Hollow Earth Fiction and Environmental Form in the Late Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth-Century Contexts An Interdisciplinary Journal

ISSN: 0890-5495 (Print) 1477-2663 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gncc20

Elizabeth Hope Chang

To cite this article: Elizabeth Hope Chang (2016) Hollow Earth Fiction and Environmental Form in the Late Nineteenth Century, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 38:5, 387-397, DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2016.1219190

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Published online: 05 Sep 2016.

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Download by: [Dr Elizabeth Chang] Date: 15 September 2016, At: 18:22 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS, 2016 VOL. 38, NO. 5, 387–397 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2016.1219190

Hollow Earth Fiction and Environmental Form in the Late Nineteenth Century

Elizabeth Hope Chang Department of English, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA

When the ill-fated Arthur Gordon Pym, hero of Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 text The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, sails from the temperate Antarctic island of Tsalal into the polar sea towards a “limitless cataract, rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart in the heavens” beyond which is visible “a chaos of flitting and indistinct images,” he also sails from his pastiche of exploration and travel narratives into the gulf of another, even more unusual, kind of genre fiction (Poe 248). Though Poe’s narrative famously does not continue into a revelation of the contents of the mighty cataract, scholars have since pointed out the many similarities between Pym’s voyage, the planned voyages of the American Captain John Cleves Symmes and the strange and now understudied history of nineteenth-century theories and narratives of a hollow earth.1 Symmes, a Midwesterner undaunted by the resounding lack of evidence for his claims, contended from 1818 until his death in 1829 through writings and public lectures that the earth must be understood to be comprised of a series of concentric spheres, with openings at the poles where light and heat, as well as, possibly, intrepid explorers like Symmes or Pym themselves could enter. “I declare that the earth is hollow, and habitable within … . I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking,” writes Symmes in his first pamphlet (qtd. in Blum 250).2 Reception of Symmes’s ideas ranged from dismissive to openly contemptuous, with most established scientists unwilling to associate with his ideas.3 But it is the works produced under Symmes’s literary influence that are significant for the purposes of this essay, beginning with the early American utopia Symzonia (1820) written by the (possibly pseudonymous) Captain Adam Seaborn, who claims to have availed himself of “all the lights and facilities afforded by the sublime theory of an internal world, published by Captain John Cleve Symmes …” (Seaborn vi).4 Seaborn’s effort is to “find a passage to a new and untried world” given that “the resources of the known world have been exhausted by research, its wealth monopo- lized, its wonders of curiosity explored, its every thing investigated and understood!” (Seaborn 13). This journey culminates with a trip through a polar Symmes hole and an encounter with the people that Seaborn terms the Symzonians, who inhabit the inside of the earth in an enlightened and advanced society now more familiar from later American and British utopias. Symzonia thus was one of the first, though certainly not the last, hollow-earth fiction, and while no later text was quite so explicit in claiming Symmes’s influence, no text can escape some measure of its sway. Further fictional investigation of the imagined territory below Symmes’s polar holes, as well as the underground spaces accessible from other geological disruptions like earthquakes, mine shafts, vol- canos, and steel prospecting drills came in the explosion of texts by American, Canadian, and British authors of the later nineteenth century. These works can now be seen as making the robust if under- appreciated category of late nineteenth-century hollow earth fiction, a group which includes Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871), Mary Bradley Lane, Mizora (serialized 1880–81, volume publication 1890), [James DeMille,], A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), William Bradshaw, The Goddess of

