘never saw such a sight before or since’.45 It is against this backdrop of temporal indeterminacy, where the present day merges with earlier events and sensations, that his strange narrative begins to unravel. The temporal ambiguity makes it unclear whether Haggard was employing this narrative framework to test motifs later included in his short work ‘The Tale of Three Lions’, or whether it represents an unconscious act of plagiarism given the marked structural and imagistic similarities between ‘Saved by Lightning’ and those tales frequently found in evangelical missionary magazines. The old man retells for his companion’s benefit how his wagon and oxen became mired on the slopes of a riverbank with nightfall rapidly descending. With the situation growing more and more desperate the

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old man decides to ride off into the veldt to seek help. He describes how soon ‘the darkness came on and the black cloud grew blacker than ever’.46 Haggard’s unpublished narrative bears a ghostly resemblance to the veldt story published in the Juvenile in 1883. Like the lost missionary of that tale, the old man describes the treacherous terrain underfoot; he just discerns ‘the faint outline of the track beneath my horse’s feet’ which means that he could ‘but make slow progress’.47 The old man recalls that he was gripped with agony at the wretchedness of his plight. Like the spiritual pilgrim in the missionary tale, and Dr Ferguson in Five Weeks in a Balloon, the old man is lost in ‘the centre of an infinite circumference’ and fears for his life. He, too, finds himself trapped within a void where sound waves are completely swallowed up: No words of mine can convey the sense of desolation and utter loneliness that overpowered me, wet and miserable as I was. There was no sound upon the earth for the wind had gone with the rain and the only sign of light in the sky above was the perpetual forked flickering of the lightning. When I shouted, which I did lustily, my voice seemed to faint and die away in the great depths of the air. The silence swallowed it as it will.48

Andrew Lang deplored African Farm for being a tale of ‘trivialities’ which simply narrated ‘a voice clamouring in the desert’.49 However, Haggard’s version of Vox clamantis in Deserto is a grotesque portrait of existential suffering and isolation. The old man’s entrapment within the infinite circumference of the African plain directly mirrors the textual fate of ‘Saved by Lightning’. Excluded and lost from the topology of what is known as Haggard’s textual archive, both the old man’s voice and the modulations of the text have been silenced. The old man is placed within a double bind of impotency: lost in the veldt and lost to posterity. Like Freud’s future ‘immortal works’, always deferred, and not yet fully formed, he is trapped both figuratively in the tale and actually lost to literary historians and textual scholars. This nightmarish vision of futile screaming within a vacuum implies how the image of Africa as ‘unexplored countries’ on Victorian maps, as well as the fears generated by this epistemological darkness, can be extended to include the dominant tropes of fin de siècle mesmeric fiction. This Gothic subgenre becomes obsessed with shadowy protagonists whose histories are marked by unsettling biographical ‘blanks’. The influence of the causal logic constantly expounded by the literature of evangelical philanthropy is discernible in the absurd finale to ‘Saved by Lightning’. Isolated in the desert the old man comes under frenzied attack from two lions: creatures that emerge and blend into the ‘blackdrop’ with every lightning flash. Indeed, at the tale’s denouement

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the ghost of Livingstone is conjured up. The old man narrates how Livingstone, having himself been mauled by a lion, evokes the pain experienced in sadomasochistic terms: ‘I have heard that Dr Livingstone says in one of his books that when the lion got him down the sensation was rather pleasant than otherwise.’50 The grotesque meets the Gothic in Haggard’s strobe-lit, rain-soaked vista as the old man describes in lurid detail how the lion bit into his arm: ‘I never endured such agony in my life as I did when that brute’s teeth were slowly meeting in my flesh.’51 With the old man’s life in the balance Haggard reverts to a familiar trope. A flourish of fin de siècle spiritualism, melding the seemingly incompatible realms of empirical science and mystical insight, charges the incongruous climax. Having been knocked to the ground by the lion, the old man recalls that he lay awaiting a final terrible blow from the lion, but divine providence intervened. Initially unsure as to how he had managed to cheat death, the old man looks over to the frazzled corpse of the lion to see its ‘tall upreared form’ with the ‘knife sticking in his chest’ and deduces that the lightning, having been attracted by the metallic conductor, had saved him from a certain ‘miserable death’.52 The old man is emphatic about who or what was responsible for this act of outrageous fortune: ‘I say “had fallen” but really as I have often said I believe that a merciful Power directed that flash.’53 Eventually, the reading public would grow tired of such tales, and of Haggard. Just as the Juvenile had fallen into steep decline from the 1890s onwards, the popularity of Haggard’s exotic settings, and perhaps even the imperial dream itself, began to lose its lustre. For Mazlish, the appeal of Haggard’s fiction lay in the Molotov mixture of romance and realism, and his ability to traverse the border ‘where life and death seem to meet’, where dreams merge and ‘where the humdrum world is transmogrified by fantasy’.54 Unfortunately, Haggard was never able to recapture this distinctive mode of address. Growing ever more commercially minded and desirous of the critical recognition that Kipling and Stevenson variously enjoyed, the once record-breaking author struggled to be taken seriously and sell at the same level. The psychological themes that were woven into the narrative fabric of his African romances, largely concealed from his own eyes and those of his audience, save perhaps Freud, are summarised by Etherington to capture Haggard’s incredible, yet fleeting, popularity. ‘Whenever Haggard put aside romances and turned his hand to writing realistic novels for adults, the results were paradoxically much more innocent, much less challenging and sinister.’55 Haggard continued publishing up until his death in 1925, but his ability to inspire the reading clientele with a ‘curious nostalgic yet contemporary clarity’ had gone.56 His work faded from public view only to

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be rediscovered several years later when hordes of new admirers were affected by Hollywood’s enthusiasm for Haggard film adaptations. However, this is not to say that the influence of African ‘blankness’ died out along with the mainstream appetite for boys’ own derring-do and imperial romance. Fresh maps were drawn across the literary landscape; indeed figurations of Central African cartographic and epistemological ‘darkness’ powerfully shaped an intriguing subgenre of the 1890s, which is the subject of my next chapter – mesmeric fiction.

Notes 1. Cited in Stiebel, 2001: p. 55. 2. Bruce Mazlish, ‘A Triptych: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Rider Haggard’s She, and Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Coming Race”’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 35 (1993), pp. 726–45 (p. 731). 3. Ibid., p. 731. 4. Ibid., p. 731. 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘Excavation and Memory’, in Selected Writings, Vol 2 1927–1934, ed. by Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 576. 6. Richard Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 113. 7. Sigmund Freud, ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. III (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 188–224 (p. 192). 8. Ibid., p. 192. 9. Ibid., p. 192. 10. Gay, 1989: p. 165. 11. Sergei Pankejeff, ‘My Recollections of Sigmund Freud’, in The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, ed. by Muriel Gardiner (London: Hogarth Press & the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1972), p. 139. 12. Armstrong, 2003: p. 118. 13. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 398. 14. Sigmund Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1887–1939, ed. by Ernst Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 403. 15. Armstrong, 2003: p. 122. 16. Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 76. 17. Ibid., p. 77. 18. Ibid., p. 78. 19. Freud, 1985: p. 287. 20. Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note Upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by

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21. 22. 23. 24.

Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature James Strachey, Vol. XIX (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 225–32 (p. 230). Hereafter: Freud, 1961b. Freud, 1961b: p. 230. Bivona, 1990: p. 80. Ibid., p. 80. Here is the dream as recorded by Haggard: A round hut, surrounded by a fence, standing on a grassy knoll, no trees about. A black woman moving within the fence and, I think, some children; myself there also, as a black man. An alarm below, which causes me to take a spear and run out. A fight with attackers driven off, but I receive a spearthrust through the middle below the breast, and stagger up by the slope mortally wounded back into the enclosure hut, where I fall into the arms of the woman and die. (Haggard, 1926: Vol. II, pp. 168–9)

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Etherington, 1978: p. 79. Stiebel, 2001: p. 55. Etherington, 1978: p. 76. This argument only really accords with Freud’s work on male infantile sexuality. His work on female sexuality, as will be seen, is much less clear and subject to constant revision throughout his life. Jung, cited in Etherington, 1978: p. 85. Henry Miller, The Books in my Life (London: Peter Owen, 1952), p. 93. Ibid., p. 93. Freud, 1974: p. 453. Ibid., p. 453. Bivona, 1990: p. 84. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. XX (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), pp. 176–258 (p. 212). This manuscript will be simply referred to by its shelfmark at the New York Public Library, Berg Coll MSS Haggard. It is unpaginated. Berg Coll MSS Haggard. Ibid. Ibid. Henry Rider Haggard, The Ivory Child (London: Cassell, 1916), p. 156. As the next chapter proposes, the location of Allan’s transgression is of fundamental importance. All notions of societal conservatism and orthodoxy have been abandoned at the front door of this respectable postcode, leaving the guest free to indulge in whatever sensory pursuits they desire. Scroope, Allan’s host, can barely repress his excitement at the prospect of narcotic transgression, yelping, ‘[c]ome, Allan, don’t shirk this Central African adventure. I’ll try if you like’ (Haggard, 1916: p. 55). Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., pp. 58–9. Berg Coll MSS Haggard. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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48. Ibid. 49. Andrew Lang, cited in Patricia O’Neil’s Introduction to The Story of An African Farm (Plymouth: Broadview Press, 2003), p. 363. 50. Berg Coll MSS Haggard. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Mazlish, 1993: p. 733. 55. Etherington, 1978: p. 82. 56. Ibid., p. 82.

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III

Preaching to the Nerves ‘But even there I see gleams of light. Science is losing its cocksureness. These recent experiments in the Paris hospitals by Charcot and others, and the attention they have received from scientific men all over the world, show that faith in the Unseen – the occult – still survives, and is hard to kill’. ‘Ah’, said his lordship, with a smile of triumph, ‘so far you are with me! You believe in Hypnotism?’ (The Charlatan)

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Chapter 10

Victorian Mesmerism

It is unsurprising that the Earl of Wansborough – positioned as a figure of fun in Robert Buchanan’s novel The Charlatan (1895) owing to his naive faith in theosophy – is a fervent advocate of hypnotism. However, the Dean’s tentative endorsement aptly highlights the era’s tangled, surprising and complicated engagement with hypnosis. The Dean’s declaration that science is ‘losing its cocksureness’ intimates the turbulent relationship between empiricism and what he clumsily refers to as ‘the occult’. As a bastion of orthodox religiosity, his statement indicates that the secular sciences should be brought more into communion with ‘Unseen’ forces. The telling allusion to Charcot’s mesmeric experimentation as ‘occult’ gestures towards the presence of an antithetical spiritual force. Over a century after its discovery, the validity and authenticity of mesmerism was still being squabbled over by proponents of established science, the Anglican Church and zealous acolytes of new age spiritualism. Franz Anton Mesmer stumbled upon the discipline and technique that would eventually bear his name while experimenting on a patient in Vienna in 1777. With the use of iron and magnets as a means to treat his aristocratic clientele, Mesmer believed that he had induced in a female patient the sensation of an ‘artificial tide’. Misguidedly, Mesmer ascribed the effect upon his patient to the magnets positioned around and upon her skin and, having ordered her to consume a drink of iron ore, believed that he was manipulating his patient’s magnetic energy. The temporary relief experienced by his patients from their symptoms had nothing to do with magnetic energy, however. After placing the magnets next to their skin he would softly touch the arms of his client, producing a trance-like state that became known as ‘animal magnetism’. Mesmer had unwittingly hit upon a technique later referred to as ‘passes’, where the mesmerist would make delicate, brush-like movements along the patient’s arms, while all the time staring fixedly into

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their eyes. His therapeutic endeavour was immediately hailed as the great panacea of the time. Having successfully established himself in Paris, he treated both monarchs and a patrician elite with pioneering inventions like ‘Mesmer’s tub’, in which individuals were made to stand around a solid oak contraption holding a piece of rope. They were then invited to touch fingers, in order to facilitate a flow of electrical energy, while in the dimly lit background incense burned and astrological symbols decorated the walls. Mesmer was in fact creating a séancelike environment and lulling the participants into a form of trance. His realisation of setting and ambience as key components in the production of a psychic state never vanished from hypnotic therapy as the century progressed. Backroom mesmeric exhibitions, which were to become a fixture of bourgeois dinner parties played out in soporific seclusion, partially foreshadow Freud’s devotion to creating the perfect atmosphere in his consulting chambers. Mesmerism finally arrived in London during the early part of the nineteenth century and under a dark cloud of cynicism. Alison Winter, in Mesmerised: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (1998), describes how animal magnetism appealed to a number of ‘self-consciously “progressive”, politically liberal and radical doctors, natural philosophers and men of letters, largely because it promised to address many of their questions about the relationship of physical forces to life’.2 Initially dismissed outright by the established centres of medical excellence, in France the Académie des Sciences and the Académie de Médecine branded it as ‘quackery’; after crossing the Atlantic, it received a frosty reception from both Oxford and Cambridge universities. Mesmerism eventually found support from, among others, John Elliotson at the newly established University College London. Elliotson, a graduate of Edinburgh University, was responsible for introducing mesmerism into British medical practice and became famous for using working class women from Irish immigrant communities as subjects in his public mesmeric trials. The potential for mesmerism to succeed and be taken seriously as a credible branch of phrenology, and not as a deeply dubious pseudoscience, was bolstered by the arrival in London of the French aristocrat and scholar Baron Charles Dupotet. Winter notes that his ‘demonstrations could be seen not only in his private rooms but in the wards of the London hospitals’.3 Winter records in stringent detail the impact made and controversies caused by mesmerism during its introduction into London and then beyond in the provinces; however, it is crucial to acknowledge the existence of a heavily performative element in these staged trials held in both the public and private spheres. Hospital

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lectures and middle-class parlours underwent metaphorical transformations into courtrooms and theatres, where bizarre exhibitions could be savoured by both frivolous sensation-seekers and dispassionate physicians or serious-minded scholars. In 1885 Freud travelled to the hospital in Paris renowned for its innovative treatment of nervous disorders, Salpêtrière, and fell under the mesmeric spell of Jean Martin Charcot. Charcot had rehabilitated hypnosis as a sober therapeutic technique away from the fairground and music hall charlatans doing the rounds from the 1850s onwards and put it to effectual use in the treatment of various neurotic complaints. Peter Gay suggests that Freud was ‘dazzled’ by the theatrical Charcot, whose ‘scientific style and personal charm overpowered Freud even more than his specific teachings’.4 Charcot found in Freud a dedicated and intellectually ferocious pupil who would regularly attend his highly charged lectures that borrowed from stage histrionics. Freud was the conscientious disciple who would eventually go beyond his mentor’s interest in neuropathology to form a comprehensive science of the mind. However Charcot, despite his intellectual verve and charismatic lecturing style, was by no means infallible, and these academic shortcomings prompted Freud to become a psychological Adam, naming complexes that lay well beyond Charcot’s grasp. Charcot had been tardy in scrutinising the heightened suggestive influence that the mesmerist exerted upon the subject. A treatise from the Nancy School stressed that the hypnotic state engenders ‘a violent passion and an almost irresistible attraction, in the hypnotised subject, toward the hypnotiser’.5 Famous for his loyalty and commitment to those father figures in his professional life long after they had been discredited, Fliess being the most notable, Freud in public remained an ardent follower of Charcot, eventually translating both his and Hippolyte Bernheim’s work into German. Freud found in Bernheim’s discovery of the suggestive potential of hypnosis the perfect vehicle to structure his burgeoning discipline. ‘Psychoanalysis’, according to Gay, ‘as Freud developed it in the mid-1890s, was an emancipation from hypnosis.’6 However, even as Freud reappraised and refined the exploratory tactics he had acquired from his time in Salpêtrière and Nancy, mesmerism was frequently belittled by both the English and French clinical establishments as a sham. The rebranding of mesmerism as a rigorous scientific discipline was greatly hampered by mainstream entertainers who exploited it to humiliate and coerce gullible volunteers into carrying out ignominious acts. It was just too sensational a ‘spectacle’ to be appreciated as a coherent mode of medical therapy. As the credibility of mesmerism started to wane among those operating in the prestigious centres of medical and scientific research, the

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method enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in the final decades of the nineteenth century, inspiring some of the most popular British novelists. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) the formidable Sergeant Cuff deduces that Franklin Blake is indeed guilty of stealing the coveted diamond of the book’s title, having been placed in a narcotic trance. Blake is said to have ‘entered Miss Verinder’s sitting-room and took the Diamond, in a state of trance, produced by opium’, having been drugged by Mr Candy.7 Charles Dickens was himself a keen amateur mesmerist who frequently hypnotised his wife on stage during lecture tours of Western Europe and the United States, developing this interest further in his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). It was, however, in the final years of Victoria’s reign that the British public became entranced by the explosion of mesmeric literature: The Mesmerist (1890) by Australian writer Henry Ernest Clark Oliphant; Robert Buchanan and Henry Murray’s The Charlatan (1895); George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1895); Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897); Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); and Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella The Parasite (1897). These novels captured the imagination by examining complex intersections between the commonplace and the weird, the secular and the saintly, the tangible and the ethereal. As Peter Keating proclaims in The Haunted Study (1989): At a time when the most advanced novelists were striving to refine themselves out of fiction, to subdue their personalities in favour of dramatic, oblique or impersonal narrative methods, the best-selling author slid easily into the spot vacated by the mid-Victorians, berating, denouncing or consoling the reader, and always telling a strong story. In opposition to the godless relativism of the age, the best-seller asserted the existence of absolute values. At its most defiant it presented itself as a coherent philosophy that was both older and newer than advanced modern thought.8

Keating avers that the intimidating expertise and expansive style of the mid-Victorian triple-decker was by the fin de siècle discarded in favour of clipped and concentrated narratives that were at once more exciting and yet more marked by the professional language of scientific discourses about homosexuality, eugenics, racial cleansing and female hysteria. Traces of the short-lived sensation genre influenced many of the best-sellers of the 1890s, as Lynn Pykett notes: ‘[t]he tentacles of sensationalism spread widely and deeply into many different kinds of fiction in the mid-Victorian period, and stretched out as far as Hardy and his contemporaries at the end of the century.’9 However, Keating’s thesis that the late Victorian best-seller asserts the ‘existence of absolute values’ is undermined by mesmeric fiction. Detective, invasion and mesmeric narratives were not only based on exhilarating, topical and

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unusual themes, but incorporated within their textual sinews a measure of oppositional or transgressive brio. Hegemonic ideologies were not simply repackaged and offered to readers as monolithic or ‘absolute values’. Even Trilby, a text that in its early chapters teases the reader with a radical alterity before adopting more orthodox generic and sentimental poses, is invested with a mutinous relish for Parisian bohemianism. Watson’s fanciful construction of his companion Holmes as a redoubtable empirical wizard in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ is undercut by the detective’s own dependence on narcotics, while the seemingly solid certainties of imperial romance are constantly shadowed by intimations of transvestism, sexual ‘inversion’ and miscegenation. Popular authors eagerly sought surprising tropes, figurations and plot manoeuvres from travelogues and anthropological surveys of the African periphery, re-imagining and propelling marginal topographies and identities into the mainstream. The Asiatic opium den in Edwin Drood is the site of racial and sexual transgression, signifying a latent potential to infiltrate the apparently genteel imperial centre. Readers savoured Haggard’s quasi-epic tales of native armies numbering thousands, alongside invasion narratives propagating the spurious myth of reverse colonisation. One of the most successful and celebrated proponents of the invasion text was William Le Queux, whose paranoid tale of Germanic incursion sold over a million copies upon release: Shots were now falling everywhere, and Londoners were staggered. In dense, excited crowds they were flying southward towards the Thames. Some were caught in the streets in their flights, and were flung down, maimed and dying. The most awful sights were to be witnessed in the open streets: men and women blown out of recognition, with their clothes singed and torn to shreds, and helpless, innocent children lying white and dead, their limbs torn away and missing [. . .] the streets were running with blood, for hundreds, both Germans and British, lay dead and dying. Every Londoner struggled valiantly until shot down; yet the enemy, already reinforced, pressed forward.10

These authors were not opportunistic philistines who spurned all engagement with urgent socio-economic issues. Rather they saw themselves as beneficiaries of, and contributors to, a complex and bracing cosmopolitanism, participating in a richly diverse literary field, and disseminating their work among ebullient audiences via increasingly elaborate marketing and promotional strategies. The largely urban, avant-garde modernist movement discovered in the fin de siècle bestseller a fascinated anxiety about issues of cultural translation, multilingualism, mongrel or mixed utterances, as well as an obsession with ideologies of exile, fragmentation and displacement.

