More free writing for Chapter 2 (HG Wells)

While reading Thomsa C. Renzi's H.G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film, I remembered that a large part of what I want to talk about with The Time Machine is the narrative structure and self-reflexive references to narrative itself.

Possible Chapter Outline:
-Time Machine's historical context (theories of the fourth dimension at the time)
-close reading of fourth dimension as a demonstration of limited human perception --connect to realism
-apply the same thing to The Invisible Man
-talk about the narrative structure of each novel and how it relates to realism - narrative time travel or narrative as time traveling!
-talk about film adaptations? (this will more likely be spread throughout the chapter)


TEXT TO GO DIRECTLY INTO CHAPTER:
When comparing the 1960 film adaptation to Wells' text, Renzi points out that while Wells employs a "frame narrator" director George Pal chooses to represent the narrative frame with a character, David Filby.  He says, "The Frame Narrator and Frame Character serve at least two purposes.  Their outside viewpoint carries a degree of objectivity and gives credibility to the inventor's Inset Narrative.  Second, they ground the story in a reality with which the audience can identify before and after experiencing the wondrous trip in the Time Machine" (Renzi 19).  Renzi ascribes this similarity in narrative frame between film and novel to the fact that both narratives need to contain the fantastical portion of the narrative - time travel.  The idea of a narrative frame "grounding the story in reality" implies that the the story itself is unreal, assuming an antithetical relationship between the two narrative discourses.  I would argue that one could also see the narrative frame as a mechanism for naturalizing time travel.  If the reader or spectator is already "grounded in reality" as Renzi says, then that sets up the time travel in the narrative as a logical part of that reality. 

Renzi also goes on to say that the return to reality provided by the narrative frame renders the realism of the time travel moot because, "the value of the dream experience is not whether it was real, but that it left an indelible impression."  This, I think, shortchanges the intellectual significance of the narrative frame and overlooks the time machine as a product of scientific experimentation.  In some ways it actually agrees with the aforementioned argument that the narrative frame naturalizes or real-izes the time travel narrative embedded within in that the reader, according to Renzi, doesn't seem to pay much attention to real and unreal on account of the narrative frame, but I would actually argue that Wells, in creating this narrative frame, hopes for readers to focus their attention on issues of realism, just not in terms of the real/supernatural binary. 

Having one time line embedded into another links the actual scientific theory behind time travel and narrative as a representation of time and space.  We begin in the Time Traveller's parlor room, explaining the theory behind the time machine, but then, instead of chronologically following the Time Traveller on his journey, the narrative remains in the Time Traveller's home, with his friends and colleagues, in order to receive him and then hear about his journey to the time of the Eloi after the fact.

The actual narrative of the Time Traveller's journey, then, is, not unlike Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written only a few years later in 1898, painstakingly told in quotations by the Time Traveller and not by the third person narrator.  Of both novels one must ask why have a narrator at all if the majority of the story is going to be told as dialogue from another non-narrator character?  For Conrad's work, many critics have argued that it is to emphasize the fact that narratives are inherently unreliable, of history or histories as always subjective and subject to the narrator's ideological, social, and political moorings. 

[Probably should bring in some Bakhtin here - both heteroglossia from "Discourse in the Novel" and narrative time from Chronotope essay.]

Even the Time Traveller himself, when the narrative frame comes to a close, remains unsure, for a brief moment, as to whether or not his story is real or was merely a dream.  He explicitly tells his colleagues that he does not expect them to believe him -  "I know...that all this will be absolutely incredible to you.  To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures" (Wells).  One, instead of assuming that the Time Traveller's admission of uncertainty is a way of labeling the middle portion of the narrative as fantastical, might think of the attention drawn to uncertainty as a way of showing that there is no way to discern to what extent any narrative told by any narrator might correlate to "reality."  All narratives are always already both dreamlike and real at once.

"I shared a cab with the Editor.  He thought the tale a 'gaudy lie.' For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion.  The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober." --> THIS IS VICTORIAN REALISM!  The telling may be "credible and sober," but that does not exclude "fantastic and incredible" content.

[ADD PARAGRAPHS FROM OLD PROSPECTUS DRAFT, PRE-SHORTENING]

Some freewriting, a part of chapter 2 (HG Wells).

In addition to the Time Traveller's theory of time as the fourth dimension, there is, of course, the much more well known or recognized portion of the novel - the dystopian prediction for the future of human civilization.  As a scientific theory of H.G. Wells himself, how does the representation of man's future as a place where cultural and industrial "progress," as the humans in the Time Traveler's time perceive it, is in fact self-destructive, also operate as a realist project or experiment?

Like Darwin's theory of natural selection, the dystopia depicted in The Time Machine is a functional scientific theory that similarly implies projections for the future.  As either an application of Darwin's theories (resembling the atavism that will be discussed in Chapter 3) -- if humans evolve to select for certain traits, they may in fact end up like Morlocks and the Eloi.  Then again, Wells' proposed future may be a refutation of Darwin's theories, because the traits that have been selected for are obviously the weakest or least desirable - for the Eloi it's an ineffective delicacy, and for the Morlock's it's a hyper-aggressive and "savage" industry.  Alexei and Cory Panshin, in "The Reinvention of the Future" write, "The Eloi, the children of the idle rich, have grown soft and stupid.  The descendants of the proletariat, the monstrous Morlocks, have retained some bestial vigor."  These two civilizations serve as a cautionary tale that co-opts an existing scientific theory like natural selection for the sake of thinking the unthinkable, the inconceivable.

The Time Traveller even mentions Darwin by name, when he says that those unfamiliar theories like those of "the younger Darwin" don't realize that the sun will get hotter over time, thus accounting for the hotter weather that the Eloi experience.  This passing reference to Darwin positions him as a scientist who would back up the Time Traveller in his assessment of the future, as his theory of evolution, extended and adapted for the Time Traveller's purposes, actually means that Darwin's theory would implicitly have to be in agreement with his. 

