Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-pfhbr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T21:23:27.997Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

CONSERVATION OF ENERGY, INDIVIDUAL AGENCY, AND GOTHIC TERROR IN RICHARD MARSH'S THE BEETLE, OR, WHAT'S SCARIER THAN AN ANCIENT, EVIL, SHAPE-SHIFTING BUG?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2010

Anna Maria Jones
Anna Maria Jones*
Affiliation:
University of Central Florida
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

There is a familiar critical narrative about the fin de siècle, into which gothic fiction fits very neatly. It is the story of the gradual decay of Victorian values, especially their faith in progress and in the empire. The self-satisfied (middle-class) builders of empire were superseded by the doubters and decadents. As Patrick Brantlinger writes, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230). And this late-Victorian anomie expressed itself in the move away from realism and toward romance, decadence, naturalism, and especially gothic horror. No wonder, then, that the 1880s and 1890s saw a surge of gothic fiction paranoiacally concerned with the disintegration of identity into bestiality (Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886), the loss of British identity through overpowering foreign influence (du Maurier's Trilby, 1894), the vulnerability of the empire to monstrous and predatory sexualities (Stoker's Dracula, 1897), the death of humanity itself in the twilight of everything (Orwell's The Time Machine, 1895). The Victorian Gothic, thus, may be read as an index of its culture's anxieties, especially its repressed, displaced, disavowed fears and desires. But this narrative tends to overlook the Victorians’ concerns with the terrifying possibilities of progress, energy, and self-assertion. In this essay I consider two oppositions that shape critical discussions of the fin-de-siècle Gothic – horror and terror, and entropy and energy – and I argue that critics’ exploration of the Victorians’ seeming preoccupation with the horrors of entropic decline has obscured that culture's persistent anxiety about the terrors of energy. I examine mid- to late-Victorian accounts of human energy in relation to the first law of thermodynamics – the conservation of energy – in both scientific and social discourses, and then I turn to Richard Marsh's 1897 gothic novel The Beetle as an illustration of my point: the conservation of energy might have been at least as scary as entropy to the Victorians.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 65 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. Cultural and Anarchy and Other Writings. Ed. Collini, Stefan. London: Cambridge UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Bagehot, Walter. Physics and Politics, or Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to Political Society. 1872. London: Keegan, Paul, 1881.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. 1841. Boston: Athenæum, 1901.Google Scholar
Choi, Tina Young. “Forms of Closure: The First Law of Thermodynamics and Victorian Narrative.” ELH 74 (2007): 301–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clausen, Christopher. “How to Join the Middle Classes with the Help of Dr. Smiles and Mrs. Beeton.” American Scholar 62.3 (1993): 403–18.Google Scholar
Collins, Wilkie. Heart and Science. 1883. Ed. Farmer, Steve. Peterborough: Broadview, 1997.Google Scholar
“The Cruelty to Animals Act.” The Law Times: The Journal and Record of the Law and the Lawyers (30 Sept. 1876): xlv–xlvi.Google Scholar
Danahay, Martin. Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.Google Scholar
Dowling, Andrew. Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.Google Scholar
Fielden, Kenneth. “Samuel Smiles and Self-Help.” Victorian Studies 12.2 (1968): 155–76.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. “Literary Alternatives to Rational Choice: Historical Psychology and Semi-Detached Marriages.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 51.1 (2008): 23–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garnett, Rhys. “Dracula and The Beetle: Imperial and Sexual Guilt in Late Victorian Fantasy.” Science Fiction Roots and Branches. Ed. Garnett, Rhys and Ellis, R. J.. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. 30–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glover, David. “Bram Stoker and the Crisis of the Liberal Subject.” New Literary History 23 (1992): 983–1002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness. 1793. Philosophical and Political Writings of William Godwin. Ed. Philp, Mark. Vol. 3. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993.Google Scholar
Gold, Barri. “The Consolation of Physics: Tennyson's Thermodynamic Solution.” PMLA 117.3 (2002): 449–64.Google Scholar
Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Haggerty, George E.Queer Gothic. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2006.Google Scholar
Hendershot, Cyndy. The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown's Schooldays. 1857. Ed. Sanders, Andrew. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Hume, Robert. “Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel.” PMLA 84.2 (1969): 282–90.Google Scholar
Hurley, Kelly. “British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Hogle, Jerrold. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 189–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurley, Kelly. “‘The Inner Chambers of All Nameless Sin’: The Beetle, Gothic Female Sexuality, and Oriental Barbarism.” Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature. Ed. Lloyd, David. Albany: SUNY P, 1993. 193–213.Google Scholar
Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Google Scholar
Luckhurst, Roger. “Trance Gothic, 1882–97.” Victorian Gothic. Ed. Wolfreys, Julian and Robbins, Ruth. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. 148–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Margree, Victoria. “‘Both in Men's Clothing’: Gender, Sovereignty and Insecurity in Richard Marsh's The Beetle.” Critical Survey 19.2 (2007): 63–81.Google Scholar
Marsh, Richard. The Beetle. 1897. Ed. Wolfreys, Julian. Peterborough: Broadview, 2004.Google Scholar
Myers, Greg. “Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy.” Energy & Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain. Ed. Brantlinger, Patrick. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 307–38.Google Scholar
Navarette, Susan J.The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin De Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1998.Google Scholar
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce et Decorum Est.” 1920. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. New York: New Directions, 1965.Google Scholar
Rodrick, Anne Baltz. “The Importance of Being an Earnest Improver: Class, Caste, and Self-Help in Mid-Victorian England.” Victorian Literature and Culture 29.1 (2001): 39–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. 1859. Ed. Sinnema, Peter W.. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Smith, Crosbie. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. 2nd ed. 2 vols., 1867. New York: Appleton, 1888.Google Scholar
Stewart, Balfour. The Conservation of Energy, Being an Elementary Treatise on Energy and its Laws. 1873. London: Keegan, Paul, 1883.Google Scholar
Stewart, Balfour. The Conservation of Energy, Being an Elementary Treatise on Energy and its Laws. 1873. New York: Appleton, 1890.Google Scholar
Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Tosh, John. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire. Harlow: Pearson, 2005.Google Scholar
Tyrrell, Alexander. “Class Consciousness in Early Victorian Britain: Samuel Smiles, Leeds Politics, and the Self-Help Creed.” Journal of British Studies 9.2 (1970): 102–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Underwood, Ted. The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy, 1760–1860. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, H. G.The Invisible Man. 1897. New York: Modern Library, 2002.Google Scholar
Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.Google Scholar
Wolfreys, Julian. “The Hieroglyphic Other: The Beetle, London, and the Abyssal Subject.” A Mighty Mass of Brick and Stone: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London. Ed. Phillips, Lawrence. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 169–92.Google Scholar
Wolfreys, Julian. Introduction. The Beetle by Marsh, Richard. Ed. Wolfreys, Julian. Peterborough: Broadview, 2004. 9–34.Google Scholar