ground caves and passages.[48] Thus this male-invented split in female sexuality is also presented in Haggard’s novels: virgin lands contra gruesome caverns. The implicitly sexualized landscape is serene and pure—but also threatening.
In the lines of thinking at Haggard’s time, metaphors of imperialism and sexuality were closely interwoven. The land was seen as a female body (‘virgin land’) and the female body was seen as a continent yet to be explored. Freud spoke of the female psychology as the ‘dark continent’ (mysteriously other, unmapped, to be explored). Science, along with imperialism, are conceived as quests for mapping and mastering this unknown Other. Jung confirms the parallels between imperialism and knowledge by talking about Freud’s “passion for knowledge which was to lay open a dark continent to his gaze” (quoted in Stott 1989:85).
As the land so the people. The loaded symbolism of one spills over into the other. According to ‘the great chain of being’ established by evolutionary theory, white man was at the top and black man at the bottom, with various other races in between. Since women in general were perceived as lower, less civilized and more animal-like than men, black women were even further down than were black men. Evolutionary theory had given white man a prime position (of course) but also a savage inheritance by linking civilized whites to apes, and to uncivilized blacks in the hierarchy of stages in evolutionary development (Stott 1989:75). This relationship worked in two interconnected ways, partly as projection of repressed sexual desires to the black man/woman as Other, and partly as a fear of barbarism beneath the facade of civilization. The vision of ‘barbarism’ as opposed to ‘civilization’ had a lot to do with repression of ‘primitive’ sexual energies. In order for the white man—whose prototype is the colonizing male—to maintain civilization and control, disturbing sexual energies had to be kept in check. Thus these constant anxieties and fears “that for the white male explorers confrontation with barbarism in Africa might release primitive impulses in themselves” (Stott 1989:87).
As for projection of repressed male sexuality there were (at least) two types of ‘Others’ on whom such sexuality was projected: (white) women and black—i. e. non-white—women and men. Projection, as pointed out (in a different, yet similar context) by Judith Butler, often involves a double process of disavowal and projection:
[The abstract, masculine epistemological] subject is abstract to the extent that it disavows its socially marked embodiment [including sexuality] and further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female (Butler 1990:16).
In fact, as Butler makes clear, disavowal and projection are crucial parts of the very mechanism of constructing ‘Others’. Also regarding the mechanisms of projection Sander Gilman writes: “The control of the woman’s body becomes the projection of the male’s own sense of lack of control over his own body. Thus the sexualized female is but a projection of his own anxiety about the ‘primitive’ na-
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