The Panshins go on to say that "It is the Time Traveller's final theory that he is present at the sad conclusion of the brief dream of the human intellect, one part of man degenerated into feeble prettiness, the other into bestiality.  But he concedes that even his theory may be wrong.  The ultimate effect of all this theorizing is to leave us uncertain of anything.  We do not know what happened.  We cannot know.  The eight hundred thousand years between now and then is a great mystery."

[GO BACK AND FIND ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL TO COMPLEMENT PANSHINS]

How is this scientific theory that predicts human civilization's future a realist experiment?  Active speculation, according to Caroline Levine, was a key tenet of realism.  The only problem is there's no way to test the Time Traveller's  -- we only have his narrative, his eye-witness account, to rely upon.  Or rather, there would be no way to test Wells' speculation, but his staging of the Time Traveller's narrative is the next best thing.

Yet another prospectus draft....

I'm really hoping this is the last one.  It's more or less the same as the last couple, but with the chapter descriptions massively stripped down.


Testing Reality’s Limits: “Mad” Scientists, Realism, and the Supernatural in Late Victorian Popular Fiction

Introduction

Written between 1887 and 1901, the novels of H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker gravitate towards one another in several vectors. They share a historical moment – the late Victorian period or fin de siècle – as well as the genre of popular fiction. In reaction to the pricier “triple decker” realist novels of the period, these shorter novels earned numerous labels that set them apart from other publications–the novella, the scientific romance, the shilling shocker, and the neo-Gothic novel . Many of them also feature a fringe or “mad” scientist, and this common figure will be the focus of this dissertation.

As any legitimate scientist would, the characters in these novels wield scientific discourse authoritatively; the “madness” perceived by other characters, then, results from their asking fundamental questions about the nature of reality and having radical ideas or theories based on such questions. Jack Griffin, as title character of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, upsets the accepted relationship between visual perception and ontology when he conducts an experiment that renders himself invisible, thus proving that something or someone can exist without being seen; in the novel, seeing fails to precipitate knowledge and no longer produces representations that evidence being. In Wells’ later novel, The Time Machine, the Time Traveller posits time as a fourth dimension, calling into question previous notions of a three-dimensional world. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes appropriates the scientific method in order to enact a kind of divination or mind reading when he claims to gain access to a man’s innermost thoughts through observation. Propelling the plot of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry Jekyll’s theory asserts that each man in fact has two men within him, leading to the grizzly struggle with his brutish alter ego, Mr. Hyde. Finally, Bram Stoker’s Dracula features Van Helsing, a medical doctor, and thus a man of science, who not only believes in but actively hunts vampires.

As one can already see from a brief sketch of each novel’s premise, these mad scientist figures not only represent but also embody the frequent coexistence of scientific and supernatural discourses in the late Victorian novel. Even though what the scientists discover, believe, or encounter might be “unrealistic” or seemingly supernatural, their methods are primarily empirical, constantly pursuing observational objectivity. I argue, then, that these mad scientists do not merely provide fantastical entertainment in their hare-brained experiments, but also directly address issues spurred by the realism often associated with “triple deckers,” the highbrow three-volume novels of Victorian literature . The realist project or “the realist experiment,” 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 reality’s very nature and our ability to see, know, and contain it . These novels, with their unique blending of the real/scientific and the unreal/supernatural, are very much in that spirit.

When framed as contending with issues of reality, these popular novels that feature mad scientists reflect or extend the intellectual work of Victorian realism, which has already been located by scholars in the writings of 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 characters featured in popular novels, such as the Invisible Man, challenge the assumption that seeing consistently and reliably facilitates knowing or being. Eliot does so explicitly in her writing by inserting reflections such as the pier-glass parable in Middlemarch, and the Invisible Man does so by attempting, through his experiments, to exist as a man without a visual representation . Both writer and character conduct similar experiments to test the limits of reality and how we might conceive of and represent that reality – one is just less literary and more literal than the other.

These novels have been historically characterized as anti-realist, by Victorians and scholars of Victorian literature alike, and isolated in genres such as the Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, horror, or romance, and this dissertation will bridge gaps across genre lines by contextualizing popular fiction in a larger dialogue on the realism that was so central to the Victorian novel . By examining these texts in order to, rather than construct a clean lineage of any one genre or literary historical period, synchronically commentate on dynamic literary historical trends, the dissertation will show that conversations about realism cannot ignore and must include late Victorian popular fiction not only because it has yet to be done, but because until it is done, the Victorian novel puzzle will remain incomplete.

Victorian science and literature were not closed discursive circuits, and critics have devised several metaphors to describe the free-flowing exchange of ideas across disciplines; John Kucich calls “cross pollination” what Paul Fayter calls “two-way traffic.” Science was very much a part of the popular imagination, as Victorians often practiced an often-sophisticated amateur science in the home – collecting butterflies or fossils, for example. Victorian themselves were, in actual scientific practices and philosophical treatises, always already testing the reality they knew and open to new knowledge formation in the form of burgeoning scientific theories. These novels, then, were not in of themselves controversial, but rather reflective of the scientific controversies and upsets actually occurring in Victorian England. This dissertation will provide its readers with as much historical context about Victorian scientific debates as is necessary to understand how these popular novels interfaced with the scientific discourse of the day.

