Prospectus: Basic Aims and Proposed Argument(s) - Draft 1 Complete

Basic Aims and Proposed Argument

The roots of science fiction, as with all genres, have no clear beginning, but one might identify the Victorian period as one possible point of origin.  Most survey texts of the Victorian Novel will have at least a small section attributing significant and historic developments in science, technology, psychology, economics, and sociology to the proliferation of fiction featuring all of these disciplines, but, most prominently, science.  Louis James, for example, opens a chapter on “Science, Utopias and Dystopias” in The Victorian Novel with the claim that “While the term ‘science fiction’ only became used in 1926, the genre had its roots in the nineteenth century…as the century progressed, scientific discoveries became increasingly a subject for debate”(James 212).  Science became particularly prevalent in Victorian popular fiction hovering closely around the turn of the century, and while not identifying itself as part of a singular genre called science fiction, these popular novels combined the scientific and the supernatural in a way not previously done.

The novel across Victorian England, of course, exhibited a complicated mix of genres; genres that stand alone in other literary periods become, in the Victorian age, modes competing against other modes in a single text.  Strains of realism, the Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, the Romantic, the melodramatic, etc., all circulated simultaneously and fluidly.  This heteroglossia in the novel fostered a literary environment in which the complex relationship between the scientific and the supernatural could precipitate.  To those whose preoccupation lies with taxonomy and categorization, this relationship might mark the birth of science fiction.

But the aim of this dissertation is not to identify the origins of the science fiction genre or engage at all in such a debate.  It will instead look at a set of closely related texts that have, in studies in Victorian literature, only recently been regarded as part of the period's literary canon, in many ways competing against mainstream fictional realism.  By examining these texts in order to not construct a clean lineage of any one genre or literary historical period but to synchronically commentate on dynamic literary historical trends, I hope to show that these popular novels, commonly essentialized as anti-realist and isolated in the science fiction genre, can contribute to a dialogue on the realism that was so central to the Victorian novel.  In many ways I will show that late Victorian popular fiction not only can but must participate in conversations about realism.  

The popular novels in question here will include those by H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker.  All of these authors have written narratives featuring fringe or “mad” scientists who wield scientific discourse authoritatively but, usually by asking fundamental questions about the nature of reality, have radical ideas that cause others around them to dismiss them.  Jack Griffin, as title character of The Invisible Man, upsets the relationship between visual perception and ontology, The Time Machine’s Time Traveller posits time as a fourth dimension, Sherlock Holmes claims to gain access to a man’s innermost thoughts through observation, Dr. Jekyll’s theory asserts that each man in fact has two men within him, and Van Helsing believes in vampires.  These mad scientist figures, forced to experiment in private, not only represent but embody the frequent coexistence of the scientific and the supernatural discourses in the Victorian novel mentioned earlier.  Even though what the scientists discover, believe, or encounter might be “unrealistic” or seemingly supernatural, their methods are entirely empirical, constantly pursuing observational objectivity.  And within these characters, neither the supernatural or the scientific “win out,” but rather they simply co-exist, inextricably linked.  Within these narratives, the scientist would not be able to test reality and discover that which mankind cannot fathom without a scientific method, nor would that method have any meaning or purpose were the supernatural not possible.

I argue, then, that these mad scientists do not merely provide fantastical entertainment in their hair-brained experiments, but rather directly address issues spurred by realism and reflect or extend the intellectual work of Victorian realism that has already been located in writers and thinkers such as John Ruskin and Walter Pater, as well as novelists traditionally categorized as realists.  Both Victorian writers contemplating realism, such as George Eliot, and the Invisible Man, for example, challenge the assumption that seeing consistently and reliably facilitates knowing or being.  Both writer and character conduct similar experiments to test the limits of reality and how we might represent that reality. 

With their characters working on their behalf, writers like Wells, Doyle, Stoker, and Stevenson take up the same realist project that more readily accepted realist novelists recognizably do.  One might assume that since a particular work itself does not indisputably attempt to mimetically represent reality, to be objective, it then does not actually say anything about the process of representation. I would argue that the opposite is in fact true and it is precisely because many of these works contain strains of the "realistic" and the "fantastic" together that they are able to reflect back upon a debate surrounding one's ability to capture reality, to perceive it and represent it in conventional ways. The realist project or “the realist experiment,” (Caroline Levine) as recently recast by critics such as Caroline Levine and George Levine, does not merely attempt to produce or reproduce the real but rather questions its very nature, and these novels are very much in that spirit.  

Beyond reconfiguring how studies in Victorian literature have, until recently, rigidly divided canonical and popular texts, this project hopes to investigate implications these popular works from the fin de siècle have for the Novel as a form.  Situating these texts in their specific literary history will then open up questions about several much larger histories - the history of the novel, the history of genre, the history of science fiction, the history of realism, and the history of supernatural vs. scientific discourse.  These works, for instance, have historically been labeled as “novellas” rather than novels.  Why is this the case?  Is the relative length of a work enough to separate it from others?  To what extent has the categorization of these texts – as popular novellas – enabled them to engage in the Victorian realist experiment in the way described here?

The other contribution this project hopes to make to studies in Victorian Literature is the unique lens that film adaptation can provide when considering perceptions, representations and “laws” of reality.  In many ways it is neglectful to consider realism and mimetic representation without considering film as a form complementary and in contrast to the novel, as the development of film as a technology would have been occurring roughly around the same time these works were published.  The introduction of photography and then later film into Victorian culture fundamentally changed the way Victorians might have conceptualized reality in terms of time and space.  As Roland Barthes observes, film has the distinct ability to more convincingly masquerade as an analogon to reality, but it in fact cannot represent reality and, more importantly, distorts reality.  Keeping all this in mind, the project will, then, draw from film adaptations of the novels discussed as they are relevant to the larger discussion of the mad scientist figure and his stake in Victorian realism.