Atvatabar (1892), John Uri Lloyd, Etidorhpa (1895), Willis Emerson, The Smoky God (1908), L. Frank Baum, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) and Edgar Rice Burroughs, At the Earth’s Core (1914) and its sequels, among many others.5 This essay is not meant to be a taxonomic accounting of these texts, but rather an exploration of the hollow earth story as a wholly transatlantic genre, as befits content so markedly resistant to national boundaries, and also a particularly resonant and obvious example of fictional genre as environmental form. Such forms are significant for their attention to the organic conditions of their setting, but more importantly, they render their readers attuned to processes of attention necessary to recognize these settings as coherent ecological spaces. In this way matters of national boundaries and even conditions of industrial modernity are less important than the narrative relationship between its world and its readers. The authors I have named, I propose, used the hollow earth narrative as a generic form to bring together adventure fiction and utopian fantasy with a pronounced attention to the operations of closed, near-planetary ecosystems. This combination forms its own subgenre, but also gives us a tem- plate to think about how popular narrative forms direct writing and thinking about the environment. While scholars including Nicholas Daly, Stephen Arata, Anna Vaninskaya, Bradley Deane, and Cara Murray have studied the plot, character and temporal dynamics of anti-realist genre novels in the end of the nineteenth century, less attention has yet been paid to the function of the organic settings of those novels in directing the formation of late-Victorian and early-twentieth century understanding of the earth’s ecology as a constructed and interpreted condition.6 Such attention is warranted, however, in keeping with a general environmental turn across the humanities as well as a growing attention to the changing priorities of literary genre that Margaret Cohen has called “travelling” in her study of the maritime novel.7 My interest in hollow earth novels, like Cohen’s in novels of the sea, is particularly in the exigencies of setting’s influence on narrative possibility; whether aboard ship or underground, plot and character both develop from the foundational demands of the environment of their imagined world.

