Narrative and Vision: Constructing Reality in Late Victorian Imperialist, Decadent and Futuristic Fiction

NARRATIVE AND VISION: CONSTRUCTING REALITY IN LATE VICTORIAN IMPERIALIST, DECADENT AND FUTURISTIC FICTION Thesis submitted to the University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Richard Smith-Bingham The Department of English University College London Gower Street London WCIE 6BT 1997 ProQuest Number: 10055411 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10055411 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT This study deals with works of imperialist, decadent and futuristic fiction written roughly between 1885 and 1904. The main authors under discussion are Conrad, Kipling, Haggard, Pater, Wilde, Huysmans and other European decadents. Wells, Morris and Hudson, and its primary aim is to show the similarity of vision between late nineteenth century authors writing in different genres or fields. The thesis starts by taking the ’strange’ worlds presented in the fiction of these writers and relating them to the aesthetic idea that fiction involves the construction of the world of the text, a world which is determined according to the principles of art and perception, a world which is not simply imitative of a supposedly actual world of facts. To support this, the thesis proceeds to analyse late nineteenth century ideas on observation, representation and mythologization. The focus then shifts from the concept of the world to that of the self as the thesis investigates the complicated relationship between the fictional human subject and the society or world of the novel in which he or she figures. After this, the thesis examines how the late Victorian fictional individual seeks, through the power of narration, to remake the world according to his or her aspirations. It also records the violence associated with this ambition when it is put into practice and the failure which ensues when the subject’s imagination makes him or her unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Indeed, that which forms the late Victorian fictional subject’s experience of the world tends more to destabilize his or her identity than to strengthen it. The final chapter considers the fiction’s imagery of fluidity, disintegration and collapse, paying close attention to the frequent appearance of crowds, chaos, darkness, rebellions and catastrophes in the texts. The conclusion looks again at the nature of late Victorian aesthetics, reviewing the importance of perception, oppositionality, balance and closure to the works. NARRATIVE AND VISION: CONSTRUCTING REALITY IN LATE VICTORIAN IMPERIALIST, DECADENT AND FUTURISTIC FICTION CONTENTS : ABSTRACT 2 CONTENTS 4 PREFACE 8 the genesis, nature and methodology of the thesis; types of critical works on late Victorian fiction INTRODUCTION: THE FICTION OFREALITY 16 perception, reality, and the fictional world; fiction as a discourse of persuasion CHAPTER ONE: 'DOCUMENTING' THE EXTERNAL WORLD 35 late Victorian fiction as under the influence of scientific positivism and (post-)Romantic theories of reality; man's need to order the world and himself; the human need for mystery; art for the moment CHAPTER TWO: THE HUMAN SUBJECT (I) 69 the human subject as individual or social construct; self-formation and the need for freedom; art's hatred of regulation; the repression of humanity by society and State; two different utopias CHAPTER THREE: THE HUMAN SUBJECT (II) 102 the individual's difficult relationship with society; telling one's tale and self-assertion; the power of the listener; fiction and persuasion CHAPTER FOUR: EXERCISES OF THE WILL 137 extreme individualists and their desire for independence, freedom or power; the world as a product of will; the bogeymen of late Victorian fiction CHAPTER FIVE: THE CONFOUNDED IMAGINATION AND THE ROLE OF DREAMS 175 the imagination as a destructive force; the private world which conflicts with reality; the use of narcotics; paranoia; dreams; madness; the confusion of the real and the unreal CHAPTER SIX: THE FIGURATION OF EXPERIENCE 203 strong sensations as a decadent ideal; experience as a force, however, which destabilizes self-identity and self-control; men among beasts; experiences of the supernatural; other figures of experience CHAPTER SEVEN: IMAGERY OF CHAOS AND COLLAPSE 234 roles, images and themes of the other: crowds, chaos, fragmentation, darkness, invasion, revolution, catastrophe CONCLUSION: THE AESTHETIC WHOLE 268 the relationship between self and not-self/other : opposition and identity; the closure of the fictional world; the limits of art THE FICTIONAL WORKS CONSULTED, BY YEAR OF PUBLICATION IN BOOK FORM 278 ABBREVIATIONS OF THE FICTIONAL WORKS DISCUSSED, AS USED IN THE TEXT 281 NOTES 283 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CONSULTED 312 Does man not eternally create a fictitious world for himself because he wants a better