Reid, JHM (2015) "She-who-must-be-obeyed": Anthropology and Matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard's "She". Journal of Victorian Culture, 20 (3). 357 - 374. ISSN 1355-5502
Abstract
This essay examines the nineteenth-century debate about an imagined matriarchal past, arguing that it raised significant questions about gender and history. It scrutinizes the interdisciplinary nature of the debate, demonstrating that anthropology and literature intersected in a fraught investigation of ‘mother-rule’. The essay contends that H. Rider Haggard’s novel She (1887) engages in complex ways with anthropological visions of a matriarchal past. The work of the major matriarchal theorists, J. J. Bachofen, J. F. McLennan, John Lubbock, and L. H. Morgan, often seen as triumphalist accounts of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, was beset by tensions about gender, power, and temporality, caught between evolutionary meliorism and nostalgia, between a defence of patriarchy and recognition of cultural variability. Haggard’s She, the essay argues, exposes and deepens the tensions at the heart of the anthropological narrative. Critics have conventionally read She as a matriarchal dystopia, yet the novel offers an ambivalent dramatization of matriarchy, and is attracted as well as repelled by the matriarchal past embodied in the white African queen Ayesha and her people, the Amahagger. More than a femme fatale, Ayesha is sorceress and scientist, harbinger of life and of death; even her violence unsettles assumptions about gender and power. Haggard’s evocation of the Amahaggers’ marriage practices works to question the anthropologists’ hierarchical cultural evolutionism, moving towards an appreciation of plural cultures. The narrative’s insistence on cyclical temporalities also disrupts a linear narrative of progress from matriarchy to patriarchy, conveying the potent attractions of a resurgent female past.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Victorian Culture on 8 July 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2015.1058057 |
Keywords: | Anthropology; matriarchy; interdisciplinarity; Victorian literature; imperial romance; feminism; evolution; progress; dystopia; patriarchy; gender; temporality; history; modernity; survival; imperialism; female violence; H. Rider Haggard; J. J. Bachofen; J. F. McLennan. |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 22 Jun 2015 09:32 |
Last Modified: | 17 Jan 2017 00:50 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2015.1058057 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis (Routledge) |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/13555502.2015.1058057 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:87264 |