We probably need no reminders of how theology, science, and ideology grew increasingly interdependent during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as the Great Chain of Being evolved into the ladder of Darwinian evolution. Justifying class, race, and gender inequality by locating its cause in "Nature" rather than society or God, biology became not only the "science of the political right, but the science of those who suspected science, reason and progress" (Hobsbawm 252). And Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, now joined with his differentiation between "weaker" and "stronger" races, resulted in a racist anthropology which presumed that Western survival and Empire were proof enough of racial superiority. Empowered by language and his civilization, the European could define, erase, exoticize, and violate the people and space he entered.

But there was another genre of popular fiction in the age whose writers acknowledged the world of Imperial conquest, the colonial, and the colonized female even as they revealed the deepest anxieties of Imperial culture -- loss of manhood, identity, and racial purity. Charlotte Brontë's Bertha Mason, Joseph Conrad's Mrs. Almayer, Rider Haggard's Ayesha, or She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and Kipling's native women are all products of English anxieties, primarily about erotic desire and domination, but also about sexually taboo encounters with darker races whose embrace will result in terminal boundary disintegra- {27} tion. Bertha, Rochester's West Indian wife, as so many readers have reminded us, is a nightmare figure, a racial monstrosity: "What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face" (Brontë, 258). Rider Haggard, however, worked his way around the problem of miscegenation even in darkest Africa: his solution was either to kill the African girl before love could be consummated (King Solomon's Mines), or to have his Europeans discover, in "darkest" Africa, a lost white civilization with an almost white female at its heart (Allen Quatermain and She). In She (1887) however, the exquisite, near-immortal, and learned queen meets with a death more hideous than any other in nineteenth-century literature. Sandra Gilbert suggests that the frightful image of the female in Haggard may also be the consequence of anxiety over a new socio-cultural phenomenon -- the emancipated New Woman: Ayesha, or She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed may, she suggests, have been half-consciously modelled on other nineteenth-century works about female assertiveness and the New Woman such as Tennyson's The Princess (1847) and Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883). Conrad's Almayer (1895) is destroyed by two women -- his native wife and his daughter, an unthinkable type of the new half-breed woman. Although he imagines his marriage to the native Malay will evolve into a bourgeois western family with traditional power divisions, Mrs. Almayer, the "savage tigress," with witchlike claws, instead sets fire to curtains and furniture, moves outside his house into her own hut and defies all his efforts to civilize her into domesticity. Yet, Conrad does not simply caricature her. His ambivalence towards miscegenation, imperialism, and gender roles is seen in his dialogical internalization of both the racist and anti-imperialist discourses of his time (see McClure 154). Denied speech for the major part of the novel, the native woman is momentarily, but significantly, restored into both language and history as she rejects her European husband and his civilization, articulates the forbidden wish to expel the colonizer, and is finally indulged by having all her desires met even as Almayer is allowed to die of opium and a broken heart. Even more important for this genre, Conrad allows the mixed marriage to produce a daughter who is not only beautiful, but allowed to speak, smarter than the Europeans and independent enough to choose native Malay life over western civilization.

Other, he carries, like Woman, a double status as powerful destroyer and as "miserable . . . abandoned . . . abortion" (219).

As was the case in economics, so too were the politics of Imperialism and education dominantly masculine. The discourse of Imperialism, gendered by hierarchy and trope, mapped domestic ideology to social paternalism, repeated familiar antinomies and confirmed Victorian myths of manhood and of Empire as paternalistic enterprise that in turn informed the myths of manliness so constructed as to oppose the ordered, disciplined, rational and masculine to the chaotic, childlike, irrational and feminine. Ideas of "character" as secret keys to racial and colonial superiority were popularized by such propagandists as Samuel Smiles, whose Self-Help (1859), Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1887) were enormously influential, easily assimilated, widely translated into almost every European and Indian language, as well as Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. More importantly, they sold more than any of the great nineteenth-century novels. The virtues he extolled were part of his gospel of work, discipline and physical exercise -- all part of the cult of manliness and Empire:

To be perceived as blank, empty, passive, and childlike suggests a sexual, geographic, and social ordering that is at once seductive and threatening.