H. Rider Haggard`s She is a typical imperial in its depiction of white heroes`s adventure among the `benighted` aliens. However, this text is differentiated from other adventure narratives because it has not only the characteristics of the adventure narrative but also implications related to the Woman Question besetting the late Victorian society. During the late nineteenth century, the British Empire was faced with major social problems. Among them were the threat posed by the New Woman to the authority of the British patriarchs and the problems brought about by the racial encounter necessarily accompanied by the imperial expansion of the nation. One of the problems caused by the racial encounter was the threat to the racial purity of the Anglo-Saxon The British imperialists needed to maintain their racial purity in order to keep their exclusive superior status in their colonies and justify the `advanced` nation`s dominion of other `savage` races Yet, as more and more young Britons were sent out to the frontiers of the Empire, there were occasionally found within them some who were not `morally` strong enough and went `native.` These `backsliders` lowered themselves to living with native girls and thus their interracial marriages threatened to deteriorate the racial purity of the Anglo-Saxon. Besides this racial problem, the British Empire during the late nineteenth century found its authority contested by its female subject at home, Women, awakened to their long-dispossessed rights and no longer satisfied with their subjection to men, started to compete with men in the pubic─politico-economic─and the private sphere This paper traces the two social problems of the British Empire within the racial and gender discourse of Haggard`s text. The gist of this paper is that Haggard`s text carries out two political missions: One is to provide a solution to the problem of miscegenation, and the other to deal with and manage the gender problem that the imperialists found threatening their authority at home. The solution provided by the text are as following: Concerning the problem of miscegenation, Haggard`s text puts its contemporary readers` anxious minds at rest by killing off the possible bride candidates of color for the white hero and thus cancelling for ever the possibility of interracial marriage. Since the gender dimension to this text is embedded in the racial narrative wherein the image of the New Woman is projected upon the alien woman, the solution of the racial problem brings along that of women`s rights movement that shook the domestic base of the patriarchal Empire. The conclusion of this paper is that Haggard`s text demonstrates not only the interchangeability of the racial and gender discourse but also the symbiotic relationship between British imperialism and patriarchal ideology.
(0)
(0)