The Representation of Landscape in King Solomon's Mines - Report Example

Running Head: Representation of Landscape in King Solomon’s Mines Topic: Representation of Landscape in King Solomon’s Mines Various factors play an important role in shaping up one’s perception of things. These include history, societal stereotypes, influential people as well as literature. In the recent past, the world has under gone many changes where its attitude is concerned towards culturally diverse groups of people. This is not just true of people but also of places that imbibe us. This change has been depicted in the study of Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s study of King Solomon’s mines. It gives a different insight into the attitudes of the colonial’s writers towards the land of Africa and its people as well as that of post colonial writers. Haggard is taken a different stance in this regard. He has distanced himself from the stereotypes associated with the mysterious land. The way he has presented the land and its people is in direct contrast with what was presented by other colonial writers. (Tosh 24) Physical setting and landscape have a pivotal role in the British imperial fiction. The subject of most of these fictions is centrally thematic. These works of landscape move beyond an objective explanation of nature. They rather represent a setting which depicts the way Europeans consider themselves to be and their relationships with the world, and it is through this association, that they have depicted the social relations surrounding them. Landscape has been represented in colonial fiction time and again by various writers. Some of the named few ones include H.Rider Haggard and E.M. Forester. In their accounts landscape has been shown as a historically and culturally specific way of exploring the world around. In Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, the landscape has been depicted as the colonizer’s ability to take over native territory. Initially, it is shown that the male colonizer conquers a feminized landscape. This reestablishes the colonization myth that has been there over the year. The role of landscape in this novel is a complex intricate one. It is multifaceted that articulates and delves into cross cultural relationships while showcasing the weakness in colonial rule. On the other hand, a passage to India makes use of landscape as a tool that exposes the dogmatic nature of colonial way of interaction, which could have been left ignored and unattended very easily. Landscape has been narrated by a secondary narrator in A Passage to India and it shows the novel’s imperial ideology. Very clearly, the African landscape as shown in King Solomon’s Mines is completely feminized. The treasure map gives various cues. It shows that the geography of traveler’s routes moulds into a female body. The main obstacle in men’s way in their bid to tame down landscapes is by preserving through the tough climates in the mountains and deserts. However, it cannot be denied that their struggle to survive in the feminized landscape, adds more weight to their masculinity. In King Solomon’s mines, the male has been associated with the colonizer while the feminine objects have been associated with the natives. In this way the novel, propagates the myth of empire, denoting that the Imperial lands were perpetually waiting to be taken over by the Europeans. The landscape has a different kind of appeal for men. It asks them to be prepared for challenges and to prove themselves to be man enough to be able to sustain the perilous geography and go inside the treasure cave. For instance once they had crossed the mountains of Bathsheba’s breasts, it was declared by Quatermine that “The magic of the place, combined with the overwhelming sense of dangers left behind, and of the promised land reached at last, seemed to charm us in silence” (Rider Haggard 109-112).  This depiction of colonization is positive and it highlights the fact that those English men who are deficient on social standing in England can make use of the colonizes to get masculine potency via imperial adventure. The novel’s show of landscape puts a veil on certain pitfalls which are evident in other works of imperial fiction. They include “anxieties of empires” such as miscegenation, corruption and the loss of identity all of which can be seen in imperial fiction at various points. The men at no point in the novel raise questions on their right and authority to explore native land. Infect, they leave to demonstrate a symbolic rape via their removal treasure from the sexual organs in a feminized landscape. This seems to be a natural phenomenon because it balances out the masculinity with the female personality. The men’s entrance in the treasure caves takes form of a metaphorical sexual union that gives a new light and definition to their male identities. (Bush 56-72) On the other hand, there are writers such as E.M Forester. They have responded to this type of gender working in imperial landscapes by compelling the reader to raise questions on their fairness, legitimacy and the kind of authority a colonial figure has to completely transform its landscape and culture. In other texts, such as A Passage to India, landscape and geography have bigger roles to play both structurally as well as thematically by depicting a more complex model of the colonial interaction. The novel is divided into three sections, the Mosque, Caves and Temples, with names of physical places vital to the Indian landscape. The start of the novel highlights the importance of describing the city of Chandra pore elaborately. The entire explanation of Chandra pore is the first sign of the way in which Forester completely abandons the typical exotic imagery of colonial landscape. King Solomon’s mines shows the land of the Kaukauna’s as a complete paradises. Chandra pore does not possess this kind of exotic appeal. It doesn’t charm and it doesn’t repel either. The description of the layout of the city, the climate and the overall vegetation is very matter of fatly. This gives rise to a quality of realism in narrator’s account. It makes the reader believe that the novel