One such scientific upset was the development of film as a technology, which had major turning points in the latter half of the century, around the same time these novels were published. In 1889 William Friese-Greene invents a camera “capable of producing short sequences of pictures” (5), and many historians claim that Augustin Le Prince to have shot the first films between 1888 and 1890. Such innovations in the technology continued until the first film screenings in Britain in 1896 . The development of photography and then later film within Victorian culture fundamentally changed the way Victorians conceptualized reality in terms of time and space. As Roland Barthes implies, film has the distinct ability to more convincingly masquerade as an analogon to reality than other forms such as painting or prose, but in fact distorts reality . The form of film itself, with its ability to create an illusion of movement from still images and synthetically splice together events and images, complicates and heightens realism’s concern with the relationship between representation and reality.
The differences and similarities between the novel and a contemporary film adaptation, being of different historical moments and narrative genres, often show that the exploration of realism through scientific inquiry is one unique to the Victorian “source” narratives . The 2002 film adaptation of The Time Machine, for example, adds a romantic subplot, which motivates the Time Traveller’s scientific pursuits; the late Victorian tendency to question the nature of reality for its own sake tendency is noticeably absent in the film. This addition of romance and subtraction of scientific curiosity reflects back on Wells' text, emphasizing the importance of experimentation to its narrative. One can make the same argument for several adaptations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Existing Scholarship

Many scholars have made connections between Victorian scientific discoveries and literary representations, and most attribute realist tendencies in novels to new and emerging technologies of the period. Richard Menke, for example, in Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems, tries “to delineate the deep ways in which new technologies, and the wider understandings that a culture could derive from them, register in literature’s ways of imagining and representing the real” (Menke 3). By framing Victorian culture as obsessed with the transmission of information, Menke sees the culture as cueing literature to try to comprehensively detail all aspects of real life, thus creating realism.

In attempting to see Victorian science in Victorian fiction, however, such works rarely integrate a variety of fictional genres. Menke, for example, lists several genres from Victorian literature as all having “informational economies,” but readers never get the sense that those economies, while sharing a unified cause in information technology and new media, resemble one another in their effects; realism is still unique in its attempt to capture reality and everything else has other business to which to attend. Similarly, work by scholars such as Robert Mighall, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wolfreys establish the genre of the “Victorian Gothic” as a discrete literary arena. This dissertation will fulfill a need in the field to connect popular fiction, which includes the Victorian Gothic, with “classic” fictional realism.

This is not to say that considering realism and the supernatural equally is an entirely new concept. Critical debates in studies in Victorian literature have been, for several decades now, advocating for an expansion of the canon to include genres previously segregated from the classic realist novel. The high brow/low brow divide has already been questioned and to a certain extent broken, as evidenced by critical trends towards considering popular fiction in order to construct a more nuanced conception of the Victorian novel as a genre . This dissertation does not, then, set out to simply reiterate that cry of outrage on behalf of the until recently less regarded popular novel, but rather hopes to use that as a starting point in continuing to examine how these popular genres, now that they've been invited to the table, add to critical conversations on the novel, genre, narration, and realism.

Over the past three decades a new operating definition of realism has formed, one that figures realism as not a straightforward literary mode that “discover[s] some non verbal truth out there,” (Levine 6) but rather as a more volatile intellectual project that sets out to investigate how reality and representations of that reality function. George Levine, in The Realistic Imagination, suggests that Victorians themselves were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today: “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (Levine 21-20). I would like to see how the authors I’ve clustered here, whom Levine does not address, might “attempt to explore or create a new reality.” Mimesis is certainly still very much a part of realism, but this new conception of it characterizes the movement as a generative and volatile process rather than one exclusively pursuing naïve or unproblematic modes of representation.

Under this new definition of realism, popular fiction that cannot be seen as representing reality objectively becomes ripe for exploration. Caroline Levine has already begun this work in The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt in her treatment of sensation fiction. She compellingly argues, for example, for Wilkie Collins, previously considered a sensation novel writer, as “an exemplary Victorian realist” (Levine 43). Levine constructs her argument by providing an exhaustive and detailed reading of Victorian critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater that calls for a rereading of Gothic and sensation fiction as engaging realism without explicitly attempting mimesis . In thinking of how this project will draw from Levine’s, one might consider an alternative title of the dissertation to be “The Serious Pleasures of the Supernatural.” Levine discusses novels by Bronte, Collins, Dickens, and Eliot, and I will take the next logical step and carry her work even later into the 19th century and further into the popular realm with Wells, Doyle, Stevenson, and Stoker.


Chapter Descriptions

Introduction
The intellectual background provided in this prospectus will be amplified in an introduction that will provide all relevant historical context, discuss the rationale behind including film adaptations of the novels studied, and form a working definition of realism for the project.

Chapter 1: Victorian Science, the Scientist, and Classic Realist Novelists
By looking at the role of science in works by novelists considered to be classic realists, this chapter will serve as a “control” in the discussion of realism, anchoring the dissertation. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874) and Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882) are two appropriate works for such a purpose, seeing as they are conventionally realist but also feature scientist figures.

Chapter 2: The Limitations of Human Consciousness and Perception in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897)
Victorian science and philosophy orbit Wells’ The Time Machine. French philosopher Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, published in 1889, for example, outlines a theory of duration, positing that human perception maps time onto space instead of understanding its own movement . A few years later, in 1894, Sim Newcomb published an article about the fourth dimension in Nature, which Wells read. Bergson’s theory parallels that of Wells’ Time Traveller: “there is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it” (Wells 2). Feeble human perception prevents the Time Traveller’s conclusion from being realistic. Two years later, Wells again illustrates the limitations of human perception in The Invisible Man. Griffin, an “experimental investigator,” (Wells 15) tests the limits of reality when he renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment. The very existence of Griffin confounds those around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him; he is not represented in any tangible way. Through an examination of Wells’ work, this chapter will explore how these novels challenge the assumption that seeing is knowing or that observation produces an accurate representation of reality.

