Feminist Interpretations
Light and dark female rivals, Helen and Queen Meriamun, both cause men’s deaths; Odysseus is “beguiled” by the snake of Meriamun, as was Eve, and the Argive Helen dwells with death, yet she is “beauty’s self.” These characters represent abstractions, rather than individuals. The hero is the ideal to which the reader is meant to aspire, but Haggard and Lane fuse together in their depiction of the fierce Meriamun. Meriamun is an embodiment of the independent New Woman they strongly disliked, however they cannot help their attachment to the character.
Read more about this topic: The World's Desire
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“With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping “homeliness” entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all “sentiment” is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called “the Public,” the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.”
—Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)