will project an unbiased and objective account of the story. The landscape of Chandra pore fails to allure, which is quiet unlike the landscape of King Solomon’s Mines. Forester has gone out and highlighted the illusory nature of various places. He substantiates the grounds that India is not a venture for Bruisers to convene their imperial fantasies. It is rather a real world environment where colonization is fluid, tenuous and comprises of cultural groups. (Haggard 45-68) The USP of Haggard’s maps from the other treasure maps that depict colonial narratives is the fact that his maps are explicitly sexualized. The land while being feminine is literally mapped on body fluids. De Silvestre’s phallic cleft bone turns out to be the organ through which he bequeaths his capital to their respective white heirs. This in effect, gave them the authority and power of befitting the owners of the prestigious treasure. Male colonial inheritance also takes place within its own boundaries. Haggard’s landscape thus hints on the hidden order in the industrial modernity. It is about the struggle and conquest of sexual and labor power of the colonized women of those times. The map also unveils a paradox. While on one hand, it is a vague sketch of the ground on which white men must fight to secure their riches hidden in the diamond mines, on the other hand, an inverted map reveals the diagram of a female body. The body is white spread, eagled and truncated. The only parts that depict female sexuality are the ones that are drawn. The narrative flows in a way that the travelers cross the body from the south. It begins from the head and pan bad water represents it. It is mutilated syntax that shows intelligence and creativity as degeneration site. Right at the center of the map, lay the two mountain peaks which are called Sheba’s Breasts. Through these mountain ranges stretch far and beyond as handless arms. The body’s length is described by the right royal way of Solomon’s Road, taking it from the threshold of the frozen breasts through the navel kop pie and over to the public mound. “Three Witches” is the name of the mound in this narrative and it is represented by a triangle of three hills that have been covered in “dark heather”. This dark triangle does two things. It points as well as conceals the entrances to the two forbidden passages. They are the vaginal entrance in which men are led through by the black mother, Gogol and the anal pit from behind it. Men will crawl through it with the diamonds and a male birthing ritual leaves the black mother, Gogol, all dead from within. (McCintock 67) The female genitals are called the Three Witches on the map. They symbolize the presence and predominance of female powers and of various alternative African claims of time and knowledge. These challenges on imperial power have been denied by inversion and control. Haggard has weaned away the threat emanating from resistant females and African power. Haggard uses “pigeon eggs” to denote gems the size of pigeon eggs to imply the size of gems that the mines were laden with. The white English men gave away three orders, the male reproductive order of patriarchal monogamy, the white economic order of mining capital and the global political order of empire. Both the map as well as the narrative unveils three orders: they are the male reproductive order of patriarchal monogamy, the white economic order of mining capital and the global political order of empire. All these orders are far from distinct, take intimate shapes where their relation with each other is concerned. As a result, all that adventure of mining capital reinvents the white patriarch in this landscape. Haggard’s map depicts the female body as sexual geometry that has been encapsulated under the technology of imperial form. At the same time, it also unveils a dubious camera obscure, for neither reading of the map is complete on its own but on the other hand, it unveils a very shadowy version beneath it of its other side. If one were to align oneself with the masculine aspect of the printed page, he will find that that the points of the colonial compass and the bloods on the map can be easily read and treasure be accessed but the colonized woman will be taken on her head. However, if the book is turned upside down and the female body is set to the right, then the entire male colonial venture becomes vague and incoherent. However irrespective of this notion, neither of the two can exist without each other. Imperial leather heads forth to explore further this dangerous and contradictory liaison that exists between imperial and anti imperial power, money and sexuality, violence and desire and labor and resistance. Gender, Race and Class: In Solomon’s mines, the themes of gender have been very beautifully conflated. Imperial leather offers three relevant and related critiques to the context. In many ways, the book is a sustained quarrel with its project of imperialism, the domesticity cult and the invention of industrial progress. Haggard’s map is intriguing. This is primarily because it offers one a miniature parable for one of the pillars of the book. He depicts that race, gender and class are not distinct areas of experience that exist in complete isolation. They are completely related to each other come in existence through their relation to each other even if it be in contradictory and conflictual ways. In this regard, gender, race and class can be termed as articulated categories. (Scott 34-90) In Solomon’s mines, the diamond mines represent female sexuality, the source of treasure and the site of imperial contest (i.e. racial difference). Gender in this landscape, is not just about sexuality but it also speaks wonders about the imperial plunder and the subdued labor, similarly race is not just about skin color, it is about labor power which has been bestowed and cross hatched through gender. However each of these domains is not completely identical to each other. They just exist through each other; they exist in intimate, reciprocal and contradictory relations. (Chrisman 102-156) At the center of the argument put forward by Imperial Leather is the claim that imperialism