1995:246). Thus in McClintock’s reading the subtext regarding Gagool is “a narrative disciplining of female reproductive power” (McClintock 1995:246).
King Solomon’s Mines, like others of Haggard’s novels, is fiction written for boys and men. It is dedicated, on the front page “to all the big and little boys that read it”. As a girl I read it in a Danish translation, and the fact that it is still in print testifies to its continued powers of fascination, even though more than a hundred years old. It is a story for men, about men; as Haggard (alias Quatermain) explicitly states: “I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history” (Haggard 1885/1994:3), meaning no (white) woman. It is a story about masculine courage and male initiation, as pointed out by Rebecca Stott: it is all about “adventure, tests of strength, morality and decency… a man-centered discourse, clearly focused on the experience of the white male out on the imperial frontier. … The quest motif becomes a quest for and initiation into manhood” (Stott 1989:71).
Similarly, on a deeper level, the story is about sexual exploration and penetration, and about sexual anxieties and fears. Also in non-fiction texts of the period, the lands to be conquered and penetrated are often called virgin lands —just lying there waiting passively to be conquered and penetrated[47]. The metaphor ‘virgin lands’ also points to the idealized image of the white woman: that she should be passive and passionless, gracefully and gratefully waiting for the moment when a man—her husband—would penetrate her, thus introducing her to the happiness of married life. The Victorian ideal of female ‘passionlessness’ fits this image: the woman as ‘the Angel of the House’ and the incarnation of high moral standards, has to be a-sexual. According to Nancy Cott this was a kind of trade-off established by the Church: “Evangelical Protestants constantly reiterated the theme that Christianity has raised women from slaves in status to moral and intellectual beings. The tacit condition for that elevation was the suppression of female sexuality” (Cott 1978:227). Writing about Victorian sexual ideology 1790—1850, Cott further states that “by elevating sexual control highest among human virtues the middle class moralists made female chastity the archetype for human morality” (Cott 1978:223). “Female passionlessness was a key-stone in men’s construction of their own sexuality” (Cott 1978:235).
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In the above quotations a cluster of Victorian/Evangelical Protestant (and by implication White Male) notions of femininity and sexuality are expressed. First the mind/body division, with mind as male and body as female, and male projection of dangerous and tempting sexuality onto women. Secondly the dichotomising of the conception of woman in Madonna/whore: woman-as-body is carrier of sexuality, but even women have a chance and opportunity for salvation, provided that—through efforts of chastity and self-control with passionlessness as a model—they succeed in turning into the Angel-woman pedestal. Sexuality as such is relegated to darker and lower spheres, in Haggard’s world typically under-