ABSTRACT
With its espousal of imperialist ideology, King Solomon's Mines strives to convey the social, political, and ethical values that informed late Victorian conceptions of Africa. Yet the 1885 novel does not provide a seamless, totalizing narrative through which the virtues of imperialism, as envisioned by apologist H. Rider Haggard, emerge as monolithic or incontestable. The gaps in imperialist ideology, which become troubling but traversable interstices in King Solomon's Mines, instead become yawning fissures that cannot be sidestepped in the parodic King. As Daniel Bivona observes, this "culture-wide 'debate'" became "a complex discussion of the foundations both of the modern ideology of imperialism and of the critique of that ideology"—a discursive domain that "eschewfed the goal of simple 'coherence' in favour of revealing the contradictions in these discourses". The chapter focuses particularly on paradigmatic linguistic, behavioral, and epistemological strategies that the parody employs to unsettle this questionable binarism.
