다시 읽는 제국주의 로맨스: 『 쉬 』의 자기배반

Abstract

This study is premised on the idea, often espoused by scholars like Sand M. Gilbert and Patrick Brantlinger, that H. Rider Haggards’ She, despite its classification as popular literature or boy’s literature, is concerned about the specific political agenda of the late Victorian society. One of the political agenda of this imperial romance is the Victorians’ anxiety about the racial purity, which was always threatened in the colonial encounter. Current scholarship on Haggard has tended to regard the text as not only expressing the Victorian anxiety but also eventually confirming the imperial myth about racial homogeneity. This study, however, distancing itself from this line of interpretation, asserts that there exist moments of self-disruption or self-betrayal in the text despite its facade of successfully strengthening the imperial myth. It further suggests that the imperialist project, launched by Haggard, of exorcising the Victorian anxiety about racial purity is never to be completed. The author’s project of placing an irreducible distance between the British subject and the racial Other is disrupted by the many unexpected turns taken by his narrative and also by its in-built interpretational possibilities that do not always conform to the authorial intention. Evidence that possibly counteracts the author’s project is not only found in the racial Other but also in the European Self. The destabilization in this work of the Manichean economy structuring the racial identities, this study argues, is exemplified by the arbitrary and fictive nature of “Englishness,” as embodied by the racial heritage of Leo, the supposedly perfect English gentleman. The conclusion of this study is that She turns out to be a mirror reflecting its own ideological working, that is, a mirror reflecting what Pierre Macherey calls the partiality of reflection.