The Morlock-Eloi Illusion: Shifting Monstrosities in H.G

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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.

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.

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. In terms of class, the passage betrays an aversion against the dandy lifestyle embodied by Wilde, which Nordau associates with luxury and wealth ("rose-coloured silk hats and gold lace cravats," etc.). As far as gender is concerned, there is an ambivalent allusion to Wilde's "queer costumes," which appear to disagree with what Nordau, elsewhere in his book, calls "normal sexual relations" (13).5 Moreover, he finds in 'decadents' like Wilde a general "aversion […] to all forms of activity and movement" (317). Generally speaking, then, degeneration theorists like Nordau believed that 'decadents' had a corruptive influence on European societies.

5 Homosexuality was (pseudo-)scientifically conceived of as a 'deviant' or 'degenerate' form of sexuality in works such as Richard von Krafft-Ebbing's 1886 study Psychopathia Sexualis. See also Hurley (1996, 71-73; 2002, 198-203).

We are now in a position to understand in what sense the late-19th-century degeneration context can be thought of as a semantically monstrous discursive formation. With reference to Halberstam's notion of "interpretive mayhem," (1995, 2) one can mark significant shifts between the kind of post-Darwinist physical degeneration that expresses anxieties regarding race and the human body, on the one hand, and the kind of decadent or moral degeneration that foregrounds aberrant behaviours in terms of class and gender, on the other. Again, this is not to say that the physical and the moral do not intersect but, rather, that the signifier 'degeneration' requires careful decoding. The theory of degeneration assumed a considerable amount of uncertainty while moving "from biology through sociology, criminology, psychology and ethics, aesthetics, and eschatology" (Ledger and Luckhurst 2000, xxii). As a discourse, it is characterized by "its vagueness – its ability to be pressed into the service of very different social and political agendas" (Taylor 2007, 16). This is the reason why the monsters depicted in late-19th-century Gothic texts are especially challenging symbolic forms to decode. Similar to the shifts that can be identified in the degeneration discourse at large, these monsters carry "the markings of a plurality of differences" (Halberstam 1995, 5-6; see also Cohen 1996, 7-12). The same representation of monstrosity can invite contradictory interpretations. This point will now be further illuminated in a close reading of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Maintaining my central interest in fin-de-siècle fears of degeneration, I will show that semantic shifts regarding the understanding of monstrosity are at work in this Gothic novella. As the title of this article indicates, my argument is inspired by a famous optical illusion known as 'the rabbit-duck illusion.' I propose this image as an allegory for reading Wells' text not so much because it features two animals (in a similar way in which The Time Machine presents two post-human species, the Morlocks and the Eloi). Rather, I capitalize on the philosophical point of the illusion that it is impossible for interpreters to recognize both animals at once; some considerable cognitive effort is necessary to recalibrate the image one sees first. In analogy to the optical illusion, I will argue that Wells' novel stages a similar shift and, in so doing, problematizes the question of which species qualifies as morally monstrous. By pursuing this interpretative trajectory, I aim to respond to one of the seven theses on monsters put forward by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, namely that "'Monster theory' must […] concern itself with strings of cultural moments, connected by a logic that always threatens to shift" (1996, 6).

Shifting Monstrosities in The Time Machine (1895) Reading Wells' The Time Machine in the context of the degeneration discourse requires an initial explanation regarding its narrative form. For even though the greatest part of the novella takes place in the far-distant future, the text is permeated with late-Victorian anxieties. The device used to evoke the Victorian cultural background is the structure of a framing narrative in which the main action, set in the year 802,701 AD, is embedded. In the narrative frame, which makes up the first two chapters of the text and is resumed at the end of the novella (in chapter 12), a crowd of scientifically interested guests gather in the home of the novella's protagonist, a scientist known only as 'the

