The Morlock-Eloi Illusion: Shifting Monstrosities in H.G
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121 ALEXANDER SCHERR The Morlock-Eloi Illusion: Shifting Monstrosities in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine in the Context of the Degeneration Discourse Physical and Moral Monstrosity in Late-Victorian Literature and Social Discourse The 19th century did not only see an abundance of monsters in British (and other European) literature. The monsters that appear in so many fictional works from the Romantic to the late-Victorian period are also fairly different in kind. As Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson (2016) show in their article on "The Changing Face of the Nineteenth-Century Monster," there are two main tendencies that tentatively point towards a typology of monstrosity. On the one hand, many monsters in 19th-century literature display a hideousness in outward appearance that is best described in terms of "physical deformity" (Six and Thompson 2016, 238). This is the kind of abject monstrosity (in Julia Kristeva's sense) that the narrators of Gothic texts find so difficult to verbalize because the abject disturbs the binaries of 'man' vs. 'animal,' 'male' vs. 'female,' or 'civilized' vs. 'savage' (cf. Kristeva 1982, 4). On the other hand, literary texts of the time show interest in inner or "moral monstrosity" (Six and Thompson 2016, 240), and thus in forms of the monstrous that articulate "invisible and potentially ubiquitous" tendencies in British society (238). 'Monstrosity,' in this second sense, denotes an eccentricity in behaviour that is deemed 'morbid' or socially inacceptable, "a thing which is outrageously or offensively wrong," as the Oxford English Dictionary specifies (2.a.). While the distinction between physical and moral monstrosity possesses heuristic value for an interpretation of 19th-century literature, it is important to see that both forms can overlap and enter different configurations.1 They can therefore also simultaneously be at work in a given literary text and are often interlinked. This is especially interesting to observe in several late-Victorian works, among which H.G. Wells' novella The Time Machine (1895) is a striking example. Like many other Gothic texts of the fin de siècle, Wells' scientific romance has fruitfully been read in the context of contemporary fears of 'degeneration.'2 The present article will follow in the footsteps of these historically informed approaches. However, 1 For example, in his notorious 1876 publication L'Uomo delinquente, Cesare Lombroso, the founder of so-called 'anthropological criminology,' went so far as to classify criminals according to "visible signs in the skull, face and body" (Taylor 2007, 14) such that physical monstrosity would here appear as a yardstick for moral monstrosity. For Lombrosian criminology and its role in late-19th-century literature, see Olson (2013, 275-301). 2 Other texts include, but are not limited to, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894), Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Excellent overviews, with a particular focus on the degeneration context, are provided by Hurley (2002) and Byron (2012). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 30.3 (Winter 2019): 121-133. Anglistik, Jahrgang 30 (2019), Ausgabe 3 © 2019 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 122 ALEXANDER SCHERR instead of merely historicizing Wells' novella, my aim is to unveil the paradoxes and contradictions that emerge once The Time Machine is placed in the degeneration context, and that complicate efforts to identify the morally monstrous in the text. My primary methodological concern, then, is the more general question of how to read monsters in Gothic literature. In order to elucidate this interest, I am taking my cue from J. Halberstam's take on the Gothic as a "rhetorical system" (1995, 3). According to Halberstam, the Gothic "refers to an ornamental excess […], a rhetorical extravagance that produces, quite simply, too much." The result is "interpretive mayhem" in which "meaning itself runs riot" (2).3 While the uncanny semantic overshoot produced by Gothic texts could thus be regarded as a kind of 'monstrous rhetoric,' I hypothesize further that a similar kind of rhetoric pertains to the degeneration discourse at large. Late-19th-century fears of degeneration are a prime example of a 'monstrous discourse' not only because they were centred on monstrosity in the form of bodily and cultural decline. Similar to what Halberstam posits for Gothic literary texts, the degeneration discourse is also marked by a semantics whose meaning can never fully be mastered by a single subject participating in it and which is uncanny or monstrous in precisely this sense.4 This hypothesis can be substantiated by linking degeneration to both physical and moral monstrosity. With regard to the physical framework, fears of degeneration Winter Journals