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Mesmeric fiction of the 1890s reflects and refines this stylistic and formal fascination with dizzying multiplicity, dissident voices, recondite messages and encrypted cadences. These tales rarely commit wholeheartedly to a traditional first- or third-person narration. Instead, dramatic encounters often unfold via a series of letters, diary entries or log-books, or middlebrow journalistic reportage. Since its very inception, the mesmeric enterprise had remained in a state of constant reinvention. Throughout this period of restless retooling, there was no clear consensus as to how mesmerism should be specified and formalised. Lacking a stable hierarchical framework or institutional authority charged with fostering uniformity of approach, devotees of this amorphous discipline construed prior knowledge through the prism of their own unique experiments and private practices. Given the lack of codified rules or standardised techniques, a perception of mesmerism as mere dilettante dabbling began to augment. Each mesmerist embarked on a process of trial and error in order to forge his or her own preferred methodology. This diffuse, haphazard and sometimes improvised mode of operation encouraged the publication of case studies as a means of knowledge transfer among ambitious practitioners. J. W. Haddock, in his 1851 study Somnolism & Psycheism, recounts his own favoured tactic of inducing mesmeric sleep in subjects. Haddock reveals that he positions the ‘patient’ right in front of him, takes hold of both their hands in his left hand, while placing his right hand on the subject’s head, while ‘desiring the subject to yield himself willingly to the expected influence, and to concentrate his attention on me by looking at my eyes’.11 If, for whatever reason, the patient refuses to yield to his influence, he then performs a few passes ‘made from the forehead downwards, or from the back of the head [. . .] along the course of the spine’.12 This sensual mesmeric foreplay should determine whether or not the subject will succumb to his mesmeric sway, ‘[for] if the party can be mesmerised, hypnotised, or whatever else it may be called, it will generally take place within half an hour, or at furthest an hour’.13 Haddock’s reluctance, or inability to assert confidently, ‘my usual mode’ and ‘whatever else it may be called’, epitomises the imprecise manner in which mesmerism was chronicled, and the way it was apprehended throughout the Victorian period. This trajectory of restive experimentation, piecemeal recording and sharing partially explains the epistolary form of much mesmeric fiction, the incantatory narrative strategies of which seek to enact a process of trance-like absorption among readers. Derek Forrest describes the Marquis de Puységur at the height of his renown as a mesmerist, who was unable to satisfy the demands of ailing French aristocrats and was compelled to adopt a similar expedient to the

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one employed by Mesmer himself, that of transferring mesmeric potency by magnetising a tree in the centre of his village. Those requiring his magnetic ministrations were encouraged to wrap their arms around the barky stalk in a hugging embrace. Puységur wrote to his younger brother detailing the transference: I continue to make use of the healing power that I have learned about from Mesmer. I bless him every day, for I have the means of healing all the sick in the neighbourhood: they flock around my tree. There were more than 130 this morning, a perpetual procession from the countryside. I spend two hours there every morning, my tree is the best baquet possible – every leaf communicates health.14

Florid reports of Puységur’s outlandish tactics began to taint the public image of mesmerism. Nonetheless, Freud’s early conception of transference carries ghostly echoes of Puységur’s manoeuvre. In ‘The Dynamics of Transference’, Freud sets out that, for psychoanalysis to address a patient’s neurosis, the analyst must go in pursuit of the libido. In its simplest guise transference is the substituting of oedipal and sexual impulses held for the mother or father onto the analyst, forming a powerful bond that can manifest itself in several ways. Freud described different scenarios that could arise from the psychoanalytical situation: the declaration of an erotic love for the analyst, or a more rational reaction that identifies the analyst as a valued friend. Freud warns that the analyst must recognise and be aware of this formidable psychic bond and utilise it ethically, that the ‘patient’s falling in love is induced by the analytic situation and is not attributed to the charms of his own person’, and that a tempted analyst ‘has no grounds whatever for being proud of such a “conquest”, as it would be called outside analysis’.15 Both the earlier and the later Freudian notions of transference can be found in mesmeric fiction. The power wielded by the charismatically persuasive figure of the mesmerist – a home-grown bewitching doctor – and the popular use of young female subjects in mesmeric trials invite comparisons with Freud’s warnings about morally dissolute practitioners who exploit and consequently debase his carefully pondered methods. Indeed the novel itself, as a material artefact, is transmuted into a site of cultural concern given its potentially alarming and deleterious mesmeric intensity. Missionary tales also sought to instil a devoted adherence among the adolescent demographic, prompting them to make a substantial financial, spiritual and personal investment in the amelioration of a, supposedly, benighted Africa. They often included depictions of enraptured youngsters mesmerised either by the glory of God or, conversely, by the ever-encroaching evils of bourgeois secularism

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and conspicuous consumption. The contributors to, and editors of, the Juvenile recognised only too well the potential of the written word to enthral and condition impressionable and callow sensibilities. The trial of Henri Chambige brought into public view the potential threat of mesmerism by way of a series of confused misperceptions. Chambige stood accused of murdering his mature lover in a bizarre story in which it was alleged that he hypnotised and then coerced her down to a villa in Algeria, but he always maintained that it was a suicide pact that had gone wrong. Mary Elizabeth Leighton, in her study of crime and hypnotic fictions, includes a telling article from The Times on the infamous Chambige trial, which gripped the public on both sides of the Channel throughout 1888, suggesting that it was his keen interest in decadent fiction that contributed to the grisly murder of Mme Grille. ‘It is clear that Chambige, whose head had been turned by reading unhealthy novels, was bent on creating a sensation and on imagining himself a kind of hero.’16 This extract illuminates the deep social misgivings that mesmeric activity engendered. The combination of ‘unhealthy novels’, with their morally reprehensible and racy plotlines cranking up excitement levels, with Henri Chambige’s amateurish interest in mesmerism is used to explain the killing of his lover. The prosecution intentionally exploited contemporary prejudices and paranoia surrounding mesmerism by exaggerating Chambige’s occult abilities. Their entire cased rested upon the importance that the jury would ascribe to the discovery of a few items of mesmeric paraphernalia found lying around his messy student apartment. More importantly, Chambige is accused by The Times of attempting to cultivate a ‘sensation’ in which he is cast as a mesmeric darkling. Chambige was a minor figure on the Parisian fin de siècle literary scene, projecting himself publicly as a Byronic ‘hero’ impatient of social constraint. The unseemly affair was complicated by the portrayal of Mme Grille as a bourgeois literary decadent who gladly offered herself as both lover and muse to the enigmatic Chambige. During her husband’s testimony the court heard about her history and propensity to slip into catatonic conditions, as well as her susceptibility to mesmeric force. M. Grille claimed that he once found her in a ‘cataleptic state’, apparently mesmerised by the play of ‘sunlight on a coffee spoon’, and recounted to the court a nervous attack that she had suffered while enjoying the performance of an Arab street juggler. M. Grille’s testimony aggravated public cynicism regarding the supposed ease with which an individual could slip in and out of mesmeric sleep, and reintroduced into the equation worries about racial hygiene, social engineering and the ethnic other.17 Mesmeric fiction was perceived by its noisy detractors as belonging

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to that cluster of ‘unhealthy novels’ that, as with Chambige, wielded an irresistible sway over the reader’s imagination. Misgivings voiced by more reactionary cultural pundits reveal a complex network of generic indebtedness that links 1890s mesmeric fiction to other marginal and largely denigrated literary forms. The typical mesmeric text is haunted by the unquiet spirits of earlier textual categories, such as Gothic, Newgate, sensation and missionary fiction. Alison Winter remarks how avid readers of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) spoke of a close-wired reading experience that bypassed an intermediary stage of reflection, and in doing so ‘the route from page to nerve was direct’.18 This intense appeal to the sensory dismantles ‘the border between fiction and physiology’, a border that Henry Longueville Mansel sought to police in his review of sensation fiction for the conservative Quarterly Review of April 1863.19 Mansel deplored a ‘class’ of literature that ‘has grown up around us, usurping in many respects, intentionally or unintentionally, a portion of the preacher’s office’, and ‘playing a not inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of a generation’.20 An entire generation was corrupted, according to Mansel, by a literary brand that was knowingly ‘preaching to the nerves’ of a gullible and undiscriminating reading public. The rhetorical persuasions of the pulpit, evangelical philanthropy and other mainstream church groups were displaced onto the pages of these ‘sensational sermons’ – exercises in habitual simulation ‘moulding minds’, ‘forming tastes and habits’.21 Sensation and later mesmeric fiction established a narco-symbiosis in which, having had a taste of these unrepentantly lowbrow yet highly spiced genres, the reading public demanded more of the same. The sensation genre’s unapologetically mass-market appeal drew a snobbish sneer from Mansel: A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop. The public wants novels, and novels must be made – so many yards of printed stuff, sensation-pattern, to be ready by the end of the season.22

Mansel associates a perverse lubricity with the typical sensation text, a lewd playfulness that becomes more pronounced in the genre’s bastard offspring, the mesmeric narrative. Practitioners of the mesmeric literary mode brashly announced the transgression of moral, ethical and social boundaries that forms the beating heart of this hybrid mode. Indeed, illegitimate children frequently appear in mesmeric narrative, which offers a fair retreat to the displaced, damaged and unwanted scions of the ostensibly genteel hearth. A staple motif is the arrival of an individual with no immediately traceable biography and uncertain origins.

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Mesmeric fiction may seem on cursory inspection the moral and ethical opposite of missionary fiction; yet it puckishly borrowed from the Christian printing houses stylistic and formal quirks that caught the eye of mainstream readers seeking escapist solace. Correspondents, for example, from various African missionary outposts routinely sent back for publication in the Juvenile colonial portraits punctuated by incidents of physical peril and high suspense. Confrontations with ferocious lions or ravenous cannibals were elaborated over several editions, and it was this process of serialisation operating in tandem with the narrative tension generated that induced in readers a form of trance. Adolescent subscribers to the Juvenile were metaphorically mesmerised by the vivid bulletins of God-sent courage in adversity, which were frequently embellished by the editors working back home. It was literary sensationalism in its purest essence. Mesmeric fiction borrowed basic plot structures from the short stories showcased in missionary magazines of the time. The hypnotist is often depicted as a grubby exploiter of female virtue – Svengali in Trilby or the Scarab in The Beetle – who has to be hunted down by a venturesome ‘crew of light’ taken from the professional middle class. From this tense confrontation emerges a solitary figure whose occupation permits the execution of retributive or vigilante justice: the private detective. Val Medway, confidant of Allan Campbell, provides the impetus to foil Cecil Wilson’s dishonest ruse in The Mesmerist, while the resourceful sleuth Augustus Champnell assumes the heavy mantle of hero in The Beetle. Indeed, Sherlock Holmes’s drug dependency may be construed as an extension or derivative of the mesmeric genre, inducing in Holmes a sort of mesmeric stupor and facilitating a transcendental awareness of how various crimes have been committed. Although not a detective in the mould of Conan Doyle’s mercurial protagonist, Van Helsing in Stoker’s Dracula is portrayed as the pivot upon which the success of the vampire-chasing coterie depends. Mina Harker is immediately struck by his determined demeanour, ‘at once indicative of thought and power’ while Dr Seward attributes a weighty forensic gravitas to the more scientifically ambiguous disciplines in Van Helsing’s repertoire.23 Van Helsing, for Seward, was ‘a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day’, endowed with a mind that remains ‘absolutely open’.24 His intellectual prowess is matched by ‘an iron nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, and indomitable resolution, self-command, and toleration exalted from virtues to blessings’, and it is claimed that he possesses ‘the kindliest and truest heart that beats’.25 It is the possession of the ‘kindliest and truest heart’ that usually determines the outcome in mesmeric fiction. Lessingham has perpetrated secret indiscretions and Allan Campbell, even under a mesmeric spell,

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still remains guilty of murdering his brother Hugh, much like Franklin Blake in Collins’s The Moonstone. Satisfactory resolution, therefore, depends upon the moral and ethical authority of a Van Helsing figure that remains unsullied or immune to the mesmerist’s diabolical machinations. Consequently, mesmeric fiction gestures towards the existence of an inscrutable facet within an individual’s psychological make-up. The vivid delineation of Dracula’s phenomenal cerebral power, the master mesmerist par excellence of fin de siècle fiction, may indeed momentarily threaten to overrun the ostensibly civilised metropolis, but the grave potential risk is nullified by Van Helsing’s efforts. To a certain extent the ‘Crew of Light’ that pursues the Count has itself been ‘vampirised’, and it is the isolated figure of Van Helsing who undermines the mesmerist’s powers of seduction. As Erik Butler proposes, Van Helsing is the ‘double of Dracula and effectively a vampire himself’, who ‘stands apart from the rest of his cohorts, calls the shots from behind the scenes, manipulates others like puppets on a string, and makes them carry out his will’.26 Both are mesmerists. In contrast to Dracula, who warns Harker that ‘[w]hen my brain says ‘Come!’ to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding’, Van Helsing, like Woodville in Buchanan’s The Charlatan, employs hypnotism as a means of excavating the silenced and repressed memories of his subjects.27 Furthermore, Dracula’s primal menace is accentuated by the clandestine and violent depiction of his mesmeric capability, whereas Mina implores Van Helsing to hypnotise her, ‘Do it before the dawn, for I feel that then I can speak, and speak freely. Be quick, for the time is short!’28 The measured forensic description of the mesmeric process stands in stark contrast to the unnerving rendering of Dracula as a fiendish puppet-master: Looking fixedly at her, he [Van Helsing] commenced to make passes in front of her, from over the top of her head downward, with each hand in turn. Mina gazed at him fixedly for a few minutes, during which my own heart beat like a trip hammer, for I felt that some crisis was at hand. Gradually her eyes closed, and she sat, stock still. Only by the gentle heaving of her bosom could one know that she was alive. The Professor made a few more passes and then stopped, and I could see that his forehead was covered with great beads of perspiration. Mina opened her eyes, but she did not seem the same woman. There was a far-away look in her eyes, and her voice had a sad dreaminess which was new to me.29

The apparent speed with which Van Helsing lulls Mina into a mesmeric trance is testimony both to his gifts as a mesmerist and to the prominence of a prevalent misconception about female susceptibility to this process. Contemporary physiology offered a portrayal of the female body compromised by the mind. Alison Winter remarks that

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‘women’s bodies were apparently subject to nervous influences that over stimulated the imagination and prevented them from being free agents in the evaluation of evidence’.30 This ominous formulation of the female body as perpetually at risk from the mind, and vice-versa, has prompted recent commentators to construe these drawing room scenes as moments of sexual exploitation. Harker’s overt sexualising of Mina, the ‘gentle heave of her bosom’, appears to underpin such scholarly appraisals of the mesmeric scene involving female subjects. Stoker’s most acclaimed novel incorporates one of the most suggestive components of the mesmeric genre: technological innovations that throw into bolder relief the dynamics of a primal and perennial human capacity for magical manipulation. The exception is Trilby, in which Du Maurier’s nostalgic sentimentalisation of the 1850s sets the text apart from a genre infatuated by the mystical pull of modern machines. Oliphant’s The Mesmerist evinces a keen fascination with the train journey as a fact-finding mission and how punctilious time-keeping as well as exact travel schedules chafe against agricultural, ecclesiastical and seasonal calendars. Arguably, it is The Beetle that elaborates the more apocalyptic associations of technological advance. In a laboratory beneath his respectable home, Sydney Atherton develops a weapon of mass destruction. He descends into his bunker to ‘plan murder – legalised murder – on the biggest scale that it has ever been planned’.31 Atherton declares that ‘I was on the track of a weapon which would make war not only an affair of a single campaign, but of a single half-hour.’32 This imagining of cataclysmic devastation subtly foreshadows the contorted carnage of the train wreck. The front coaches ‘matchboxed’ among the ‘heap of debris’ were ‘telescoped into one another in a state of apparently inextricable confusion’.33 This ‘crashscape’ of ‘inextricable confusion’ encapsulates a genre that thrived on merging stylistic registers and formal categories so as to effect a productive disorientation among readers and middlebrow pundits alike. The ‘inextricable confusion’ also captures how mesmeric texts repeatedly derail sentimental expectation by offering dissatisfying, ambiguous or hastily contrived conclusions. Mesmerism remained elusive of precise definition, even darkly inscrutable to those authors who sought to exploit its terms and procedures in their fiction. Consequently, the fantastical narrative of The Beetle is violently interrupted by a fortuitous train crash: a familiar plot device in many sensation novels, such as East Lynne (1861). Professor Gilroy is delivered from the clutches of Miss Penelosa as a result of her untimely death, and The Charlatan, with its Gothic set piece finale of a shipwreck, jars against the conventional duality of the bucolic and (sub)urban settings

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where much of the narrative action unfolds. The formal fractures and bizarre incongruities that these writings variously exhibit comprise a deeply vexed reaction to mesmerism’s uncertain functionality. However, mechanised technology appears to offer a reassuring alternative to the invisible science of unconscious cerebration.34 Finally, encoded within these multifaceted generic hybrids is the unsettling threat of contamination. Michel Foucault sought to gauge the transition between archaic and new modes of exercising political power in the nineteenth century. He discerns a shift away from regimes predicated upon physical compulsion towards a more nuanced disciplinary social order. In fiction this antiquated system was manifest in the form of swashbuckling tales of swordsmen and rambunctious military action; however, this was displaced by a more covert form of repression articulated through narratives of racial degeneration, taint and invasion. Allan Conrad Christensen believes that, for this new social order, ‘the mechanism of contagion, with its subtle and mysterious way of imposing power over those it infects, becomes an effective metaphor’.35 In late Victorian Gothic tales like Dracula or The Beetle the menace of contagion threatens to ‘reduce all difference and distinctions to a generalised incoherence’.36 Van Helsing and his disciples realise that the extermination of the ‘Undead’ relies upon the ability and speed at which they can sterilise the Transylvanian soil shipped over with the Count. Mesmerism emerged from and was inextricably tied to an aggressively masculinised and medicalised scientific credo, with the figure of the mesmerist closely aligned with that of the physician. It is in Conan Doyle’s The Parasite that the latent threat posed by mesmerism as a form of social contagion is apparent. Professor Gilroy describes his tormentor, Miss Penelosa, as capable of ‘project[ing] herself into my body and tak[ing] command of it. She has a parasitic soul – yes, she is a parasite, a monstrous parasite. She creeps into my frame as the hermit crab does into the whelk’s shell.’37 Penelosa is evoked in terms of an airborne parasitic virus that infiltrates and then exerts complete control over the erudite Gilroy, whose life of cosy academic seclusion is overturned. Mesmeric fiction returns obsessively to the menace of contagion emanating from obscure Far Eastern outposts and shrouded African hinterlands – a symbolic geography supercharged with bio-hazardous connotations. Naturally, if the fin de siècle Gothic text was construed as a magnetised literary object, then it could also become a pernicious pollutant, eroding ‘correct’ aesthetic tastes and sound ethical discriminations. Part of the Trilby boom of 1894 was anchored in the novel’s viral release. It was initially serialised in Harper’s Monthly and proved to be an immediate commercial success, with the magazine noticing a

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sharp increase in sales. Just as the reported readership of the Juvenile was estimated to be approximately 100,000 a month, but was probably more than double as each edition was distributed among close family and friends, so too were copies of Harper’s shared among clusters of satellite enthusiasts. Du Maurier in an interview for The Critic in 1896 suggests that the narrative was in fact the product of an extended period of gestation: ‘of the mechanism of the story, I can tell you nothing. The story formed itself.’38 Initially, British audiences were wary of a text that Du Maurier himself termed as ‘weird’, and the readership’s apathy was compounded by the fact that early copies were published without the author’s distinctive illustrations. The eventual inclusion of pictorial representations was crucial to the novel’s commercial triumph. Although Du Maurier had secured a modest measure of literary renown through his first novel Peter Ibbetson (1891), he was widely known before the publication of Trilby as a popular illustrator for Punch. It was in the United States that the Trilby boom began to gather furious momentum. By the end of 1895 the novel had sold in excess of 200,000 copies and dominated the number one spot on the bestseller list across the country: New York in the east, Louisville in the south and Los Angeles in the west.39 American popularity filtered back over the Atlantic, with a one-volume illustrated deluxe edition selling out before publication. Critical reactions of the time applauded the book for its ‘New Testament lovingness’ and ‘Christian Charity’.40 The Atlantic magazine heralded Trilby as a ‘nineteenth century fairy tale for grown men and women’.41 Edward Purcell remarks how one pundit positioned Du Maurier’s novel alongside the beau ideal of late-nineteenth-century writing, ‘by virtue of its charm, its flavour, its quality of attaching and interesting in every paragraph’.42 Du Maurier’s contemporary and colleague at Punch, Sir Francis Burnand, picked up on the comparisons with Thackeray, but Burnand, who became bitterly jealous of his one-time friend, had this to say in a letter to Sir Henry Lucy: Had Thackeray had a bastard son in literature, and that bastard son had had another bastard in literature, I think it possible that the last in this line might possibly have written ‘Trilby’. The Deistic Little Billee sneering to his worthy confidant, a dog, at what he is utterly incapable of appreciating (I do not say ‘understanding’ or ‘comprehending’) represents that tyrannical braggart school of French deism (absolute Atheism is impossible) which would, in the name of Liberty of thought, burn, behead and crucify all who might venture to differ from themselves.43

