Honestly, I can't bring myself to view the work in those terms, because, frankly, it was written in 1886.
As a modern reader, I read it and thought "Wow, what complete and total arrogance combined with ignorance." It was an interesting read, though, in the sense that it does give one a fairly good idea of how people (well, the British, anyway) viewed the world and its inhabitants at the time.
I'm not sure which two women you mean as start diametric opposites. There are three women in the book, only one of whom is white (that being She), and I found them surprisingly more nuanced than I expected for a work of this nature. I'm not saying that they were incredibly subtle portrayals, but just that She was portrayed as being mostly evil but with a side to her that wasn't completely bad (she went mad over the course of millenia). Then there was Ustane, who for all that she was a "noble savage" (a stereotype that's always gotten on my nerves) was also reasonably complex in her motivations. The third woman, Amenartas, is long dead before the narrative starts, but she too gets a reasonably thorough treatment, to the point where I wasn't sure if her story or the story of She was the right one, and likely the truth lands somewhere in-between and maybe a bit to the left.
So, yes, I agree with you that the book is a giant stereotype and that having a white woman be the queen of a tribe in deepest darkest Africa is offensive, but it's a bit like taking offense at an eighteenth-century novel because the heroine feels her life is over when she's not married by the time she's tweny-eight, or something. It's all about historical context.
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As a modern reader, I read it and thought "Wow, what complete and total arrogance combined with ignorance." It was an interesting read, though, in the sense that it does give one a fairly good idea of how people (well, the British, anyway) viewed the world and its inhabitants at the time.
I'm not sure which two women you mean as start diametric opposites. There are three women in the book, only one of whom is white (that being She), and I found them surprisingly more nuanced than I expected for a work of this nature. I'm not saying that they were incredibly subtle portrayals, but just that She was portrayed as being mostly evil but with a side to her that wasn't completely bad (she went mad over the course of millenia). Then there was Ustane, who for all that she was a "noble savage" (a stereotype that's always gotten on my nerves) was also reasonably complex in her motivations. The third woman, Amenartas, is long dead before the narrative starts, but she too gets a reasonably thorough treatment, to the point where I wasn't sure if her story or the story of She was the right one, and likely the truth lands somewhere in-between and maybe a bit to the left.
So, yes, I agree with you that the book is a giant stereotype and that having a white woman be the queen of a tribe in deepest darkest Africa is offensive, but it's a bit like taking offense at an eighteenth-century novel because the heroine feels her life is over when she's not married by the time she's tweny-eight, or something. It's all about historical context.