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TESTING REALITY’S LIMITS: ‘MAD’ SCIENTISTS, REALISM, AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN LATE VICTORIAN POPULAR FICTION A dissertation presented by Jennifer Sopchockchai Bankard to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts March 2013 1 TESTING REALITY’S LIMITS: ‘MAD’ SCIENTISTS, REALISM, AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN LATE VICTORIAN POPULAR FICTION by Jennifer Sopchockchai Bankard ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University March 2013 2 ABSTRACT In the late Victorian period, approaching the fin de siècle, popular fiction frequently featured what critics would now call mad scientists. These mad scientist characters served as a vehicle for Victorian authors to explore the epistemological relationship between humans and the material world, often highlighting the shortcomings of the human eye or subjective perception of reality. By tracing the scientific and supernatural discourses surrounding representations of scientists featured in works by H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, this revisionist literary history demonstrates that Victorian popular fiction and “classic realist” novels share a common interest in human perceptions and representations of a material reality. Arguing that the genre categories traditionally applied to these texts are permeable and unstable, Testing Reality’s Limits continues work begun by scholars, such as George Levine, who redefined Victorian realism as a self-conscious experiment rather than a naively mimetic practice, and addresses literature not yet studied by such scholars. While the project is rooted in literary criticism and Victorian literature, it also engages with contemporary popular culture and cinema. Each chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of notable film and television adaptations of each novel discussed, to place Victorian realism in context. By incorporating an adaptation studies perspective, the research offers a better understanding of both Victorian and contemporary trends, viewing popular culture as a series of intertextual relationships and an evolving history rather than isolated cultural moments. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This manuscript would not exist without my dissertation committee – Laura Green, Kathleen Kelly, and Patrick Mullen. Without the comprehensive exam fields they helped me develop, I never would have been able to conceive of Testing Reality’s Limits. The same can be said of Caroline Levine’s The Serious Pleasures of Suspense, which I read in preparation for my Victorian Novel exam; she inspired me to continue the work she started, and for that I thank her. I especially want to thank Professor Green, my dissertation committee chair, for her ability to unearth the best of my ideas from any draft and her astounding attention to detail (never letting an awkward phrase go unnoticed!). And thank you, Professor Kelly, for nurturing my inner nerd and for teaching me how to prioritize my revisions and see the big picture, on and off the page. I would also be remiss if I did not thank Professor Kathy Howlett who, before her tragic passing in 2009, made an indelible mark on my academic life. She encouraged my work with film adaptations of British literature, and adaptation is such an integral part of this project because of that encouragement. I never would have made it to this proverbial finish line without the camaraderie and counsel of fellow graduate students at Northeastern University: Alicia Peaker, Greg Cass, Brent Griffin, Jessica Nelson, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Stephanie Loomis Pappas, Michele Braun, Janelle Greco, Sarah Hastings, Aparna Mujumdar, Anne Kingsley, Melissa Wolter-Gustafson, Andy Hyzy, Shannon Jane Balandrin, Danielle Skeehan, Tim Strange, Jess and Tom Witty, George Scala, Jim McGrath, Lana Cook, Genie Giaimo, and the list goes on and on. An enormous thank you must go to Melissa Daigle, Northeastern’s English graduate programs administrative assistant, for answering any question or request thrown at her with swiftness and a 4 smile, and for making sure I was actually in a position to graduate upon completing my dissertation. I owe my entire family – immediate, extended, and in-law – a lifetime of gratitude, not only for their love and support but also for their respect and their insistence on the importance of education and learning. Without their high expectations, their understanding, and all those books they bought me as a kid, I would never have pursued and finished a PhD. I thank my brother, Andrew, the ultimate autodidact, for reminding me that we must study because we sincerely desire knowledge and not because someone else told us to do so. I also thank him for helping me prepare for my defense. Thanks to all my friends for cheering me on and always acting interested or impressed by my dissertation writing, regardless of whether or not they actually were. I especially want to thank Lindsay Matias for reading entire chapter drafts for me and for frequently lending an ear to a writer’s neuroses. I’d also like to thank my two furry friends, Wampa and Tauntaun, for keeping me company while I sat at my computer for the innumerable hours it took to write and revise this. It’s amazing what two cats can do for a writer’s sanity, especially when they decide to sit on her keyboard. The deepest appreciation of all I bestow upon my husband, Jonathan Bankard, for supporting me in every way possible for the past three years. You gave me the chance to focus exclusively on the dissertation without worrying about a paycheck. You were pesky, asking me how many pages I’d written that day. You were patient. You told me I could do it, and kept my self-doubt check. You got me here. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 4 Table of Contents 6 Introduction 7 Chapter One: Dr. Lydgate, Bodysnatching, and the Proto-Mad Scientist in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) 28 Chapter Two: The Limitations of Human Consciousness and Perception in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) 66 Chapter Three: Imagination and the Scientific Supernatural in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) 136 Chapter Four: Material Reality, Observational “Power,” and a “Scientific Use of the Imagination” in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of Four (1890), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902) 192 Works Cited 243 6 Introduction What is a Mad Scientist? Dissecting a Pop Culture Icon. The classic image conjured by the phrase “mad scientist” originates in late Victorian popular fiction. H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, for example, introduces its scientist protagonist, Griffin, as not the “stranger” that early chapters of the novel refer to but as a scientist, with a detailed description of his makeshift laboratory in a village inn: When Mrs. Hall took his dinner in to him, he was already so absorbed in his work, pouring little drops out of the bottles into test-tubes, that he did not hear her until she had swept away the bulk of the straw and put the tray on the table, with some little emphasis perhaps, seeing the state that the floor was in. Then he half turned his head and immediately turned it away again. (Wells 18-19) This passage emphasizes an intense focus and disorganization symptomatic of the “madness” typically associated with a mad scientist. Griffin is “so absorbed in his work” that he is unable to notice a woman entering his room with a tray of food and certainly unwilling to stop to eat that food. The fact that he conducts his elaborate experiment in a hotel room rather than a more appropriate and sterile room at a scientific institution indicates that he operates on the fringe of a scientific community and that his work may not be scientifically respected or socially acceptable. The mysterious, nondescript “test-tubes” and “bottles” are telltale signs of an unorthodox, perhaps illegal, experiment, as is the “state that the floor was in” that Mrs. Hall notices. A reader can infer that the “state” to which she refers is a messy one, littered with “books – big, fat, books, of which some were just in an incomprehensible handwriting,” “crates,” “cases,” and “glass bottles” (Wells 16). This point of description indicates that Griffin cares not for tidiness; he only cares about his experiment. 7 This familiar image of the mad scientist, one that is so strong that no critic, historian, or scholar ever needs to acknowledge it as a culturally manufactured concept, has persisted in Anglo-American culture for over a hundred years. It is so ubiquitous that it is rarely challenged. The conception of who the mad scientist is – and what he looks like – is a forgone conclusion, an example of cultural shorthand. As the cited passage from The Invisible Man shows, Victorian literature, and especially late Victorian popular fiction, solidified if not created the mad scientist. A genealogy of this archetype needs to be traced, and the following examination of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series serves as such a genealogy. In order to construct a complete genealogy, the study includes analyses of both these novels and notable film and television adaptations of them, as well as historical context on Victorian scientific discourse and culture. In the late Victorian period, approaching the fin de siècle, popular fiction frequently featured what critics would now call mad scientists.

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