Chapter 3: Darwin as Super-Naturalist in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
The influence of Darwin’s theories can be found in innumerable corners of Victorian literature, but towards the close of the period, a particular “spin off” of Darwin’s theories called atavism persisted in popular fiction. Atavism or degeneration, proposed and used by scientists such as criminologist Cesare Lombroso and physician and social critic Max Simon Nordau , speculates that if Darwin’s theory of man evolving over the ages from more primitivism organisms is true, then there is no reason he might not devolve. Like Wells’ Time Traveller, Van Helsing and Dr. Seward from Dracula and Dr. Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adopt the accepted scientific discourse of the day and take them to logical extremes, casting “unreal” phenomena – Mr. Hyde the brute and Dracula the vampire – as real products of biological evolution.

Chapter 4: Powers of Observation and the Illusion of the Supernatural in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet (1887), Sign of Four (1890), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)
In the first novel to feature Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally accepted notions about reality that he, like Griffin, conducts experiments in private. His unmatched skills of detection are directly dependent on his empirical approach, but an empirical approach not restricted by assumptions about reality. Even though they are in fact based on observation, the narrative often describes Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in observation and logic. When Watson comments on Holmes’ writing, for example, he says "It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity" (Doyle 20). And so Holmes exists in opposition to, say, what Griffin of The Invisible Man represents, shoring up the idea that seeing is in fact the only way of knowing; it’s just a matter of seeing well.


Works Cited
Primary Works
Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sign of Four. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York: Broadview, 2004.
Ritchie, Guy. Sherlock Holmes. Warner Bros., 2009.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Wells, H.G. The Invisible Man. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1897.
Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Wells, Simon. The Time Machine. Dreamworks, 2002.

Secondary Works
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Routledge, 1983.
Brantlinger, Patrick. “Science Fiction.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Fantina, Richard and Kimberly Harrison, eds. Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2006.
Fayter, Paul. “Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction.” Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Ferguson, Christine. Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006.
Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca: Cornell Unviersity Press, 2006.
Herbert, Stephen. A History of Early Film, Volume 1. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Kucich, John. “Scientific Ascendency.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Levine, Caroline. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Levine, George Lewis. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Menke, Richard. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian fiction and other information systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
O’Gorman, Francis. The Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.
Rausch, Andrew J. Turning Points in Film History. New York: Citadel Press Books, 2004.
Robbins, Ruth and Julian Wolfreys. Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Smajic, Srdjan. “Supernatural Realism.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 42.1 (Spring 2009): 1-22.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Reclaiming Late-Victorian Popular Fiction.” English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920. 53.2 (Spring 2010): 170-181.

Prospectus: Draft 3 Complete

Testing Reality’s Limits:  “Mad” Scientists, Realism, and the Supernatural in Late Victorian Popular Fiction

Introduction

Written between 1887 and 1901, the novels of H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker gravitate towards one another on several planes. They share a historical moment – the late Victorian period or fin de siècle – as well as the genre of popular fiction.  In reaction to the pricier “triple decker” realist novels of the period, these shorter novels, often published serially in periodicals, earned several labels that set them apart from other publications–the novella, the scientific romance, the shilling shocker, and the neo-Gothic novel[1].   Many of them also feature a fringe or “mad” scientist, and this common figure will direct the focus of this dissertation. 

As any legitimate scientist would, the characters in these novels wield scientific discourse authoritatively; the “madness” perceived by other characters, then, results from asking fundamental questions about the nature of reality and having radical ideas or theories based on such questions.  Jack Griffin, as title character of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, upsets the accepted relationship between visual perception and ontology when he conducts an experiment that renders himself invisible, thus proving that something or someone can exist without being seen; in the novel, seeing fails to precipitate knowledge and no longer produces representations that evidence being.  In Wells’ later novel, The Time Machine, the Time Traveller posits time as a fourth dimension, calling into question previous notions of a three-dimensional world.  Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the protagonist of several of his novels, appropriates the scientific method in order to enact a kind of divination or mind reading when he claims to gain access to a man’s innermost thoughts through observation.  Propelling the plot of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry Jekyll’s theory asserts that each man in fact has two men within him, leading to the grizzly struggle with his brutish alter ego, Mr. Hyde.  Finally, Bram Stoker’s Dracula features Van Helsing, a medical doctor, and thus a man of science, who not only believes in but actively hunts vampires. 

As one can already see from a brief sketch of each novel’s premise, these mad scientist figures not only represent but also embody the frequent coexistence of scientific and supernatural discourses in the late Victorian novel.  Even though what the scientists discover, believe, or encounter might be “unrealistic” or seemingly supernatural, their methods are entirely empirical, constantly pursuing observational objectivity.  I argue, then, that these mad scientists do not merely provide fantastical entertainment in their hare-brained experiments, but also directly address issues spurred by the realism often associated with “triple deckers,” the highbrow three-volume novels of Victorian literature[2]. The realist project or “the realist experiment,” 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 our ability to see, know, and contain it[3].  These novels, with their unique blending of the real/scientific and the unreal/supernatural, are very much in that spirit.     

 When framed as contending with issues of reality, these popular novels that feature mad scientists reflect or extend the intellectual work of Victorian realism, which has already been located by scholars in the work of 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 characters featured in popular novels, such as the Invisible Man, challenge the assumption that seeing consistently and reliably facilitates knowing or being.  Eliot does so explicitly in her writing by inserting reflections such as the pier-glass parable in Middlemarch, and the Invisible Man does so by attempting, through his experiments, to exist as a man without a visual representation[4].  Both writer and character conduct similar experiments to test the limits of reality and how we might conceive of and represent that reality – one is just less literary and more literal than the other. 

These novels have been historically characterized as anti-realist, by Victorians and scholars of Victorian literature alike, and isolated in genres such as the Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, horror, or romance, and this dissertation will bridge gaps across genre lines by contextualizing popular fiction in a larger dialogue on the realism that was so central to the Victorian novel[5]. By examining these texts in order to, rather than construct a clean lineage of any one genre or literary historical period, synchronically commentate on dynamic literary historical trends, the dissertation will show that conversations about realism cannot ignore and must include late Victorian popular fiction not only because it has yet to be done, but because until it is done, the Victorian novel puzzle will remain incomplete.