Time Traveller,' on two occasions. These visits are recounted by one of the guests, who remains anonymous and who serves as a homodiegetic narrator ('I as witness'). During his guests' first visit, the Time Traveller unfolds his proto-Einsteinian theory of time as "a kind of Space" (Wells 2005, 5) in which it is possible to move, and he presents his time machine as a technology with which such travel can be accomplished. Strikingly, the atmosphere is Gothic right from the beginning: the enigmatic Time Traveller leads the way "down the long, draughty corridor to his laboratory" (10) in "flickering light" (11), and the whole scene is surrounded by an air of mystery and incredulity. A week later, on the day of the group's second visit in chapter 2, the scientist has mysteriously just returned from his first time-travel "dusty and dirty" (13), his face "ghastly pale" (13). He then begins to tell what he has experienced in the remote future world, taking over the role of the autodiegetic narrator in the embedded narrative (chapters 3 – 11). One can attribute three significant functions to the interplay of the two different narrative levels (framing and embedded) in the text. First, the device, which is used quite similarly by Wells in The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), serves to authenticate the Time Traveller's weird report. As his guests increasingly turn from unbelievers to believers, the addressee of the framing narrative is likewise invited to consider the possibility of the account's truthfulness. Second, the embeddedness of the Time Traveller's narrative in late-19th-century Britain facilitates a particular rhetoric. It can be read as "a warning that European civilization might deteriorate if current social realities were not changed for the better" (Nate 2015, 24). These contemporary social realities, as we will see, present themselves in disguised form but are still recognizable in the two kinds of monsters that appear in the Time Traveller's narrative. The "Wellsian technique," as Richard Nate felicitously describes this rhetoric, is thus one of "working out future developments through a careful analysis of present conditions" (2015, 25). It is an apt narrative form for articulating fears of degeneration as such anxieties are obviously related to future developments. Third, the framing narrative serves a cognitive function. It communicates to readers that the Time Traveller's observations of the future world are ideologically informed by his late-Victorian background. 'Frames,' in this sense, are "basic orientational aids that help us to navigate through our experiential universe, inform our cognitive activities and generally function as preconditions of interpretation" (Wolf 2006, 5). This is to say that the Time Traveller enters the year 802,701 with a cultural cognitive frame that is Victorian rather than futuristic. As a result of this cognitive framework, the protagonist is predisposed to analyse the world he encounters against the backdrop of the cultural knowledge of his own time, including the kind of knowledge that was generated in the post-Darwinian degeneration discourse. Interestingly, the first thing he espies is the monument of a "White Sphinx" (Wells 2005, 22). The incident is striking for two reasons: first, because a sphinx represents a hybrid creature that is part human and part animal and thus embodies the same kind of liminality that is accentuated by Gothic monstrosity; second, because, in Sophocles' tragedy of King Oedipus, the sphinx is associated with a riddle the correct answer to which is 'man.' In Wells' novella, the White Sphinx therefore evokes the Darwinist question of what the human has become in relation to the animal. At the same time, it presents the Time Traveller with a problem of reading, i.e. the interpretive task of having to recognize in the creatures he will encounter the post-human descendants

of the English people that once existed on the planet. The sphinx thus confronts the Victorian scientist with a set of questions that are reminiscent of late-Victorian anxieties about degeneration: What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness – a foul creature to be incontinently slain. (22) As this passage shows, the Time Traveller's concerns relate to aspects of both gender (loss of "manliness") and race (development into "something inhuman"). Furthermore, it is interesting that the protagonist projects one of the Victorians' greatest fears – that of a "common likeness" between human beings and earlier species – onto the inhabitants of the future world by assuming that they might think about him in the same way, dehumanizing him as a monstrous and "foul creature." In order to see to what extent these concerns are confirmed, it is necessary to analyse the post-human inhabitants of the future world in terms of race, gender and class. Curiously, though, the first species the Time Traveller meets does not seem to qualify as monstrous at all, at least not at first sight. The so-called 'Eloi,' who begin to surround the Victorian adventurer after his arrival, are described as "exquisite creatures" about which there was "nothing […] at all alarming" (24). They are of "a Dresden-china type of prettiness" (24) and absolutely harmless: their mouths are "small, with bright red, rather thin lips," and their eyes "large and mild" (25). Having spent some time in their company, the Time Traveller notes a number of features that are annoying rather than dangerous: for one thing, this concerns the Eloi's intellect, which the Victorian traveller compares to that of "five-year-old children" (25). Moreover, the frail creatures are characterized as "indolent" and "easily fatigued" (28). A true Darwinist, the Time Traveller soon comes up with an evolutionary explanation and conjectures that the Eloi may have adapted to an environment that did no longer pose any serious dangers to the human-like organisms living in it: "The work of ameliorating the conditions of life – the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure – had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. […] And the harvest was what I saw!" (31). The scientist thus surmises that there has been some sort of dialectic at work: once humanity had rid itself of all major challenges, there was no longer any need for bodily activity or sharp thinking. As the Time Traveller puts it, "[t]his has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay" (33). Even though the Eloi are in themselves harmless, the protagonist's comment that inactivity manifests itself in "art" and "eroticism" calls to mind Nordau's damning criticism of the fin-de-siècle 'decadents' and thus links the Eloi to the degeneration discourse (cf. Hurley 1996, 82-84; Richter 2011, 184-185). Indeed, the more time he spends among them, the more confident the Time Traveller becomes about his theory that the little creatures are the descendants of a "decadent humanity" (Wells 2005, 41). Wearing "pleasant fabrics" and "bathing in the river" (41), the Eloi do not only evoke the kind of upper-class or aristocratic fin-de-siècle lifestyle with which Nordau takes

