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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their Ia pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1+1 Canada CRADLES IN SPACE: THE CHANGELING IN FOLK NARRATIVE AND MODERN SCIENCE FICTION by © Adam Lawrence A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature, School of Graduate Studies, Faculty of Arts Memorial University of Newfoundland March 2010 St. John's, Newfoundland ABSTRACT This dissertation considers how modem science fiction (SF) has continually employed elements of European folk narrative to explore subaltern and subterranean culture­ meaning, both the politically disenfranchised and biologically deformed figures who threaten to emerge from their underground habitations and infiltrate the most cherished institutions of the upper world. According to legends deriving from England, Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia, it was common practice for the fairies, also called the "Good People" or the "little people," to abduct human children and leave withered and cantankerous fairies, known as "changelings," in their place. I argue that the changeling emerges as a "conceptual persona" in the nineteenth century when folklorists and scientists alike began to interpret changeling tales as unsophisticated diagnoses of congenital diseases-before the medical lexicon of "congenital malformation" was even available. The changeling provided the absent lexicon, which was specifically adopted by Victorian British society as an explanation of insubordinate behaviour among children, women, the lower classes, and the non-white races. My five chapters discuss the figure of the fairy changeling as it appears in British and other European legends and as it is adapted in several SF novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To begin, I suggest that these European folk legends describe a "fairy economy," in which two species engage in various forms oftrade and exchange (Chapter 1). Through detailed readings of such folktales as "The Fairy Wife" and "The Speckled Bull" and such legends as "The Caerlaverock Changeling" and "Johnnie in the Cradle," I argue that the changeling enunciates a particular set of issues that surface in the Victorian period, concerning childcare, reproduction, cross-cultural and cross-species relations, and hybridity, and which are further explored in the realm of modem SF. Both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case ofDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde re-imagine the changeling as a representative of the lower-class mob, the atavistic criminal population, and the Gothic underworld (Chapter 2). Shelley's and Stevenson's monsters are also clearly prototypical SF creations, related as they are to early speculations on the biologically engineered human. In both The Time Machine and The Island ofDr. Moreau, H. G. Wells modifies these gothic/scientific fictions and their folkloric antecedents by exploring, on the one hand, the future devolution of the species into a two-nation world consisting of fey-like "little people" and monstrous underlings and, on the other hand, a near future hybridization of the species through the radical vivisection ofvarious animal types (Chapter 3). Wells's two works present vivid attempts to conceptualize a "symbiotic" community, clearly hinted at in the legends involving human-fairy interactions. As I argue through these first three chapters, the changeling narrative presents a fictional narrative that explores human origins through the interaction and exchange with a nonhuman species. Viewed through the lens of SF, the changeling legend conceptualizes species evolution and speculates on the utopian possibilities of cross-breeding cultures and species. Providing an Eastern European perspective, Karel Capek explores the folkloric-cum-evolutionary notions ofhybridity and symbiosis, first, in R. U R., a craftily disguised melodrama about artificially grown workers called "Robots" and, second, in War with the Newts, a satirical scientific parable about salamanders conditioned and bred to function as a labour force (Chapter 4). In both 11 scenarios, the engineered entities possess the "changeling" instinct to infiltrate and undermine human authority but also present the nightmarish results of co-opting monsters for profit and war. Olaf Stapledon develops this twentieth-century folkloric-cum­ evolutionary exploration, first, in two "cosmological" fictions, Last and First Men and Star Maker, which contemplate the future development of the human species and the potential function of symbiotic communities. Adapting these original far- future visions, Odd John and Sirius return us to the quaint environment of folk narrative, conceptualizing new changelings in the form of a mutant superman and a hybrid man-dog. Together, Stapledon' s "composite" fictional world testifies to the resilience of the folkloric tradition and the religious or supernatural fascination with the fearful symmetry of the human organism. Such science-fictional speculations enable us to discover that legends contain within them subversive undercurrents associated with both a rural underclass as well as a "little folk" driven underground by colonization and industrialization. From this perspective, there are some fascinating intersections between folklore and SF, including the crossover between the "alien" and the "fairy," the abduction motif itself, and the cultural significance of physical metamorphosis as it is consistently presented in changeling narratives and in "alien encounter" SF. 111 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am humbly grateful for the inspiration and support of many people. To my supervisor, Noreen Golfinan: thank you for your enthusiastic engagement with a project that went through so many transformations. As you know, your "theory" class really inspired much of my early thinking on "hybridity" and liminality, and introduced me to Deleuze and Guattari. Thanks also for responding in a timely fashion to my endless questions-big or small. This study seemed so strange and unpromising-and still seems strange-until you encouraged me to keep going. Thanks also go to the other patient members of my dissertation committee, Pat Byrne and Christopher Lockett, who waded through this material and offered helpful comments; thanks especially to Pat Byrne whose insight guided my revisions of the "folkloric" sections of the dissertation. I would also like to thank the members of my internal examination committee, Danine Farquharson and Andrew Loman, who posed many illuminating questions related to my use of poststructural theory, and my external examiner, Nicholas Ruddick, who offered invaluable insights on Darwinian science. A number of professors and colleagues offered their support as well. I would like to thank Tamas Dobozy whose directed reading course on poststructuralism enabled me to develop some ofthe theoretical underpinnings of the dissertation; thanks, Tamas, for patiently working with my ideas and helping me to articulate difficult concepts. I would like to thank Mark Cumming whose graduate course on nineteenth-century British and American literature got me thinking about "fairies" and "changelings" in Victorian culture right from the outset. Thanks to Brad Clissold whose modernism course first introduced me to Bergson and "creative evolution"; thanks as well for arranging a colloquium where I could read a section of my dissertation to colleagues and for an interesting discussion of "magic" and "alternate worlds." I would like to thank Donna Walsh for her help with arranging my original science-fiction reading list, for introducing me