Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality Beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt

Abstract

H. Rider Haggard’s fiction has not often been connected with forms of the gothic in Victorian culture, and yet it contains many of the regular motifs of the gothic tradition. Indeed, in his book on the gothic, Devendra P. Varma contends that Haggard’s literary style was influenced by that of Beckford in Vathek (1987, 133). At a purely mechanistic level, Haggard’s best known works deploy typical tropes of gothic fiction to create dramatic situations of terror: the sealed tomb and labyrinth of King Solomon’s Mines (1885), the death pit of She (1886), the eerie bat-infested pyramid tomb of Cleopatra (1889), the torture dungeon of The World’s Desire (1890). In the most derivative example, Thomas Wingfield, the hero of Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), watches helplessly as Spanish priests bury alive in a dungeon wall a nun and her illegitimate baby (Haggard 1908, 66–7).1 In addition, powerful and menacing figures who control and manipulate other characters by the exertion of dark preternatural or supernatural forces are central in many texts: the witch-like Gagool; Ayesha (and her priest); Harmachis, high priest of Isis in Cleopatra, and Cleopatra herself; Meriamun, the Pharaoh’s queen in The World’s Desire; Swanhild in Eric Brighteyes (1891). Add to these a stock of amulets, powders and poisons, resurrected corpses, dangerous shrines, murdering priests, curses and haunt-ings, Faustian pacts, ghostly temples, scenes of bondage and seduction, phantom ships and prophesies of doom, and the stories become reflections of a gothic sensibility.