great issue. They are also repeatedly described as effeminate, with hardly any difference between males and females (cf. 29), and the scientist observes them "making love in a half-playful fashion" (41). As such gendered descriptions are evocative of late-19th- century anxieties related to homosexuality, it becomes plausible to see the Eloi as "in many ways an embodiment of the worst fears of the degenerationists" (Hurley 1996, 83). Nevertheless, the Eloi's negative attributes would probably be less conspicuous if it was not for the Morlocks, the second post-human species of the future world. The Time Traveller is first confronted with these creatures during the night after he has rescued Weena, an Eloi woman, from drowning. In an atmosphere that is notably Gothic, the protagonist describes the Morlocks in the following way: "And up the hill I thought I could see ghosts. Three several times, as I scanned the slope, I saw white figures. Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white, ape-like creature running rather quickly up the hill, and once near the ruins I saw a leash of them carrying some dark body" (Wells 2005, 44). This early description features three of the Morlocks' central characteristics, which will subsequently be alluded to again and again. The first of these traits is their animality. The Morlocks are repeatedly described as "ape-like" (45) or compared to other animals, e.g. a "human spider" (46). This is a feature which they share with other fin-de-siècle monsters, including Mr Hyde, Count Dracula and the Beast People on Dr Moreau's island. The Morlocks are "wild beasts" with "strange large greyish-red eyes" (45) and the Time Traveller entertains the possibility that they partly move "on all fours" (46) – a serious indicator of devolution. Other than the Eloi, then, the Morlocks display outright hideousness with regard to their physical appearance: "I could imagine that the modification of the human type was even far more profound than among the 'Eloi,' the beautiful race that I already knew" (49). Bodily degeneration has progressed so far in the case of the Morlocks that the Victorian traveller at times lacks a proper term for description and simply calls them "things" (cf. 46, 47, 61). Again, as Kelly Hurley's (1996; 2002) work shows, the trope of the 'unspeakable' is quite common in late-Victorian Gothic works in general and attests to a post-Darwinian climate in which the collapse of the boundaries between 'human' and 'animal' challenged the limits of the imaginable. The Time Traveller has a hard time convincing himself that both of the futuristic species are the evolutionary descendants of humanity. However, he gradually realizes "that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upperworld were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages" (Wells 2005, 46). The fact that the Eloi are referred to as "Upperworlders" whereas the nocturnal Morlocks are "Undergrounders" living in tunnels (cf. 49) is significant and will soon enough receive further attention. What should have become clear by now is that both the Eloi and Morlocks represent two different forms of degeneration, while the latter are particularly affected by racial or bodily decline. For all their physical monstrosity, one of the Morlocks' racial markers indicates an uncanny similarity to the Time Traveller, which links to the second trait alluded to in the above passage. Indeed, it is striking that the narrator is almost obsessed with the Morlocks' 'whiteness' (cf. 44-46), variously referring to them as "whitened Lemurs" (51), "white creatures" (53), or "white Things" (61). With reference to the degeneration

discourse, it is plausible to assume that the Time Traveller's obsession with the Morlocks' race is not only based on the likely explanation that they must have adapted to their subterranean living conditions. The creatures' whiteness is also "a sickening reminder of their former 'glory,' their descent from Europeans" (Richter 2011, 186). Consequently, the narrator admits to feeling "a vague sense of something familiar" (Wells 2005, 58) when he reflects on his encounters with the Morlocks – a phrase which resonates strongly with Sigmund Freud's definition of the uncanny as "something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression" (1998, 50). The Morlocks' physical monstrosity is not only due to their animality and, in this sense, radical difference from human beings. It rather results from their whiteness and bodily ambivalence, which exposes the liability of humans to regress into animals and emphasizes uncanny similarities between the Victorian traveller and the post-human species.6 These uncanny similarities go further as the Morlocks' third and final key feature will show. The above-cited passage merely alludes to this feature in a vague manner when the Time Traveller remarks that he saw the creatures "carrying some dark body" (Wells 2005, 44), but the worst anxieties that this observation might trigger will later be confirmed: the Morlocks are in fact cannibals who prey on the Eloi. When he first comes to this realization, the narrator is so horrified by the idea that he does not even dare to voice the obvious truth: "His [= man's] prejudice against human flesh is no deep- seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men – !" (62). The interruption in the form of the dash renders cannibalism as an unspeakable atrocity. It is the ultimate proof that the Morlocks are not only physically hideous but also morally monstrous. In spite of all this, a peculiar incident in the framing narrative has not escaped the attention of commentators on Wells' novella. When the Time Traveller returns from his journey, joining the guests in his Victorian home, the first thing he requests is a piece of meat: "Save me some of that mutton. I'm starving for a bit of meat" (14). While the protagonist's desire for meat might be fairly inconspicuous to first-time readers of the text (given the early appearance of the utterance before the embedded narrative), it is all the more disturbing with regard to the chronology of the story, i.e. in view of the cannibalism the narrator has just witnessed. As Marina Warner phrases it, "the Traveller's lust for mutton on re-entry to his own time does strike a jarring note and aligns him with the Morlocks, those predators upon the innocent and paschal Eloi" (2005, xxiv). It can be argued that the effect of such linkage between the Victorian protagonist and the Morlocks is two-fold: on the one hand, it obviously resonates with the post-Darwinist degeneration narrative, emphasizing as it does "the liability of the white man, the Victorian man, to abhumanness" (Hurley 1996, 87). On the other hand, the parallel between the meat-eating traveller and the post-human species is in keeping with some other passages in the text that throw a more ambivalent

