Chapter Descriptions
The following chapters will primarily provide close readings of novels to investigate their usage of the supernatural and discuss how that might locate them in the Victorian realist project. And since genre is also a critical context for the dissertation, its chapters will also attempt to examine each novel’s narration to see how that might also contribute to the discussion, particularly by way of addressing the frequent labeling of these texts as novellas, scientific romances, shilling shockers, horror stories, etc. As mentioned previously, the narrative premise of these novels asks the same questions Victorian writers asked of realism, but how such premises are actually carried out narratologically will also be of interest in the context of realism. If these novels are not attempting to detail every minutiae of life in order to represent reality as more capacious Victorian novels do, then what are they doing instead? Similarly, the film adaptations discussed alongside the novels, where appropriate, will both use adaptive choices in content or premise as well as stylistic choices in film narration to focus more sharply on the novels themselves.
Chapter 1: Limitations of Human Consciousness in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895)
An application of science that expands our conception of reality is so central to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine that the narrative defines its protagonist strictly in terms of his scientific inquiry by giving him no name other than The Time Traveller. This implies that he is only important to the reader of the novel insofar as he is able to make his “great discovery” (Wells page #) – to travel in time. Any other information about his identity is immaterial. This chapter will focus on this “great discovery” as not a purely fantastical narrative catalyst, as an idea “against reason,” as one of the Time Traveller’s friends, Filby, says, but rather as a way of posing questions about how humans construct, perceive, and represent their realities.
While the Time Traveller’s method is strictly scientific, complete with “experimental verification” (Wells page #), his conjectures based on such a method questions the very fabric of time and our normal, basic assumptions about how we relate to both time and space. During the parlor room conversation in which the novel begins, the Time Traveller gives his friends and colleagues a lecture about how time is in fact a fourth dimension of space. He says, “There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives” (Wells page #). By framing the notion of time travel as one that is closely related to or based on pre-existing, scientifically proven notions about “the three planes of Space” the Time Traveller’s theories fit into a realist discourse, even if his conclusion does not seem “realistic.” He also calls our existing ideas about the “distinction between” the dimensions of space and time “unreal,” using the very language his colleagues and readers would to describe his theory of time.
Feeble human perception prevents the Time Traveller’s conclusion from being realistic; in this same passage, he continues on to say - extremely emphatically to underscore the radical and unbelievable nature of what he posits - that “THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TIME AND ANY OF THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF SPACE EXCEPT THAT OUR CONSCIOUSNESS MOVES ALONG IT” (Wells page #). The problem of time travel, according to the Time Traveller, is a problem of perception, and the ability to travel through time as if it were space is an action only limited by human consciousness. The idea that our “consciousness moves along” time implies that consciousness binds humans to time, making them immobile in it. In other words, he posits that seeing is not necessarily knowing; in fact it is the assumption that seeing is knowing that prevents us from conceptualizing time and space in such a way that would allow for time travel.
The act of the Time Traveller telling his own story is just as much a part of Wells’ narrative as his journey into the future itself. The narrator describes the Time Traveller as a storyteller who is “too clever to be believed” (Wells page #) and “had more of a touch of whim among his elements” to the point where they “distrusted him” (Wells #). And when the Time Traveller returns from his adventure, he refers multiple times to the act of storytelling. First he is too hungry to tell the story, then he asks his friends to not interrupt his story, and finally he says, “Most of it will sound like lying. So be it! It’s true – every word of it, all the same” (Wells #). One cannot help but see a connection between the Time Traveller’s awareness of realism in his own narrative and the stake his experiment as a test of reality’s limits has in realism.
