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.