This is certainly not to say that no novels paid attention to the stresses of environmental setting before the rise of this genre. Indeed, hollow earth novels, despite their often awkward plots and characterizations, continue a long and refined narrative tradition that uses increasingly attentuated imagined spaces to produce a quite sophisticated and complex conditions under which narrative can take place. Pym’s narrative, moving as it does from southern islands to hollow earth chasms, is helpful here because the movement from island to polar opening is exemplary of the movement across genres and narrative modes that occurs when hollow earth fiction refines and builds upon the environmental premises of island fictions. Islands were frequently posited in nineteenth-century literature to function as closed ecologies, that is, bounded spaces where the operations of nature can be both predicted and reconstructed. Yet as environmental historians like Richard Grove have clearly shown us, island ecologies never maintain immutable boundaries nor absolute disconnection from the world outside, in fact or fiction. Indeed, the island ecology was central to the development of environmentalism in the nineteenth century precisely because of its fluid interchange with other colonial outposts and centers, and island adventures—from R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858) to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)—exhibit a similar flexibility of boundaries.8 Thus island fictions offer one initial possibility in negotiating between a very particular setting that can be addressed via encyclopedic description and a broader interconnection with an ocean’s worth of other islands combining to create a state of interdependent existence. But hollow earth fictions, by their very premise, both perform this negotiation and take it a step further. Surface environmental conditions, in these novels, must as a matter of course be either severely limited or rejected entirely. This rejection occurs not through hermetic sealing of the world’s boundaries—after all, an outsider always has to get in so that the story can be told—but by restaging the development of a self- sustaining environment under apparently self-cancelling conditions. That is to say, by virtue of the subterranean setting, the ecology of the novel would seem to need to be deprived of many of the con- ventionally necessary components of organic life. Yet in fact these hollow earth fictions insist on the NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 389 vital necessity of environmental form to the constitution of their utopian and dystopian agendas. Paradoxically, through the removal of the mimetically realistic supports of plant and animal life, these fictions illuminate the anthropocentric structures of thought understood to constitute the sys- tems of that life. That is to say, we can see the beginnings of a certain kind of modern environmental thinking developing in the pages of these hollow earth texts, in which each constitutive element of human and non-human organic life—light, air, water, and life itself—must be rationalized into existence. This thinking takes shape here in these ways particularly because the malleable generic forms of the romance reinforce the dissolution of formal ties between the natural and the native through the rejection of some—but not all—premises of realism. Thus, in growing plant forms beneath the earth, the absurdity of that environmental impossibility effectively (if eccentrically) highlights the condition that Timothy Morton has famously termed “ecology without nature.” Considering the appeal (and repulsion) of a subterranean world also has a long critical history, of course. Rosalind Williams’s penetrating inquiry Notes on the Underground traces what for her is an ever-widening reach of subterranean thinking, culminating in what she only partly facetiously terms our collective preparation to “descend below the surface of the earth forever” (Williams 212). (In this she is anticipated by Lloyd’s Etidorhpa, whose blind seer proposes “It is probable that in the time to come when man deserts the bleak earth surface, as he will some day be forced to do … nations will march through these spaces on their way from the dreary outside earth to the delights of the salu- brious inner sphere” (Lloyd 124).) In Williams’s reading, novels are only one part of a much broader study of the ways that life underground is not just a metaphor for the increasingly technological and artificial substances of human existence but an inescapable eventuality. But it’s also worthwhile to work the other way—that is, to look at how Victorian writers imagine a life underground as a way of getting back to generic and narrative categories that affect the novel more generally. In bringing together what we might broadly call an adventure novel’s focus on progress through space and a utopia’s emphasis on movement through time, hollow earth novels, particularly those of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, show how narrative setting can produce both spatial movement and temporal progress within the novel form with the purpose of explicating the conditions under which life can exist in the first place. Hollow earth fiction, then, shares with lost world and utopian fiction literature the twin projects of explicating and historicizing the phenomena of a self-sustaining ecology.9 This is the first step in understanding environmental adventure fiction as a global rather than as a local proposition, a mode of understanding that has recently been framed as a twentieth- and twentieth-first-century practice. Lawrence Buell and Ursula Heise, in their recent overview of the field, comment on the evolution of ecocritical perspectives away from “the prioritization