Burnard’s energetic invective against Trilby evinces a yearning to return to the sort of prosaically believable characters that abounded

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in the triple-decker realist novel of the mid-Victorian era. This cultural conservatism espouses and campaigns for a naive schematic verisimilitude, positing the idea that a true test of a writer’s talent is an ability to produce ‘real, living, breathing’ men and women, whom the reader feels ‘intimately acquainted with’.44 Burnand repudiates contemporary critical evaluations seeking to praise the text for a ‘New Testament Lovingness’ and deplores Little Billee for embodying ‘that tyrannical school of French deism’. Burnand detects in Trilby an anti-ecclesiastical animus, as well as an alleged amorality nourished by the unwholesome preoccupation with mesmerism. Another reviewer writing for the Atlantic displays greater cordiality than Burnand, and astutely diagnoses the text as a mesmeric object that bewitches – even overwhelms – readers with its forceful, exhilarating and direct style: It is the April-day character of the book which unquestionably sets the reader’s pulse quickening, and hurries him headlong over the dancing pages. The spontaneity, which does not take heed even of good English, sweeps away judgment as one reads: one simply abandons one’s self to the book, and only fears he may not keep up with the author’s pace. The quickening transition from tears to laughter back to tears, gives no time for reflection.45

This generous review inadvertently echoes the sentiments voiced by The Times columnist who cautioned against ‘Unhealthy novels’. Yet another fruitful comparison can be made here between imperial romancers and exponents of mesmeric fiction. In his autobiography, Haggard declares in typically idiosyncratic fashion that the ‘first duty of a story is to keep him who peruses it awake’.46 The reader must ‘share the every hope and care of those whom he begets: the rich, low voice of Ayesha must thrill his nerves; he must discern her enthralling and unearthly beauty, and look into the mingled grandeurs of her blasted soul!’47 Haggard avers that the best adventure fiction should – in a telling reversal of Mansel’s polemical position – preach ‘to the nerves’ of readers. The imperial romance was consciously designed to keep an audience in a heightened state of alert and suspense: When a year or so ago Mr. Kipling, who as a rule goes to bed early, told me that he had sat up to I know not what hour and got chilled through reading ‘Ghost Kings’ because he could not lay it down, it gave me a higher opinion of that work than I could boast before. In romance ‘grip’ is almost everything. Whatever its faults, if a book has grip, these may be forgiven.48

It is possible to view Du Maurier then as a spirit mesmerist by proxy, a spectral puppeteer who silently infects readers with a whispered

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secularism. Trilby becomes the ideal avenue to channel mesmeric energy. As Freud declares in ‘The Uncanny’: the story-teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material.49

The potential of mesmeric fiction to enrapture callow readers recalls The Christian Remembrancer’s panicky reaction to the sensation vogue of the 1860s, leading practitioners of which were supposedly capable of ‘drugging thought and reason [. . .] stimulating the attention through the lower and more animal instincts’.50 In the Athenaeum, Geraldine Jewsbury depicted these feverish, distempered narratives as ‘fantastic and unwholesome as the smoke which curls up from the puffing pipe of the smoker of hashish’.51 This goes beyond Freud’s conception of the totemic power of objects, in that scrutinising a sensation or mesmeric text takes one quite literally out of oneself in moments of shock and awe. In The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890) the eponymous anti-hero is utterly ‘gripped’ and intoxicated by the arcane inscriptions of the Yellow Book: ‘[f]or years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book.’52 The ‘poisonous book’ exerts a hypnotic influence over Dorian and enacts a radical psychic transformation within him: The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.53

The Yellow Book’s incredible ‘spell’ is rooted in its deployment of wellestablished mesmeric techniques of sensory stimulus and elaborate, incantatory repetition: ‘cadence of the sentences’, ‘subtle monotony’. Missionary fiction, as discussed in previous chapters, functioned in much the same way. Reading is the voluntary participation and surrendering to a trance-like state, wherein the subject becomes prone to a dizzying array of influences. Before mesmerism, the term ‘influence’ denoted the exercise of a quasi-spiritual or astral power over individuals, but the notion of being under the influence enters the mainstream lexicon around 1866.54 This comes almost a century after Mesmer’s pioneering discoveries in the subject that would eventually bear his name, and after an entire vocabulary – scarred by a ceaseless anxiety and enigmatic ambivalence – had built up around the eerie possibilities of mesmeric sway.

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Notes 1. Robert Buchanan and Hugh Murray, The Charlatan (London: Chatto & Windus, 1895), p. 2. 2. Alison Winter, Mesmerised: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 33. 3. Ibid., p. 46. 4. Gay, 1989: p. 48. 5. Joseph Grasset, L’Hypnotisme et la suggestion (Paris: Octave Doin, 1909), p. 301. 6. Gay, 1989: p. 51. 7. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (London: J. M. Dent, 1944), p. 358. 8. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1989), p. 442. 9. Lynn Pykett, The Sensation Novel: From ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone’ (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 1994), p. 68; cited in Andrew Radford, Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). 10. William Le Queux, The Invasion of 1910. With a Full Account of the Siege of London (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1906), pp. 342–59. 11. J. W. Haddock, Somnolism & Psycheism (London: James S. Hodson, 1851), p. 39. 12. Ibid., p. 39. 13. Ibid., p. 39. 14. Marquis de Puységur, cited in Derek Forrest, Hypnotism: A History (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 75. 15. Sigmund Freud, ‘Observations on Transference Love’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. XII (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 157–71 (pp. 160–1). 16. ‘Tragedy in Algeria’, The Times, 9 November 1888, p. 5; cited in Mary Elizabeth Leighton, ‘Crime and Hypnotic Fictions’, in Victorian Literary Mesmerism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 212. 17. It is important to stress that the setting for this most literary of killing was a villa in French colonial Algeria. 18. Winter, 1998: p. 324. 19. Radford, 2009: p. 11. 20. H. L. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113 (April, 1863), pp. 495–6; cited in Radford, 2009: p. 9. 21. Mansel, cited in Radford, 2009: p. 9. 22. Ibid., p. 9. 23. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1897), p. 185. 24. Ibid., p. 114. 25. Ibid., p. 114. 26. Erik Butler, ‘Writing and Vampiric Contagion in Dracula’, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, no. 2 (2002), pp. 13–32 (p. 29). 27. Stoker, 1897: p. 295. 28. Ibid., p. 320. 29. Ibid., p. 321.

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30. Winter, 1998: p. 215. 31. Richard Marsh, The Beetle, ed. by Julian Wolfreys (Plymouth: Broadview Press, 2004), p. 102. 32. Ibid., p. 102. 33. Ibid., p. 319. 34. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young attributes Dracula’s failure in London to his faith in outmoded and antiquated technologies of communication. Winthrop-Young observes that Dracula’s foray into the foreign meatmarket ‘resembles that of an early modern merchant directly involved in all purchasing ventures’. The Count de Ville ‘does not advance beyond handwritten letters’ and personal interaction when undertaking his infernal business. See Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, ‘Undead Networks: Information Processing and Media Boundary Conflicts in Dracula’, in Literature and Science, ed. by Donald Bruce and Anthony Purdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 115–16. 35. Allan Conrad Christensen, Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: ‘Our feverish contact’ (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 7. 36. Ibid., p. 7. 37. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Parasite (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1897), p. 60. 38. The Critic, 24 October 1896, p. 248. 39. Edward Purcell, ‘Trilby and Trilby-mania’, Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. XI (Summer 1977), pp. 62–76 (p. 64). 40. Book Buyer, no. 11 (October 1894), pp. 435–6; Publishers Weekly, 26 January 1895, p. 175. 41. It is impossible not to hear the echoing voice of Haggard in these lines. King Solomon’s Mines was published in September of the same year. I am not suggesting that Haggard’s famous dedication ‘[t]o all the big and little boys who read it’ was borrowed from this review, but there seems to be a haunting trace of Haggard in the choice of word used by the Atlantic; Atlantic, no. 75 (February 1895), p. 270. 42. Purcell, 1977: p. 68. 43. H. Lucy, Sixty Years in the Wilderness: More Passages by the Way (London: E. P. Dutton, 1909), p. 393. 44. Anon., ‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, Christian Remembrancer, no. 46 (July 1864), pp. 209–36. 45. Anon., Atlantic, no. 75 (February 1896), p. 269. 46. Haggard, 1926: Vol. II, p. 92. 47. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 94. 48. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 92. 49. Freud, 1955: p. 251. 50. Anon., 1864: p. 210. 51. Geraldine Jewsbury, ‘New Novels’, Athenaeum (July 1865), p. 147. The 1866 Westminster Gazette registered with unfeigned dismay the emergence of a ‘Sensational Mania’ that was little better than an atavistic throwback to forms of medieval madness: If there is no accounting for tastes, blubber for the Esquimaux, half-hatched eggs for the Chinese, and Sensational novels for the English. [. . .] Just as in the Middle Ages people were afflicted with the Dancing Mania and

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Lycanthropy, sometimes barking like dogs, and sometimes mewing like cats, so now we have a Sensational Mania. Just, too, as those diseases always occurred in seasons of dearth and poverty, and attacked only the poor, so does the Sensational Mania in Literature burst out only in times of mental poverty, and afflict only the most poverty-stricken minds.

Anon., Westminster Review, no. 86 (October 1866), pp. 269–71. Cited in Norman Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 158. 52. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Ward, Lock, 1891), p. 189. 53. Ibid., p. 187. 54. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Mayne Reid’s Headless Horseman, ‘[i]f not absolutely intoxicated, it could be seen that the ex-officer of volunteers was under the influence of drink.’

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Chapter 11

Imperial Invisibility

T. S. Eliot’s etherised patient has become one of the staple images of literary modernism, a synonym for the atrophied and deadening stasis that stymies all forms of passionate expression. The industrialisation of the factory and the prevalence of new technologies at home and abroad in the colonial workplace transformed the types of injuries seen in hospital wards. New surgical techniques were developed to, as Susan Buck-Morss writes, literally ‘piece together the casualties of industrialism’ that now blighted the industrial proletariat.1 In the university dormitories of the north eastern United States, students inhaled quantities of nitrous-oxide (laughing gas) during ‘ether frolics’ to produce entrancing sensations. One night when high on the sickly fumes, the students etherised some rats, which, unsurprisingly, immobilised the creatures. Crawford Long, a physicist and pharmacist, having witnessed the effects of the ether on the rats, as well as the reckless abandon of the students who were numb to the bruising boisterousness of their revelry, identified ether’s anaesthetic potential. Like mesmerism decades earlier, the plausibility and viability of ether was put on trial in the public amphitheatres: ‘[i]n 1846, – in a much more sober, legitimating atmosphere than the ether frolics – the first public demonstration of general anaesthesia was given at Massachusetts General Hospital, whence this “wonderful discovery” spread rapidly to Europe.’2 Given its heretical and dubious associations, mesmerism was not considered a reliable form of anaesthesia. Patients placed under mesmeric influence often exhibited signs of acute distress during operations. In contrast, the invisible fumes of ether pacified both the patient and the performing surgeon, who became desensitised to the gruesome operating scene: ‘[w]hereas surgeons earlier had to train themselves to repress empathic identification with the suffering patient, now they had only to confront an inert, insensate mass that they could tinker with without emotional involvement.’3 Nonetheless, operations performed under general

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anaesthesia retained, in the formative years, a distinctive air of theatricality consistent with both the showmanship of Anton Mesmer but also the highly charged stand-offs between Christian missionaries and indigenous witchdoctors. The spiritual sovereignty of the missionaries was ensured through their disavowal of native magic as pernicious hokum; if unable to decipher the surreptitious stratagem of their African adversary, they could always cite the influence of some unseen diabolical presence as a haughty excuse. Both the Reverend Owen and John Bull are paired off against witchdoctors in their respective narratives, while surrounded by ‘heathen’ populations whose faith is invested in the indigenous sage, whereas the public demonstrations of ether’s clinical possibilities prompted sceptical reporters to become as theatrical in their rhetorical mannerisms: The Catlin, glittering for a moment above the head of the operator, was plunged through the limb and with one artistic sweep made the flaps or completed a circular amputation. After several aerial gyrations the saw severed the bone as if driven by electricity. The fall of the amputated part was greeted with tumultuous applause by the excited students. The operator acknowledged the compliment with a formal bow.4

After John Snow’s initial revelations in the new field of Germ Theory and with the subsequent advancements in medical research, glass partitions were introduced in 1890 to separate curious onlookers from the operating scene. In the operating theatre a multitude of invisible influences were brought into collision. Buck-Morss interprets the partitioning glass with reference to Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’, in which he explores the perspectives of the surgeon and the cameraman respectively before comparing them with that of the magician or painter. Thus BuckMorss elegantly describes how the partitioning ‘glass window became a projection screen: a series of mirrors providing an informative image of the procedure’.5 Magic, for Benjamin, was an early form of ritualised technology designed to exert mastery over natural processes. Benjamin posits that the figures of the magician/painter and surgeon/cameraman embody two irreconcilable ideologies: The magician heals a sick person by a laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself, though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hands move among the organs.6

The magician and the surgeon are the respective practitioners of auratic and non-auratic art. By maintaining distance from the subject,

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the magician preserves the mystical potency of his manoeuvres, standing in sharp contrast to the surgeon, who disrupts the aura of his work by penetrating ‘deeply into the web’.7 Benjamin’s account is problematised by the figure of the mesmerist – a composite of both the surgeon and magician – who exploits forms of ceremonial observance melded with technological innovations. While the mesmeric enterprise may be situated in a history of archaic forms of ritual technology, it does not follow Benjamin’s simple diagnostic recognition of ‘magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples’.8 The mesmerist’s capacity to improvise around both cutting-edge surgical techniques and venerable magical practices exposed latent social fears regarding the fusion of a menacing modernity with insular atavisms. Both ether and mesmerism were potent forms of sedation and control that could be deployed in ways that avoided detection by the human eye. One obvious consequence of the missionary movement’s cartographic exploration into Africa was the way in which the continental landmass was carved up into states by the imposition of invisible national boundaries. The missionary movement, in contributing to and refining new modes of cartographic and textual presentation, linked up African settlements, ports and townships. Although the missionary campaign to proselytise the ‘lowly’ heathen population of Africa predates the invention of the telephone and the accompanying sprawl of wires and exchanges, the expansive coverage of missionary exploration crudely anticipates the instantaneous form of global communication facilitated by telegraph wire.9 Evangelical philanthropy not only harnessed modern technology to aid it in the quest to convert, but African encounters galvanised countless technological improvements.10 While the missionary societies were perceived to be in the vanguard of technological development, mesmerism was accused of marrying, incongruously, the meretricious and the rarefied, the urgently contemporary and the basely primitive. By the fin de siècle another revolution in communication had been made, this time in the field which became widely known as wireless telegraphy. The invention of wireless telegraphy coincides neatly with the boom in mesmeric fiction. Sir Oliver Lodge, a key figure in the Institute for Psychical Research, was conducting public experiments based on the Hertz wave from 1894 onwards. Although debates about the provenance of wireless telegraphy continue, the intervention and exhibitions of Marconi captured the public imagination. Marconi arrived in England with his ‘secret box’ in 1896, boasting that his radio-waves broadcast from a vertical antenna could penetrate through any solid obstacle.11 Such comments gave an air of

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glamorous alterity to Marconi. In an interview for McClure’s Magazine in 1897, he enigmatically responded to a question inviting him to differentiate between a Hertzian wave and a Marconi wave with, ‘I don’t know. I am not a scientist, but I doubt if any scientist can tell you.’12 Marconi implies that this technology transcends human comprehension: his invention is a rational science injected with the magical, even the sublime. Unsurprisingly, Marconi was perceived as operating on the extreme borders of legitimate scientific enquiry. He consciously cultivated the persona of a stage mesmerist or illusionist in refusing to divulge the mechanical magic behind his secret box: With his secret box and vertical antenna, Marconi pulled the Hertzian waves out of the scientific laboratories. At first, as is often the case, scientists were not very effective outside of their laboratories. Nobody could exactly guess what constituted Marconi’s secret box. Nobody could explain why the Marconi wave could communicate across buildings and even hills. Most important, it was not certain why only Marconi could send messages over several miles when all others had failed [. . .] An invisible battle between theory and practice was under way.13

A definitive diagnostic assessment of mesmerism had proven futile, if not impossible. It was the allegorical equivalent of Marconi’s secret box. Marconi’s intentionally misleading declaration, ‘I am not a scientist’, encouraged contemporary perceptions of him as a mercurial and shamanistic presence. Wireless telegraphy, like mesmerism, was invisible to the naked eye, and only made perceptible through a series of demonstrative experiments specifically designed for public audiences. Like yellow fever, cholera and electromagnetic and radio waves, mesmerism was feared and mistrusted partly because it could not be seen. In a 1902 New York Times article, the manager of the French Cable Company, an opponent of Marconi, albeit with a vested interest, derided Marconi’s landmark transatlantic broadcast between Cornwall and Newfoundland in 1901, and ascribed the signals received by the secret box to ‘electrical currents from the earth’.14 M. Lurienne protested that the ‘curvature and thickness of the earth is an insuperable barrier’ to transoceanic telecommunication before arguing that: the divergence of the electrical waves sent from a wireless instrument renders the scheme impracticable from a commercial standpoint. Waves sent out in England may go to Russia just as well as to America. There is no means of concentrating them or sending them in one direction.15

This spurious parade of scientific expertise can be easily dismissed as jealous slander by a partisan pundit. Nonetheless, such bitter remarks simultaneously reveal the desperation of an industry and a deep-seated

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scepticism linked to the issue of scientific verifiability. Wireless telegraphy was ‘non-scientific science’, and the secretive Marconi should not be trusted, nor should he be granted the oxygen of free publicity. The radical potential of Marconi’s discovery was maligned not for being cloaked in absurdly esoteric terminology, but because it implied an elaborate ruse or legerdemain from the repertoire of a stage illusionist. M. Lurienne’s reproachful remarks betrayed a wilful ignorance that had failed fully to grasp the mechanical procedure. Signals could not be lost or sent in the wrong direction, as communication was dependent upon frequency and a process of decoding. This meant that anyone with the appropriate equipment could receive Marconi’s broadcast. Mesmeric fiction embraced with mischievous relish this notion of precise signalling. In one illustration from Trilby, Svengali’s body morphs into the shape of a radio transmitter beaming invisible cerebral waves into the defenceless subject. Although Woodville in The Charlatan is an experienced mesmerist who served his hypnotic apprenticeship in India, he too remains surprised at his powers to control Isabel through the manipulation of unseen forces. Woodville ‘could understand that his will was controlling hers’ yet remains ‘amazed and troubled’ by his ability to lull Isabel into a serene state of passivity.16 The neurotic confusion that Isabel’s declaration of love induces in him evidences his inability to discern whether she is now freed from the gaze of the judgemental coterie, telling him the truth or simply obeying his tacit instructions. The proponents of mesmeric fiction saw rich artistic opportunities in presenting the invisibility of Marconi’s waves as an atavistic throwback. It seemed natural enough that the wellspring of an unholy alliance between progressive science and ancient spells should be the overseas colonial hinterland. An unsettling primitivism long associated with mesmeric techniques was rehabilitated by a lingering perception of the epistemological darkness synonymous with Central Africa. While the supposed aesthetic benefits of primitivism sparked fierce debate in the 1980s, recent postcolonial theorists have decried this notion of reappropriating venerable cultural conventions and practices as yet another means of de-historicising colonial communities and spaces. To critics such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, the primitivist credo carries with it the oppressive residue of colonial exploitation. According to Chakrabarty, Western democratic institutions founded upon the spoils of empire characterised non-Western cultures in terms of grievous lack: of history, art, language and literature.17 In the fin de siècle, primitivism undoubtedly tapped into and connected with concepts of regression and degeneration. Mesmeric fiction, on one level, capitalised upon prevalent social misgivings by rendering the mesmerist as

