Fantasy in the 1890s - Research Paper Example

Fantasy in the 1890s Dr. Louis James, in his book The Victorian Novel, d that H. G. Wells was the precursor of modern science fiction in his combination of down-to-earth realism and conjecture, and in his use of fantasy to examine contemporary issues. (p. 186) He went on arguing that the novel The Time Machine centrally questions the optimistic view of social progress of the earlier nineteenth century, and has an unchanged relevance for the twenty-first. (p. 186) Wells, himself, offered us an insight on what sparked the idea of the novel in the book, Experiment in Autobiography: I heard about and laid hold of the idea of a four dimensional frame for a fresh apprehension of physical phenomena, which afterwards led me to send a paper, The Universe Rigid, to THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW (a paper which was rejected by Frank Harris as incomprehensible), and gave me a frame for my first scientific fantasia. THE TIME MACHINE. . . .If there was a Universe rigid, and hitherto uniform, the character of the consequent world would depend entirely, I argued along strictly materialist lines, upon the velocity of this initial displacement.  The disturbance would spread outward with ever-increasing complication.  But I discovered no way, and there was no one to show me a way to get to get on from such elementary struggles with primary concepts, to a sound understanding of contemporary experimental physics. (1934, p. 172) This gave us a glimpse how science influenced Wells who, himself identified the eminent biologist T.X. Huxley as one of his inspirations. Hence, in a bid to elaborate on the narratives and figures which according to Nicholas Daly (2000, p. 118) enabled late Victorian middle-class culture to successfully accommodate certain historical changes and modernizing processes; I would present my arguments in the context of Wells breakthrough novel, The Time Machine. This essay will do so in address the extent of the relationship between late Victorian fantasy and modernity. Background The latter part of Victorian era is significant in the changes in England because of the upheavals in the area of science and the industry. In this period, for instance, the Industrial Revolution reached its peak and the pillars of modern scientific world such as Darwin, Maxwell, Mendeleev, Joule and Kelvin were laying the theoretical foundations of evolution, electricity and magnetism. These developments were felt in every sector of the Victorian society and naturally, in literature, which saw the emergence of a kind of romance fiction that reconciled fantasy and realism. This was largely attributed to Wells in a landmark literary piece, the Time Machine. The novel is an interesting study since it is seen by scholars as an artifact that it reflected the values of a society that was at the throes of modernity and would then revolutionize the fantasy/romance genre of his time and beyond. Social Prejudice Wells was born poor. Without scholarship, his family’s income level and social standing could not have afforded him a college education. He represented a large sector of the Victorian England, and perhaps in the present, which suffered class prejudices where talent is not enough to achieve one’s dreams. This was clearly evident in his creation of the two races of the future in The Time Machine. “By creating two sub-species of the future and calling them the Eloi and the Morlocks, Wells found a voice for his feelings about the extent of the unadmitted prejudice in England and what this was doing to people. He did not romanticize either the upper classes, the Eloi, or the lower classes, the Morlocks. He simply showed them slowly moving away from each other and becoming two entirely different species.” (“H. G. Wells”) Wells was also not apologetic in infusing his thoughts and seamlessly incorporating it to the time traveler’s musings on the social structure of the Elois and the Morlocks and in the process expressing his opinion of the society he belonged: So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. (Wells 2002, p. 57) Fantasy and Realism Unlike previous works of fiction, like those of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, whose settings are marked with high degrees of fantasy (like the freedom to use the symbolism of the chess board) and worlds are conveniently created without realistic foundations, Wells’ is founded on scientific premise. We should remember that his intellectual training was mostly scientific as explained by his education, closeness to Huxley and his interest in science and technology. So it is not surprising to find that Darwinism, as an example, is clearly manifested in the evolution of the two races in the story. Notice how well-versed he is in scientific parlance as he came up with dialogues such as: It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why _three_ dimensions particularly--why not another direction at right angles to the other three?--and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimension geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four--if they could master the perspective of the thing. See? (Wells 2002, p. 3) Slusser, G. would then observe that all disciplines, scientific or literary, that were represented among the Traveller’s audience of professionals remained close to the message of the future. (2001, xii) Entropy Science would also cultivate Wells’ skepticism about the likelihood of human progress. The Time Machine dwelt on the issue of degeneration, twisting the Darwinian evolution into reverse as culture loosens itself from nature and descends into luxurious, decadent corruption. Wells, explained this as he illustrated the Eloi as some species that lacks intelligence and vitality, physically weak, unimaginative and incurious. The several big palaces I had explored were mere living places, great dining-halls and sleeping apartments. I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made. And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency. There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among them. They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going. (2002, p. 48) Some explanations for the Eloi’s devolution were given including the humankinds past struggle to transform and subjugate nature through technology, politics, art and creativity. In the world of the Eloi there were no hardships – no disease, war – so society became non-hierarchical with no leaders or social classes. As his next