HG WELLS

This article explores figures of visibility and otherness in H.G. Wells’s novel 'The Invisible Man', discussing the relevance of such figures to the historical paradigm of the Victorian period in which the text was written.

Through an analysis of the text, the human body and skin are considered as mediums invested with personal and social meaning; modification through acts of dress and undress can be seen to have ramifications that impact both the individual and their social setting. The Invisible Man is discussed as a literary figure that comes to represent how the human body may be read as a metaphorically laden site.

As a culturally produced text, literature is seen as a lens with the potential to draw attention to the values, ideas, and beliefs that underlie a society.

In this paper three key themes in H.G. Wells' novel 'The Invisible Man' (1897), are discussed: firstly, the ways that the body may be fashioned through dress and individual practices; secondly, how wearable artefacts may socialize bodies and symbolically communicate; and thirdly, how the fashioned body may challenge personal and cultural boundaries. Collectively, these issues draw attention to the relational network of body, culture, and dress.

These relationships are highly relevant to design research in fashion, dress, and wearable artefacts, which all use the body as a site. This study is seen as being an example of how literature may be utilized as a speculative device to encourage experimental and creative design research practices.

The author's practice led doctoral research, which emphasizes the body and skin as sites for design, is used as an example of a cross-disciplinary approach that draws on the issues raised through an analysis of the novel.

Between 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many
species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’
from a bee? Half a century after Darwin’s death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid’s flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower’s pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin’s science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

In A Christmas Carol the protagonist journeys to the past and future: it is, at its very heart, a story about time travel, and yet this aspect of the tale has been overlooked by both Dickensians and SF scholars. This article examines the nature of time travel in Dickens's story, its use and implications, and compares this to the model adopted by H G Wells in his subsequent work The Time Machine, which, despite postdating the Carol, has long since been seen as the father of time travel fiction.

Eschewing the all-pervading contextual approach to literary criticism, this book takes a Lacanian view of popular British fantasy texts of the late 19th century such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, revealing the significance of the historical context; the advent of a modern democratic urban society in place of the traditional agrarian one. Moreover, counter intuitively it turns out that fantasy literature is analogous to modern Galilean science in its manipulation of the symbolic thereby changing our conception of reality. It is imaginary devices such as vampires and ape-men, which in conjunction with Lacanian theory say something additional of the truth about – primarily sexual – aspects of human subjectivity and culture, repressed by the contemporary hegemonic discourses.


Reviews
"An impressive academic book that evinces a scrupulous attention to all existing scholarship and a thorough mastery of both Lacanian psychoanalysis and fantasy literature. The author deploys Lacanian psychoanalysis in a subtle yet thoroughly erudite fashion in order to illuminate the literary texts in a way that no previous scholars have done." - Todd McGowan, Associate Professor of Film Studies,University of Vermont

"Sharoni plumbs the heights and depths of late-Victorian and Edwardian fantasy. If we knew that She was one of Freud's favorite novels we grasp only now why Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Rider Haggard had anticipated Lacan and Žižek in their Freudian re-elaborations and offered us so many haunting modern fantasies." - Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania
Table of contents
Preface
Introduction: Vampires and Ape-Men: A Lacanian Reading of British Fantasy Fiction, 1886–1914
 Introduction
 The Return of the Primordial Father: Freud’s Totem and Taboo and the Late Victorian and Edwardian Fantasy Novel
 The Outline of the Book

1 The Historical Background: The Modernization of Britain 1870–1914

2 Types of Literary Criticism: The Contextual versus the Critical Approach
 2.1 Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literary Criticism, and the Question of Evidence

3 Lacan’s Reconsideration of Totem and Taboo
 3.1 Totem and Taboo and Oedipus Rex
 3.2 The Name-of-the-Father
 3.3 The Thing (Das Ding) and Object a
 3.4 Anxiety and Object a
 3.5 Père ou Pire: Father or Worse
 4 ‘Yet Another Interpretation’

4 Science and the Thing: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World
 1 Introduction
 2 The Plot
 3 Totem and Taboo and the Doubling of the Primal Father
 4 The Abdication of the Father
 5 The Father-Out-of-Law
 6 The Return of the Courtly Love Tradition
 7 Courtly Love as Art and the (Scientific) Need to See for Oneself
 8 The ‘Larger than Life’ Scientist
 9 Lacan and Sublimation
 10 Science and Civilisation
 11 The Ending of the Novel: The Use of Beauty
 12 Courtly Loave, the Lady and the Baby Pterodactyl

5 The Missing Name-of-the-Father: She
 1 Introduction
 2 The Plot of She
 3 She and ‘Totem and Taboo’
 4 The Fantasy Space and the Absence
 5 The Asexual Primal Father
 6 A Land Where the Names of Fathers are Missing
 7 The Absence of the (Normal) Sexual Relationship
 8 The Father’s Bequest to His Son
 9 Myth, Fantasy and Realism
 10 Conclusion

