Who is "She"? Rider Haggard, the Queen of Sheba and the African landscape
Despite cursory mention in the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles, the Queen of Sheba plays a vital role in prefiguring the establishment of a vast, yet much maligned typology of female empowerment and the female other in late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature. Testing Solomon�...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2004
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| In: |
Journal for semitics
Year: 2004, Volume: 13, Issue: 1, Pages: 82-94 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | Despite cursory mention in the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles, the Queen of Sheba plays a vital role in prefiguring the establishment of a vast, yet much maligned typology of female empowerment and the female other in late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature. Testing Solomon's wisdom placed her firmly outside the established parameters of acceptable female behaviour, while appropriating a claim to an alternate source of "wisdom". Hence she became, in religious tradition, the exemplar of the strange woman - the female figurehead of the strange, "dark", unknown, frightening and exhilarating African continent of nineteenth and early twentieth century explorers' lore. Her association with a mythical, magical, sexually imbued and politically loaded colonialist portrayal of all things African in the late Victorian and early twentieth century writings of Rider Haggard is the object of inquiry in this paper. The collective "She" becomes the embodiment "of complex dynamics of colonial desire and power which lie behind the persistent need to reappropriate the libidinous spaces imputed to non-Western cultures". She is the counter-Victoria. As biblical backdrop, Sheba in Western tradition is measured against Haggard's African references : the rain-queen Modjadji, the white woman of Brandberg, and so forth, with particular emphasis on Haggard's attempts at conforming the non-conformable "African queen" to colonialist standards in terms of physical landscape, assigning a biblical heritage to the queen and her people, skin colour, comparing her to Western standards of physical beauty, etc. This paper investigates and compares Haggard's conceptual framework for his portrayal of She in both the biblical and post-biblical material, to that which his education and travels would have exposed him in terms of examples of female rule in Africa. This leaves the paper to comment on the enduring influence of Haggard's conjoined portrayal of the biblical and African female sovereign on Western consciousness. In the nineteenth century, European travellers in Africa set themselves three epic tasks : to travel to the fabulous Timbuktu, locate the sources of the Nile, and relocate the lost city of Ophir and King Solomon's mines. Ironically, the first quest ended in frustration in a dusty trading town on the southern fringes of the Sahara, the second in rancor and an unseemly death, and the third in denial and fantasy. Ophir was a chimera. Although a monumental city was located on the Zimbabwe plateau in central Africa, Great Zimbabwe was not the biblical Ophir, and all attempts to cast it as the stage for ancient settlers out of the civilizations of the Middle East failed. My favourite anecdote involves a series of psychic séances that were held there. The participants "discussed" ancient life with the conjured spirits of the "ancients", which says something about psychic experiences and the wishful thinking of not only these parties but all the many others who laboured hard to invest the monumental towns of Zambezia with a fancy not their own (Vogel 2001 :xv). |
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| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal for semitics
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| Persistent identifiers: | HDL: 10520/EJC101024 |
