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 19th 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
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.
[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.