literary materials would show, such as in the War of the Worlds, Wells questioned the ability of a culture which is preoccupied with degeneration to survive in the modern world. His visions, as with the case of the Eloi and the Morlocks, painted the collapse of the infrastructure of the civilization which in the novel War of the Worlds he described as a world losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body. (Wells 2004, p. 107) Thermodynamics Another interesting vision of Wells in the Time Machine which speaks of modernity is the concept of energy and thermodynamics. There is an extraordinary amount of literature discussing this area since it is seen as prophetic. For instance, Thomas Richards (1993) acknowledged that The Time Machine anticipated the influential thesis of Frederick Soddy’s Matter and Energy: … the relations between energy and matter… control, in the last resort, the rise or fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of nations, the movements of commerce and industry, the origin of wealth and poverty and the general physical welfare of race. (p. 89) This particular concept, I must highlight, is also influential in the preceding science fiction novels such as those of Frank Herbert’s Dune chronicles. The only modification is that the “energy” consumed is a spice that fuels not machines but the humans themselves. Going back, Wells, through The Time Machine, worked within the area of thermodynamics as he addressed the central problematic of obtaining the highest output of work from a given form of energy. (Richards, p. 89) Thermodynamics, according to Iwan Rhys Morus (2005, p. 126) is the new way of doing physics – a science which explores concepts such as the Universe ending in heat death or disproving the claims of geologists and evolutionary theorists concerning the development of life on earth. Wells, as most of his work would display, sees societies as systems operating on matter to produce waste, and he goes so far to see the construction of all social systems as predicated on the form of matter they consume as energy. The Time Machine laid all the ground work of his conceptual initiatives as thermodynamics would be explained thoroughly in his novel, Tono-Bungay in 1926. “The Further Vision” is the chapter of The Time Machine which narrated a poignant and powerful illustration in the past hundred years of the second law of thermodynamics in action – at least until the publication of Pamela Zoline’s story “The Heat Death of the Universe” in 1967. (Slusser, p. 24) According to Richards (p. 89), leading theorists in Victorian England regarded thermodynamics as physics of economic value, and Wells carried its economic implications further in his novel,Tono-Bungay: Tono-Bungay traces the historical life cycles of the technologies of British agriculture, manufacture, and mining. The novel begins with an anatomy of an imperiled agricultural system, ‘the Bladesover system.’ It then turns to an extended parody of entropy in the manufacturing process, embodied in the patent medicine system of turn-of-the-century Britain. (p. 89) Conclusion In conclusion, we turn to Athena Vrettos for insight: Wells thus charts the tensions between degenerationist pessimism and evolutionary optimism, providing readers with a set of interpretive codes designed to negotiate their collective relationship to modernity Although Well’s fantasy envisions cultural otherness as radically alien, his representations… refigure the same concerns about physical, social, and racial vulnerability (both at home and abroad) that we find in studies like those of Galton, Broca, Nordau and Lombroso. These concerns did not take a single narrative form or arise from a clearly articulated set of social motives; rather, we can see a diverse group of cultural practices expressed through a pattern of late-nineteenth-century fitness narratives. (1995, p. 144) Indeed, from The Time Machine to his later work, Wells successfully painted his apprehensions about imperial decline, urban poverty, or the effects of feminism on middle class reproductivity. Obviously, his target audience was not the teeming masses of his day, but the professionals and the future audience which could contend with his ideas of time machine, temporal displacement or the fourth dimension. According to David Seed, Wells scientific romances, carefully plotting contemporary theories and techniques, disclose a darker visionary mode in which differences of civilization, savagery, humanity, and monstrosity collapse. More than anything, this related The Time Machine to modernity and its reflection of the Victorian Britain. This is collaborated by Slusser as he argued that The Time Machine has been, and will continue to be, a focal point for strong cross-disciplinary readings and in light of the “two cultures” debate, Wells’ novel not only brought together the various and conflicting intellectual currents of his time, scientific and humanistic, but handed them down as intellectual legacy to our world. (p. xii) Slusser went as far as saying that The Time Machine can claim the status of secular scripture as against the Bible as a mythological narrative in offering his story of the end time. He stressed that Wells fuses scientific understanding with spiritual catharsis: If, as I once proposed, the Traveller’s sojourn in the Palace of the Green Porcelain, the run-down museum where he finds the decayed and useless remnants of human culture, represents a memento mori for our species, the scene in the year 30 million may be Wells’ memento mori for the entire terrestrial habitat. (p. 24) References Daly, N. (2000). Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siecle. Cambridge University Press. James, L. (2006). The Victorian Novel. Blackwell Publishing Morus, I. R. (2005). When Physics Became King. University of Chicago Richards, T. (1993). The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of the Empire. Verso Seed, D. (2005). A Companion to Fiction. Blackwell Publishing. Side Bar on Herbert George Wells. (n.d.). Retrieved January 10, 2007, from University of Arizona Web site: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~gmcmilla/kidwells.html Slusser, G. (2001). H.G. Wells Perennial Time Machine. University of Georgia Press Wells, H.G. (1934). Experiment in Autobiography. Macmillan Wells, H.G. (2002). The Time Machine. Signet Classics Wells, H.G. (2004). War of the Worlds. Spark Publishing/Sparknotes Vrettos, A. (1995). Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford University Press Read More