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 Hollow Earth Fiction and Environmental Form in the Late Nineteenth Century 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 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2016.1219190 Published online: 05 Sep 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 8 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gncc20 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 pur- poses 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 CONTACT Elizabeth Hope Chang [email protected] © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 388 E. H. CHANG 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 account- ing 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 understand- ing 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 help- ful 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 lit- erature 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.

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