Immortal and Undone: Beauty, Power, and the Women Who Refuse to Die

By Mary Mba (Ph.D.)

When I was a child, Mom was a teacher and had a rich collection of literary work that I always got lost in as my escape. One of the memorable books I read was She—not just the first novel, but the entire trilogy: She, Ayesha: The Return of She, and Wisdom’s Daughter. I didn’t fully understand the cultural implications then, but I was captivated. Ayesha was beautiful, wise, terrifying, and unyielding. She ruled. She didn’t apologize. She lived for thousands of years, and her story stayed with me for decades.

Years later, while teaching Death Becomes Her in my Women in Film course, I began to see it differently and would often reference Haggard’s She in my classes. I’d shown the film many times as an example of visual satire, camp, and gender performance—but something clicked. The themes of fear, beauty, power, and punishment weren’t just superficial. They echoed the same cultural anxieties I had first encountered in She. And so, this paper—and this blog post—was born.

“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”: A Name I Know Too Well

Over the years, I’ve been called that—“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”—not as a compliment, but as an attempt to silence me. To mock my defiance, my curiosity, and my penchant for being a critical and logical thinker. To punish my refusal to bow to illogic or perform submissiveness so unquestioningly. But here’s the irony: they called me that not because I refused to obey—because I asked critical questions, thought outside the box, was creative, pushed boundaries, had a can-do attitude, refused to just conform, and stepped out of line – to improve on and do it even better.

Just like Ayesha.
Just like Lisle.

Two Immortal Women, A World of Fear

In She (1887), H. Rider Haggard introduces Ayesha: a veiled, ancient queen who rules over the lost African kingdom of Kôr. She’s more than beautiful—she’s unbearable to behold. Her gaze kills. Her voice commands armies. But she is also an Orientalist fantasy: white and wise, ruling over “uncivilized” African subjects, her power derived from a mystical fire hidden deep in the heart of Africa.

The novel is a product of British colonial anxiety—a time when the empire was both expanding and crumbling, and Victorian masculinity was obsessed with controlling the “wild” unknown. Ayesha, therefore, is the feminine Other: desired and feared, powerful and dangerous, and ultimately undone by the very mystery that defines her.

Fast forward to Death Becomes Her (1992). Lisle von Rhuman is just as commanding—an immortal beauty who seduces aging celebrities with a potion of eternal youth. Her appearance is coded as exotic but sanitized: a vaguely Mediterranean accent, long flowing gowns, Middle Eastern décor, and a surreal, ageless presence. She lives in a palatial Beverly Hills estate that could double as a temple. Her power, like Ayesha’s, is spiritualized, sexualized, and elusive. We never really know where she’s from. That’s the point. She is Othered, but safely packaged for the Western gaze.

The Psychology of Glamorous Entrapment

From a psychoanalytic view, Ayesha and Lisle embody the Freudian death drive—they don’t grow or evolve, they just loop: around obsession, vanity, loss, and denial. Their beauty is a trap. Their immortality? A gilded coffin.

In Lacanian terms, their reflection becomes their prison. They’re stuck performing an ideal version of themselves, and that performance… slowly falls apart.

From Freud to Lacan to Kristeva, the psychology in both stories is clear: these women are trapped in the mirror. Immortality is not a gift—it’s a loop. Ayesha can’t move on from her past. Lisle is frozen in her aesthetic present. And Madeline and Helen—Lisle’s customers—become grotesque dolls, eternally reapplying paint over decay.

Enter Julia Kristeva. In her theory of abjection, she describes the abject as what we try to cast off in order to be “clean,” “whole,” or “civilized.” It’s the stuff that blurs boundaries—between life and death, self and other, inside and outside. It’s vomit, blood, rot… or a woman whose neck is twisted backward but still walks in heels. In both She and Death Becomes Her, the immortal body becomes abject: a horrifying, leaking symbol of what must be expelled to maintain order—but that refuses to go quietly.

These women don’t live forever.
They perform forever.
And in doing so, they become both icons… and abjections.

Power + Punishment = The Price of Being “Too Much”

Ayesha and Lisle are punished not because they’re evil—but because they’re too powerful. Too commanding. Too unapologetic. Too unknowable. The narratives demand their collapse to restore patriarchal order.

Madeline and Helen, meanwhile, are punished for aging, then punished for refusing to age. Their co-dependent decay isn’t just grotesque—it’s a satire of how society turns women into rivals, then cannibalizes them.

The Exotic Immortal and the Colonial Gaze

Ayesha’s African empire is visually lush but racially caricatured. Her dark-skinned servants speak in broken English. The white male explorers see her as goddess and monster, mother and mistress. Her femininity is both the height of allure and the reason she must be destroyed.

Lisle may not be “colonial” in the traditional sense, but she’s no less coded. She’s timeless, foreign, and unknowable. Her immortality is portrayed as forbidden knowledge—like ancient wisdom stolen from temples—and her body is marked not by race, but by exotic performance. She’s the kind of Other that Hollywood adores: seductive, mysterious, and conveniently unattached to any real cultural identity.

Camp, Queer Time, and Living on the Edge of Decay

Of course, Death Becomes Her doesn’t just lean into satire—it leans into camp. Stilettos on corpses. Lipstick on broken necks. Sequins over splinters. It’s fabulous and horrifying, and queer scholars have long celebrated it for refusing naturalism. The women don’t die. They don’t grow. They just exist, unnaturally and unapologetically.

And that, too, is a kind of resistance.

Ayesha is camp, too—in her high drama, her divine pronouncements, her robes and rituals. She is queen, priestess, diva, and drag.

What Do We See in the Mirror?

When I look at Ayesha and Lisle, I don’t just see fictional women—I see reflections of cultural obsessions. I see what we do to powerful women who don’t conform. I see the fear of aging, the punishment of visibility, and the danger of desire unbound.

But I also see possibility. Performance. Resistance. A touch of the divine.

💬 Let’s Talk

This blog post reflects just a portion of my full academic paper:
📖 *“The Immortal, the Vain, and the Undone: A Comparative Analysis of H. Rider Haggard’s She and Death Becomes Her”
🗣️ What does immortality mean to you?
👁️‍🗨️ What are you refusing to let die?
💅🏾 And what version of you lives forever in the mirror?