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inextricably tied to, even originating from, obscure colonial outposts. The threat of the scarab in The Beetle derives from its ability to settle unnoticed in a gloomy corner of suburban London, bringing with it the disturbing resonance of reverse colonisation. However, within these slippery and highly allusive narratives, the primitive and the atavistic resonate as pluralistic and multivalent forms. This foreshadows a brand of Freudian psychoanalysis that sought to retrieve and reclassify the ‘primitive’, while gauging its semantic accretions. A deeper understanding of the febrile modern moment, and to some extent the uncertain future, was predicated on a regressive journey through the recesses of the subconscious mind. The mesmerists who feature so prominently in this subgenre of Gothic fiction in some respects follow on from the witchdoctors of Central Africa as the precursors of Freudian analysts. It is only after being placed in a mesmeric trance – where she is freed from stultifying and staid social expectations – that Isabel Arlington expresses the love she feels for Woodville in Buchanan’s The Charlatan, and in The Parasite, Gilroy becomes a tourist of his own felt sensations and imaginative faculties: My eyes were fixed upon Miss Penelosa’s face, but as I gazed the features seemed to blur and to fade away. I was conscious only of her own eyes looking down at me, gray, deep, inscrutable. Larger they grew and larger, until they changed suddenly into two mountain lakes toward which I seemed to be falling with horrible rapidity. I shuddered, and as I did so some deeper stratum of thought told me that the shudder represented the rigor which I had observed in Agatha. An instant later I struck the surface of the lakes, now joined into one, and down I went beneath the water with a fullness in my head and a buzzing in my ears. Down I went, down, down, and then with a swoop up again until I could see the light streaming brightly through the green water. I was almost at the surface when the word ‘Awake!’ rang through my head, and, with a start, I found myself back in the arm-chair, with Miss Penelosa leaning on her crutch, and Wilson, his note book in his hand, peeping over her shoulder.18

This incitement to primitivism as a technique to negotiate the problems of quotidian life can be modified to include another shade of meaning, one that parallels Adorno and Horkheimer’s interrogative work on reason. They solicit the reclamation of ‘enlightened thought’ divorced from mythic obfuscation: The dilemma that faced us in our work proved to be the first phenomenon for investigation: the self-destruction of the Enlightenment. We are wholly convinced – and therein lies our petito principii – that social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought. Nevertheless, we believe that we have just as clearly recognized that the notion of this very way of thinking, no less that the actual historic forms – the social institutions – with which it is interwoven, already contains the seed of the reversal universally apparent today.19

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Both citations sustain an engagement with the primitive so as to open up avenues into the distant past. In the first instance the primitive ‘transports’ the individual from his temporal surroundings into a landscape of Jungian archetypes – a copious cache of tropes and figurations that epitomises the collective unconscious. It is only when the mesmeric subject is removed from the disciplinary sway of social institutions such as the family or state bureaucracy that dissident, fugitive desires find an articulated form. The mesmerist must encourage the subject to sever, albeit temporarily, connections with everyday actuality so as to conduct a regressive cerebral journey that will, in turn, allow the subject to resolve problems faced in the present and the future. Adorno and Horkheimer make a similar declaration in the Dialectic with regards to the reassessment of Enlightenment thought. They gauge primitivism as a purgative potency, a means of experiencing multiplied perception free from intrusive and befuddling myth. For them a return to primitivism is the only possible start, a metaphorical ‘clean break’ from the choking residues of history. Debates about racial cleansing, social hygiene and ethnic otherness are familiar staples of mesmeric fiction, but the appearance of the colonial interloper in this genre adheres to no set structure or established paradigm. In his succinct article ‘Trance-Gothic’, Roger Luckhurst sketches a critical trajectory that veers away from orthodox scholarly approaches that treat Gothic fiction as ‘a repository for articulations of racism, sexism and homophobia’, before remarking that: hypnotic or mesmeric power is part of the repertory of the fin de siècle monster, and certainly representations of hypnosis are traversed by racial stereotyping (Svengali’s Jewishness), degenerate criminality (Moriarty, even John Buchan’s Medina), and sexual terrorism (Dracula, and a host of exotic women mesmerists demoralising plucky Englishmen).20

Luckhurst’s thesis indicates that images of primitive alterity are deployed by a Gothic symbolic code, in producing a literature that sought to elude controversy by slipping under the critical radar of middlebrow magazines, while systematically lampooning imperial positivism. ‘Victorian gothic has more modalities than horror’, according to Luckhurst, and I would extend this argument to include the mesmeric genre, which shatters ‘determinist chains of Victorian materialism’.21 Alison Winter also surveys the oppositional and seditious potential of mesmerism. Friends gathered in elegantly furnished rooms to witness at first hand informal exhibitions of mesmeric agency. Winter’s research promulgates the notion that the mesmerist’s professional identity was intimately bound up with a subversive flair that eroded smug assumptions about social kudos and caste:

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because there were often pronounced class and gender differences between mesmerist and subject, the volatile relations that developed in the experiments seemed to offer testimony about relative status [. . .] the mesmerist was a potent class challenger; elsewhere the trance would inspire one frail maidservant to tell her prestigious physician [. . .] that he was a fool.22

While Winter’s cogent survey of the bourgeois drawing room scene is valid, her assessment stops short of documenting fully the repercussions for those who participated in these outlandish domestic experiments. Mesmeric fiction is strewn with scenes of secretive mesmeric gatherings staged in bourgeois drawing rooms. Such backdrops are, in turn, littered with a plethora of uncanny colonial clutter and exotic ornamentation. Winter’s presentation of the mesmerist as a figure who tests contemporary gender and class divisions can be complicated further to incorporate the way in which the mesmerist also threatens to destabilise ethnic and national identities. Historians of the Victorian occult and textual scholars may each point to the fact that these secretive soirées took place behind locked doors, well away from the watchdogs and watchwords of a punitive society. However such an argument is anchored in a basic misconception: that all the traces and trappings of established, mainstream culture could be banished from these arcane proceedings. From the fine textiles used to fashion the participants’ clothes, to the sumptuous furniture and fittings found in the room itself, fastidious bourgeois taste continued to invade and intervene. These gatherings were not staged in hermetically sealed spaces, but in lavishly appointed parlours festooned with the weighty symbols and trophies of empire. The imperial enterprise offered the well-heeled British shopper greatly expanded opportunities for conspicuous consumption and fostered a burgeoning demand for textiles, dyes and food stuffs (not to mention tea) that had once been deemed exotic rarities. Consumer clamour stimulated the discovery and rapid expansion of new markets. From the kitchen of the middle-class housewife to the smoking-room of the Mayfair male-only club, empire was manifest in a bewildering array of palpable forms, all acting symbolically to proclaim as well as demarcate overseas aspiration. In the illustrations that accompany The Parasite, Miss Penelosa, having fainted from her psychic exertions, recovers beneath the shroud of her tiger-skin rug. Earlier in the novella Gilroy describes how her head ‘rested on her hand, and a tiger-skin rug had been partly drawn over her’.23 The vestiges of a brutal colonialism define and decorate the private sphere, highlighting the tangible as well as spectral presence of the foreign ‘other’ in mundane existence. Furthermore, The Charlatan

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makes explicit the relationship between empire, commercialism and exploitation when Lord Dewsberry proclaims: I can understand exploration when it has a useful and definite end. The exploration which results in the discovery of an America or an Australia, which is useful in finding new outlets for capital and enterprise, justifies itself. But what use can a dreary tract of mountain, covered with snow, and populated by a crowd of ignorant and brutal savages, be to anybody? Such men as Colonel Arlington are rare, and I cannot help thinking it a pity that he should risk his life for such a very inadequate gain.24

This is a return to a Foucauldian panoptic perspective in which the self-appointed custodians of civilised virtue monitor and constrain individuality by establishing a factitious brand of normalcy. Social authority consolidates itself within a discreet, yet turbulent, symbolic terrain in which individuals are disciplined by the various appendages of the state apparatus – schools, medicine, law and, later, psychiatry. Dewsberry’s ruthless business acumen is shown to dictate his political convictions – ‘I can understand exploration when it has a useful and definite end’ – and appears to be the only mechanism that can supersede and supplant the mesmerising imperial doctrine he personifies. He recalls Lord Semingham in Hope’s The God in the Car, another jingoistic ‘political maniac’ who ‘would cheerfully have given his life to save one acre of English territory from dismemberment’.25 In reality such systems of disciplinary control and policing prove largely ineffective, because within this regulated regime individuals can still forge spaces for insurgent or mutinous expression. Foucault’s panoptic vision of late Victorian society is absolute in its design but not in its practice. Mesmerists, and those complicit in paranormal activities, fabricated psychic ‘retreats’ where the state could not always intervene. The ‘experiments’ of Gilroy and Penelosa, Barrington Cowles and Miss Northcott, Woodville and Isabel, are simultaneously forged in a reassuring image of cosy materialism, yet threaten to transcend it. Through mesmeric exploration the implacable rigidity of state mechanisms is subject to searching critique and highlights blindspots within any claim to a panoptic surveillance. Mesmeric performances vouchsafed a productive gap in which to resist, unmask and erode the pernicious fictions underpinning state control. According to Winter, the mesmerist is a formidable challenger precisely because she or he smudges social partitions: In mocking their way through a mesmeric trial, people found themselves exploring the major problems of the age. Writ at large, Victorians were not only testing the reality of a particular phenomenon or the veracity of a particular person; they were carrying out experiments on their own society.26

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A process of bold experimentation revealed established racial taxonomies to be as misleading as they were shallow. These drawing room dramas also followed in a long tradition of spiritualist performances that took place behind closed doors from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, which in turn evolved into mesmeric exhibitions and then finally into psychoanalytic demonstrations. As Jung testifies in his short paper ‘On Spiritualistic Phenomena’, ‘[t]here was hardly an evening party or dance where the guests did not steal away at a late hour to question the table.’27 Jung describes how in Zurich he examined several spirit mediums and clairvoyants, as well as attending séances, leading him to conclude that ‘as a rule’ mediums are ‘slightly abnormal mentally’.28 He debunks table-turning and spontaneous phenomena by insisting that participants are placed in a vulnerable trance by the medium; he remarks that such ‘psychological phenomenon is strange only to people who know nothing of hypnosis’.29 Consequently, Jung provides a psychoanalytic account of a clairvoyant who had ‘already made a fool of herself in various cities’ in Switzerland, and in trying to ascertain her mental state ‘had nearly thirty sittings [. . .] over a period of six months’.30 Although adamant that the woman possessed no talent that exceeded ‘normal psychological’ capacity, Jung does mention her ‘remarkably fine gift for unconscious combinations’, allowing her to fuse ‘“petites perceptions” and guesses and evaluate them in a very skilful way, mostly in a state of slight clouding of consciousness’.31 However, this is not the same Jung who leaves an open-ended interpretation of the healing of a sick girl in Africa, adding that there ‘is nothing supernatural about this state; on the contrary, it is a well-known subject of psychological research’.32

Notes 1. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October, Vol. 62 (Autumn 1992), pp. 3–41 (p. 27). 2. Ibid., p. 21. 3. Ibid., p. 27. 4. Cited in Owen H. Wangensteen and Sarah D. Wangensteen, The Rise of Surgery: From Empiric Craft to Scientific Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), p. 233. 5. Buck-Morss, 1992: p. 32. 6. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 235. 7. Ibid., p. 235. 8. Ibid., p. 161. 9. The initial proposition to join North America to Great Britain via an

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature underwater cable was first mooted by Cyrus Field in 1853. After several failed attempts, thwarted by storms and inadequate technology, in 1858 communication was finally made. That a message sent along the wire on behalf of Queen Victoria to President Buchanan was started on the 16 August but not completed until the following day inadvertently highlights the fragility of the network. The dire state of the cables meant that Morse signals arrived faint and difficult to decipher, and even despite Kelvin’s earlier invention of the mirror galvometer, communication was lost a few weeks later. See also Nigel Linge, ‘The Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable 150th Anniversary Celebration 1858–2008’, in History of Telecommunication (Manchester: University of Salford, 2008). Arguably, this phenomenon was most profound in the refinement of mobile printing presses and precision instruments essential for cartographic representation. For a more comprehensive and detailed study of this see Sungook Hong, ‘Marconi and the Maxwellians: The Origin of Telegraphy Revisited’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 35, no. 4 (October, 1994), pp. 717–49. ‘Telegraphy Without Wires: A Possibility of Electrical Science II. The New Telegraphy – Interview with Signor Marconi’, McClure’s Magazine (March 1897), pp. 389–92. Hong, 1994: p. 737. ‘Cable Men Do Not Fear Marconi’, The New York Times, 16 February 1902. Ibid. Buchanan and Murray, 1895: p. 30. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History’, in Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, ed. by Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (Rotterdam: Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001), pp. 178–95. Doyle, 1897: pp. 39–40. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by J. Cummins (New York: Continuum, 1982), xiii. Roger Luckhurst, ‘Trance-Gothic 1882–97’, in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 148–67 (p. 150). Ibid., p. 150. Winter, 1998: p. 4. Doyle, 1897: p. 76. Buchanan and Murray, 1895: p. 49. Ibid., p. 44. Winter, 1998: p. 4. Carl. G. Jung, ‘On Spiritualistic Phenomena’, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. by R. F. C Hull, ed. by Gerhard Adler, Michael Fordham, Michael McGuire and Herbert Read, Vol. XVIII (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), para. 669. Ibid., para. 725. Ibid., para. 727. Ibid., para. 732. Ibid., para. 732. Ibid., para. 732.

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Chapter 12

Olive Skins

A stage poster publicising the upcoming performance of a stage mesmerist from the turn of the twentieth century illustrates well how contemporary theatre-goers tied the cultural phenomenon of mesmerism to the Orient. In an obvious homage to Darwin’s monkey-to-man drawing, the slick mesmerist of the fin de siècle is depicted as the evolutionary product of a historical process of transformation. The posture of the scrawny Oriental figure in the background, diminutive and hunchbacked, stands in stark contrast to the mesmerist’s unmistakably Homo sapiens attitude.1 This vivid association with the Orient links the mesmeric gift to continental Africa while capitalising on the growing public and professional interest in ancient Egyptian history and material culture. Haggard himself was a keen amateur Egyptologist who believed he was the reincarnation of Egyptian and Nordic royalty.2 Expeditions to Egypt returned outlandish and fantastical finds to be collated and stored in the British Museum in London. Restless anxieties about the supernatural potency of imperial plunder that mesmeric narratives exploited were hardly new. The washed-up head of the gorgon on the English south coast in Haggard’s novel The Witch’s Head (1884) taps into similar cryptozoological concerns about the illicit removal of trinkets and trophies from their original cultural context. Furthermore, the stage poster identifies Egypt as the Oriental source of the mesmerist’s capability, and in doing so suggests that this mystical ‘gift’ is synonymous with African supernaturalism. Livingstone’s quest to discover the origins of the tributary river that flows through Sudan and into the Nile led him to the continental interiority and to the Victoria Falls in Uganda, and lurking behind the nascent discipline of Egyptology was the menacing threat of the ‘Dark Continent’. Haggard’s literary followers failed fully to distinguish the Central African witchdoctor, the Egyptian mystic, the West Indian shaman and

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the occult sages from the South Seas. His detailed rendering of Menzi and the magical influence that he possesses in ‘Little Flower’ resonates with the pictorial representation of the ancient Egyptian mesmerist featured on the popular poster.3 Haggard’s evocation of Menzi, who possesses ‘the eyes of a mystic’, exemplifies the centrality of the gaze within colonial mesmeric fiction.4 Conan Doyle’s John Barrington Cowles (1886) gestures subtly towards the tragic fate of the eponymous protagonist by concentrating heavily on his eyes.5 He is described, paradoxically, as having ‘wonderful eyes’ of ‘steely hardness’ and ‘feminine softness’, with ‘their penetrating intensity suddenly melting away into an expression of womanly weakness’.6 The indefatigable John Bull is capable of staring his interlocutor down, while his preservation is guaranteed owing to his Saxon birth and unswerving faith in the civilising mission. By contrast, the portrayal of Barrington Cowles’s eyes implies that he may be prone to hypnotic suggestion, and he is in fact acutely vulnerable to the mystic’s penetrating gaze. This notion is refined in another account of Cowles’s demeanour: Cowles was a tall, slim young fellow, with an olive, Velasquez-like face, and dark, tender eyes. I have seldom seen a man who was more likely to excite a woman’s interest, or to captivate her imagination. His expression was, as a rule, dreamy, and even languid; but if in conversation a subject arose which interested him he would be all animation in a moment.7

Again, Cowles’s predisposition to mesmeric influence is revealed by his ‘dreamy’ and ‘languid’ expression. John Barrington Cowles’s father was the colonel of a Sikh regiment in British India and Cowles himself is Anglo-Indian. Cowles’s ‘olive’ skin can be construed as a signifier of his otherness: a Mediterranean passion melded with an Oriental effeminacy, a supposition bolstered by the narrator’s pointed reference to his ‘ardent tropical’ disposition. Darkness specifies Cowles’s difference from the rest of Edinburgh society, functioning as both a reassuring signpost and a robust explanation of his tragic destiny. In mesmeric fiction this trope of ‘olive skin’ reappears with startling frequency. Professor Gilroy in The Parasite considers himself to be an archetype ‘of the effect of education upon temperament, for by nature I am, unless I deceive myself, a highly psychic man’.8 As a child he ‘was a nervous, sensitive boy, a dreamer, a somnambulist, full of impressions and intuitions’; as an adult he bears these traits like the mark of Cain in his ‘black hair’, ‘dark eyes’ and ‘thin, olive face’, which ‘are all characteristic of my real temperament’.9 As the narrative progresses and he falls more and more under Penelosa’s sway, the degenerationist discourse becomes more pronounced: ‘Agatha says that I am thinner and darker under the eyes.’10

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Both protagonists in Buchanan’s The Charlatan imply how physical discoloration and psychic dissolution are inextricably intermingled. Isabel Arlington has ‘dark, dreamy eyes [. . .] dark hair, and [a] pale olive complexion [. . .] Beautiful as she was, her beauty seemed of the night rather than of the day, and her very voice, with its deep musical tones, increased the impression of settled sadness’.11 Woodville’s complexion is so dusky that his status as a refined English gentleman requires qualification. His friend Mervyn declares that ‘he’s not a native, though – at least, not altogether – though I should say he had a touch of the tar-brush. Very gentlemanly person, and particularly well-read.’12 While the sun-kissed faces of Du Maurier’s ‘trois angliches’ pale upon return to genteel England, in Paris they too assume a familiar olive colouring: ‘Little Billee spent a month at Barbizon, and when he came back it was with such a brown face that his friends hardly knew him; and he brought with him such studies as made his friends “sit up”.’13 This marked stress on dark faces may have functioned as a mechanism to distance contemporary readers from the sinister and threatening power of mesmerism. To an extent, this is a return to, or residual hangover from, the mid-Victorian fascination with physiognomy. At a purely semantic level the name Blakenny in The Mesmerist implies an encroaching moral and intellectual darkness or ontological void. However, these are not dubious exemplars of a denigrated and demonised social hinterland, but rather admired personages located at the very core of the British establishment. Even the figure of the mesmerist is shown to be comfortably ensconced within a class structure that is hallowed by time and consecrated by tradition. Miss Penelosa has become a fêted figure within the sedate academic landscape of the university town in which the story unravels, while Blakenny and Svengali, although besmirched by a jealous minority of observers, secure invitations to a succession of elegant dinner parties and literary salons. In mesmeric fiction darkness is by no means a straightforward index of peripheral or ancillary social status, but rather a tool that dissects taxonomic groupings and overturns binary oppositions. The olive-skinned personage greatly complicates narratives of colonial control and surveillance predicated upon racial superiority, and embodies instead a version of Bhabhian hybridity. The prevalence of these resourceful hybridised individuals throughout every social stratum gleefully deconstructs the series of inclusions and exclusions on which bourgeois hegemony rests. ‘Hybridity’, for Bhabha, ‘represents that ambivalent “turn” of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification – a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority.’14 These oliveskinned interlopers do not resolve tensions between cultures and races

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in a dialectical play of recognition. Colonial kudos is anchored in a complex system of acknowledgements that requires the validation of its legitimacy through the gaze of the colonised subject. It requires the ‘production of differentiations, individuations, identity effects through which discriminatory practices can map out subject populations that are tarred with the visible and transparent mark of power’.15 This system of repetition and recognition, grounded in essentialist theories concerned with the preservation of racial purity, is corroded by the ambiguous magical repertoire of the hybridised figures who dominate the mesmeric subgenre. Hybridity brings the coloniser into contact with the native self and in doing so enacts a linguistic and cultural contamination of the dominant order. This strategy of subversion operates by reversing the effects of the colonial disavowal, ‘so that the “denied” knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition’.16 Du Maurier’s Trilby, a suntanned bohemian from the Latin Quarter with a Scottish mother and Irish father, embodies venturesome and boisterous youth. Although dressed in ‘the grey over coat of a French infantry soldier’, Trilby at this point in the novel is a wittily modish figure, whose vigorous beauty is both recognisably European but also alluringly ‘other’.17 In contrast, when relocated to the metropolitan centre and surrounded by unsmiling custodians of genteel decorum, her loss of extrovert verve, colour and natural vibrancy is perceived as a badge of ‘lady-like’ grace: ‘[d]ay by day she grew more beautiful in their eyes, in spite of her increasing pallor and emaciation – her skin was so pure and white and delicate, and the bones of her face so admirable!’18 Here, Du Maurier finesses an allegorical depiction of ‘Old England’ irrevocably changed and charged by colonial negotiations. Bhabha posits that all textual discourse produced during this era of ‘High Imperialism’ is riddled with a ‘colonial delirium’ – a term borrowed from Tom Nairn – that is ultimately unsustainable. For Bhabha such novels are: the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the English book. They mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic differences which emerge in the colonial discourse as the mixed and split texts of hybridity. If the English book is read as a production of hybridity, then it no longer simply commands authority.19