Victorian science and literature were not closed discursive circuits, and critics have devised several metaphors to describe the free-flowing exchange of ideas across disciplines; John Kucich calls “cross pollination” what Paul Fayter calls “two-way traffic.”[6]  Science was very much a part of the popular imagination, as Victorians often fancied themselves do-it-yourself scientists at home – collecting butterflies or fossils, for example.  Victorian themselves were, in actual scientific practices and philosophical treatises, always already testing the reality they knew and open to new knowledge formation in the form of burgeoning scientific theories.  These novels, then, were not in of themselves controversial, but rather reflective of the scientific controversies and upsets actually occurring in Victorian England.  This dissertation will provide its readers with as much historical context about Victorian scientific debates as is necessary to understand how these popular novels interfaced with the scientific discourse of the day.

One such scientific upset was the development of film as a technology, which would have occurred roughly around the same time these novels were published.  The introduction of photography and then later film into Victorian culture fundamentally changed the way Victorians conceptualized reality in terms of time and space.  As Roland Barthes implies, film has the distinct ability to more convincingly masquerade as an analogon to reality than other forms such as painting or prose, but in fact distorts reality, thus making the form relevant to this discussion of realism[7].  The differences and similarities between the novel and a contemporary film adaptation, being of different historical moments and narrative genres, often show that the exploration of realism through scientific inquiry is one unique to the Victorian “source”[8] narratives.  The 2002 film adaptation of The Time Machine, for example, adds a romantic subplot, which motivates the Time Traveller’s scientific pursuits; the late Victorian tendency to question the nature of reality for its own sake tendency is noticeably absent in the film.  This addition of romance and subtraction of scientific curiosity reflects back on Wells' text, emphasizing the importance of experimentation to its narrative.  

Existing Scholarship

Many scholars have made connections between Victorian scientific discoveries and literary representations, and most attribute realist tendencies in novels to new and emerging technologies of the period.  Richard Menke, for example, in Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems, tries “to delineate the deep ways in which new technologies, and the wider understandings that a culture could derive from them, register in literature’s ways of imagining and representing the real” (Menke 3).  By framing Victorian culture as obsessed with the transmission of information, Menke sees the culture as cueing literature to try to comprehensively detail all aspects of real life, thus creating realism. 

In attempting to see Victorian science in Victorian fiction, however, such works rarely integrate a variety of fictional genres.  Menke, for example, lists several genres from Victorian literature as all having “informational economies,” but readers never get the sense that those economies, while sharing a unified cause in information technology and new media, resemble one another in their effects; realism is still unique in its attempt to capture reality and everything else has other business to which to attend.  Similarly, work by scholars such as Robert Mighall, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wolfreys establish the genre of the “Victorian Gothic” as a discrete literary arena.  Once again this dissertation will fulfill a need in the field to connect popular fiction, which includes the Victorian Gothic, with “classic” fictional realism.

This is not to say that considering realism and the supernatural equally is an entirely new concept.  Critical debates in studies in Victorian literature have been, for several decades now, advocating for an expansion of the canon to include genres previously segregated from the classic realist novel.  The high brow/low brow divide has already been questioned and to a certain extent broken, as evidenced by critical trends towards considering popular fiction in order to construct a more nuanced conception of the Victorian novel as a genre[9].  This dissertation does not, then, set out to simply reiterate that cry of outrage on behalf of the until recently less regarded popular novel, but rather hopes to use that as a starting point in continuing to examine how these popular genres, now that they've been invited to the table, add to critical conversations on the novel, genre, narration, and realism.

Over the past three decades a new operating definition of realism has formed, one that figures realism as not a straightforward literary mode that “discover[s] some non verbal truth out there,” (Levine 6) but rather as a more volatile intellectual project that sets out to investigate how reality and representations of that reality function.  George Levine, in The Realistic Imagination, suggests that Victorians themselves were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today: “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (Levine 21-20).  I would like to see how the authors I’ve clustered here, whom Levine does not address, might “attempt to explore or create a new reality.”  Mimesis is certainly still very much a part of realism, but this new conception of it characterizes the movement as a generative and volatile process rather than one exclusively pursuing naïve or unproblematic modes of representation.

Under this new definition of realism, popular fiction that cannot be seen as representing reality objectively becomes ripe for exploration.  Caroline Levine has already begun this work in The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt in her treatment of sensation fiction.  She compellingly argues, for example, for Wilkie Collins, previously considered a sensation novel writer, as “an exemplary Victorian realist” (Levine 43).  Levine constructs her argument by providing an exhaustive and detailed reading of Victorian critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater that calls for a rereading of Gothic and sensation fiction as engaging realism without explicitly attempting mimesis[10].  In thinking of how this project will draw from Levine’s, one might consider an alternative title of the dissertation to be “The Serious Pleasures of the Supernatural.”  Levine discusses novels by Bronte, Collins, Dickens, and Eliot, and I will take the next logical step and carry her work even later into the 19^th century and further into the popular realm with Wells, Doyle, Stevenson, and Stoker[11]. 

Chapter Descriptions

Chapter 1: Limitations of Human Consciousness in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895)

When considering Wells’ The Time Machine, I see French philosopher Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, published in 1889, orbiting the text.  Bergson’s theory of duration posits that human perception maps time onto space instead of understanding its own movement[12].  And a few years later, in 1894, Sim Newcomb, a Canadian astronomer, published ideas about the fourth dimension in Nature, which Wells consequently read.  Bergson’s theory parallels what Wells’ Time Traveller says about time as a fourth dimension: “THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TIME AND ANY OF THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF SPACE EXCEPT THAT OUR CONSCIOUSNESS MOVES ALONG IT” (Wells 2).  Feeble human perception prevents the Time Traveller’s conclusion from being realistic; the problem of time travel 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.  But, if these theories were a natural part of the Victorian scientific landscape, why would popular fiction represent these them as preposterous?

I also 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.  The narrator describes the Time Traveller as a storyteller who is “too clever to be believed” (Wells 12) and “had more of a touch of whim among his elements” to the point where they “distrusted him” (Wells 12).  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 17).

Chapter 2: Epistemological Crises in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897)

Only two years later, Wells writes another narrative featuring an epistemological crises caused by the limitations of human perception in The Invisible Man.  Griffin, who refers to himself as an “experimental investigator,” (Wells 15) tests the limits of reality when he renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment; this experiment not only allegorically represents the realist project, but the very existence of Griffin as an invisible man confounds the characters around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him.  He is not represented in any tangible way. Thus, the epistemological crisis H.G. Wells stages here speaks directly to the realist experiment enacted by other authors.  This second chapter will explore, in a similar manner to the last, how both the premise of the narrative and the way that premise plays out challenges the assumption that seeing is knowing, that observation produces an accurate representation of reality. 

As Griffin reveals himself, the villagers experience the uncanny sensation of “the strangest thing in the world” (Wells 67) when they hear a voice coming out of an “empty space,” when in fact the space is not empty, but occupied by Griffin’s body.  The act of seeing in this case is unreliable because even though no one can actually see Griffin, this does not mean that he is not there, does not mean that they cannot know him.  Victorian writer Walter Pater, from whom both Levines draw many of their ideas about realism in Victorian literature, claims that seeing guarantees nothing – it does not equate knowing, but in fact displaces knowledge or obscures it.  The peasants of The Invisible Man fail to understand that even though they see an empty space, that space is not necessarily empty, and this aptly proves Pater’s point.

A film like the 1933 adaptation of The Invisible Man complicates the narrative’s representation of reality with special effects. When Jack Griffin removes his head bandages for the first time, for example, one might cast a discerning gaze on his "face" to see if there are any traces of filmic trickery or illusion. When he, while only wearing a white shirt, dances in the air, a spectator of the film might try to find the "strings" that hold up that shirt, that assure us that the shirt is just a shirt and does not have an invisible man inside.  This then makes spectators even more aware of representational limits.

Chapter 3: Darwin as Super-Naturalist in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

This third chapter will discuss two novels – Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – simultaneously because the mad scientist figures from both of their narratives draw from evolutionary theory.  The influence of Darwin’s theory of natural selection can be found in innumerable corners of Victorian literature, but towards the close of the period, a particular “spin off” of Darwin’s theories called atavism persisted in popular fiction.  Atavism or degeneration, proposed and used by scientists such as criminologist Cesare Lombroso[13] and physician and social critic Max Simon Nordau[14], speculates that if Darwin’s theory of man evolving over the ages from more primitivism organisms is true, then there is no reason he might not de-evolve.  Like Wells’ Time Traveller, Van Helsing, Dr. Seward and Dr. Jekyll adopt the accepted scientific discourse of the day and take them to logical extremes, thus casting “unreal” phenomena – Mr. Hyde the brute and Dracula the vampire – as real products of biological evolution.

This chapter will explore the extent to which these theorists were themselves considered “mad,” and speculate as to how that impacts a view of these texts as questioning the nature of reality?  That is, how much can mad scientist figures such as Van Helsing be a more radical contemporary of Darwin, Lombroso, or Nordau if they themselves were already considered radical?  Is Darwin himself already participating in the Victorian realist experiment in the ways described here?

Chapter 4: Powers of Observation and the Illusion of the Supernatural in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet (1887), Sign of Four (1890), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)

In the first novel to feature Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays Holmes as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally perpetuated assumptions about reality that he, like Griffin, conducts experiments in private.  His unmatched skills of detection are directly dependent on his empirical approach, but an empirical approach not restricted by assumptions about reality.  Even though they are in fact based on observation, Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning are often described by the narrative in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in observation and logic.  When Watson describes an article written by Holmes, for example, he says "It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity" (Doyle 20).  And so Holmes exists in opposition to, say, what Griffin of The Invisible Man represents, shoring up the idea that seeing is in fact the only way of knowing; it’s just a matter of seeing well.

Why not assume that realism contains, regulates, or shuts down the supernatural in these narratives?  Science, instead of giving a novel the authority to allow the supernatural to participate in realism, might be a way to tame the beast, so to speak.  Looking at the Sherlock Holmes stories casts this doubt on popular fiction most of all, because out of all the texts under discussion here, those by Doyle dispel the supernatural with science rather than representing the cases of the supernatural as realist experiments. Holmes faces several seemingly supernatural cases – a ghostly hound turns out to be a large dog covered in phosphorous in The Hound of the Baskervilles and Indian “mysticism” permeates The Sign of Four.  Rather than finding this troubling, I think this makes Doyle’s fiction all that much more important to include, so that this project avoids a one-note repetition of the mantra “the supernatural is a part of realism” and instead exists as a complex and nuanced discussion of these texts.    
Works Cited

Primary Works

Doyle, Arthur Conan.  A Study in Scarlet.  New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Doyle, Arthur Conan.  Sign of Four.  New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Doyle, Arthur Conan.  The Hound of the Baskervilles.  New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Eliot, George.  Middlemarch.  New York: Broadview, 2004.

Ritchie, Guy.  Sherlock Holmes.  Warner Bros., 2009. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis.  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  New York: Penguin     Books, 2002. 

Stoker, Bram.  Dracula.  New York: Penguin Books, 2003. 

Wells, H.G.  The Invisible Man.  New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1897.

Wells, H.G.  The Time Machine.  New York: Penguin Books, 2005. 

Wells, Simon.  The Time Machine.  Dreamworks, 2002. 

Secondary Works

Barthes, Roland.  Image, Music, Text.  New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.

Beer, Gillian.  Darwin’s Plots:  Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and    Nineteenth-Century Fiction.  Routledge, 1983.     

Brantlinger, Patrick.  “Science Fiction.”  A Companion to the Victorian Novel.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

Fantina, Richard and Kimberly Harrison, eds.  Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre.  Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Fayter, Paul.  “Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction.”  Victorian Science in Context.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 

Ferguson, Christine.  Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle.  Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006.

Guerlac, Suzanne.  Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson.  Ithaca: Cornell Unviersity Press, 2006.

Kucich, John.  “Scientific Ascendency.”  A Companion to the Victorian Novel.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

Levine, Caroline.  The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Levine, George Lewis.  The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 

Menke, Richard. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian fiction and other information systems.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Mighall, Robert.  A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

O’Gorman, Francis. The Victorian Novel.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

Robbins, Ruth and Julian Wolfreys.  Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century.  New York: Palgrave, 2000.

Smajic, Srdjan.  “Supernatural Realism.”  Novel: A Forum on Fiction.  42.1 (Spring 2009): 1-22.

Weintraub, Stanley.  “Reclaiming Late-Victorian Popular Fiction.”  English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920.  53.2 (Spring 2010): 170-181.

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[1] Patrick Brantlinger cites Brian Stableford as establishing “scientific romance” as a genre: “the genre emerged in response to the “ongoing war of ideas whereby men of science were trying to displace the dogmas of religion”” (Brantlinger 371).  See also Stanley Weintraub’s “Reclaiming Late-Victorian Popular Fiction”: “In the 1890s, the unlamented demise of the three-volume novel created an audience in Britain for cheap, one-volume fiction accessible to the burgeoning readership created by the Education Act of 1870” (Weintraub 171).

[2] My operating definition of realism stems from Caroline Levine’s in The Serious Pleasures of Suspense:  “a cluster of British thinkers self-consciously theorized a new aesthetic in the 1850s.  They borrowed their model of perception from scientific experimentation, putting their most serious emphasis on the testing and the suspension of judgment.  They called this project “realism” (Levine 10). 

[3] Caroline Levine’s choice of words in the formulation “the realist experiment” is both fitting, considering the focus on scientists and experiments in these novels, and no coincidence; Levine uses “experiment” here rather than “project” to emphasize realism as a continual testing of reality’s boundaries. 

[4] At the start of Middlemarch’s Chapter 27, Eliot’s narrator describes a pier-glass that has several scratches in all directions until the light of a candle held up to it changes the scratches into “a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun.”  It is the ability to see the scratches with the light of the candle, the illumination of observation and seeing, that changes what the scratches actually are.  Illumination precipitates illusion, and in demonstrating this notion Eliot’s narrator actually describes the complexities of novel writing as a form of representation.  Revealing something with a light or writing will inherently change that which is represented, in a “flattering illusion” produced by “exclusive optical selection” (Eliot 232). 

[5] A representative example of this is A Companion to the Victorian Novel, which, in offering readers a survey of Victorian literature and culture, which has two chapters discussing the impact Victorian science had on Victorian literature – one by John Kucich that discusses science’s influence over realist novels and another by Patrick Brantlinger that discusses science’s influence on popular fiction.  This chapter separation implies that science influencing realism and science influencing science fiction as two entirely separate phenomena; to him and many other critics, they were mutually exclusive reactions to the same historical circumstances.

[6] Fayter writes, “The more we examine the historiographic boundaries between science fiction and science, the more it becomes apparent that the flow of ideas was not simply one-way, from the sciences to literature” (Fayter 262).

[7] In Image, Music, Text, Barthes, when discussing the photograph, says, “Certainly the image is not the reality but at least it is its perfect analogon and it is exactly this analogical perfection which, to common sense, defines the photograph.  Thus can be seen the special status of the photographic image: it is a message without a code…” (Barthes 17).  This same principle can extend to the moving photographic image – film.

[8] Many scholars of adaptation studies, such as Robert Stam and Dudley Andrew, currently contest or resent the notion of a “source text,” arguing that the adaptations are their own texts not to be compared to or evaluated against any “original” version. 

[9] See Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, edited by Richard Fantina and Kimberly Harrison (2006), Christine Ferguson’s Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle (2006), and Francis O’Gorman’s The Victorian Novel (2002), for example.

[10] She claims, for example, that “Victorian writers and readers understood suspenseful narrative as a stimulus to active speculation….a rigorous political and epistemological training, a way of fostering energetic skepticism and uncertainty rather than closure and complacency” (Levine 2).

[11] Srdjan Smajic’s article “Supernatural Realism,” published in the Spring of 2009 in Novel, may be the most recent addition to this reconsideration and new conception of realism; he even goes so far as to name his first subheading, “realism reloaded” to make clear to readers that his work hopes to destabilize realism as a fictional mode, and avoid the “myopic” (1) view of previous scholars looking for a concrete definition.  This project will take up Smajic’s invitation “to propose an improved, more flexible, and capacious definition of realism” (3) and carry on the work he begins with Silas Marner, Jane Eyre, and Waverly to include late Victorian authors. 

[12] In summarizing Bergson’s theory, Suzanne Guerlac, in Thinking in Time writes, “When we figure time as a line, or a circle, time stops moving.  We inadvertently turn time into space” (Guerlac 1).

[13] Lombroso was the author of Criminal Man (1875), which studied the biological sources of criminal deviance.

[14] Nordau was the author of Degeneration (1893), which argues that the human race is deteriorating.

Prospectus: Chapter Descriptions: Chapter 4 - Draft 1 Complete

Chapter 4: Powers of Observation and the Illusion of the Supernatural in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet (1887), Sign of Four (1890), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)

Sherlock Holmes, while identifying himself as a professional detective, is one by way of science. In the first novel to feature Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays the detective as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally perpetuated assumptions about reality that he, like Griffin, conducts experiments in private. His unmatched skills of detection are directly dependent on his empirical approach, but an empirical approach not restricted by assumptions about reality. Even though they are in fact based on observation, Holmes’ powers of deductive reasoning are often described by the narrative in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in observation and logic. When Watson describes an article written by Holmes, for example, he says "It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity" (Doyle). And so Holmes exists in opposition to, say, what Griffin of The Invisible Man represents, shoring up the idea that seeing is in fact the only way of knowing; it’s just a matter of seeing well.

There are also interesting connections to be made with Wells’ The Time Traveller here. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes explains to Watson his theory of deduction, which involves “reasoning backwards” (Doyle). He says, “Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result” (Doyle). This explanation echoes the Time Traveller’s explanation of time travel theory in that human consciousness can account for a particular scientific principle’s unrealistic qualities. Holmes implies in this passage that the average person cannot “evolve from their own inner consciousness” to achieve this advanced reasoning, and that is why his performances of solving cases strike others as magical or inexplicable.

Why not assume that realism contains, regulates, or shuts down the supernatural in these narratives? Science, instead of giving a novel the authority to allow the supernatural to participate in realism, might be a way to tame the beast, so to speak. Looking at the Sherlock Holmes stories casts this doubt on popular fiction most of all, because out of all the texts under discussion here, those by Doyle dispel the supernatural with science rather than representing the cases of the supernatural as realist experiments. Holmes faces several seemingly supernatural cases – a ghostly hound turns out to be a large dog covered in phosphorous in The Hound of the Baskervilles and Indian “mysticism” permeates The Sign of Four. Rather than finding this troubling, I think this makes Doyle’s fiction all that much more important to include so that this project avoids a one-note repetition of the mantra “the supernatural is a part of realism” and instead exists as a complex and nuanced discussion of these texts.

The most recent film adaptation of Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes (2009) directed by Guy Ritchie, while not directly following any of Doyle’s plots, directs one’s consideration of Holmes’ relationship with the supernatural and with science in interesting ways. The film’s narrative opens by introducing a villain by the name of Lord Blackwood who, after being hanged, seems to rise from the dead and escapes. He plans to put all of British parliament under a trance, but, as Holmes exposits at the end of the film, Blackwood’s supernatural feats can all be traced back to chemical and biological experiments as well as innovations in electrical/radio engineering. This is another example of how a film adaptation might facilitate discussions of realism and the supernatural in any one of these chapters.

Prospectus: Chapter Descriptions: Chapter 2 - Draft 1 Complete

Chapter 2: Epistemological Crises in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897)

Only two years later, Wells writes another narrative featuring an epistemological crises caused by the limitations of human perception in The Invisible Man.  Griffin, who refers to himself as an “experimental investigator,” tests the limits of reality when he renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment; this experiment not only allegorically represents the realist project, but the very existence of Griffin as an invisible man confounds the characters around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him. He is not represented in any tangible way. Thus, the epistemological crisis H.G. Wells stages here speaks directly to the realist experiment enacted by other authors.  This second chapter will explore, in a similar manner to the last, how both the premise of the narrative and the way that premise plays out challenges the assumption that seeing is knowing, that observation produces an accurate representation of reality. 

Most of the novel features Griffin bitterly battling ignorant villagers who want to arrest him, and the reason the peasants Griffin loathes so much are unenlightened is because they cannot bring themselves to mistrust or question their senses.  They come up with all sorts of more rational explanations for his “appearance” – that he is in a disguise, that he is racially “black,” that he has some sort of skin disease that makes him marbled black and white, that he was in a horrible accident and needs to cover his body in bandages, etc. - as opposed to questioning their ability to “see” and subsequently acknowledging that it is within the realm of possibility that Griffin is invisible.  His invisibility – the fact that they cannot see him – would mean that he is not there, so they must rationalize his strange appearance, which in fact is a lack of appearance, in some other way.

When Griffin reveals himself, they experience the uncanny sensation of “the strangest thing in the world” when they hear a voice coming out of an “empty space,” when in fact the space is not empty, but occupied by Griffin’s body.  The act of seeing in this case is unreliable because even though no one can actually see Griffin, this does not mean that he is not there, does not mean that they cannot know him.  Victorian writer Walter Pater, from whom both Levines draw many of their ideas about realism in Victorian literature, claims that seeing guarantees nothing – it does not equate knowing, but in fact displaces knowledge or obscures it.  The peasants of The Invisible Man fail to understand that even though they see an empty space, that space is not necessarily empty, and this perfectly proves Pater’s point.

On the other hand, The Invisible Man also supports John Ruskin’s more traditionally cited realist notion that imagination is a faulty sense of sight, and that a representation that looks to be an accurate representation – unideal and unimaginative – is realist and therefore preferable.  The peasants plotting against Griffin use only their imaginations and not their powers of reason and observation to reproduce Griffin to each other verbally.  The narrator says, for instance, “Elaborated in the imagination of Mr. Gould, the probationary assistant in the National School, this theory took the form that the stranger was an Anarchist in disguise, preparing explosives.”  This use of imagination to inaccurately represent someone makes Mr. Gould and the other townspeople fools; the peasant readings of Griffin will strike readers as laughable, therefore locating them in a realist role, scoffing at the anti-realists.  And this positioning of the reader as a participant (or a better participant than Mr. Gould) within a realist project occurs despite the narrative, in its premise, being a supernatural and uncanny tale.  That is, the reader knows that invisible men aren’t possible outside of the novel, but he or she still stands as superior to the townspeople who, in relying on their overactive imaginations, do not know how to properly enact realism.

Prospectus: Chapter Descriptions: Chapter 1 - Draft 1 Complete

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.