of the region as the preferred ecological and cultural unit in early ecocritical place theory” and towards a glob- ally-cognizant worldview incorporating ideas of risk, danger, and justice (Buell, Heise, and Thornber 421). Meanwhile Brian Trexler has argued for the creation of new categories of understanding of the novel in the light of global warming, asking “how did climate change make new demands on the novel itself, forcing formal and narrative innovation?” (10). It is clear, however, that the genre novels of the late nineteenth-century were also, like these more recent critics, interested in expanding readerly worldviews beyond the hyper-localism of the late realist novel and into a preliminary understanding of global ecology much before the widespread usage of words like ecocriticism or environmentalism. Deirdre Lynch and Jesse Oak Taylor have shown how this might work in their attention to what we might call the glasshouse realism of the canonical nineteenth-century novel.10 Hollow earth fictions, by denying the shared skies and transparency posited by those two more general models, have been comparatively overlooked and yet also do comparatively more to imagine a completely self-sustaining model of natural and human interdependence that can—and indeed must—be explained through rhetorical form. We can therefore see hollow earth novels as poised at the interchange between nineteenth-century genres of science fiction, fantasy, utopia, and realism, yet still identifiable as a distinct and instructive generic form within what Vaninskaya has shown as the “romance revival” of the late nineteenth 390 E. H. CHANG century. This genre recognizes and makes narrative a consciousness of environmental scarcity in a particularly specific way which, indeed, has not previously been so precisely identified. As a consequence, this hollow earth genre also helps us to think about the ways that genres more generally themselves form an environmental rhetoric, long before the neologism of “cli-fi” came into use to categorize novels interested in engaging with the effects of global warming. Critics have identified the concept of “ecospeak” to describe the dangerously limiting rhetorical preconditions that shape discussions of the environment in popular contemporary discourse.11 Such “ecospeak,” however, is not only a function of the twenty-first century but also of the nineteenth; and so for this reason many kinds of novels are environmental literature, beyond the highly mimetic studies of countryside familiar from John Clare and Thomas Hardy. The relations between the novel form and the self-sustaining closed system that hollow earth novels propose comes not only as a consequence of narrative form, but as a precondition of its expression to the reader as a transporting fiction. My attention to these novels, then, is not meant as a proscriptive or particularly taxonomic understanding of genre, but rather as an expansion of the attention paid to the operations of setting, in addition to those of character and incident, as a marker of the distinctions of genre. Indeed, some novels that include significant sections of underground activity, including Haggard’s She (1887), Wells’s Time Machine (1895), and E. M. Forster’s novella The Machine Stops (1909), rate relatively low on their scale of environmental cognitive estrangement, at least of the subterranean sort. This is to repurpose a term of Seo-young Chu’s. Chu, herself drawing on a meta-history of science fiction’s attempts at self-definition, alerts us to the anti-mimetic, cognitively estranging work of such fiction above all other categories to trace the boundaries of the genre.12 For Chu, science fiction (including a variety of works not often called as such), offers high-intensity mimesis due to the “massively complex representational and epistemological work necessary to render cognitively estranging referents available both for representation and for understanding” in contrast to the low-intensity mimesis demanded by realism’s easy evocation of “almonds and nickels” (Chu 7). In this way, the tombs of the fallen city of Kôr, in She, demand less readerly engagement than the apparently self-explana- tory cultivated fields that greet the traveler in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, since grave- yards of former civilizations hew closer to reader’s lived experience than farming in a land without a sun. This burden of justification for the smallest operations of narrative weighs down these narratives as utopian/dystopian fictions as well, of course, and these have been comparatively better studied, especially in their corollary genre of the lost world/lost race novel, of which late-nineteenth-century examples also abound. Worth distinguishing from Gilman’s Herland (1915) or Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), however, is the hollow earth narrative’s need to embed a far lengthier environmental explication along with its social and political renegotiations. In part, the lack of readerly appeal of these ostensibly plot-driven tales comes from the fact that they must spend most of their pages identifying how things are the way they are, before they can even begin to address how things might, through the course of eventful narrative, eventually come to be. Thus, the plot triggers that so often shape and direct adventure fictions, and indeed genre fictions more generally, are often overwhelmed by the burden of descriptive explanation. Indeed, the combative relationships between the competing demands of different genres is embedded within the novels themselves. In The Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, the readers of the discovered lost narrative frequently debate what kind of text they are actually reading—“it has the ring of a confounded sensation-monger