The strident claim of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority is genealogically compromised by these olive-skinned hybrids, with serious consequences for the colonial text – it ‘retains its presence, but it is no longer a representation of an essence; it is now a partial presence, a strategic device in

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a specific colonial engagement, an appurtenance of authority’.20 Roger Bromley avers that hybridity ‘is always a threat to the dominant culture which seeks to “ethnicise” difference and render it static and exotic’, as opposed to ‘seeing it as a condition of the culture as a whole, always in transformation, always subject to modification’.21 Mesmeric fiction exposes how even authority figures who boast of an unsullied racial heritage bear in their psychic or physical make-up traces of hybridity. In The Mesmerist, Allan’s elliptical aside underscores the metaphorical pairing of uncertain ethnicity with ambiguous biography, and incomplete or absent histories: ‘I cannot tell you whether my own Mother was fair or dark.’22 To repeat one of Bhabha’s diagnostic fundamentals on the mechanics of colonial authority, the production of difference and individuation in imperial discourse is required ‘through which discriminatory practices can map out subject populations that are tarred with the visible and transparent mark of power’.23 Hybridity scuppers this colonialist objective to map out a distinct ethnography or defined clan lineage and manifests itself in mesmeric fiction as an encrypted or shadowy back story. Paul Lessingham is the subject of intense speculation, rumour and innuendo given the dearth of verifiable public data regarding his formal education or upbringing. Mr Lindon’s incessant enquiries into the matter are repeatedly thwarted, leading him to exclaim that Lessingham is ‘a mushroom, – or a toadstool, rather! – sprung up in the course of a single night, apparently out of some dirty ditch’.24 This biographical ‘void’ leads Lindon to conclude ‘that he’s a nothing and a nobody’.25 It transpires that the ‘Apostolic’ Lessingham had been kidnapped in Cairo and imprisoned amid the sepulchral alleyways where he witnessed orgiastic rituals and sacrificial ceremonies involving ‘young and lovely English women’.26 His contact with the Scarab’s hybridity provokes moments of crippling realisation, when his whole identity as produced by the imperial machine unravels. Lessingham, tormented by his own hybridised status, frantically rewrites his own personal history and emerges as a paranoid personification of empire. Hybridity’s tendency to destabilise authoritative centrality and to corrupt discursive ‘purity’ is aptly demonstrated by the figure of the Beetle throughout the novel. The Scarab’s menacing potential is underpinned by the rhetoric of pathology, mutation and distortion, which blurs the human/non-human divide: There was not a hair upon his face or head, but, to make up for it, the skin, which was a saffron yellow, was an amazing mass of wrinkles. The cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal. The nose, on the other hand, was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the

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beak of some bird of prey. A characteristic of the face – and an uncomfortable one – was that, practically, it stopped short at the mouth. The mouth, with its blubber lips, came immediately underneath the nose, and chin, to all intents and purposes, there was none. This deformity – for the absence of chin amounted to that – it was that which gave to the face the appearance of something not human, – that, and the eyes. For so marked a feature of the man were his eyes, that, ere long, it seemed to me that he was nothing but eyes.27

The ‘saffron yellow’ skin, for contemporary readers, would have signified fatal illness through the colour’s association with jaundice and especially the invisible peril of yellow fever.28 The ‘blubber lips’ evoke obvious parallels with the racist theriomorphism frequently found in the fiction of the missionary movement, and highlights the homogenising centrifugal force of the ‘Heart of Darkness’ trope in the description of other Africans. Miss Penelosa, who in the accompanying illustrations literally morphs into a maenad hybrid figure, is of West Indian descent, an intriguing authorial choice given that an estimated seventy per cent of the West Indian population are of African origin. The majority of this African diaspora would have been snatched by the slave trade from subSaharan Africa. Yet she is portrayed, both visually and discursively, as a pale-skinned entity that is also ominously and unmistakably ‘feline’: Any one less like my idea of a West Indian could not be imagined. She was a small, frail creature, well over forty, I should say, with a pale, peaky face, and hair of a very light shade of chestnut. Her presence was insignificant and her manner retiring. In any group of ten women she would have been the last whom one would have picked out. Her eyes were perhaps her most remarkable, and also, I am compelled to say, her least pleasant, feature. They were gray in color, – gray with a shade of green, – and their expression struck me as being decidedly furtive. I wonder if furtive is the word, or should I have said fierce? On second thoughts, feline would have expressed it better. A crutch leaning against the wall told me what was painfully evident when she rose: that one of her legs was crippled.29

Towards the novella’s denouement an increasingly manic Gilroy depicts Penelosa in terms of invisible contagion: If I had time, I might probe it to the bottom and lay my hands upon its antidote. But you cannot tame the tiger when you are beneath his claws. You can but try to writhe away from him. Ah, when I look in the glass and see my own dark eyes and clear-cut Spanish face, I long for a vitriol splash or a bout of the small-pox. One or the other might have saved me from this calamity.30

Fin de siècle theriomorphism, like racial and ethnic hybridity, deconstructs notions of stable selfhood, implying instead their inherent fluidity. The critic Dani Cavallaro remarks of these animal/human creations: ‘[i]n their irreverent violation of boundaries, the hybrid and the

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grotesque graphically remind us that the intrinsic nature of our species is inconsistent and that any attempt to definitively quantify our affinities with, and differences from, other animals inevitably leads to intractable enigmas.’31 Cavallaro posits that these hybrid bodies encourage an intuitive reconnection with repressed or stifled systems of knowledge, which ‘brings to mind Carl Jung’s speculations about the collective unconscious as the repository of archetypal symbols endowed with numinous attributes’.32 It is Claud Blakenny’s apparent lack of personal history that not only heightens the dramatic intensity of The Mesmerist but also increases the aura of arcane and inscrutable mystery that surrounds him. Like Wilson, the dilettante mesmerist behind the gruesome killing, Blakenny’s integrity is impugned because little is known publicly about him. Val Medway includes both Blakenny and Wilson on his list because, ‘it is always well to be suspicious of a man whose past is a sealed book’.33 This formulation of the personal past as coded, concealed or withheld testimony – even a ‘book’ of secret spells – is reminiscent of Bhabha’s concept of the fissured or split texts produced in the high imperialist era. In his chapter on mimicry in The Location of Culture, Bhabha teases out the contradictions latent within a certain brand of nineteenth-century colonial/civilising discourse – the ‘rich text’ – that tried to show how indigenous racial, cultural and physical difference could be domesticated through Christian conversion. These split texts reproduce the colonial other as ‘almost the same, but not quite’.34 The Mesmerist is itself a fractured narrative that unfolds through the eyes of both Allan and Val. Blakenny’s oracular presence among Buchanan’s nouveau riche clique is the radical potency that undermines conventional narratives of cultural conditioning and encourages a more intuitive mode of perception.

Notes 1. The simian appearance of the Egyptian mesmerist may also evoke the satirical portraits of Darwin that appeared in satirical magazines from the 1870s onwards. Cartoonists in Fun and The Hornet magazine, and in France La Petite Lune, created bizarre hybridised or anthropomorphised caricatures of Darwin so as to lampoon his central tenets. 2. See for instance Cleopatra and Smith and the Pharaohs, as well as his correspondence from Ditchingham, which features strange hieroglyphs in the left-hand corner of the paper. 3. Rather pertinently, ‘Little Flower’ first appeared in the collection that featured Smith and the Pharaohs. The unseen menace of Central Africa that

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature nourished anxieties surrounding Egyptian mysticism is enacted within the collection. Haggard, 1920: p. 169. Trilby’s first mesmeric encounter with Svengali is brought about in an attempt to cure her neuralgia of the eyes. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘John Barrington Cowles’, from The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales (London: Longmans, Green, 1890), pp. 232–3. Ibid., p. 231. Doyle, 1897: p. 2. Ibid., pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 17. Buchanan and Murray, 1895: p. 45. Ibid., p. 54. George Du Maurier, Trilby (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895), p. 125. Bhabha, 2004: p. 162. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 162. Du Maurier, 1895: p. 14. Ibid., p. 391. Bhabha, 2004: p. 161. Ibid., p. 163. Roger Bromley, Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 124. Henry Ernest Clark Oliphant, The Mesmerist (London: Eden Remington, 1890), p. 11. Bhabha, 2004: p. 158. Marsh, 2004: p. 158. Ibid., p. 158. Lessingham and Champnell understand the events of his captivity by suggesting that such sacrificial ceremonies were rife in this part of the world. This belief is corroborated by an unnamed youth who suffered a similar detainment: He did admit, however, that he had assisted more than once at their orgies, and declared that it was their constant practice to offer young women as sacrifices – preferably white Christian women, with a special preference, if they could get them, for young English women. He vowed that he himself had seen with his own eyes, English girls burnt alive. (Marsh, 2004: p. 297)

27. Ibid., p. 53. 28. In 1893, work on the Panama Canal had to be halted for nine years after an estimated 22,000 workers died of yellow fever and other tropical diseases. 29. Doyle, 1897: pp. 11–12. 30. Ibid., p. 70. 31. Dani Cavallaro, The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear (London/New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 190. 32. Cavallaro, 2002: p. 191. 33. Oliphant, 1890: p. 144. 34. Bhabha, 2004: p. 122.

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Chapter 13

Dark Spaces

But O Cook, O Thomas Cook & Son, path-finders and trail clearers, living sign-posts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to bewildered travelers – unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but to the East End of London, barely a stone’s throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know not the way!1

A tradition of cartographic and discursive representation that sought to depict the African interior as a void or dark space reappears in the rural, suburban and metropolitan settings of mesmeric literature. The failure to provide a comprehensive chart of what Sir Henry Morton Stanley called in his Autobiography ‘Fatal Africa’ disillusioned some proponents of organised exploration, given that their overseas endeavours had been partly legitimised by erroneous claims to encyclopedic knowledge.2 Imagined projections such as rivers, waterfalls, mountains and bizarre fauna had been used variously by cartographic science, evangelical philanthropy and imperial romance to gloss over empirical ‘gaps’ in the mapping of the immense interior. The quasi-realist tales of Central Africa published in magazines such as the Juvenile offered to the mesmeric subgenre and late Victorian adventure writing more generally a lavish symbolic and metaphorical cache with which to process and render ‘dark’, ‘atavistic’ or ‘unknown’ spaces. The geographical landmass of Britain often features in missionary tales as a romanticised and yearned for Jerusalem, an exaggerated site facilitating a curious reversal of colonial wish-fulfilment. If the blank spaces of Central Africa acted as a canvas upon which to project ‘deviant’ unconscious desires, then the embellished portrayal of England as an ennobling and redemptive retreat mirrors the aggressive super-ego checking wayward instinctual promptings through remorse – which plays upon guilt – for the sedate life left behind. This exaggerated sense of ‘home’ or the ‘motherland’ relied upon myriad images of a fecund hinterland, whose overflowing ripeness stood in sharp contrast to the

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cracked earth, torrid heat and noisome vapours of Stanley’s Africa. One contributor to the Juvenile remarked that, ‘[s]triking and pleasant to our eyes was the deep green of the grass when we came home from Africa, soft and carpety under our feet, silent our tread upon it; so different from the harsh, noisy grind of the oxhide sandal upon a dry, sandy African soil.’3 Jack London’s People of the Abyss (1903) deliberately confuses the vague, amorphous topography of the English metropolis with the African interior to suggest a bourgeois appetite for the next fleeting frisson. The restive quest for illicit pleasures in ‘darkest’ London is couched in terms redolent of risky African exploration. Jack London’s sardonic referencing of Thomas Cook patches onto the seemingly genteel image of the bourgeois home missionary, physician, philanthropist and charity worker, a sense of touristic voyeurism. That the slums were not simply a source of humanitarian concern for the affluent classes but also an increasingly perilous playground is mirrored in how mesmeric fiction shows the once courageous colonial map-maker (d)evolving into a heedless flâneur. Missionary magazines consistently presented a profoundly fractured map of belle époque Britain, in which bucolic enclave and urban heartland were constructed through a series of figurative binaries: idyllic/ turbulent; untainted/degenerate; pure/corrupt. Therefore the ‘soft green carpet’ of England assumed an altogether more sombre resonance when measured against a squalid inner city. It nourished uneasy perceptions of the city as a living organism, much like the wilderness of Central Africa, existing in a state of perpetual flux. The ‘unspeakable misery of the life within the wild continent, the utter absence of every comfort’, which Stanley noted sadly in his Autobiography, was suddenly transposed to the metropolitan working-class ghetto.4 Published street maps could not keep pace with the dizzying rate of metropolitan redevelopment, a process generating uncanny effect by manipulating the pedestrian’s familiarity with their immediate locality. The lush green carpet of Albion – an open and welcoming expanse – was contrasted with city streets that epitomised a camouflaged cartography of secret haunts and dangerous crannies, so subverting the traditional pastoral associations. Annabel Patterson has called for a reconfiguration of the pastoral mode, arguing that recent critical approaches have been ‘reduced to total confusion’.5 Instead of offering a reductive definition of the pastoral inextricably bound up in ideas of rural plenty and Arcadian bliss, Patterson believes a total re-evaluation is required, while Terry Gifford notes how the pastoral ‘can be a dramatic form of unresolved dialogue about the tensions in that society, or it can be a retreat from politics into an apparently aesthetic landscape that is devoid of conflict and tension’.6

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Patterson’s conception of the pastoral as a term that demands constant re-evaluation positions the literary repertoire as politically and culturally dissident. For the missionary movement pastoral acknowledged and paid lavish tribute to the glory of God, which emanated from the green, rolling pastures of rural England. It also enabled evangelical philanthropists to lament the moral and physical degeneration of metropolitan spaces. Consequently, advocates of mesmeric fiction interrogated and developed the pastoral mode by fusing it with facets of Gothic melodrama and the uncanny. For Raymond Williams, the pastoral articulates a time that is only just out of reach, and is designed to stave off the more harrowing byproducts of technological advancement by presenting ‘the idea of an ordered and happier past set against the disturbance and disorder of the present’.7 It is an idealisation or romanticising of the past, ‘based on a temporary situation and on a deep desire for stability’ that ‘served to evade the actual and bitter contradictions of the time’.8 Evangelical philanthropy construed the exaggerated pastoral evocations of an England remembered as irrefutable evidence of God’s benevolent favour, while the unforgiving African interior figures as a locus of terrible biblical initiation: English boys and English girls and English horses and English cattle do not know what it is to have their tongues parched with thirst, but African hunters, traders, and missionaries, and African horses and cattle, and all the wild beasts of the forest know it from frequent and painful experience. England is a land of blessings more than can be told, and that is only another way for saying that English boys and English girls cannot count the many, many blessings they have got from the loving hand of God. Not the smallest of these many blessings is the rain poured out without measure from the clouds which a good God causes to pass over English skies.9

Returning missionaries were cast in the role of battered yet unbowed soldiers of Christ; having immersed themselves in a destructive element, they returned to English shores with accounts of violent persecution at the hands of indigenous tribes amid a blighted, sterile terrain. Such tales cultivated further a perception of Britain as a lush Arcadian retreat. As the final Beatitude of Matthew declares: ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted/because of righteousness,/for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’10 Home missionaries began to target and infiltrate the deprived rural and urban ghettoes that rapidly emerged in the wake of industrial modernisation. The evangelical movement was able to recruit from the most gifted and prosperous sections of society, using their prodigious literary output to justify the ‘redemption’ of the neediest citizens. Evangelism was not so much a theological system, but rather a robust response to

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a perception that empire was beginning to sap not only the nation’s lifeblood but also its coffers, a drain that had fostered endemic levels of poverty and strife in coastal towns that had swelled in size owing to new employment opportunities. Urbanisation caused increased atomisation of the population into various social groups, living in disparate and dispersed quarters within the city boundaries. This atomisation posed serious problems for urban cartographers and recalled the challenges faced by colonial map-makers in the African interior. The immense profits generated by imperial expansion and trade had stimulated an influx of migrants to the port cities of Glasgow and Liverpool, and highlighted how the topographical quandaries brought on by social atomisation were by no means restricted to London. In Glasgow, by 1880, the United Free Church’s investment in home missions had surpassed the funds sent to struggling colonial outposts. This new period of inward investment at home was required to stave off the threat posed by a reverse spiritual colonisation: There are thousands who are giving only an irregular attendance on the means of grace, and who are thus on their way to that condition into which many have already preceded them, of total neglect in reference to all spiritual things. We may safely say, then, that besides 70,000 Roman Catholics, there are 90,000 of our fellow-citizens who stand as much in need of our missionary assiduities, as any objects we can find in Jamaica, or Caffrelan, or Calabar.11

Both Glasgow’s East End and London became home to a sizeable Irish population displaced by severe poverty and famine. Urban settlements afflicted by this ‘Irish infestation’ were described in exoticised terms redolent of contemporaneous depictions of the African native’s ‘rabid fury’.12 The acute social problems caused by Irish immigration were particularly pronounced in Glasgow, where overwrought Scottish Presbyterians imagined Catholicism spreading like a stain across the city. Presbyterian magazines began to publish polemical essays in which fears relating to racial hygiene, hereditary fitness and miscegenation in remote colonial stations were transposed onto a domestic setting under such alarmist titles as ‘Home and Heathen Populations Contrasted’ and ‘Depravity on the Ganges and on the Clyde’. These slippages in the policing of colonial boundaries created a new and confused cartography that made it difficult to differentiate, ethnographically, dark skin and dark morals. The Free Church construed these Irish Pandemoniums – labyrinthine in their structural architecture – as the epitome of a hell on earth. This traumatic vista was compounded by the viral threat of these sites dispersing beyond localised vice-dens to corrode a sense of Protestant decorum:

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We have been too easily repelled by the aspect of their physical distress, and have too readily shrunk from their dwellings, where, instead of the ‘melody of joy and health’, we should often be forced to listen to the rude sounds of strife, and blasphemy, and intoxication.13

In an effort to combat this spreading moral taint, the Evangelicals deployed within these acherontic East End ghettos a stringent and thoroughgoing missionary enterprise. As one elder railed, during the 1890 General Assembly of the Free Church, ‘aggressive work was the Church of Christ showing itself alive. The congregation which was not aggressive must languish.’14 Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House (1852) personifies the enterprising initiative and stoic dedication to missionary labour that, in the final years of the century, the church hierarchies redirected to the grievous problems at home: ‘Indeed! Mrs Jellyby’, said Mr Kenge, standing with his back to the fire, and casting his eyes over the dusty hearth-rug as if it were Mrs Jellyby’s biography, ‘is a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects, at various times, and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa; with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry – and the natives – and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population.’15

Middle-class, married women became the backbone of the missionary project at home, operating as Sunday school teachers and informal social workers. This, again, was especially pronounced in Glasgow, where the wives and daughters of the city’s merchants became actively involved in the fight against the religion of the ‘Irish Apes’16 who settled in the East End. These prosperous merchants had financed and promoted the home mission out of a strong sense of civic duty, but, as family-run industries expanded, many of the more affluent families decamped to the swish new suburbs of Pollokshields, Hyndland and Bearsden, taking with them the spine of evangelism – Sunday school teachers. A short story entitled ‘The Two Brothers’, written by Robert Richardson and published in 1880, epitomises the verbal texture and tone of the evangelicals’ ‘humanitarian’ approach. The story describes the plight of two Irish brothers, Mick and Nat, who are compelled to imitate a band of ‘Savoyards’ by their whiskey-swigging mother. The term Savoyard immediately conjures up ideas of East European mysticism and musical street performances that captivated audiences by evoking a mixture of pity and exoticism. The children of Irish immigrants are rendered as pathetic and fallen

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creatures and, for the first time, considered to be a fertile demographic for the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, seeking new converts. The tale, while demonstrating the importance of the 50,000 religious volunteers working throughout Scotland, betrays the crystallisation of a new attitude towards the community of immigrant children and a new approach to the Irish in Scotland. Initial representations of the O’Keefe clan appear to contradict this by substantiating the myopic and orientalist ethos in directly aligning the boys with their mother: ‘[t]he boys were both dark-skinned as was the woman – their mother.’17 However, this shifting approach to the Irish community abandoned the antecedent terms of colonial fiction. Richardson charts the emergence of a cultural schism between first- and second-generation immigrants and their offspring, identifying this gulf as the space in which conceptions of social identity could be manipulated and exploited by the home missionary movement. Consequently, Richardson accentuates every discernible difference between parent and child, and in doing so inadvertently supplies a literary portrayal of a burgeoning multiculturalism: Mrs. O’Keefe was, as the reader will have gathered, an Irishwoman, but her children had been born and bred all their lives in Scotland. The speech of Mick and Nat O’Keefe was thus a curious hybrid dialect, Scotch words and phrases, interspersed with Irish idioms picked up from their mother, – which was not a little funny to listen to, but which I am doubtful of being able faithfully and adequately to reproduce.18

