ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with Victorian scholar Patricia Murphy’s Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman. Whereas C. G. Jung believes that Henry Rider Haggard’s Ayesha in She illustrates the anima’s historical aspect, Murphy, using Julia Kristeva’s categories of linear versus monumental/cyclical time, argues that Ayesha illustrates an ahistorical stance. Jung’s approach to history, however, leads to the conclusion that Kristeva’s binary system is a false dichotomy. Ayesha and the anima She represents are neither linear nor cyclical but participate in a larger category of simultaneous time and the ever-present nature of all times within the collective unconscious. Ayesha, as Jung’s ideal representation of the anima, is not ahistorical but pan-historical.