6 In The Island of Dr Moreau, the protagonist Prendick experiences a similar touch of the Freudian uncanny when he reflects on his encounters with the Beast People, describing them as "human in shape, and yet human beings with the strangest air about them of some familiar animal" (Wells 2005, 65). For a Freudian approach to late-Victorian monsters in the degeneration context, see also Hurley (2002, 197-198).

light on the Morlocks and even present them, in contrast to the Eloi, as "exemplary Victorians" (87). Above anything else, this concerns the fact that the Morlocks are industrious workers – a character trait that is almost rendered humorous when the Time Traveller finally returns to his machine in order to escape, finding that "it had been carefully oiled and cleaned" (Wells 2005, 80) by his hard-working enemies. It is through passages like this that the class-related dimension of the degeneration discourse is invoked by Wells' novella. Once again, the protagonist proves himself a paradigmatic Victorian observer when he explains the development of the aristocratic Eloi and the proletarian Morlocks as the radical yet logical outcome of a dire social trend that already pertained to 19th-century English society: [P]roceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you – and wildly incredible! – and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way. […] Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth? (48) Such socialist reasoning complicates the evaluation of the Morlocks' monstrosity. It naturalizes and partly even excuses their violent behaviour as the evolutionary outcome of social circumstances to which the Victorians should have better attended. We are thus faced with a considerable amount of ambivalence in our assessment of the various monstrosities depicted in The Time Machine. The 'Morlock-Eloi illusion,' the proposed allegory for reading Wells' novella, means to address this uncertainty. It speaks to the situation that the more the monstrosity of one of the two species will be foregrounded, the more the other species will be backgrounded. With regard to the category of race, the Morlocks are far more monstrous, degenerate and physically abject than the racially inconspicuous Eloi, who "had kept too much of the human form not to claim my [= the Time Traveller's] sympathy" (Wells 2005, 62). On the other hand, the more the focus shifts to the moral monstrosity of the Eloi (their 'decadence' with its gendered and class-related implications), the more the Morlocks' industriousness and cleverness will appear as Victorian virtues. Significantly, these shifts take place within the same discourse – late-19th-century degeneration theory – which Wells' novella both reflects and actively reshapes. In the final section of this article, I will attempt to explain why the openness of the text and, in particular, the possibility of reading the Eloi as monstrous are significant features with regard to the novella's cultural work. For that matter, I will zoom in on the category of gender while also extending the contextual scope of the discussion by considering the imperial underpinnings of the degeneration discourse.

Conclusion: 'Monstrous Masculinity' and the Politics of Empire Fin-de-siècle fears of degeneration are never only related to the integrity of the individual human body but testify to broader cultural concerns. In late-19th-century Britain, in particular, they are deeply intertwined with anxieties regarding the health of the empire, which various social observers perceived to be in a state of crisis. At the apogee of its extension, many commentators felt that the empire had become vulnerable

