Misogyny by Gilmore David D.;

Author:Gilmore, David D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Jungle Queens and Serpents

The theme of the evil seductress luring man into the primitive past finds rich expression in late nineteenth-century English adventure novels, especially those involving explorers on the Dark Continent. In this genre, authors intertwine those dual Victorian icons of primitivism—woman and darkest Africa—into flamboyant images of female perversity. Such hybrid tropes flourish profusely in novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), and various “Tarzan” works by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In these fantasies African women are used as metaphors for bestiality, licentiousness, and regression. For example, Conrad’s powerful novella, which is about civilized man’s descent into chaos and savagery in the colonial Congo, conjures up the spectacular vision of a savage native woman, the embodiment of the call of the wild. His vivid description is worth quoting in full:

She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a light jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knees, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow . . . bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. . . . She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul. (Conrad 1983: 100–101)

In this vision, woman and brute nature are one. The barbaric Black Woman is the symbol of Africa, which is in turn the embodiment of the overripe rendered throughout in the idiom of pathetic fallacy.

The Jungle Queen extends her arms invitingly to the narrator, Marlowe, inviting him to join her in celebration of the lustful animality of the jungle. Distantly glimpsed amidst rotting vegetation, the archetypal siren represents all that is eerie, uncanny, atavistic: that which is beyond understanding, the Dark Continent itself, unknown rites, the occult, tropical fecundity, cannibalism, savagery. As Marianna Torgovnick says, the circularity between the concepts “female” and “primitive” is so complete in Conrad’s work “that it is difficult to tell which set of tropes influenced which” (1990:156).

H. Rider Haggard in his fantasy novel She also creates an African totem-queen to symbolize the sinuous, sinister forces of nature. (Both Freud and Jung thought the two-thousand-year-old heroine perfectly epitomized the feminine impulse in nature [Dijkstra 1996:95].) The nameless goddess is referred to symbolically as “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” thus implying a tyrannical feminine archetype reminiscent of primitive matriarchy myths and Bachovenian anthropology. With reptilian imagery predominating, “She” is presented as something between human and animal. The majestic “She” is a tall, beautiful woman, but, as the narrator says, “with a certain snake-like grace.” She is described as not only

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