She (novel)
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 cover of She: A History of Adventure |
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| Author | H. Rider Haggard |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Ayesha Series |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy novel |
| Publisher | Longmans |
| Released | 1887 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 317 pp |
| ISBN | NA |
| Followed by | Ayesha, the Return of She |
She: A History of Adventure is a novel by H. Rider Haggard, first serialized in The Graphic from October 1886 to January 1887. In reprints it was extraordinarily popular in its day, and it remains in print to the present day (2007).
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
She recounts the adventures of an expedition to an unexplored part of East Africa, where three Englishmen find Ayesha, a beautiful and apparently immortal sorceress, who claims the expedition's leader, Leo, as the reincarnation of her long-dead beloved. (Haggard gives a phonetic rendering of “Ayesha” as “assha”.) She had become ageless and perfectly beautiful more than 2 millennia earlier by immersing herself in a magic flame; she presses the expedition leader now to immerse himself as well.
This character was supposedly inspired by the Balobedu Rain Queen Masalanabo Modjadji. Jung, who admired Haggard's myth-making powers, used She to illustrate his concept of the anima. [1]
[edit] Explanation of the novel's title
The title is short for "She Who Must Be Obeyed", a translation of the Arabic honorific used for Ayesha by the Amahagger, a tribe whom she has enslaved. (The phrase acquired additional significance in British popular culture as the name by which John Mortimer's character Horace Rumpole refers to his wife.) Also, in childhood, Haggard's nursemaid used to menace him with an ugly doll which went by the name "she who must be obeyed".[2]
[edit] Plot summary
A Cambridge professor, Horace Holly and his adopted son, Leo Vincey, travel to Africa, following instructions on a potsherd left to Leo by his biological father. They encounter a white queen, Ayesha, who has made herself immortal by bathing in a pillar of fire, the source of life itself. She becomes the prototypical all-powerful female figure. She is to be both desired and feared. She is a breathtakingly beautiful creature who will not hesitate to kill any one who displeases her or stands in her way. The travelers discover that Ayesha has been waiting for 2000 years for the reincarnation of her lover Kallikrates, whom she had slain in a fit of jealous rage. She believes that Vincey is the reincarnation of Kallikrates.
In the climax of the novel, Ayesha takes the two men to see the pillar of fire. She wants Leo to bathe in it as she did so that he can become immortal and remain with her forever. His doubts about its safety lead her to step into the flames once more. However, with this second immersion she reverts to her true age and immediately withers and dies. Before dying she tells Vincey, "I die not. I shall come again."
Throughout the book Haggard explores the themes of power, life, death, reincarnation, sexuality, and fate.
In the original novel, Ayesha is to a great extent selfish and amoral, caring very little for the feelings or even the lives of others so long as she gets what she wants. However, it is evident that, in the course of writing the novel, Haggard moved away from a purer conception of feminine evil. Indeed, one sees the process of transition fossilized in this sentence from the chapter entitled “Ayesha Unveils”:
- I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil — at least, at the time, it struck me as evil.
In sequel Ayesha (1905) and in prequels She and Allan (1921) and Wisdom's Daughter (1923), Haggard attempted to vindicate her character, and she comes more to resemble the elder Irene of George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie.
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
She has been adapted to film at least nine times (as La Colonne de feu in 1899 and as She in 1908, 1911, 1916, 1917, 1925, 1935, 1965, and 2001, with a dubious further claimant by that title in 1982). The 1925 silent version, starring Betty Blythe, was produced with the active participation of Haggard.
The 1935 black and white version, starring Helen Gahagan, Randolph Scott and Nigel Bruce, is set in the Arctic rather than in Africa, and depicts its ancient civilization in an Art Deco style, with music by Max Steiner, and with convincing (for the time) scenes of destruction. It lost a great deal of money and ended Gahagan's film career.
Some critics, nonetheless, say that this version is artistically superior to the 1965 Hammer Horror color version, set in Africa, which starred Ursula Andress as Ayesha and John Richardson as her reincarnated love, with Peter Cushing and Bernard Cribbins as other members of the expedition. This version was followed by a 1968 sequel The Vengeance of She (alternately “The Return of She” or “Ayesha: The Return of She”), which bears little resemblance to Haggard's work, and was novelized by Peter Tremayne (as The Vengeance of She).
A television series titled She was produced by the South African Broadcasting Corporation in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
There have been several audio adaptations, including at least two from the BBC, the most recent being a Radio 4 broadcast starring Tim McInnerny on 2 and 9 July 2006.
See:
[edit] Popular culture
In addition to Tremayne's book, there are at least three other alternate tales of Ayesha: the first being King of Kor or She's Promise Kept, a Continuation of the Great Story of She (1903) by Sidney J. Marshall; the second being Journey to the Flame (1985:11/01) by Richard Monaco. Unlike Vengeance, King, and Journey, Sherlock Holmes: On the Roof of the World; or The Adventure of the Wayfaring God by Thomas Kent Miller (1987) attempts to fit within the canon of Haggard's four novels — and within that for Sherlock Holmes established by Arthur Conan Doyle. Further, She was rewritten as H. Rider Haggard's She [Retold] (1949) by Don Ward for Dell.
Haggard's She was lampooned by four works in 1887:
- He by Andrew Lang and Walter Herries Pollock
- He, A Companion to She, Being a History of the Adventures of J. Theodosius Aristophano on the Island of Rapa Nui in Search of His Immortal Ancestor by John de Morgan
- He (“by the Author of It, King Solomon's Wives, Bess, Much Darker Days, Mr. Mortons Subtler and Other Romances”) by an unknown author
- It, A Wild, Weird History of Marvelous, Miraculous, Phantasmagorial Adventures in Search of He, She, and Jess, and Leading to the Finding of It; A Haggard Conclusion by an unknown author
(These were collected as They (1978) by Robert Reginald and Douglas Menuille.)
W. H. Auden poked fun at She with one of his Literary Graffiti (a collections of clerihews):
- Sir Rider Haggard
- Was completely staggered
- When his bride-to-be
- Announced "I AM SHE!"
In addition, the story was lampooned in two issues of Justice League Task Force written by Peter David. In these issues, the Martian Manhunter takes on a female form (“Joan J'onzz”) to join an all-female Justice League — Wonder Woman, Maxima, Vixen, Gypsy and Dolphin — in confronting “Her Who Must Be Obeyed”.
In 1887, Window Curtains (1880) by Timothy Shay Arthur, an otherwise unrelated tale of embezzlement, was reissued as “Me” Or the Story of the Window Curtains – A Companion to “She”, and falsely attributed to Haggard.
She was also the prototype of the Empress Jadis in C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew.
[edit] Footnotes
1. Austin, Sue. "Desire, Fascination and the Other: Some Thoughts on Jung's Interest in Rider Haggard's 'She' and on the Nature of Archetypes" Harvest: International Journal for Jungian Studies, 2004, Vol.50, No.2 (Full Text)
2. Fuller, Alexandra. King Solomon's Mines: Introduction, Modern Library Edition, 2002.
[edit] External link
- She, available at Project Gutenberg.
[edit] References
- Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers, 137.
