H. Rider Haggard and the Victorian occult

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20225703

In themes of spiritualism, Zulu magic, and oriental mysticism that both subvert and support colonialism, H. Rider Haggard depicts British subjects in foreign settings in three novels of the late nineteenth century: King Solomon's Mines, Nada the Lily, and She. Haggard's best known novels were written at the height of British imperialism, when England was exporting its language and culture to its colonies, and inadvertently showing its colonized its methods of advantage and rule which the colonized ultimately appropriated for themselves. Although an avowed imperialist, Haggard's fiction nevertheless demonstrates his empathy for this appropriation, and the occult is the medium through which his subtle subversions of empire, gender and race are presented. In a discourse of the Victorian occult, supported by material from Haggard's diaries and autobiography, this project shows Haggard assigning his fictional Africans supernatural power, and focusing on their imperial tendencies. Informed by his experiences in the seance parlors of late nineteenth-century London, and his apprenticeship as a British civil servant in England's Government House in Natal, Haggard's quest romances demonstrate not only how much the occult was an obsession among colonial Victorians, but also how much race and gender, when privileged by the occult, contributed to colonial attitudes and prejudices about Britain's colonized.