Haunted by Love and Marriage: She and Heart of Darkness

Rider Haggard’s She and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are very different books. She is an adventure romance of well over 100,000 words while Heart of Darkness has somewhat less than 40,000 words and is grim and impressionistic. And yet in 1983 Allan Hunter [1] suggested that Heart of Darkness is a parody of She. A few years after that Murray Pittock [2] published a list of correspondence between the two. More recently Johan Warodell [3] has given us a detailed comparison of Conrad’s Kurtz and Haggard’s Ayesha. This paragraph from Stephen Tabachnick [4], citing Pittock, will give you an idea of the similarity between these two superficially very different texts (p. 190):

Pittock specifically notes several parallels of plot and character, as follows. First, both stories “concern journeys undertaken to meet a mysterious character in the heart of Africa, in both cases white, recalling the legends of Prester John” or of Mujaji, the white-skinned queen of the Lovedu tribes in the Transvaal. Second, “Both journeys into the interior are by river, and, like Marlow’s, the helmsman of Holly and Leo is killed as a result of the action of the natives before either of the protagonists can reach his destination.” Third, in both works, the great age of Africa is part of the mystery. Fourth, the “technological superiority” of the contemporary explorers is “a feature of both books.” Fifth, “Marlow’s first sight of Kurtz echoes Holly’s last sight of Ayesha in She, as one terribly aged: ‘I could see the cage of his ribs [and] the bones of his arms moving.’” Sixth, both Holly and Marlow witness secret rites: Marlow “encounters Kurtz in the wood during the rites of the African sorcerer..., which echoes Holly’s solitary witnessing of Ayesha cursing her dead rival, Amenartas.” And last, neither Kurtz’s soul nor Ayesha’s knows any restraint and both “yearn for power.”

Beyond that I would note that both books are haunted by marriage.

Before we ever see Kurtz we see a painting he made of his Intended; moreover, we learn that he journeyed into Africa’s interior so that he could make his fortune and thus be worthy of his Intended, at least be worthy in the eyes of her family. This is from Marlow’s conversation with that woman:

And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

Kurtz sought to enrich himself through empire so he could return home and get married. That’s what interests me, the relationship between marriage and empire that marks the outer boundary of Heart of Darkness.

It’s there in She as well. In Chapter 22, “Job Has a Presentment”, Ayesha is talking with Leo and Holly:

“Almost dost thou begin to love me, Kallikrates [that is, Leo],” she answered, smiling. “And now tell me of thy country–‘tis a great people, is it not? with an empire like that of Rome! Surely thou wouldst return thither, and it is well, for I mean not that thou shouldst dwell in these caves of Kôr. Nay, when once thou art even as I am, we will go hence–fear not but that I shall find a path–and then shall we journey to this England of thine, and live as it becometh us to live. Two thousand years have I waited for the day when I should see the last of these hateful caves and this gloomy-visaged folk, and now it is at hand, and my heart bounds up to meet it like a child's towards its holiday. For thou shalt rule this England––“

“But we have a queen already,” broke in Leo, hastily.

“It is naught, it is naught,” said Ayesha; “she can be overthrown.”

Of course, things didn’t work out that way at all. Ayesha died in the Pillar of Life and Leo went off to Tibet in search of wisdom. But the whole preposterous story is inscribed in the relationship between empire and marriage.

What could that relationship be, in either text? It’s not causal in either direction. And to say it’s (merely) symbolic is not quite right. Both stories tell of men adventuring into the unknown. But the territory where they conduct their adventure, Africa, is available through empire and the goal of the adventuring is linked to marriage. Marlow is in search of Kurtz, who wanted to get rich so he could get married; Leo and Holly are in search of Leo’s ancestry, where they find a woman who wants to marry Leo.

I think Leslie Fiedler’s classic book, Love and Death in the American Novel (1966), can give us some idea of what’s at stake. Fiedler argues that, while the 18th- and 19th-century European novel is focused on courtship and marriage, the American novel — which is necessarily based on European prototypes — is about “a man on the run, harried into the forest [e.g., Cooper’s Natty Bumpo] and out to sea [e.g., Melville’s Ahab], down the river [e.g., Twain’s Huck Finn] or into combat [e.g., Crane’s Henry Fleming] — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say, the confrontation of a man and a woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility” (p. 26). Of the European novel Fiedler remarks (p. 25):

The novel, however, was precisely the product of the sentimentalizing taste of the eighteenth century; and a continuing tradition of prose fiction did not begin until the love affair of Lovelace and Clarissa (a demythologized Don Juan and a secularized goddess of Christian love) had been imagined. The subject par excellence of the novel is love, or more precisely–in its beginnings at least–seduction and marriage; and in France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, even in England, spiritually so close to America, love in one form or another has remained the novel’s central theme, as necessary and as expected as battle in Homer or revenge in the Renaissance drama. But our great Romantic Unroman, our typical anti-novel, is the womanless Moby Dick.

Haggard and Conrad are writing at the end of that version of the European novel. Both are stories of men lighting out for the territory like American novels, but both are as well haunted by love and marriage.

The analytic trick, it seems to me, is to figure out the imaginative objects and forces got reconfigured as we move from She to Heart of Darkness. Ayesha becomes the Intended, Leo becomes Kurtz, Holly becomes Marlow, and the unnamed editor of She becomes the unnamed auditor on the deck of the deck of the Nellie who then conveys Marlow’s story to us. And that’s just the beginning of the analytic job. Ayesha is a much more active character than the Intended; the relationship between Holly and Leo is different from that between Marlow and Kurtz; motives are different; one story traffics in the supernatural, the other note; and so forth. Completing that analysis is a job for another day, and a somewhat longer and more tortured post.

And that analysis is, in turn, preliminary to a consideration of the order of publication. Obviously, She, published in 1886, came before Heart of Darkness, 1899-1900. Why? Is that a matter of mere historical contingency or does it reflect the formal and thematic economy, if you will, of the Anglophone literary system. There is, of course, one respect in which Heart of Darkness could not have been written before She. It is set in the Belgian Congo. Since King Leopold had only created the Free Congo State in 1885; it would take a few years to administer the atrocities Conrad depicts (he sailed the Congo in 1890). But, by that time, European colonialism had centuries worth of depredations to its credit. A narrative like Heart could have been centered elsewhere.

What I’m after, and what I believe to be the case, is an argument that narrative is subject to a psycho-cultural economy such that She has to have been written before Heart of Darkness. Both texts arose in the same cultural system and that system. She reflects an earlier state of that system than Heart of Darkness and this is so, not because of the often contingent events of history, but because of the internal dynamics of that system.

What I’m thinking is that, in this case, that dynamics is that of parody, perhaps even of anxious influence in one of the senses Harold Bloom has theorized. We know that Conrad detested Haggard’s fiction. Did he create the expressive technique of Heart as a way of writing an Africa novel that was utterly different from Haggard’s?

References

[1] Hunter, Allan. Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinsm: The Challenges of Science. London: Croom Helm, 1983.


[2] Pittock, Murray. “Rider Haggard and Heart of Darkness”. Conradiana 1987, Vol. 3 (19).


[3] Warodell, Johan. “Twinning Haggard’s Ayesha and Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz”. Yearbook of Conrad Studies (Poland), Vol. 18, pp. 57-68 Kraków 2011.

[4] Tabachnick, Stephen E. “Two Tales of Gothic Adventure: She and Heart of Darkness” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 56, Number 2, 2013, pp. 189-200.

[5] Fiedler, Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel. New York, Stein and Day, 1966.