world than reality? (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power) PREFACE This doctoral thesis has emerged out of a study of works of imperialist, decadent and futuristic fiction largely written in the last fifteen years of nineteenth century England. My first thoughts were to write a broad thesis on the different types of fiction written in this period but, when I soon realized I had neither time nor word-space in this project to deal with the material in the way I wanted, I reduced my sights and settled on a comparative study of works from three genres or fields of fiction which I felt had more in common than first sight allowed. In addition, each of these fields seemed particularly constitutive of the sentiments and ideas of the age: the late Victorian period has long been considered as providing some of the finest fiction of empire; decadence is regarded as a literary movement that was born, lived and died within those years; science fiction, whether political or purely diverting, evolved at this time into a widely-read and significant genre.^ I was further attracted to these fields on account of their notional distinction from mainstream social fiction: I wanted to examine how this fiction, so particular to the period and yet so ec-centric, was able to image the age's central interests and concerns. Although many works of imperialist, decadent and futuristic fiction are often idiosyncratic and sometimes present extremes of fictional behaviour, at the same time they tend draw attention to their relationship with mainstream social fiction through the affirmed English or European identity of their main protagonists. Imperialist fiction tells of protagonists who reaffirm or refute (often contradictory) English values while they are in the very act of engaging with strange peoples and continents. Decadent fiction often portrays a more obviously European social world but, in doing so, it privileges private aesthetic experiences and fantasies over the public conventions of social relations. Science fiction uses images of a notional future and technology either to show the consequences of society's persisting in the activities and attitudes in which it is already engaged or to depict a more harmonious world founded on very different principles to those of late nineteenth century Europe. In general, late Victorian writers of fiction in these fields fabricated locations and scenarios away from representations of normal British society which enabled them and their protagonists to express with greater freedom the desires and fears embodied within the social novel. Many literary critics of the last thirty years seem undecided as to whether late Victorian fiction is merely evidence of a transitional experimentation and diversity which marks the passage from high Victorian to modernist literature or whether the 1880s and 1890s form a distinctive period in literary history justifiable by the merits simply of its own artistic output. In this debate the consideration of field or genre has been a convenient way for critics to organize their 10 ambivalent responses to a period of literature which sometimes only appears integrated by its commitment to a diversity of 2 form and content. Such an approach, however, has tended either to produce an image of the period as a web of artistic cliques or to divide the literature into isolated strands, which gives the impression that there is no real connection between the various fields. As regards the three fields under discussion (ignoring those critics who specialize in a single author), imperialist fiction has mostly been the province of critics of (literary) imperialism and not of late Victorian fiction; English decadent fiction has either been treated as a sub-group of French decadent fiction or as a momentary aberration in the development of English literature; analysis of late Victorian science fiction, when not by those interested in socialist utopianism, has been more interested in the development of the genre than in the fiction of the period in which it was written.^ These broad lines certainly do not describe the critical map exactly and, admittedly, in the last ten years critics have responded much more to the idea that the different fields are part of the one large discourse of late Victorian fiction. With this in mind two methods of criticism stand out: the thematic approach and the perspective which is concerned with cultural politics. The former, either by alluding to a large number of works or by analysing in depth about five or six, takes a single unifying theme in whose light individual works are analysed.^ While this method often makes for a coherent read, it sometimes moves beyond revealing paradigms of late Victorian aesthetic thought to producing stereotypes, owing to the singularity of its theme and the narrowness of its scope.

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