all through” complains one (Mille 71). And in The Smoky God the narrator, in passing on the deathbed confession of hollow earth traveler Olaf Jansen, deflates much of the narrative suspense of the tale by beginning with the declaration: “Olaf Jansen makes the startling announcement through me, an [sic] humble instrument, that in like manner, God created the earth for the ‘within’…while the outside of the earth is merely the veranda, the porch, where things grow by comparison but sparsely” (Emerson 28). There are many possible ways we might consider the ways that environmental form assembles a different category of literary genre, but for the purposes of this essay I want to pay attention especially to the process of organic cultivation as they work out across these narratives. This is NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 391 because the first thing that must be done with a hypothetical world is to artificially explain its diegetic conditions into self-perpetuating permanence: in other words, to effect its cultivations. And such fictional cultivations had manifest nineteenth-century analogues in real botanical practice happening aboveground. Victorian plant acclimatization societies, by moving and replanting specimens around the globe, proposed organic life to be rootless and endlessly perfectible while at the same time, native plant societies insisted on the inextricable linkage between organism and place of origin. In accounts of this opposition we find the narrative difference between a malleable timeline open to intervention and redirection and a historically determined timeline with only one possible outcome rendered in horticultural form. This is complicated by the fact that, in hollow earth novels, there are no spaces that can be understood to be truly wild and therefore free of human influence. Even in the landscapes that appear to be untouched, the act of bringing them into existence denotes the mental strain of their overt fictionality—a fictionality required by its closed conditions. In a broader sense, cultivation is certainly a generally adaptable lens to investigate genre fiction of the late nineteenth century. A large proportion of boys’ adventure novels published in both England and America at the end of the century can be understood as fantasies of economic agriculture. An obvious example is G. A. Henty’s The Young Colonists: A Tale of the Zulu and Boer Wars (1885), whose titular protagonists travel to South Africa meaning to establish a tree farm but accidently end up participating in the Boer War instead; we might also point to Mowgli’s adult career in the Indian Forestry Service in Kipling’s chronologically first but narratively last story of the Jungle Book, “In the Rukh” (1893). Such a taming of the natural landscape as a metaphorical or actual practice of colonial control extends more broadly across the genre however, from the boy plant-hunters of Mayne Read’s adventures (The Plant Hunters; or, Adventures Among the Himalyan Mountains (1858) and its sequel, The Cliff Climbers (1864)) to Ballantyne’s marooned youngsters in The Coral Island, who plan thusly to bide their time awaiting rescue: “we’ll build a charming villa, and plant a lovely garden round it, stuck all full of the most splendiferous tropical flowers, and we’ll farm the land, plant, sow, reap, eat, sleep and be merry” (Ballantyne 25). Similarly, grown-up adven- turers are surrounded, explicitly or implicitly, by plants and plant life subject to manipulation and cultivation and equally resolve to transform the landscape via their personal industry. Aside from the heavy tropical vegetation that generally blankets the setting of many adventure novels, plants often set in motion the action, as in H. Rider Haggard’s Allan and the Holy Flower (1915), in which Allan Quartermain travels in search of an orchid, or otherwise facilitate the plot, as in the man-eating plant fictions like Aubrey’s The Devil Tree of El Dorado (1897). The wildness of landscape that is so frequently the precondition of the late-nineteenth-century romance, then, must be understood to exist in competitive parallel with the increasingly (and already) cultivated spot in which adventures are actually taking place. Moreover, beyond the conditions in which the landscape controls and directs its inhabitants, there are equally many where the explorer discovers skills of cultivation as revelatory of future per- fections. William Morris’s 1890 News From Nowhere promotes the evolution of organic cultivation as a symbol of a generally enlightened state: “England was once a country of clearings amongst the woods and wastes, … It then became a country of huge and foul workshops … It is now a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt …”(Morris 100). As long as the rockeries, shrubberies, woods and feeding grounds are “natural,” the old man explaining this new society insists, any variety of space is useful—establishing an important and widely held paradigm that it is both possible and desirable to distinguish between “natural” native plants and those whose over- or under-cultivation forces them out of this category. Despite the clarity of this premise when it applies to the fruit-forcing and man-made rockeries that Morris’s characters deride, such clearly bounded delineations of the practice of cultivation are functionally impossible on a larger scale. Even novels more concerned with animalism like Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula depend on small but significant details of nineteenth-century up-to-date horticultural practice: the garlic flowers that Van Helsing employs to pro- tect Lucy are sent for by telegraph “…all the way from Haarlem, where my friend Vanderpool raise [sic] herb in his glass-houses all the year” (Stoker 132). 392 E. H. CHANG