This account echoes the manner in which indigenous tribesmen, recently converted to Christianity in the African interior, set about mimicking the physical and verbal tics of their colonial overlords. The proselytising of Mick and Nat is dependent upon the munificence of the young middle-class Sunday school teacher, who ‘left her pleasant home in a fashionable quarter of the town to come down here among the slums and alleys every Sunday morning to teach a class of poor ignorant boys’.19 The saintly figure of Mary Farquhar contrasts violently with the grubbiness of that other matriarch in the narrative, Mrs O’Keefe. This stark conflict also imbues descriptions of the school itself, which is rendered as a refuge of celestial tranquillity from the perpetual chaos of the boys’ daily lives. The boys are mesmerised both by their surroundings and Mary Farquhar’s pastoral care: Mick and Nat liked going to the Sunday school. It was pleasanter than their own small sordid, untidy cellar; for the room in which the school was held was at least clean, and fresh, and airy. Moreover, they were taught by a lady who had a soft, kind voice, and a happy knack of dealing with boys so as to interest and attract them.20

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The young Mrs Jellybys and Mary Farquhars, local champions who tried to focus their full attention on the education and uplift of lower class children from both denominations – but predominantly in Glasgow’s East End to first- or second-generation poor Irish immigrant families – grew disillusioned with the wretched and abject squalor in which they worked, and sought instead a more sedate existence instructing the suburban bourgeoisie. The home mission’s longevity was largely reliant upon the symbiosis between Sunday Schools and the divinity graduates of Presbyterian academies. In ‘The Two Brothers’, the conversion of Mick and Nat is affirmed when, under the vigorous influence of the church and Mary Farquhar, the boys resolve to dedicate themselves to the enlightening mission. This is an example of crude propaganda designed to persuade middle-class wives to persevere with the home mission and to encourage working-class converts to play a more active role within the organisation. Working-class factions, allied with some upwardly mobile Irish émigrés who had previously embraced the home missionary movement, grew increasingly resentful of the patronising involvement of this new commuter class. This is a point echoed by Wilde in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), in which Wilde accuses the middle class as comparable to the ‘worst slave-owners’ who mask the ‘true horror of the system being realised’ through their, supposedly, altruistic intentions.21 Charity, for Wilde, ‘creates a multitude of sins’ in which the property-owning elite, in attempting to help the pitiable poor, only succeed in supporting the exploitative class system that is the root cause of the problem.22 Altruism, therefore, is re-imagined by Wilde in terms of a bourgeois psychic economy, where super-ego guilt can be assuaged through charitable acts. The church hierarchy’s obsession with temperance was equalled by their unease over an increasingly secular society, where their pietistic clout was beginning to dwindle. In 1897 the author of an article entitled ‘Church Attendance in Glasgow’, warns that failure to reverse the trend in church-going will result in the country plunging further into ‘heathenism’, which by the fin de siècle had attained troubling new connotations. Heathenism increasingly specified, not those of a different denomination, but rather those who rejected altogether the observances, rituals and rhythms of religious life. Robert Buchanan grew up against this backdrop of sectarian squabbling and tension in Ayr. He was raised in a secular household after his father, having heard Robert Owen, was compelled to relinquish organised religion in favour of preaching that other misconstrued doctrine, Socialism. Despite this upbringing, through which he was encouraged to cultivate a philosophical stance of sophisticated scepticism, Buchanan

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discovered a faith that would stay with him for the remainder of his life. Robert Buchanan and Ernest Henry Clark Oliphant are arguably the most obscure and critically neglected proponents of mesmeric fiction. They feature as meagre footnotes in studies devoted to more canonical texts, such as The Beetle and Dracula. The scant critical and biographical material that exists on Buchanan points towards his profound sense of social and moral decay as enticing him towards the church. In a 1903 biography of Buchanan, J. Hay describes a closely knit Protestant community quick to segregate their children from those unwholesome carriers of a secular creed: ‘“[d]on’t play with yon laddie”, his potential playfellows warned each other, “his father’s an infidel”.’23 Buchanan quickly grew disaffected with the socio-economic outlook while studying at Glasgow University; he struggled to reconcile the grievous hardships of industrialisation with his newly found Christian beliefs, and attempted to formulate a viable theodicy in this cheerless cityscape. The harsh and embittering actualities of mid-Victorian Glasgow jarred against the idyllic evocations of a thriving imperial heartland disseminated by missionary magazines. It was so removed from these Edenic depictions that Buchanan and many of his contemporaries began to equate ‘the dreadful city with Hell, and to make of the growing complexity something of a latter-day Fall’.24 This tension between a pre- and post-lapsarian milieu is played out in The Charlatan and signals the discovery of a theodicy in which Buchanan, like many missionaries returning from Central Africa, asserts the existence of a benign deity in the midst of the city’s wanton excess. Buchanan’s biblical poem ‘The City of Dream’ (1888), which he refers to as ‘an epic of modern revolt and reconciliation’, echoes in its formal complexity the spiritual quest narrative finessed by Schreiner’s African Farm.25 Heavily influenced by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton, as was Schreiner, it recounts the mysterious journey of Ishmael as he departs from the decaying earthly metropolis in search of the Heavenly City: And first methought, with terror on my heart, I fled, like many a pilgrim theretofore, From a dark City built beside the sea, Crying, ‘I cannot any longer bear The tumult and the terror and the tears, The sadness, of the City where I dwell, Sad is the wailing of the waters, sad The coming; and the going of the sun, And sad the homeless echoes of the streets . . .’26

Ultimately, Ishmael’s quest falters because ‘as the title suggests, he comes in the end to the bitter realisation that all his spirit’s life-long quest hath

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been only a Dream within a Dream’.27 However, towards the end of his trek Ishmael stumbles upon the ‘City without God’, a civilisation devoid of spiritual possibility and governed entirely by the petty strictures of scientific materialism and cold logic. Buchanan’s protagonist is portrayed as simultaneously impressed and distressed by what he surveys. In this distinctive urban environment: Never a sound of war, Clarion or trumpet, cry of Priest or King, Came to disturb the City’s summer peace; And never a sick face made the sunlight sad, And never a blind face hunger’d for the light, And never a form that was not strong and fair Walked in the brightness of those golden streets.28

Forsyth argues that Buchanan balks at this humanely organised architectonics with its grand boulevards and elegant civic amenities because he regards the ‘organising scientific spirit as the evil genie of the urban machine running amok to humanity’s detriment’.29 It is, however, difficult to negate the tone of admiring wonder – even rapt reverence – imbuing Ishmael’s description of this ostensibly godless site. It is this dichotomous relationship to metropolitan modernity, where it is simultaneously celebrated and derided, that features prominently in mesmeric fiction and echoes the cartographic experience of Central Africa. The Central African terrain, defying and resisting neat topographic labelling, had demonstrated the sheer impossibility of attaining a magisterial encyclopedic vista. Mapping had been used in the mid-nineteenth century as a tacit and coercive weapon, enforcing discipline among subjugated or recently annexed tribes. The glaring faults and limitations of scientific cartography, as well as organised exploration overseas, fostered anxiety about rendering accurately the British national map. What if there were similar gaps, fissures and in-between sites in urban locales that thwarted the imperial instinct towards narrow classification and panoptic prestige? For Buchanan, both the countryside and the city are sites in which new purgatorial maps can be drawn. Children of the fin de siècle are presented as a broken, dysfunctional and devitalised generation in The Charlatan. Mervyn bemoans that, ‘we are all tired nowadays [. . .] We are the inheritors of centuries of decay.’30 The unspecified rustic English setting where the bulk of the narrative unfolds is populated by a cadre that has grown disaffected with the furious rhythms of the metropolitan everyday. The seemingly tranquil locality is haunted by spectral presences both real and imagined. Isabel is tormented by her own unresolved history:

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A strange sound, a universal sob of superstitious awe, broke from the throat of every person in the room. Something white, mystically luminous, began to grow in the darkness. It grew slowly almost to completed human form, then wavered half-way back to nothingness, grew and strengthened again, and finally amid the awe-struck silence of all present, seemed to solidify into the shape and face of Colonel Arlington. Isabel rose with a hysteric scream. ‘Father, father, you live!’31

The mysterious disappearance of her father and her previous life as an Anglo-Indian are offered as the cause of this neurotic hysteria. Like the syphilitic Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts, Isabel Arlington is grappling with the pernicious effects of her father’s colonial past. The theosophic ramblings of the Earl of Wanborough around his estate with Madame Obnoskin underscore his status as a bewildered figure in search of the grail of psychic transcendence. Woodville and Dewsberry, though seemingly polar opposites, are both restive souls looking for material comfort and spiritual fulfilment in their pursuit of Isabel. These pallid characters have little instinctual connection with their lush natural surroundings and differ markedly from the fleshy physicality of the South African women affirmed in Schreiner’s African Farm. This want of sincere rapport is echoed and extended in the design and architectural details of the country house: An owl flitted past him, winging silently towards the dark turret tower, which rose like a black shadow to the left of the modern mansion, and the only sound in the air was the thin z-like cry of the bats, which flew high in the air between the lawn and the turret.32

The exaggerated faux-Gothic exterior prompts us to question the validity of all the cultural and social transactions that take place within this circus hall of mirrors. The labyrinthine architecture of the house, with its warren of secret passages, nooks and hidden vantage points, where characters spy on each other without fear of detection, supports contemporary suspicions about the incomplete cartography of ‘home’. In this area of covert ploys, voyeuristic fascinations and stymied desires, the anthropomorphised creatures from African fantasy reappear as revenants that flicker across the protagonists’ features. Woodville’s ‘face looked as black as night, his eyes flashed, his mouth was set fiercely, and with a savage gesture he had thrown his cigarette away. The storm lasted for a moment, but during that moment it was terrible.’33 Although not as overtly Gothic in its structure and descriptive flourishes, Oliphant’s The Mesmerist betrays a similar wariness, mistrust and fear of English country house culture. The estate to which the Campbell family retires after striking rich is depicted as a retreat for those struggling to adjust

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to the perils of modern life. The sometimes shadowy and impalpable monsters of the colonial imagination energise and complicate the mesmeric genre, which seeks to induce in both its characters and readers a heightened consciousness. This is attained by counterpointing, or interfusing, the seemingly sedate ambience of country house culture with the primordial wilderness and feverish drum beat sounds of the modern city – a narrative strategy largely indebted to the textual fashioning of Central Africa as a fantasised territory of mesmeric wonder.

Notes 1. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (London: Isbister, 1903), pp. 2–3. 2. Henry M. Stanley, The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, ed. by Dorothy Stanley (New York: Houghton, 1909), p. 296. 3. Juvenile, February 1883. 4. Stanley, 1909: pp. 296–7. 5. Annabel Paterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 7. 6. Terry Gifford, Pastoral (Oxford: Routledge, 1999), p. 11. 7. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 45. 8. Ibid., p. 45. 9. Juvenile, February 1883. 10. Matthew, 5: 10–12. 11. Juvenile, February 1852. 12. Stanley, 1909: p. 249. 13. Anon., ‘Glasgow a Field For Missions’, in Juvenile Missionary Magazine of the United Presbyterian Church (Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Sons, 1852), p. 27. 14. T. Binnie, Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Free Church (Edinburgh: Free Church of Scotland, 1890), p. 292. 15. Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Vol. I (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), pp. 1–457 (p. 36). 16. L. Curtis Perry discusses, in his study of Punch caricatures, the representation of the Irish as simian brutes and the British as pious crusaders for a Protestant God and civilisation. See L. Curtis Perry, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Caricature (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971). 17. Robert Richardson, ‘The Two Brothers’, The United Presbyterian Magazine (Edinburgh: W. Oliphant, 1880), p. 462. 18. Ibid., p. 462. 19. Ibid., p. 464. 20. Ibid., pp. 463–4. 21. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1912), p. 3. 22. Ibid., p. 4.

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23. Harriet Jay, Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life’s Work, and His Literary Friendships (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), p. 19. 24. Buchanan’s cynicism and disgust for modern life echoes the sentiments of the Scottish Modernist Edwin Muir. Muir, who had met Jung and was a disciple of psychoanalysis, in such poems as ‘The Good Town’ and ‘The Brothers’ obliquely reveals the deep trauma triggered by his move to Glasgow from Orkney. Orkney is remembered and yearned for as a symbol of a childhood innocence lost. R. A. Forsyth, ‘Robert Buchanan and the Dilemma of the Brave New World’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 9, no. 4 (Autumn, 1969), pp. 647–57 (p. 651). 25. Cited in Forsyth, 1969: p. 640. 26. Robert Buchanan, The City of Dream (London: Chatto & Windus, 1888), pp. 1–2. 27. Forsyth, 1969: p. 650. 28. Buchanan, 1888: p. 54. 29. Forsyth, 1969: p. 652. 30. Buchanan and Murray, 1895: p. 32. 31. Ibid., pp. 202–3. 32. Ibid., p. 111. 33. Ibid., p. 138.

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Chapter 14

Filthy Places

The image of the underworld also bears this ambivalent character; it contains the past, the rejected and condemned, as unworthy to dwell in the present, as something useless and obsolete. But it also gives us a glimpse of the new life, of the future that is born, for it is this future that finally kills the past. All these ambivalent images are dual-bodied, dual-faced, pregnant. They combine in various proportions negation and affirmation, the top and the bottom, abuse and praise.1

The plotting of new maps of ‘the underworld’ in mesmeric fiction becomes most apparent in the vivid delineations of urban life. For Buchanan, the modern metropolis was home to the New Fallen, a lurid setting comparable with Dante’s wretched inferno and the degraded city of Babylon from the Book of Revelations: Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a home for demons and a haunt for every evil spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird. For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries.2

Oliphant regards the city in a similar way to Jack London, as a man-made jungle only apprehended through tenacious exploration and systematic survey, as a constant game played with the unusual, the outlandish and the extraordinary. Congruently, Richard Marsh provides a portrait of an unfinished civilisation beginning to show the signs of decay. London in The Beetle complicates the popular perception of the Victorian city as defined largely by an insatiable craving for novelty; instead it is an eerie frontier containing gloomy pockets of barrenness and desolation. It is not so much a locus where human existence overspills into suburbia, destroying it in the process; rather the centre is threatened by the dark spaces within and on its shabby, haphazard peripheries.

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The Victorian passion for translations of Dante resonates throughout Buchanan’s depiction of London as a sprawling inferno that houses an aggregation of lost and faceless souls.3 Buchanan portrays a Dantean chthonic realm in which new urban living conditions and frenetic demographic turnover thwart the various attempts of law enforcement agencies, local politicians and town planners to impose ‘legibility’ on this expanse. His mingled disdain and dejection at a rotten and rapacious modern moment signals a deeply felt yearning for the restoration of a more balanced, responsible and bucolic polity. Woodville, displaced and exiled from Wanborough, sought a modicum of escapist solace in the relative anonymity of metropolitan living. He yielded ‘as so many weary men have done, to the strange fascination of the great city, and spent many hours after nightfall in lonely wanderings from street to street’.4 It is during such solitary ‘wanderings’ that the Dantean echoes resonate most powerfully: Sometimes, in his mood of bitter scorn for humanity, he felt that only one thing was certain – a horrible and ever-present hell; and as he walked through the streets and alleys, swarming with unclean creatures, full of the wails of broken lives, he seemed to be wandering through hell.5

Buchanan’s detailed re-imagining of London as a modern ‘hell’ announces unseen civilisations lurking above and below ground. Large and variant populations had been compelled by industrialisation to live in close proximity to one another and, as David Pike avers, homogenisation and strict regulation became the primary means of policing phenomenal urban space.6 However, problems with sanitation and the spread of disease contributed to the transformation of the city into a site of perilous and potentially fatal encounters. Pike is not quite correct in his assertion that the nineteenth-century ‘metropolis was the first in which rich and poor did not live cheek to jowl in a mixed-use urban space’,7 as even after a concerted process of segregation there remained, within London’s affluent West End, Irish immigrant enclaves and the attendant threat of widespread contagion.8 Pike notes that the stokers of dust destructors, like the ones found in Shoreditch, contributed to a perception of domestic cartography as one shadowed by colonial experiences of the ‘other’. Those working at the mouth of the garbage incinerator were ‘as black as negroes’.9 William Ryan depicts how, as with the foul torments of Dante’s netherworld, the reader and onlooker both seem mesmerised by an awesome image of the industrial sublime: ‘[e]verything is big, coarse, forbidding; and yet the gloomy, brown pavilion of fire holds the eye, its ugliness redeemed by the majesty and power of the mysterious force within.’10 The Great

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Stink of 1858 propelled construction of an underground sewage system designed to ‘flush away’ the city’s detritus in all its manifestations. This unseen process became an effectual means of mass subjugation, in which intransigent inner-city natives could be flushed underground for ‘what was not suitable to the world above was to be repressed, if not eliminated altogether’.11 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White construe the system of subterranean sewage as a process that transposes psychic desire across the topography of the city. Their psychoanalytic interpretation, in which filth becomes a synonym for the Freudian unconscious, posits a theory of the nineteenth-century sewer as the repository of some abandoned or repudiated truth. This argument recalls Jung’s belief that, in travelling towards the African interior, he was in fact journeying back to the beginning of time; that, among the archetypes of this primordial unconscious, he could salvage profound personal verities. In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud notes the extent to which ‘soap’ operated as an ‘actual yardstick’ of modern life.12 Cleanliness is one of the contributing factors to the formulation of refined culture: ‘[w]e do not think highly of the cultural level of an English country town in Shakespeare’s time when we read that there was a big dung-heap in front of his father’s house in Stratford.’13 The manic dedication to daily ablutions and class hygiene exhibited by Du Maurier’s trois angliches is an instructive and notable example of Freud’s belief that ‘[d]irtiness of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilisation.’14 Their compulsion to repeat the hygienic processes and protocols outlined in the handbooks issued to colonial explorers, missionaries and bureaucrats – such as the Royal Geographical Society’s Hints to Travelers – is symptomatic of the bourgeois worldview in which an appalled fascination with tainted public spaces is extended to incorporate our ‘demand for cleanliness’ in relation to the human body.15 Order, then, ‘is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision’.16 Nevertheless, Stallybrass and White tend to read the Victorian city as if it were a single tangible entity, so underestimating the multiplicity which lurks beneath. As David Pike contends, this underground geography enthralls ‘because it contains all that is forbidden’ and ‘contains it as an unimaginably rich, albeit inchoate and intoxicating, brew of other times, places, and modes of being in the world, and because that brew intimates the fragility of the unity claimed by the world above’.17 In Buchanan’s grim(y) Dantean vision of a vertically segmented society, the world above is synonymous with fussy legal structures, economy and social conformism. This inherently unstable setup cannot

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be maintained indefinitely. Just as the mummy curse was feared to exact revenge on the surface world as punishment for the disturbance and desecration of ancient subterranean sites, so the underworld tribes of Buchanan’s London would eventually emerge to punish the moneyed, ‘daylight’ minority. Woodville has experienced the vindictive force of bourgeois disdain, having been compelled to flee from Isabel, who is literally wasting away under his mesmeric influence. He seeks solace in this subterranean realm, free from the strictures and petty prohibitions of class orthodoxy: It was a comfort to him in his utter despair and humiliation to feel swallowed up in the great ocean of life, to know no one, and yet to be a part of an ever busy multitude of souls. In the remotest solitude he had never felt so completely alone as he did now, surrounded by men, living shadows of himself, toiling, striving, suffering, coming they knew not whence, and going they knew not whither.18

Woodville feels utterly alone despite – or perhaps because – he is surrounded by men, and this monstrous imagery is reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s conception of London at night as ‘a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes’.19 Hardy redraws the metropolitan map by transmuting it into a chart of threatening excess. ‘As the crowd grows denser’, for Hardy, ‘it loses its character of an aggregate of countless units, and becomes an organic whole, a molluscous black creature having nothing in common with humanity’; this bizarre creature pollutes the streets, and ‘throws out horrid excrescences and limbs into neighbouring alleys; a creature whose voice exudes from its scaly coat and who has an eye in every pore of its body’.20 This technique ironically recalls the ancient Phoenician tradition in which images of deities were superimposed upon areas to be charted in the production of anthropographic sailing maps. Buchanan’s descriptions of the metropolitan cityscape could be interpreted as a challenge to urban map-makers, demanding the creation of a new discipline capable of dealing with this amorphous and anarchic terrain. In fact the ‘taming’ of this city organism through comprehensive mapping required a devoted return to the painstaking methods employed by scientific explorers of Central Africa. Verne’s hot-air balloon provides Dr Ferguson with an aerial vantage point that would later revolutionise cartographical methodology; but the relative ease with which this terrain could be sketched was hedged by compromised detail and exactitude. From the balloon’s cabin, indigenous tribes are indistinguishable from the fantastical creatures roaming the terrain. London is difficult to map not because of its changelessness