is not something that happened before elsewhere. It cannot be separated from the western identity. Infect imperialism and invention of race was the pillars of Western industrial modernity. The development of race in urban areas, gave rise to not just the term middle class, but also to lobbying for dangerous classes such as the working class, the Irish, the Jews, the prostitutes, the feminists, the gays, the lesbians, the criminals, and the militant crowds. Similarly, the domesticity cult was very important provided that the concealed dimension of male as well as female identities wavering and unstable as these were; they were an indispensable element both of the industrial market and the imperial enterprise. One might wonder as to why European men were the most direct agents of the entire establishment. Irrespective, male theorists of imperialism and post colonialism have very rarely felt the need to explore the gendered dynamics of this subject. They were white men who manned the merchant ships and the rifles of the colonial armies, white men who presided over and oversaw the mines and slave plantations, white men who commanded the global flows of capital and rubber stamped the laws of the imperial bureaucracies, and they were European man only who owned 85% of the earth surface by the end of the nineteenth century. European imperialism was on the exterior, a violent encounter with pre-existing hierarchy’s power. These hierarchies took shape of the unfolding of the own inner destiny but as untidy opportunistic interference with various other regimes of power. Such encounters, worked wonders in changing the trajectory of imperialism itself. Within this long and conflictual engagement, the gendered dynamics of colonized cultures were twisted and convoluted in various ways, in their bid to change the shape of imperialism that took place in different parts of the world. Colonized women, before being invaded by the imperial rule were invariably disadvantaged within their societies. They were treated very differently from the sexual and economic labor point of view of colonized men of that time. They took various roles such as slaves agricultural workers, house servants, mothers, prostitutes, concubines of the far flung colonies of Europe and to negotiate not just the imbalances of their relations with their own men but also the huge array of hierarchical rules and regulations that existed in the society back then. These rules and regulations formed the basis of the structure of men and women. Colonial women were also ambiguously replaced within the entire process. Barred from other corridors of the society and of formal power, the experienced the privileges and social contradictions of imperialism very differently from those experienced by colonial men. It didn’t matter, whether they were shipped out as convicts or they were conscripted as into sexual and domestic servitude, where they were upholding the reigns of the empire and bearing it’s sons and daughters or whether they were running schools and hospitals of that’s that, or if they working with their husbands side by side with them in their missionary schools and hospitals, and as wards in remote outposts. However gender is not synonymous with women only. As said by Joan Scott that to study women in isolation perpetuates the fiction that one sphere the experience of one sex has little or nothing to do with the other. Catherine Mac Kino on the other hand is of the view that sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism. Feminism is more about class, race work and money but it is just as much about sex. They are co-joined and cannot be separated from each other. One of the most moving accounts of recent feminist theory has been the deliberation of the fact sexuality and gender are two separate clauses and should be treated as such. (L. Chrisman 56-70) Masculinity on the other hand was most explicitly defined in opposition to felinity. During the time of Victorian England, the issue of gender and the place of the Victorian woman gave rise to a lot of eye brows, speculations and controversies. The emerging new Woman usually would be a middle class woman who enjoyed personal independence in various ways which confronted the patriarchal propriety. The increasing number of women who had started fending and working for themselves presented an affront to the established male dominated British society. They felt threatened by the fact that they had suddenly taken over. There were many men who felt that their masculinity was subjected to immense threat, especially of those whose jobs were lost out to women and the work environment were becoming increasingly feminized. This also paved way for emigration to the colonies which started looking alarmingly more attractive. Julia Bush is of the view that masculine’s at that time was imbibed in the currency of popular imperialism and it peddled at the turn of the century through novelists, poets, journalists, educators, politicians and the returning soldier heroes of the Boer War. British women would only be seen absent from the art of bravery, strength, endurance and self discipline in great epics. Indeed women are rather noticeably absent from every other adventure fiction that was written in that period. There were obviously, various reasons for emigration, the biggest one being the prospects of better life after emigration. The same kind of fear regarding the emerging power of females has been addresses in King Solomon’s Mines. This has been done through the character of Gigolo. The relative absence of females has been very distinctly marked in King Solomon’s mines when the narrator Allan Quarter main points out in the opening chapter that he can safely say that “there is no petticoat in the entire history. “ There are of course two females, Foulest and Gigolo, but the latter was very aged and could not be married. In the landscape sketched by Haggard, a black savage woman and one who is of no use where her role in rearing kids is concerned are of no importance. But they are these two characters that have proven to be crucial in understanding Haggard’s version of masculinity. Fault’s issue revolves around interracial relations while Gigolo’s issue is of primary importance. She has been given unprecedented power given her status as a woman. Moreover she has lived for eons of generations and has the ear of King Twyla, the leader of the Kaukauna’s. She has also been bestowed the power of life or death over the entire kingdom due to her brutal and terrifying acts. Thus the world order shown in this land scope is very un-natural and it is within this un-natural world order, do the three protagonists find themselves. Gigolo is not all about a women who is in the position of power. She is savage; she is primitive and is in line with the theories of racial generation that have stayed around over the last couple of generations. Infect many claim that she has evolved over the course of the years. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species that explained his theory and concept of natural selection had been published some thirty years ago and had influenced an entire generation of Social Darwinist theorists. So much so that now it has been further supported by the various theories of race and generations. (Brantlinger) These theorists have been multi varied they have varied from the criminal anthropologists like Cesar to people like Francis Galton to racist theorists like Vacherie Lapouge and Gustave LeBonz and beyond. Darwins theory is central to human kind rather than simply animals. It has outlined where humanity started. In Haggard’s account, the reign of terror over all the male figures continues to predominate and in the novel also, he is the one who has complete access to the treasures of mines. The last point is of prime importance as it points out the fact that the secret of the production of mineral wealth in South Africa is out and hoped for regeneration of Britain. This regeneration rested in the hands of the labor power of women. The masculinity of the three men is therefore re-affirmed later on when Gigolo is destroyed in the story and any threats associated with New Woman is successfully quashed. The three main characters and their masculinity has been highlited in a very sound manner. This kind of manner serves to compliment the numerous other moments that have been spread throughout the book. Foulata on the other hand, becomes the devout hand maiden of Captain Good while he remained as the sailor. He was aware of the consequences of being a sailor yet he starts to fall for her. This was of course a major problem, one which was acknowledged by Quarter main later on. Foulata agrees upon going wherever Good went but it was then when she started discovering problems that most settlers in Africa faced. In the final scene, of Foulata, she is stabbed by Gagool. Haggard wraps up the entire account by having Foulata agree with different racist prejudices existing in the society as pointed out earlier on by Quartermain. (Scott 56-70) In the map traced out by King Solomon’s mines, the male party follows the upside down version of the female body. As mentioned before, it runs from the Sheba’s Breasts to the Three Witches and eventually a cave hiding the treasures of the mines. The only parts that depict female sexuality are the ones that are drawn. The narrative flows in a way that the travelers cross the body from the south. It begins from the head and pan bad water represents it. It is mutilated syntax that shows intelligence and creativity as degeneration site. Right at the center of the map, lay the two mountain peaks which are called Sheba’s Breasts. Through these mountain ranges stretch far and beyond as handless arms. The body’s length is described by the right royal way of Solomon’s Road, taking it from the threshold of the frozen breasts through the navel kop pie and over to the public mound. “Three Witches” is the name of the mound in this narrative and It is represented by a triangle of three hills that have been covered in “dark heather”. This dark triangle does two things. It points as well as conceals the entrances to the two forbidden passages. They are the vaginal entrance in which men are led through by the black mother, Gogol and the anal pit from behind it. Men will crawl through it with the diamonds and a male birthing ritual leaves the black mother, Gagol, all dead from within. As pointed out by Rebecca Stoff that King Solomon’s Mines does possesses its own female body. This female body is that of Africa itself which is waiting to be explored. The point put forward here is that t while the novel continues to proclaim unrestrained by the presence of females, the entire adventure is based around trying tame down the female landscape. This is precisely why in Solomon’s mines, the masculinity of the English gentlemen has been threatened and asserted very aggressively in their bid to regain dominance over women. This has been done in various ways in the landscape. The heroes can be seen as alive only at the closing aperture of the novel. This is after a battle which revolves around the landscape of death defying struggle through the desert and the defeat of those spawned from the land only, the autochthonic Kaukauna’s... Curtis, Good and Quartermine ended up overcoming feminine landscape by showcasing Victorian manliness. They showed the strength and courage needed in the killing of large animals, the stamina and endurance needed in their survival through climatic extremes. (Cunninghan n.p. ) Works Cited Brantlinger. Victorians and Africans,. 2000. Bush, Julia. "The Right Sort of Woman: Female Emigrators and Emigration to the." Women’s History Review (1994). Chrisman. Imperial Unconscious,.2000 Chrisman, Laura. The Imperial Unconscious? Representations of Imperial Discourse. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Cunninghan, Laura. Association of Young Journalists And Writers. 14 September 2010 . Haggard, Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. London: Penguin, 1994. McCintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the. Routledge, 1994. Scott. The Dark Continent,. n.d. Scott, Rebecca. The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s. 1989. Tosh, John. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain,. 2005. Read More