Some hollow earth novels, most notably Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, begin to explore this hothouse metaphor as a structuring concept. Verne’s Journey, written in 1864, rewritten significantly in 1867, and translated into English in 1871 and 1877, is a French novel widely influ- ential in England and America, telling the story of a German scientist traveling into the earth through an Icelandic volcano—a strong example of the transnational influence on hollow earth fiction’s plot and reception alike. The Journey seems at first retrospectively narrated and chiefly interested in describing the adventure underground as a journey backwards through geological and evolutionary history. As Axel describes his admiration of the prehistoric underworld: “Providence seems to have wanted to preserve in this enormous hothouse all the antediluvian plants which have been reconstructed so successfully by the scholars” (142). But once on the raft upon the underground sea in the adventure’s final section, Axel becomes hallucinatory and directly transcriptive of his vision: “The vegetation is multiplying exaggeratedly. I pass like a shadow amongst arborescent ferns … . I lean against the trunks of giant conifers … . The centuries are flowing past like days!” (153). Axel’s physical subsumation to the subterranean plant life, taking place as it does in a kind of waking dream, can describe impossibly rapid organic progression in an eternal present and therefore occupies at least this portion of the novel in the paradoxical development that other hollow earth novels adopt wholesale. Also like those other works, however, Verne’s text equally imposes a crucial caesura of self-justification into the habitat production that other novels might silently normalize. In his proposition that the hierarchy and progress of the ecosystems encountered can be scientifically determined, that is, we also understand that they must be; that the natural ecology of the novel must be explained into being. The setting both compels the narrator to describe its limits and its restric- tions, as well as the conventions and assumptions by which it is understood to explicitly make life possible. The extreme artificiality of the circumstances not only establishes the fiction but also enables its production in the first place. As a result, protagonists of hollow earth novels spend a good deal of time remarking on the superior cultivation of the landscape they are encountering. This begins with Seaborn’s description of the enlightened interior of Symzonia in 1820—“We ascended the river, the banks of which, and all the country near them, appeared like one beautiful and highly cultivated garden, with neat low build- ings scattered throughout the scene. No crowded cities, the haunts of vice and misery, hung like wens upon the lovely face of nature” (Seaborn 117)—but continues throughout the later novels. The most advanced state in the generally ultra-advanced underground kingdom of the Vril-ya in Bulwer-Lyt- ton’s The Coming Race gains note in part because “every inch of its territory is cultivated to the utmost perfection of garden ground” (Bulwer-Lytton 171). The Coming Race, with its superhuman race of Vril-ya who control a mysterious and all-pervasive force known as Vril, is probably the currently best known of all complete hollow earth fictions and thus its ecological arrangements are worthy of some further attention. (Here again, however, it is worth pointing out the cross-influence between Bulwer-Lytton’s British text and the American and French examples that preceded it). Vril is responsible, among other things, for providing light and heat in the interior of the earth, as the unnamed American narrator discovers soon after an accident in a mine leaves him stranded underground:

Slowly and cautiously I went my solitary way down the lamp-lit road … . Deep below to the left lay a vast valley, which presented to my astonished eye the unmistakable evidences of art and culture. There were fields covered with a strange vegetation, similar to none I have seen above the earth: the color of it not green, but rather of a dull leaden hue or of a golden red. (Bulwer-Lytton 17) While Bulwer-Lytton goes on to devote many following pages to the societal and intellectual charac- teristics of the Vril-ya, his novel mirrors other hollow earth ﬁctions in beginning its social commen- tary with this initial environmental strangeness. These plants, we later learn, are descended from seeds brought below ground many centuries prior, which have been assisted by the power of vril to become the super-sized analogues of aboveground specimens—trees resembling “gigantic ferns” or “in the form of enormous fungi” (Bulwer-Lytton 19). While this on one hand seems like NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 393 the work of a particularly successful acclimatization society, the narrator’s semi-arbitrary connection of the landscape he observes to the plant life with which he is familiar might also be said to make horticultural the misreading strategies endemic to all narrators of utopian texts. As in every utopia, the narrator’s narrow-minded lack of understanding of the transformative possibilities of the world he observes is meant to be corrected by the perceptive reader over the course of the novel—while the narrator cannot see the clear parallels between the barbarism of Koom-Posh and American democ- racy, for example, the British reader surely can. Likewise, in the case of the plants that have long since developed past the above-ground forms that the narrator associates with them, this utopia is botanical as well as social. (This follows also in the correction offered to the traveler by the old man in Lloyd’s Etidorhpa, who instructs him about the fungi, which, in their underground setting, “grow to perfection. This is their chosen habitat … . Plants adapt themselves to surrounding conditions … Such specimens of fungi as grown in your former home have escaped from these underground regions, and are as much out of place as are the tropical plants transplanted to the edge of eternal snow …”(Lloyd 120). Similarly, the ultra-advanced women of the American Mary Bradley Lane’s utopian fiction Mizora: A Prophecy (1890) inhabit a land where “neither sun, moon or stars are visible,” and yet where the botanical richness, beauty, and variety is a matter of immediate documentation so that, as the Russian exile who narrates the tale explains, “I have been thus explicit in detailing the circumstances of my entrance into the land of Mizora, or, in other words, the interior of the earth, lest some incredulous person might doubt the veracity of this narrative” (Lane 25, 19). It is a sign of hollow earth’s fiction devotion to environmental form as precipitating social constructions that such veracity is best established first by reference to the lush foliage of the setting, even before description of the population of blonde goddesses who (it is later revealed) actively eliminate hereditary weakness (of intellect, physicality, gender, and more) to produce “a race of superior people” (Lane 110). Indeed, the history and operation of this genetic engineering is so tightly bound together with forms of organic and horticultural cultivation that the two cannot be distinguished in the novel’s exposition. Recourse to botanical metaphor is everywhere, as the Preceptress points out: “If you have any knowledge of nature, ask yourself if such a condition of birth and infancy [of disease and poverty] is likely to produce a noble, healthy human being? Do your agriculturists expect a stunted, neglected tree to produce rare and luscious fruit?” (Lane 106). Mizora, like the other novels I’ve been describing, posits not only that the conditions of the interior world must be explained and justified, but that the apprehension of their creation is directly productive of a utopian society. Though Bradley’s novel does more than most to justify the cultivation of mind and nature as twin acts of selection in a pseudo-Darwinian scheme, it shares with all hollow earth novels a presup- position that its environmental conditions must always already be cultivated by virtue of their presence; setting, like the novel itself, must justify its own existence through both exposition and plot incident. In the hollow earth genre, then, characters find the hostile setting paradoxically both antithetical to the real supports of plant and animal life and yet vitally necessary to the understanding of the constitutive elements that make that life possible. These novels restage the development of a self-sustaining environment under apparently self-cancelling conditions, and do so in order to yield a protagonist who, if not triumphant over the villains of the tale, is newly cognizant of the ecology within which such a tale must take place. Through these works and others like them, we can trace larger shifts in the generic evolution of the novel at the end of the century. These shifts, I contend, can only be understood in light of the changing conditions of the global environment; conditions in which plant and animal life existed against, rather than within, native locale—conditions, that is, of modern environmentalism. Ultimately, I would suggest, the particularities of the hollow earth form are less worthy of our attention as a function of taxonomic catalogue and more interesting to us as predicative or causal conditions that configure the form of narrative itself. Setting’s “reality effect” has until recently been less well-studied than other social and emotional functions of the nineteenth-century novel form, with thing theory being the obvious exception, and it is helpful to take 394 E. H. CHANG into account novels that are particularly obtrusive in their efforts to establish setting before asking questions about the larger scope of novels into which the artificially natural world does not so obviously intrude. This may mean reading more closely novels that seem to descend into forms of pastiche. Take, for example, the villains of another American work: L. Frank Baum’s 1908 Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. This later installment in the series obsessively emphasizes the unusual and extreme effects of underground cultivation, including the nation of vegetable people caught up in a fraught transfer of power when the usurping Prince refuses to pick his successor Princess from the royal family’s bush—even though she has clearly already fully ripened—because he does not want to follow custom to become chopped up and planted as seed for another Royal Family plant. Yet even in this flattened example, conventions of the narrative genre remain. In a manner typical of hollow earth novel, the story begins via a combination of natural disaster and industrial modernity—Dorothy is tossed underground by an earthquake at the railway station. Dorothy’s first exchange with the farm boy Zeb as they realize what is happening to them marks out the surety with which characters understand the constraints of the narrative genre in which they appear:

“We’ve got to come to the bottom some time,” remarked Zeb, with a deep sigh. “We can’t keep falling forever, you know.”

“Of course not,” said Dorothy. “We are somewhere in the middle of the earth, and the chances are we’ll reach the other side of it before long. But it’s a big hollow, isn’t it?”

“Awful big!” answered the boy. (Baum 28) Here the temptation is to read the rapacious environmental assimilation of American settler-colonists onto the fantasy terrain of the center of the earth, and yet the obvious fact of the “other side” demonstrates how implacably hollow earth ﬁction denies any possibility of unlimited spatial resource. What’s more, it is clear throughout the hollow earth genre that metaphors of national fron- tiers only partially apply to these imagined interior spaces. Instead this ﬁction tutors its readers in what happens when a bounded and restricted habitat restarts or preserves life under conditions neither natural nor native. Earlier in this essay I suggested that the cultivated interior of the earth could never be entirely sealed, since that would disallow the story of its cultivation from ever being told; this is also true in an extra-diegetic sense. Contemporary fiction proposes to us several new sets of hollow earth resi- dents. In Mat Johnson’s biting race satire, Pym (2012), which is retelling/continuation of Poe’s nineteenth-century novel, the narrator Chris Jaynes takes shelter after his underground misadventures with a race of despotic frost giants in a “life-size terrarium,” the “state of the art 3.2 Ultra BioDome” (Johnson 240); Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam triology (2010–2013) also uses the biosphere as a figural analogue for an earth whose economy of scarcity has at last run dry. Hewing even closer to the Victorian novel’s structuring narrative conditions are recent ecologically-minded science fictions addressing the environmental construction of the long-haul spaceship. Kim Stanley Robinson, past master of a planetary developmental narrative understood in terms of intensive cultivation in his Mars trilogy (2001–2003), works in Aurora (2015) to tell the story from inside a new kind of hollow earth—a series of conjoined biospheres that sustain the diversity of terrestrial biology within the confines of a space vessel fleeing Earth’s degraded living conditions. This conceit allows an even more explicit engagement with the transnational goals of these kinds of explorations. Whether polar, intra-terrestrial, or extra-terrestrial, the explorers retain their national affiliations at their own peril. Likewise, the North American, British, and European authors of the nineteenth- and twenty-first- century works I have been discussing use both their dystopic plots and their disruptive settings to upend the compartmentalization of the national novel. If Robinson, for one, is more overt in narrat- ing the mechanics of the self-sustaining spaceship ecology than his nineteenth-century forebearers, he is also more ruthless in asserting how inevitably its conditions must ultimately collapse. But for both eras of fiction, the novel’s structural dependence on the reader’s participatory construction of its NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 395 cultivated setting expands the conditions of narrative in the articulation of a new environmental novel form.

Notes

1. See, among many others, Randel Helms and J.O. Bailey. 2. Symmes’s theories were later compiled into James McBride’s Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres: Demon- strating That the Earth Is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open about the Poles. 3. His main scientific legacy was to contribute to a developing nineteenth-century interest in polar expeditions. See Blum as well as Gretchen Murphy. On the global interest in polar expedition, see also Jen Hill. 4. Despite Seaborn’s apparent praise of Symmes, the novel has been taken as either a burlesque on Symmes’s ideas, or, seemingly paradoxically, a work anonymously authored by Symmes himself; neither proposition is in current critical favor. 5. For a fuller, though non-academic, accounting of many of these texts, see David Standish. 6. A partial biography of recent work includes: Bradley Deane; Anna Vaninskaya; Nicholas Daly; Stephen Arata; and Cara Murray. 7. See her “Traveling Genres,” as well as her book-length study The Novel and the Sea. 8. See Grove. On colonial botanical gardens, see Lucile H. Brockway. 9. As has been frequently noted, this is a project with multiple and overlapping definitions—Lawrence Buell points to environmental criticism, literary-environmental studies, literary ecology, literary environmentalism, or green cultural studies in his The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (11–12), and other efforts at field identification abound beyond my ability to list here. 10. See both Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jesse Oak Taylor. 11. See M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer. See also George Myerson and Yvonne Rydin. 12. This is in opposition to, among others, Darko Suvin’s foundational definition of science fiction as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cogni- tion, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (7–8).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Elizabeth Hope Chang is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri. Her current research involves natural and unnatural cultivations in the late-nineteenth-century British novel. She has also published on literary and aesthetic relations between Britain and China in the nineteenth century, including Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Stanford, 2010).

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