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and elemental permanency but because it does not seem to stand still long enough for recorders to document its peculiar quirks, crannies and contours; houses, indeed entire streets, are knocked down, replaced and renamed within a matter of months. Woodville’s vertical descent is subtly elaborated in passages of the novel that evoke his malicious glee at being lost in the multitude of the city. Woodville’s stroll through Soho betrays both a fear of the intoxicatingly exotic and an enraptured interest in the heady otherness of his immediate surroundings: Wandering out of Soho, and turning into Coventry Street, he mixed with the crowds returning from the theatres and with the idlers lingering along the pavement; crossed Piccadilly Circus, where the nightly saturnalia of painted women was beginning; pushed his way through the obscene throngs outside the St. James’s Restaurant, and gained the quieter pavements of Piccadilly. The rattle of innumerable cabs, the sound of voices, the flashing of the lamps in the street and the lamps of the moving vehicles, all seemed strange and afar off, like lights and sounds in a dream.21

Woodville’s walk through an unreal pageant of ‘painted’ faces invites comparison with Olive Schreiner’s eerie evocations of the metropolis. Confused by this environment where referents constantly shift and actuality retreats behind the visible sign, Buchanan, like Schreiner, resorts to constructing the ‘obscene’ locale as a dreamscape. Ponderevo, in Tono Bungay (1908), describes Soho in similarly bewitched and entranced terms, declaring that he had ‘became quite familiar with the devious, vicious, dirtily-pleasant exoticism of Soho’.22 Benjamin, in The Arcades Project, conceptualises the modern metropolis as a colonial space that casts the flâneur as a displaced native, born of the city but suffering from a profound sense of alienation. Rob Shields reads Benjamin’s flâneur as someone who is not at home in urban localities, ‘for these spaces are filled with foreigners and goods from distant lands’.23 The metropolis has been made deeply strange by empire. Benjamin’s flâneur, it could be argued, resembles the evangelical home missionary who felt compelled to roam the strange streets of the fin de siècle city, encountering ‘deviant’ peoples who sheltered in heathen slums like tribes. However, in contrast to the evangelicals who were overtly horrified by the sites/sights, sounds, and pungent odours of the modern city, Woodville is exhilarated by the spaces filled with foreigners and goods from distant lands. Richard Marsh’s The Beetle amplifies and complicates this perspective. His redrawing of London is a corollary of the demonic landscape of Central Africa that reappears frequently in missionary literature. It is not

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a place of exuberant diversity and bustle, but rather an ever-changing locale pockmarked with atavistic portals. Marsh’s narrative renders the pockets of dishevelment lying within London, a previously unmapped cartography that has the potential to sully or engulf the sophisticated urban centre. Holt enters Hammersmith on a night when even the rain seems diabolically tropical: ‘[t]he rain was like a mist, and was not only drenching me to the skin, but it was rendering it difficult to see more than a little distance in any direction. The neighbourhood was badly lighted.’24 Befuddled by this urban jungle, Holt stumbles into a ‘portal’ that transports him back in time to a ‘Lost World’. Marsh refuses to specify whether this corner of London has been left behind by relentless industrial expansion or is in fact the monstrous by-product of it: Retreating from the inhospitable portal of the casual ward, I had taken the first turning to the left, and, at the moment, had been glad to take it. In the darkness and the rain, the locality which I was entering appeared unfinished. I seemed to be leaving civilisation behind me. The path was unpaved; the road rough and uneven, as if it had never been properly made. Houses were few and far between. Those which I did encounter, seemed, in the imperfect light, amid the general desolation, to be cottages which were crumbling to decay. Exactly where I was I could not tell. I had a faint notion that, if I only kept on long enough, I should strike some part of Walham Green. How long I should have to keep on I could only guess. Not a creature seemed to be about of whom I could make inquiries. It was as if I was in a land of desolation.25

It is unclear if, upon entering this ambiguously colonial landscape that is ‘crumbling to decay’ Holt remains in London. He has only a ‘faint notion’ as to where he may be, and his ‘imperfect’ cartographic knowledge dictates that if he keeps on long enough he may ‘strike some part of Walham Green’. Holt is overcome by the sharp sense that he is ‘leaving civilisation behind’. This detail adumbrates a movement towards a more streamlined and efficient social system in the ‘developing’ parts of the city. Alternatively, we can construe this notion as a ‘civilisation’ not completed, that the accelerated growth has been facilitated through the partial neglect of less salubrious zones. These maligned spaces on the metropolitan map become a refuge for terrorist cells where conspirators and would-be insurgents meet to plan devastating raids on the wealthy overlords. Marsh’s London is not segregated in terms of an East/West divide, because it is impossible to fix – let alone effectually police – the physical lines of separation. The boulevards and thoroughfares provide ample opportunity to socialise, dine, see and be seen, but this freedom of movement is tied to a fear of contagion. That the moneyed mercantile class has decamped from the perilous habitat

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of the inner-city in favour of suburbia does not allay acute bourgeois misgivings.26 As Stallybrass and White observe: Thus even as the separation of the suburb from the slum established certain class differences, the development of the city simultaneously threatened the clarity of that segregation. The tram, the railway station, the ice rink, above all the street themselves, were shockingly promiscuous. And the fear of that promiscuity was encoded above all in terms of the fear of being touched. ‘Contagion’ and ‘contamination’ became the tropes through which the city life was apprehended.27

Suburbia functions here as an ideological elsewhere: a sanitised psychological retreat from the tangible dangers of inner city life. If the metropolis is a ghastly leviathan for Hardy, a complex space to be gauged horizontally and vertically in Buchanan, then for Marsh and Wells respectively it is reconstructed as a cancerous tumour or fungal excrescence. Wells imagines the city as ‘some tumorous growth-process’, which ‘bursts all the outlines of the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble comfortable Croydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham’.28 Wells articulates in Tono Bungay the challenge that this eruption poses to the controlling mechanisms of cartography: ‘[t]o this day I ask myself will those masses ever become structural, will they indeed shape into anything new whatever, or is that cancerous image their true and ultimate diagnosis?’29 In The Beetle, Marsh carefully charts the emergence of a suburban underclass along the dockside areas of Wapping, Vauxhall and Limehouse. Champnell, Atherton and Lessingham are reconstructed as detectives and missionaries on a quest to locate the Scarab and Miss Lindon. Their refined and genteel sensibilities are meant to provide a reassuring lens through which to view the terrifying otherness of these sepulchral ghettoes and their denizens. Miss Henderson’s odd vernacular stands in stark contrast to the received pronunciation of the group, rendering her exotic and strangely other in comparison. The group’s bourgeois credentials are reaffirmed by Champnell’s description of the ‘disorderly house’.30 Champnell consciously exaggerates his discomfort to highlight his detachment from the shabby surroundings; Lessingham considers himself ‘immune’ to, or inoculated against, such spectacles of dissolution by his conversion to an ideology of sober self-improvement. His responses reveal the hypocrisy common to evangelical converts, evincing fastidious disgust for the slums although in a previous life he had revelled in sensation-seeking sorties through the eroticised decay of Cairo’s backstreets. Champnell observes that ‘[a] candle was guttering on a broken and dilapidated single wash hand stand. A small

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iron bedstead stood by its side, the clothes on which were tumbled and tossed.’31 The forensic precision with which Champnell details his surroundings is meant to mark the group out from the degraded natives in the room. The Beetle borrows from the missionary movement this stylistic device of casting the respectable Englishman as a nonplussed yet well-meaning foreigner in a strange land to preserve his implied superiority. This is underscored by the colonial nuances that distinguish Marsh’s rendering of the physical terrain: Paradise Place proved to be within three or four hundred yards of the Station House. So far as could be seen in the dark it consisted of a row of houses of considerable dimensions, – and also of considerable antiquity. They opened on to two or three stone steps which led directly into the street. At one of the doors stood an old lady with a shawl drawn over her head. This was Mrs Henderson. She greeted us with garrulous volubility.32

‘Paradise Place’ carries rich polysemic resonances. If interpreted ironically, it simply reaffirms Marsh’s perception of a grossly unjust imperial hegemony which routinely exploits – when it does not completely extinguish – the weakest members of society. The extract also illuminates the idea that found ultimate expression in the mapping of unfamiliar lands by colonial map-makers: the use of geographical blankness and topographical absence as a site of wish fulfilment. Marsh’s depiction of suburbia vouchsafes a site of the phantasmatic and the hallucinatory. This enclave might have seemed gruesome or fetid to late Victorian sanitary inspectors and social reformers, but to the indigenes dwelling along this dark artery it could be reimagined as idyllic. To the entrepreneurial class these dockside districts were simply abstract points where goods arrived from abroad, making it easier to ignore the impecunious tribes who lived in squalid conditions beneath the shadows of the ships and warehouses. The filth of Marsh’s city is impossible to contain or control. Its choking dust, thick smoke and industrial fumes ironically evoke ‘the miasma exhaled from the soil, the noisome vapours enveloping every path’ that define the ‘huge continent’ of Africa in Stanley’s Autobiography.33 The Beetle infuses the rottenness of the industrial sublime with a male paranoia obsessed with safeguarding the racial and social purity of the female forms amid the chaos of the metropolis. Marjorie Lindon’s determined defiance of her father’s wishes and her refusal to submit to the physical vitality of Atherton in favour of the more politically idealistic Lessingham, would, on the face of it, appear to mark her out as an embodiment of the New Woman. Julian Wolfreys refines this reading of Marjorie so that she is both a ‘destabilising trope and signifier of

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otherness’, within the text.34 For Wolfreys, ‘the fear for Victorian masculinity is that the New Woman presents a form of parodic masculinity’, capable of ‘transgressing both the boundaries of her own supposedly “proper” gendered identity and that of a certain self-defining Victorian masculinity’.35 Marjorie’s forced transvestism at the hands of the scarab, the cutting of her hair and adoption of male dress, exacerbates the threat that she already poses to the pursuing tripartite. Wolfreys acknowledges that this forced transvestism is ‘a violation of Marjorie’s genderidentity’; however, more than this, ‘it produces a potential phantasm of Marjorie already feared in the late Victorian masculine imaginary’, and could explain ‘the extremity of outrage felt and acted on by Atherton, Lessingham, and Champnell – for they have made manifest to them the cultural anxiety presented by the New Woman’.36 There is a further consideration that would account for the sweeping complexity of the characters’ repulsed reaction. Marjorie Lindon’s abduction and momentary disappearance from view is a consequence of hypnosis. As Champnell observes, ‘[s]he was in a trance state’, and as such, her cross-dressing, and her lack of agency coupled with the grimy rags she is compelled to wear, together slyly subvert the traditional missionary narrative of conversion. Indigenes who chose the ‘higher’ religion of the missionaries visually demarcated themselves from the ‘benighted heathen’ by assuming the sartorial styling of Western civilisation. As noted earlier, this act of imitation, although valued as the symptom of a teleological step towards ‘improvement’, was often lampooned by missionaries in droll asides to their white readership.37 However, with the term ‘heathen’ increasingly used at the fin de siècle to denote a pernicious secularism, the home missionaries consciously employed the same visual tactics in the corrupt urban heartland. Southon’s manic, but undeniably impressive, dedication to the missionary endeavour was reflected in his wearing of woollen socks and pressed woollen undergarments in the Central African heat. This was designed to preserve an illusion of the dignified English gentleman and the complex resonances – civilised, superior, hygienic and so forth – such a uniform encoded. Under the mesmeric influence of the scarab, the native puppeteer, Marjorie’s otherness is aggravated further. Champnell interviews several eyewitnesses who mistake her for an Arab; and metaphorically she is an Arab by proxy as the colonial subject, the scarab, is controlling her actions. Furthermore, the true horror of Marjorie’s transformation from a daughter of the ruling class to that of ‘heathen’ bride is her new association with an emergent Victorian underclass. Atherton’s misogynistic condescension gives way to visceral disgust when he bellows, ‘Marjorie Lindon, the daintiest damsel in the land! – into the streets of London

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rigged out in Holt’s old togs!’38 Hypnotised and clothed in Holt’s fetid rags, she is simultaneously an embodiment of colonial idolatry and the degenerate secular heathenism of the inner-city proletariat. Champnell depicts her as ‘attired in a rotten, dirty pair of boots; a filthy, tattered pair of trousers; a ragged, unwashed apology for a shirt; a greasy, ancient shapeless coat; and a frowsy peak cloth cap’.39 Issues of class and racial identity become confused at this point, so that the working class is interchangeable with the African and Asiatic races. Marsh replicates the logic of the evangelical missionary movement in refusing to differentiate between social and ethnic categories. Marjorie’s attire is stereotypically working-class; yet with the addition of a rag wrapped around her face she takes on a decidedly Arabic appearance in the eyes of various onlookers. Trilby’s demeanour fails to generate the same excitement, although she too masquerades around bohemian Paris in male clothing. She is ‘clad in the gray overcoat of a French infantry soldier’ and a ‘huge pair of male slippers, which made her drag her feet as she walked’.40 This is because, unlike Marsh, Du Maurier’s verbal and pictorial representations of Trilby betray her middle-class origins. His etchings of Trilby bear more than a passing resemblance to a romantic version of Britannia. Trilby’s transvestism and amorphous gender identity fail to excite the same repulsed response from Du Maurier’s trio, simply because she adheres to the novel’s shrill insistence on social and sexual ‘cleanliness’. Trilby’s occupation as a laundry maid is stressed repeatedly. She may be dressed in male clothing but it is spotless attire. The same cannot be said for Marjorie Lindon, whose ‘Englishness’ is concealed beneath rotten rags: ‘And I think you will find that Miss Lindon and Mr Holt are together at this moment’. ‘In men’s clothing’. ‘Both in men’s clothing, or, rather, Miss Lindon is in a man’s rags’. ‘Great Potiphar! To think of Marjorie like that!’41

Marjorie’s proxy heathenism and working-class garb revisit missionary concerns relating to the natives’ relationship with the space they inhabit. Miss Lindon is precariously separated by only a single vowel sound from the city that soils her. A rare typo (or Derridean slippage?) by the transcribers working on the e-text version of the novel for the website www.projectgutenberg heightens this correlation between Marjorie and the metropolis in their accidental renaming of her as Miss London.42 Concealed by the putrid garments of an urban underclass, Marjorie Lindon’s ‘fall’ mirrors the perceived degradation of London’s neglected enclaves, and invites comparison with Schreiner’s vivid image

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of Waldo’s scarred skin – a gory anthropographic ‘map’ revealing colonial violence. In Schreiner’s African Farm, Gregory’s transvestism facilitates his transcendental ‘rebirth’ as St Gregory; however, in Marsh’s text, and in the mesmeric subgenre as a whole, sartorial transgression carries the possibility of personal destruction. Atherton, Champnell and Lessingham worry that, if Marjorie continues to wear the grotesque uniform of the proletarian tribes, then she too will be consigned to the city’s tainted underworld. An etymological study of the word ‘grotesque’ reveals its origins in Italian, grotto/grotta: a cavernous location that houses bizarre ornamentation. Marsh’s brand of grotesque Gothic prompts comparison with the Central African terrain that defied accurate mapping. Marsh intentionally employs the grotesque as a means to challenge the ideological hegemony of imperial England, intimating how the relentless acquisition of new territories abroad also had a very serious human cost at home. Dani Cavallaro contends that the grotesque, ‘by combining disparate and even logically incompatible elements, undermines the myth of corporeal unity insistently promoted by Western thought’.43 In his improvised basement grotto, Atherton develops a weapon of mass destruction with the capability not only to undermine ‘Western thought’, but to obliterate the whole of Western civilisation: I went into my laboratory to plan murder – legalised murder – on the biggest scale it ever has been planned. I was on the track of a weapon which would make war not only an affair of a single campaign, but of a single half-hour [. . .] Once let an individual, or two or three at most, in possession of my weapon-that-was-to-be, get within a mile or so of even the largest body of disciplined troops that ever yet a nation put into the field, and – pouf! – in about the time it takes you to say that they would be all dead men. If weapons of precision, which may be relied upon to slay, are preservers of the peace [. . .] then I was within reach of the finest preserver of the peace imagination ever yet conceived.44

Acute anxieties surrounding cartographic voids and lacunae appear exaggerated yet also justified in The Beetle. The blank space on the global map was filled with the distorted monsters conjured up by scientific explorers and evangelical philanthropists to validate their intervention in Africa. Marsh exploits this notion to demonstrate that there were analogous fissures and vacancies in the metropolitan centre, with the potential to devastate a Western secular democracy with apocalyptic finality. Atherton is exposed as a cold-blooded entrepreneur in the vein of Dewsberry, and an individual who possesses the ruthless dispassionate eye of a colonial bureaucrat. In order to reap the financial rewards of selling this weapon to the British Government, Atherton must supply

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‘proof on a large scale’ of his invention’s efficacy.45 He provides a chilling solution to his dilemma during a conversation with Marjorie Grayling: ‘I could take my plant to one of the forests of South America, where there is plenty of animal life but no human, I could demonstrate the soundness of my position then and there.’46 Marsh’s satirical critique of imperial rapacity anticipates Conrad’s Marlow, who records that in ‘the empty immensity of the earth’ French colonial troops endlessly fired their guns. ‘There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding’, recounts Marlow, ‘a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives – he called them enemies! – hidden out of sight somewhere.’47

Notes 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 409. 2. Revelations 18: 2. 3. Evidence of Victorian and Edwardian appreciation of Dante can be found in the most obscure aspects of culture. David Pike notes that the capability of a mechanical device, designed for the incineration of refuse, was advertised using the rhetoric of the medieval underworld: ‘[h]ad Dante but known the dust destructor, to what exquisite agonies could he not have condemned some of the wretches of his Inferno!’ David Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 221. 4. Buchanan and Murray, 1895: p. 96. 5. Ibid., p. 98. 6. Pike, 2005: p. 196. 7. Ibid. 8. Engels singles out the Irish diaspora in Manchester for reprimand. He declares that ‘the Irishman allows the pig to share his own living quarters. This new, abnormal method of rearing livestock in the large towns is entirely of the Irish origin [. . .] The Irishman lives and sleeps with the pig, the children play with the pig, ride on its back, and roll about in filth with it.’ Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 106. 9. Cited in Pike, 2005: p. 221. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 196. 12. Freud, 1961a: p. 9. 13. Ibid., p. 9. 14. Ibid., p. 9. 15. Ibid., p. 9. 16. Ibid., p. 9. 17. Pike, 2005: p. 197. 18. Buchanan and Murray, 1895: p. 97.

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19. Florence Hardy, Life of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 224. 20. Ibid., p. 224. 21. Buchanan and Murray, 1895: pp. 154–5. 22. H. G. Wells, Tono Bungay (New York: Duffield, 1908), p. 115. 23. Rob Shields, ‘Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on flânerie’, in The Flâneur, ed. by Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 62–78 (p. 66). 24. Marsh, 2004: p. 45. 25. Ibid., p. 45. 26. Freud provides details in ‘The Rat Man’ of a patient who paid him in money that he had ironed at home. ‘It was a matter of conscience with him, he explained, not to hand anyone dirty paper florins: for they harboured all sorts of dangerous bacteria and might do some harm to the recipient.’ See Sigmund Freud, ‘Notes Upon A Case of Obsessional Neurosis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. X (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 147–251 (p. 147). 27. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 135. 28. Wells, 1908: p. 115. 29. Ibid., p. 115. 30. Marsh, 2004: p. 301. 31. Ibid., p. 302. 32. Ibid., p. 302. 33. Stanley, 1909: p. 296. 34. Julian Wolfreys, ‘Introduction to The Beetle’, in The Beetle (Plymouth: Broadview, 2004), p. 29. 35. Wolfreys, 2004: p. 29. 36. Wolfreys, 2004: pp. 29–30. 37. Haggard incorporates this facet of missionary story-telling into the ‘Little Flower’: Beyond the river they were met by some Christian Kaffirs of the Sisa tribe, who were sent by the Chief Kosa to guide them through the hundred miles or so of difficult country which still lay between them and their goal. These men were pleasant-spoken but rather depressed folk, clad in much-worn European clothes that somehow became them very ill. (Haggard, 1920: p. 162)

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Marsh, 2004: p. 286. Ibid., p. 285. Doyle, 1897: p. 14. Marsh, 2004: p. 286. This appears when Champnell says: I mean that it seems to me that the facts point in the direction of my conclusions rather than yours – and that very strongly too. Miss Coleman asserts that she saw Miss London return into the house; that within a few minutes the blind was replaced at the front window; and that shortly after a young man, attired in the costume I have described, came walking out of the front door. I believe that young man was Miss Marjorie Lindon. (Italics mine.)