and exposed to internal and external threats. Scholars such as Patrick Brantlinger (1988) and Stephen Arata (1996) have therefore explained the upswing of Gothic fiction in the 1880s and 1890s as a response to the prevalent cultural sense of 'crisis' or 'decline.'7 With respect to the category of gender, these studies show that the crisis of empire is frequently interlinked with a 'crisis of masculinity' (see also Haschemi Yekani 2011). This is obviously the case in works of the "imperial Gothic" (cf. Brantlinger 1988, 227- 254) such as Rider Haggard's She (1887) and Stoker's Dracula (1897), in which the masculinity of the British male adventurers is at least temporarily disempowered by the matriarch Ayesha or the sexually ambivalent Count. While the Time Traveller's own masculinity is never really at stake in Wells' novella, it is remarkable that one of his biggest concerns upon entering the future world is the possibility that "the race had lost its manliness" (Wells 2005, 22). What is more, even though the setting of the embedded narrative is not contemporaneous with the age of empire and, hence, the colonial settings depicted in late-Victorian adventure novels, it bears pointing out that Wells' protagonist characterizes himself as "too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours – that is another matter" (38). As a result of his combined occidentality and masculinity, then, the Time Traveller is not very different from "action heroes in imperial adventures of deadly perils, as in G.A. Henty and Rider Haggard" (Warner 2005, xvii). However, his masculinity is yet another feature that aligns the Victorian scientist much more with the Morlocks than with the effeminate Eloi. In this sense, the masculinity of the meat-devouring protagonist is not only an occidental one – it is also monstrous. Even though degeneration theory might be a highly diverse discourse that knows a lot of monstrosities (physical and moral), The Time Machine ultimately suggests that some monstrosities are, in the long term, less culturally dangerous than others. In an article on the representation of piracy in late-Victorian fiction, Bradley Deane (2011) reaches a number of insightful conclusions that can help to substantiate this point by way of analogy. Deane shows how adventure novels of the fin de siècle differ from mid-Victorian tales of piracy by displaying "an increasing willingness to embrace Britain's piratical heritage as the root of its modern imperial identity" (2011, 701). In these novels, among which Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) would be a well-known example, piracy does no longer appear as an unequivocal moral monstrosity. Instead, the subtext of these works is that "in certain situations, piracy is the correct approach to empire" (Deane 2011, 710). As Deane convincingly demonstrates how such a morally flexible ethic contributes to the "construction of imperial masculinity" (2011, 694), I propose that a similar conclusion can be reached with regard to the interplay of monstrosity and masculinity in The Time Machine. In Wells' novella, then, it would appear that, in order to rid oneself of the monstrosity (read: decadent femininity) of the Eloi, it might be necessary to temporarily embrace the monstrosity (read: ferocious masculinity) of the Morlocks. We are thus dealing with a case of "masculine assertiveness" emerging as "a conscious reaction against the perceived effeminacy of contemporary life," which Arata (1996, 13) posits

7 Cf. Arata: "[I]n this period [= the fin de siècle] political and cultural concerns about the decline of empire often become gothicized." (1996, 111)

as a more general tendency in late-Victorian culture. Whereas some fin-de-siècle Gothic texts establish a direct causal connection between the reversion to barbarism and "the weakening of Britain's imperial hegemony" (Brantlinger 1988, 229), this relationship is much more ambivalent in The Time Machine, where it remains open which is worse: the Morlock's cannibalistic savagery or the Eloi's effeminate aversion to activity. Yet, considering that the fin de siècle marked a particularly ruthless stage in the history of British Imperialism (cf. Deane 2011, 692), there are good reasons for seeing the Morlocks' monstrous masculinity as a cultural attitude that Wells' hero secretly adopts. This reading of the Time Traveller – and the late-Victorian belief system he represents – is in keeping with Cohen's assumption that a monster can paradoxically inspire distrust and loathing at the same time that "we envy its freedom" (1996, 17). It attests to a cultural situation in which even a homosexual writer such as John Addington Symonds felt that "[w]e cannot be Greek now" (cf. Arata 1996, 80-89), meaning that late-Victorian (imperial) realities did not allow for the fine sentiments and cultured homoeroticism Symonds associates with ancient Greece. Considering that the Eloi's "pleasant fabrics" (Wells 2005, 41) and fondness for bathing are somewhat reminiscent of a Greek lifestyle, we might hear the Time Traveller shouting Symonds' statement at the lethargic Eloi as he heroically rushes to the help of the drowning Weena. In the final analysis, The Time Machine shows that late-19th-century fears of degeneration manifest themselves in two forms of monstrosity – physical and moral – which can enter various striking, and sometimes paradoxical, configurations. The semantic complexities pertaining to the physically and especially the morally monstrous in the text corroborate the thesis that the theory of degeneration can "be pressed into the service of very different social and political agendas" (Taylor 2007, 16). Wells' novella is at once an illustration of post-Darwinian anxieties, a Marxist critique of the class divide and, as I last tried to show, a re-affirmation of hegemonic masculinity. It provides, in this sense, a versatile and sphinx-like textual illusion whose monstrous semantics are ever-shifting and which allows for a variety of readings.

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