ABSTRACT
In The Burden of Time, Hannah Arendt makes an intriguing connection between boyhood and the imperialist character (Arendt, 1951). Arendt observes that ‘only those who had never been able to outgrow their boyhood ideals’ make ideal candidates for enlistment in the colonial services; ‘imperialism to them was nothing but an accidental opportunity to escape a society in which a man had to forget his youth if he wanted to grow up’. Arendt prefaces the small section she devotes to the imperialist character with the startling observation that imperialism guaranteed a ‘certain conservation, or perhaps petrification, of boyhood noblesse which preserved and infantilised Western moral standards’. The infantilism of imperialism is a subject I would like to explore in this opening chapter on the writer Henry Rider Haggard and his contributions to the culture of masculinity in the late Victorian period. Because Arendt’s analysis is essentially an attack on the totalitarian politics in Europe in the run-up to the Second World War, and because her argument is motivated by the desire to see the moral idealism of youth develop and mature into the good society (which, she argues, in the milieu of Empire they singularly failed to do), her deconstruction of imperialist ideology is framed against the ‘plain insanity’ of imperialism which turned moral idealism into the fraudulent conviction of inherent superiority. What is missing from her summation, although her own analysis shows a sensitivity to the complex workings of ideology and interpellation, is a sensitivity to the question of the fantasy and myth in the political unconscious. The issue is not one of knowledge (the fraudulent conviction of superiority) but one of desire-what is the cultural investment in the ideological figure of the ‘boy’ at the turn of the century? Why is the boy’s story such a powerful myth? What kind of grammar and syntax of desire does the boy’s story articulate for its readers? How desire is channelled (or lived through) in the boy’s story
will form the central motivation behind my reading of Haggard’s African romances.