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228 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Cavallaro, 2002: p. 190. Marsh, 2004: p. 102. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 118. Conrad, 1973: p. 20.

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Conclusion

This book opened with a quotation that greets today’s visitors to Bergasse 19, now the Freud museum in Vienna, in which Freud discusses how the artistic imagination was always one step ahead of him. This book has shown how the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis already existed abstractly in the literature of the late Victorian period. Like Freud’s own work, which existed conceptually but had yet to be written, the fiction produced in the last few decades of the nineteenth century gestured towards an experimental psychology later organised by Freud in the creation of his radical science. In Degeneration, Max Nordau observes that, at the close of the nineteenth century, it would fall to ‘[t]he poet, the musician, [. . .] to announce, or divine, or at least suggest in what forms civilisation will further be evolved.’1 The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, and the subsequent optical effect on the global climate, literally transformed metropolitan London into an uncanny and exotic geography. The heimlich city was rendered unheimlich beneath the shroud of red mist that had been carried thousands of miles in the aftermath of the explosion, and it was against this unreal setting that Nordau proclaimed, ‘[t]he day is over, the night draws on.’2 For Nordau, it would be the work of artists, writers and poets that would give definition to the dreams of civilisation and create a new ontology for what he understood as a clean break from the old order of the nineteenth century; however, his rigid chronological conception, the Victorian epoch giving way to Edwardian optimism, is undermined by the very artists that he re-imagines as prophets. In 1900 Arthur Conan Doyle published his short tale ‘The Leather Funnel’, in which the necromancer Lionel Dacre reveals to his English friend, the story’s narrator, his vast ‘library of occult literature’ and the private collection of ‘Talmudic, cabalistic and magical works’ that he has amassed in his Parisian home.3 Uncanny echoes of the Rat Man’s experience of walking into Freud’s consulting room appear in the

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unnamed narrator’s description of Dacre’s acroamatic paraphernalia; such ‘[b]ooks, weapons, gems, carvings, tapestries, images’ surround the couch on which he is to spend the evening discussing dreams and their relationship to the occult:4 It was a singular bedroom, with its high walls of brown volumes, but there could be no more agreeable furniture to a bookworm like myself, and there is no scent so pleasant to the nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. I assured him that I could desire no more charming chamber, and no more congenial surroundings.5

Doyle’s narrative undercuts Nordau’s attempt to neatly classify nineteenth-century culture as distinct from that of the new twentieth century. Freud himself, and the proponents of belle époque fiction, defy all attempts to taxonomically classify them in terms of chronology. These paradoxical figures – Freud, the sexual democrat who also embraced a rigid social etiquette – disrupt all critical attempts to understand the turn of the century as a new beginning in which fin de siècle aestheticism is displaced by twentieth-century artistic modernism. Lionel Dacre asks his companion if he is familiar with the ‘psychology of dreams’, which is quickly dismissed by the sceptical narrator as a ‘science of charlatans’.6 The ghost of the young Freud, who turned away from a promising career in neurology to follow a hunch that would lead him to Charcot and Bernheim in France, is conjured up in Dacre’s response: The charlatan is always the pioneer. From the astrologer came the astronomer, from the alchemist the chemist, from the mesmerist the experimental psychologist. The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow. Even such subtle and elusive things as dreams will in time be reduced to system and order.7

Alison Winter credits mesmerism with ‘drawing new geographies of authority within British society’ in relation to class, gender and ethnicity, as well as exposing the ‘vicissitudes of the human mind [. . .] and spirit’.8 Mesmerism underwent a notable historical transformation from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was hailed as the great medical panacea of somatic and nervous disorders, to its dismissal as the chicanery of charlatans and tricksters in the 1860s, to its short-lived rehabilitation by Charcot and Bernheim as an effectual means of psychological therapy. It was a fluid and nebulous knowledge system that suffered from the want of a regimented base upon which to perfect its techniques, hence the manipulation by more unscrupulous practitioners, which irrevocably eroded its ‘brand’ as a serious scientific discourse. By

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the fin de siècle this largely unregulated body of wisdom began to fracture and was ‘absorbed into a variety of different disciplines and projects’.9 Despite the earnest and unstinting efforts of Charcot at Salpétrière and Bernheim in Nancy, the popular perception of hypnosis was indelibly marked by the histrionic music-hall mesmerists who toured around the country performing sensational and humiliating spectacles. In the transplanting of mesmerism from the medical lecture-halls to the secretive back-rooms of the bourgeoisie, and finally to the stage, mesmerism, for Winter, ‘lost’ the provocatively transgressive ‘role that it had once played in the intellectual debate’.10 The spiritual and ‘Other World’ aspects ‘became, in the hands of men like William Crookes and Oliver Lodge, a branch of physics’.11 Meanwhile, the insights gleaned from the production of ‘altered states’ through the induction of mesmeric processes were incorporated into the respective realms of medicine, surgical practice and theory, the spiritualism ‘industry’ and psychoanalysis. The importance of mesmerism in the historical development of psychoanalysis is, for Winter, revealed by how the mesmerised subject’s involuntary responses expressed unconscious fears, an idea that ‘became a central part of the consulting-room culture’.12 Freud underwrites this assertion in his Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis (1933): ‘I have been able to say that psychoanalysis proper began when I dispensed with the help of hypnosis.’13 This foreshadows Lacan, who posited that ‘it was by distinguishing itself from hypnosis that analysis became established’.14 Freud, who had fallen under Charcot’s charismatic spell, eventually grew disenchanted with mesmerism’s so-called power as a therapeutic tool: The cathartic treatment, as Breuer had made use of it, presupposed that the patient should be put in a deep hypnosis, for only in hypnosis was available the knowledge of his pathogenic associations, which were unknown to him in his normal states. Now hypnosis, as a fanciful, and so to speak, mystical, aid, I soon came to dislike; and when I discovered that, in spite of all my efforts, I could not hypnotise by any means all of my patients, I resolved to give up hypnotism and make the cathartic method independent of it.15

Freud may have resolved to eradicate the actual practice of hypnosis from his professional methods, but he subtly transposed key elements, such as the environmental conditions used in the induction and production of hypnotic states, and reworked them in his development of psychoanalysis. On top of the lines that comprise this clinical history, other cartographies and cultural coordinates are grafted. Freudian thought was shaped by the campaign to traverse and ‘reclaim’ Central Africa, the

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last great void in European geographical knowledge, as well as by the anthropological texts that benefited from this enterprise. The prodigious literary output of the evangelical orders vouchsafed a complex portrayal of African manners and mores based on first-hand reports of missionaries living abroad. Its pages were packed with accounts of tense face-to-face encounters between missionaries and local medicine-men; more often than not, these narratives sought to neutralise a paranormal threat by re-imagining the witchdoctor as a bogus conjurer or shoddy huckster. However, portrayals of the indigenous shaman, as found in such publications as the Juvenile, retained a residual power to disturb. Evangelical theology was predicated upon the binary categories of good and evil; therefore, a belief in God and the redemptive agencies of Christianity also implied the existence of Satanic and diabolic influence. Consequently, missionary depictions of the native witchdoctor painted him as an exaggerated darkling, a melding of sage, healer and hierophant. The mesmerist that features in fin de siècle fiction is the shadowy reincarnation of the Central African witchdoctor as popularised by missionary periodicals. It has never been the intention of this book to argue that psychoanalysis evolved exclusively out of the missionary campaign in Africa. The history of the evangelical enterprise continues to be interpreted reductively and often casts the missionary as a gullible pawn of imperial overlords. By illuminating, however, the complexities of evangelical philanthropy, this book has plotted genealogical lines that link together the missionary, the native witchdoctor, the clinical and stage mesmerist, and the analyst. Furthermore, the Gothic mode that reappeared in the latter part of the nineteenth century underwent a reinvigoration partially as a result of missionary chronicles of Central African tribal culture. David Punter posits that the enduring popularity of the Gothic throughout the nineteenth century can be understood in terms of its ‘peculiar nature’ as ‘a para-site’.16 Punter contends that the ‘Gothic exists in relation to mainstream culture’ in a manner analogous to a parasite and the host. Julian Wolfreys develops Punter’s thesis to prioritise ‘the spectral’ as ‘the parasite within that site, or, that parasite, which we call modernity’.17 This frustrates all attempts to explain ‘modernity’ in teleological terms, because haunting ‘disrupts origin and eschatology’.18 Wolfrey’s notion echoes Homi Bhabha’s belief that the elaborate architecture of modernity reveals fissures insufficiently camouflaged by the dominant discourse; such fissures ultimately reveal a bloody colonial heritage. Conan Doyle’s short story, The Parasite, with its dark faces and exotic traces, exposes a ‘time-lag’ in which the revenants of a colonial past can

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make their uncanny return; the olive-skinned figures of mesmeric fiction embody a tangled narrative of empire rooted in the consequences of cultural and racial miscegenation, and his cross-fertilisation generates new genealogical and generic maps that encode, at a micro-level, specific histories of European imperialism. Julia Kristeva demonstrates that this ‘heterogeneity of biology’ and psychoanalysis both produce uncanny foreignness: The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners. Therefore Freud does not talk about them. The ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics: it would involve cosmopolitanism of a new sort that, cutting across governments, economies, and markets might work for mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious – desiring, destructive, fearful, empty, impossible.19

The notable accomplishment of literary sensationalism, imperial romance and mesmeric fiction is to expose not only how we are ‘all foreigners’, but also to map what Adorno and Horkheimer call a Europe of ‘two histories: a well known, written history and an underground history. The latter consists in the fate of the human instincts and passions which are displaced and distorted by civilisation.’20 Re-Imagining ‘The Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature has addressed the many ways in which blank cartographical spaces obsessed the European literary imagination in the late nineteenth century. The primary sources – forgotten Victorian novels and misconstrued short stories, unpublished manuscripts, overlooked magazine entries (re)discovered during archival research – return to haunt not just the modern moment, but also an academic discipline in which postcolonial scholars have imprudently branded evangelical philanthropy a thinly veiled tool of colonial pacification. The primary material speaks about how European modernity and postcolonial studies have variously sought to repress oppositional voices that threaten to destabilise a form of historical absolutism that both seek to perpetuate.

Notes 1. Nordau, 1895: p. 5. 2. Ibid., p. 5. 3. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Leather Funnel’, from Tales of Unease (Ware: Wordsworth Limited Editions, 2000), p. 151. 4. Ibid., p. 154. 5. Ibid., p. 154. 6. Ibid., p. 155. 7. Ibid., p. 155.

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234 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Winter, 1998: p. 346. Ibid., p. 348. Ibid., p. 348. Ibid., p. 348. Ibid., p. 348. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis (Part II), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, Vol. XVI (London: The Hogarth Press, 1963), pp. 241–463 (p. 292). Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 273. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis’, The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. XXI (April, 1910), pp. 181–218 (p. 191). David Punter, ‘Introduction: Of Apparitions’, in Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999), p. 3. Wolfreys, 2002: p. 2. Ibid., pp. 2–3. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 192. Adorno and Horkheimer, 1982: p. 231.

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Index

Aberger, Peter, 110 Achebe, Chinua, 47, 63, 75n Adorno, Theodor, 189–90, 233 Alighieri, Dante, 107, 114, 132, 145n Arendt, Hannah, 134–5 Armstrong, Richard, 149–50 Baines, Thomas, 102 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 215 Benjamin, Walter, 149, 185–6, 219 Bernheim, Hippolyte, 167, 230–1 Besant, Walter, 79, 81 Bhabha, Homi, 21 The Location of Culture, 15, 19, 21, 22n, 41–3, 57, 59n, 87–8, 95n, 139–9, 146n, 197–9, 201, 232 Bivona, Daniel, 151–4 Blake, William, 90 Booth, William, 7, 10 Brantlinger, Patrick, 100, 105 Browne, Thomas, 103 Buchanan, Robert, 209–10, 214n The Charlatan, 165, 168, 175, 189, 197, 201, 217–19, 221 The City of Dream, 210–11, 215–16 Buck-Morss, Susan, 184–5 Burnand, Francis, 178–9 Butler, Erik, 175 Cavallaro, Dani, 200–1, 225 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 188 Chambige, Henri, 172–3 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 154, 165, 167, 230–1 Christensen, Allan Conrad, 177 Church Missionary Society, 16–17, 24, 63n, 82, 104–5 Cixous, Hélène, 54, 60n, 86, 108 Coetzee, J. M., 143

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Collins, Wilkie The Moonstone, 168, 175 The Woman in White, 173 Comte, Auguste, 44, 48n Conrad, Joseph, 36, 47, 124, 127, 131–2, 141, 226 A Personal Record, 106–7 Heart of Darkness, 34, 113–17 Youth, 120n Cox, Jeffrey, 18, 20–1, 25, 40 Cureau, Adolphe Louis, Savage Man in Central Africa, 63–5, 67, 70–2, 76n Curzon, George, 99, 102 Darwin, Charles, 48n, 67, 105, 150, 195, 201n de Brosses, Charles, 44, 51–2 de Puységur, Marquis, 170–1 Derrida, Jacques, 49n, 84, 91, 93n, 99, 112, 116, 128–9, 151, 154, 224 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 207 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 168–9 Dickinson, Emily, 131 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 79, 123, 168, 174 John Barrington Cowles, 196 Sherlock Holmes, 10, 156, 169, 174 ‘The Leather Funnel’, 229–30 The Parasite, 168, 176–7, 189, 191–2, 196–7, 200 du Maurier, George, Trilby, 111, 168–9, 174, 176, 178–80, 188, 197–8, 202n, 217, 224 Ellis, Havelock, 45, 127, 142 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 127–8, 131, 136–7, 143 Engels, Friedrich, 226n

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Esdaile, James, 76n Esty, Jed, 124–5, 134–5 Etherington, Norman, 120n, 152–3, 158 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, 3–5, 135 Fliess, Wilhelm, 150, 167 Ford, Ford Madox, 36 Forman, Ross, 20 Forrest, Derek, 170 Foucault, Michel, 17, 40, 125, 177, 192 Frazer, James George, 66, 150 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 4–9, 20, 28, 42–3, 45, 53–6, 63, 65–8, 75n, 76n, 79–80, 83–4, 86, 88, 92n, 103, 108, 112, 114–16, 137, 141–3, 148–58, 160n, 166–7, 171, 189, 217, 227n, 229–31, 233 ‘A Note Upon the Mystic “Writing Pad”’, 142–3 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 53 Civilisation and its Discontents, 7, 59n, 114–15, 217 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 231 ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, 149 The Interpretation of Dreams, 8, 152, 154 The Question of Lay Analysis, 155 ‘The Uncanny’, 54, 58, 180 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 65 Totem and Taboo, 7, 66–7 Gay, Peter, 66, 149, 167 Gifford, Terry, 204 Greene, Graham, 106 Guérard, Albert, 57 Haddock, J. W., 170 Haggard, Henry Rider, 8–9, 47, 61, 77n, 94n, 104, 109, 111, 123, 148–59, 169, 195–6 Allan Quatermain, 80 Dawn, 148 King Solomon’s Mines, 80–1, 148, 153, 182n ‘Little Flower’, 87–92, 196, 227n She, 8, 148, 152–3 The Days of My Life, 78–81, 92n, 95n, 152, 160n, 179 The Ivory Child, 156, 160n The Wizard, 81–8

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Hammond, Dorothy, 103 Hardy, Thomas, 168, 218, 221 Harley, J. B., 99, 107 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17, 27–8, 47, 49n, 51–2, 155 Hobsbawm, Eric, 17 Hoffman, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, 58, 64–5 Hope, Anthony, 6, 123, 192 Horkheimer, Max, 189–90, 233 Hyam, Ronald, 15, 21 Jablow, Alta, 103 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 180, 182n Joyce, James, 103 Jung, Carl Gustav, 6, 57, 65, 67–70, 74n, 114–17, 119n, 121n, 124, 130, 141, 152–3, 190, 193, 201, 214n, 217 Memories, Dreams and Reflections, 114, 116–17 ‘On Spiritualistic Phenomena’, 193 ‘The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirit’, 68–9 Kant, Immanuel, 26–7, 37n, 49n Keating, Peter, 168 Keats, John, 56 Keppler, Carl, 57 Khanna, Ranjanna, 5 Kipling, Rudyard, 78, 101, 105, 111, 158, 179 Kristeva, Julia, 233 Kucich, John, 137, 139, 141 Lacan, Jacques, 138, 231 Laing, R. D., 125, 127, 144n Lang, Andrew, 79, 87, 95n, 148, 150–2, 157 Le Queux, William, 169 Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, 172 Livingstone, David, 7, 21, 99–101, 118n, 126, 158, 195 Lodge, Oliver, 79, 186, 231 London, Jack, The People of the Abyss, 203–4 London Missionary Society, 16–17, 25–6, 31, 36, 38n, 69, 82 Juvenile Missionary Magazine, 25–6, 28–35, 36n, 37n, 39n, 46–8, 61–2, 72–4, 77n, 82, 86–7, 104, 123, 155, 157–8, 172, 174, 178, 203–4, 232

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Index Long, Crawford, 184 Luckhurst, Roger, 92n, 190 Mackay, Alexander, 73–4 Mannoni, Dominique-Octave, 117 Mansel, Henry Longueville, 173, 179 Marconi, Guglielmo, 186–8 Marsh, Richard, The Beetle, 111, 174, 176–7, 189, 199, 202n, 210, 215, 219–26, 227n Marx, Karl, 19–20, 45, 49n Maughan, Steve, 37n Mazlish, Bruce, 148–9, 158 Mearns, Andrew, 9 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 165–6, 171 Miller, Henry, 153–4 Miller, J. Hillis, 69 Moffat, Robert, 31, 39n Mohamed, Abdul R. Jan, 41 Monsman, Gerald, 81, 85, 93n Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 139 Moretti, Franco, 107–9 Nordau, Max, 8, 229–30 Oliphant, Henry Ernest Clark, The Charlatan, 168, 174, 176, 197, 199, 201, 210, 212–13, 215 Patterson, Annabel, 204–5 Paul, Jean, 103–4 Pietz, William, 44 Pike, David, 216–17, 226n Punter, David, 7–8, 136, 232 Purcell, Edward, 178 Pykett, Lynn, 168 Reade, William Winwood, Savage Africa, 1–3, 146n Rhodes, Cecil, 6 Richardson, Robert, 207–9 Ryan, William, 216 Said, Edward, 15, 17–19, 21, 41–2, 48n, 81, 99, 102 Sanders, Mark, 123, 125, 137 Schreiner, Cronwright, The Life of Olive Schreiner, 126–7, 137, 142, 144n Schreiner, Olive, 102, 118, 123–43, 144n, 148, 151–2, 210, 219, 224–5 Dreams, 131–4 ‘The Psychology of the Boer’, 128

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The Story of an African Farm, 123–4, 131, 134–43, 212 Thoughts on South Africa, 124, 129 Shapple, Deborah, 135–6 Showalter, Elaine, 123–4 Smith, Sydney, 15 Snead, James, 17, 52–3 Society for Psychical Research, 68, 79–80, 92n, 186 Sontag, Susan, 118n Southon, E. J., Hints for Missionaries Proceeding to Central Africa, 31–3, 37n, 41, 223 Stallybrass, Peter, 217, 221 Stanley, Brian, 16–17 Stanley, Henry Morton, 10, 100, 203–4, 222 Stead, W. T., 9, 87 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 78, 123, 158 Treasure Island, 81 Stewart, James, Dawn in the Dark Continent, 19, 25–6, 35–6, 42 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 168, 174–7, 182n, 190, 210 Stott, Rebecca, 116 Swift, Jonathan, 2, 17, 20, 103, 111 Thiang’o, Ngu˜gı˜ wa, 4–5 Thomson, Joseph, 61–2 Tibawi, Abdul Latif, 18 Tymms, Ralph, 57 Verne, Jules, 109 All Around the Moon, 110–11 Five Weeks in a Balloon, 109–13, 116, 130, 141, 218 Wagner, Richard, 6 Watt, Ian, 20 Wells, H. G. The Island of Doctor Moreau, 3, 100 Tono-Bungay, 221 White, Allon, 217, 221 Wilde, Oscar, 75n, 148, 209 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 10, 57, 180 ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, 209 Williams, Raymond, 205 Winter, Alison, 166, 173, 175, 190–2, 230–1 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, 182n Wolfreys, Julian, 54, 83, 223–3, 232

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