emerged in a post-Darwinist climate in which a number of scientists began to perceive the boundaries between the 'human' and 'animal' as unstable (cf. Hurley 1996, 55-64; Richter 2011, 1-16). Some late-19th-century scientists even deemed it possible that "the Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) evolutionary process might be reversible" (Hurley 1996, 56), and that standards of humanity and civilization might regress into "sordid animalism" (56). H.G. Wells himself, who was scientifically trained and well familiar with the theories of Darwin, for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution Thomas Henry Huxley and Edwin Ray Lankester, considered this scenario in an article tellingly entitled "Zoological Retrogression" (Wells 2000). By stating that "there is almost always associated with the suggestion of advance in biological phenomena an opposite idea, which is its essential complement" (2000, 6), Wells does not only suggest that the emergence of humankind might have an "evolutionary antithesis" (6). He also concludes that such "degradation" might come about relatively quickly as "rapid progress has often been followed by rapid extinction or degeneration" (12). Even though scientific theories of degeneration or 'devolution' were hardly in keeping with the way in which Darwin had originally conceptualized natural selection in On the Origin of Species (1859), one can quite easily see how they are connected to concerns 3 A similar point is made by the editors in their introduction to this focus issue. 4 As Halberstam heavily builds on Foucault, it seems legitimate to ask if discourse analysis could draw inspiration from monster theory in the same way. When Foucault argues that subjects contributing to discursive formations participate in "a web of which they are not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea" (1972, 126), he almost seems to give voice to experiences of Gothic uncontrollability and uncanniness. I would therefore posit that a Foucauldian type of discourse analysis informed by monster theory would be particularly attentive to the semantic shifts that are at work in discursive formations, thus rendering processes of meaning-making difficult to master. Anglistik, Jahrgang 30 (2019), Ausgabe 3 © 2019 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) SHIFTING MONSTROSITIES IN H.G. WELLS' THE TIME MACHINE 123 about bodily decline. To mention only one literary example, this fear is articulated in a striking way in Arthur Machen's Gothic novella The Great God Pan, in which the monstrous female antagonist Helen Vaughan metamorphoses "from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast" (2006, 66). In the biological context, then, degeneration was fashioned as a scientific theory that has obvious implications for human physicality and, hence, for the category of race. But degeneration was also a moral concern. Nowhere is this clearer than in Max Nordau's notorious work Entartung (translated from German into English as Degeneration in 1895), in which the author famously evoked an image of the European fin de siècle as a period of cultural downfall. Dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, Nordau's book is highly informed by the prevalent biological and (pseudo-)scientific ideas of its time. However, it is less a scientific work in its own right than a diatribe against cultural trends that, as the author believed, represented a form of moral monstrosity or 'degeneracy:' "That which nearly all degenerates lack is the sense of morality and of right and wrong. For them there exists no law, no decency, no modesty" (Nordau 1895, 18). This diagnosis was put forward, in particular, with regard to a number of artists whom Nordau variously labelled "decadents" and "aesthetes" (cf. 1895, 296-337). With respect to Britain, his animus is directed primarily against Oscar Wilde. The following passage lists several of Wilde's personality traits that irritate Nordau: Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works. Like Barbey d'Aurevilly, whose rose-coloured silk hats and gold lace cravats are well known, and like his disciple Joséphin Péladan, who walks about in lace frills and satin doublet, Wilde dresses in queer costumes which recall partly the fashions of the Middle Ages, partly the rococo modes. He pretends to have abandoned the dress of the present time because it offends his sense of the beautiful; but this is only a pretext in which probably he himself does not believe. What really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about. It is asserted that he has walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his head, and a sunflower in his hand, the quasi- heraldic symbol of the Æsthetes. (317) Nordau's criticism of Wilde deserves attention because it reveals that degeneration is not only a racial matter endangering the human body; its theorization also rests on assumptions that are both class-based and gendered.