SOURCE: Mazlish, Bruce. “A Triptych: Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, Rider Haggard's She, and Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race.” Comparative Studies in Society and History: An International Quarterly 35, no. 4 (October 1993): 726-44.

In the following essay, Mazlish examines the influence of H. Rider Haggard's novel She on Sigmund Freud and the influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Coming Race on Haggard before discussing how the three men understood ideas about race, gender, and imperialism in order to show how Africa was commonly used in nineteenth-century discourse as a symbol of the repressed consciousness.

Culture, one of the keywords of our time, became common, as Raymond Williams has suggested, in Western discourse in the early nineteenth century.¹ Subsequently, pushed by both anthropological and literary-aesthetic studies and extended to global dimensions, the concept of culture, which supposedly expresses primordial naturalness and the irrational, is often played off against its counterpart from the...