6 The Recuperation of the Thing: ‘The Horror of the Heights’
 1 Introduction
 2 The Symbolic, the Real and the Thing
 3 The Danger of the Thing
 4 The Social versus a Deadly Solipsistic Enjoyment
 5 The Primal Father Who Enjoys
 6 The Return to the Greek Myths
 7 The Summons of the Real

7 The Name-of-the-Science: The Invisible Man
 1 Introduction
 2 The Isolation of the Individual in Modern Urban Society
 3 The Invisible Man as Primal Father
 4 Invisibility and the Anonymity of the City
 5 Beyond the Law
 6 The Impossibility of a ‘Special, Solitary Enjoyment’
 7 The Cancellation of the Name-of-the-Father
 8 The Impossible Existence
 9 ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King’
 10 The Name-of-Science

8 The Re-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father: Dracula
 1 The Plot
 2 Lacanian Readings of Dracula
 3 Dracula as ‘Totem and Taboo’
 4 The Fantasy Area: Transylvania and the Loss of the Symbolic Grid
 5 Dracula’s Castle and Freud’s Reception Hall
 6 Dracula in the Castle as Jonathan Harker’s Double
 7 Van Helsing and the Return of the Master
 8 The Ambiguity of the Master Figure

Conclusion


Bibliography
Index

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds has been adapted many times into different media. Film adaptations of the book have seen a resurgence in the past decades, which coincides with new astrophysical discoveries and continued (perceived) threats to America. While the renewed fascination with space began well before the new millennium, thanks to exploration of Mars and the discovery of extrasolar planets, fuelling new adaptations of Wells’ work, the heightened fear of terrorism after 9/11 has coloured these adaptations, projecting renewed fears of the Other onto these later films. The aim of my research is to answer the following question: how do Independence Day (1996) and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) react to and expand on H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and how do these adaptations explore fears of epidemics, terrorism and invasion? I will attempt to answer these questions by comparing and contrasting two recent films with the book, and finding parallels with current-day events in America.

The central question of this thesis is: how do the rise of Darwinian evolution, fin de siècle fears of degeneration and the abhuman monster affect the representation of science and the scientist at the end of the nineteenth century, and how is this reflected in the selected corpus of fiction? I will argue how the main themes of scientific discovery, Darwinism, abjection, abhumanism, and degeneration have been incorporated into several fin de siècle gothic novels, and how these novels react to those themes in turn. Several other important themes are hypnotism and its influence on the mind, the place of humanity in nature and history, and the hegemony of Victorian civilization. I will argue that Gothic literature can play a central role in the debate surrounding scientific advancement and ethics, and that it continues to do so to this day.

'H.G. Wells' and Julian Huxley's The Science of Life: Love, Life, and Literature After Teleology'

This paper will discuss H.G. Wells’ and Julian Huxley’s The Science of Life, examining how their interpretation of evolutionary psychology, man’s place within nature, and their Darwinian rejection of a teleological notion of progress reflect a range of modernist concerns, including collectivity, play, eroticism, and the embodied mind.

In Wells’ scientific romances we see evidence of his interests in both Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary theory. The Invisible Man’s Griffin is both a figure spawned from the Darwinian-influenced study of eugenics and a self-evolved, Lamarckian figure who has adapted his body to the anonymity of the modern world. What has not been noted are the suggestive parallels between Griffin and the psychical theories of Fredric Myers. Myers’ theory of progeneracy stated that those with ‘degenerate’, psychical abilities may, in fact, be more highly developed [1]. This is applicable to Griffin as his physical state of invisibility makes him apparently bodiless, meaning many of his actions are interpreted by others as manifestations of a supernatural, telekinetic or telepathic energy. In addition to this, as a Lamarckian, Darwinian and Myersian evolutionary, Griffin deviates from the degenerative model found in contemporary texts. He does not degenerate from a hegemonic to a queered male; instead he utilizes and improves his already queered form. Although his albinism and iconoclastic personality mark him as a degenerate, he reinvents himself as progenerate. Having changed his problematic visible body, he is both removed from the stigma of his physicality and connected to the heightened state of Myers’ psychics. However, Wells complicates this presentation of progeneracy by exploring the boundaries of Griffin’s invisible form, highlighting the isolation that it affords as its ultimate flaw.

In short, this paper will draw on Wells’ own scientific interests to argue that The Invisible Man’s Griffin is a figure based around contemporary biological and psychical theories of evolution, manifesting as progeneracy, and Wells uses the character to explore and criticise fin de siècle debates on evolution and degeneracy.


[1] Luckhurst, Roger, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.110