’Scaping the Body: Of Cannibal Mothers and Colonial Landscapes

Abstract

The New Woman flourished in the 1880s and 90s, a period also dominated by the Scramble for Africa and the high point of what Patrick Brantlinger has termed the production of the myth of the Dark Continent. Just as the periodical press was full of articles on the Woman Question so they were also full of articles on the Africa Question, articles from explorers and colonial administrators about its exploration and its political management. Both subjects of public interest were mediated through discourses of evolutionary progress: what marks out the 'civilized' from the 'barbaric', the natural from the unnatural? In this essay I want to explore some of these connections between the myth of Africa as monstrous woman, intensifying and consolidating in the 1880s and 90s, and the myth and fears about the New Woman growing in the same period, and finally to show how both are determined and shaped by evolutionary debates about the 'nature' of the natural world. I will try to suggest ways in which the two myths leak into each other. Patrick Brantlinger writes: 'Africa grew "dark" as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light.' 1 It grew darkest of all in the final decades of the nineteenth century. However, as this mythologized landscape becomes dark it also becomes distinctly femi-nized in this period. As it became darker (imagined in the words of Brantlinger as 'a centre of evil … possessed by demonic darkness' 2) and simultaneously more feminized, its darkness cast its femininity as increasingly monstrous and 'unnatural'. The peculiarly enduring myth of the Dark Continent, produced by Western writers about Africa in this period, is a distinct fusion of discourses of race, science and gender. Many questions about the nature of gender, of acute importance to European writers troubled by the presence of the New 150 A. Richardson et al. (eds.), The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact