Neo-Victorian Voices: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2022)

Historical fiction meets science fiction in the latest book I’m writing about as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, on novels written in the twenty-first century but set in the nineteenth. Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022) is inspired by H.G. Wells’s classic tale of man playing God—The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).

Readers of the original novel will recognize some common elements—the mad vivisectionist Dr. Moreau, his alcoholic assistant Montgomery, and a host of Beast Folk (here, “hybrids”), the result of the scientist’s experiments. But there are significant departures too. While The Island of Doctor Moreau is set in the South Pacific, the action of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau takes place in a remote part of the Yucatán peninsula in nineteenth-century Mexico. And while our characters are isolated, they are not on an island—a backdrop of real political strife ups the stakes as the novel comes to its dramatic conclusion. Then too, there’s the daughter of the title. Carlota Moreau (the doctor’s illegitimate child) is one of our two point of view characters, along with Montgomery. There’s no straight man, like Edward Prendick, to mirror reader responses to the story—all the characters are implicated in the ethical questions at the novel’s heart, some in ways they don’t initially realize.

There’s lots to love here—a well-paced Gothic tale, a classic Victorian story in an unusual setting, and feminist commentary layered over the moral questions that Wells’s classic raises. I would have enjoyed a few more concrete descriptions of the hybrids, especially given the medical training Carlota receives from her father, to keep the novel more clearly in the realm of scientific speculation, rather than sheer fantasy. Another line Moreno-Garcia walks is in her depiction of the relationship between Montgomery and Carlota. While their age gap isn’t unusual for the period, she seems aware that modern readers may take issue with Montgomery’s attraction to a girl he first met as a child. As a result, the conclusion to the story between them seems a little non-committal, in a way that, for me, made the ending less satisfying. 

Did you read The Daughter of Doctor Moreau? I’d love to know what you thought of it. And do let me know which novel you’d like to see me review next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want monthly updates about this blog and my writing straight to your email inbox? Sign up for my mailing list here. 

A Victorian Alphabet: Y is for Why Yellow??

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is a staple nineteenth-century text for students of literature in the English-speaking world, and especially the US. The 6,000-word short story is an account written in the first person of a woman, Jane, who has been confined to an upper room in a secluded house by her husband John as a result of a nervous disorder. There, having been prescribed a ‘rest cure’ for her hysteria, separated from her baby, and barred from writing, she goes slowly mad, convinced there is something living behind the room’s yellow wallpaper.

Even this straightforward summary raises lots of questions (and contains plenty of content for future blog posts!), but one central question stood out to me the first time I read the text (and seems to have occurred to multiple other students turning to Yahoo Answers for clarity!) – why is the wallpaper yellow, rather than any other shade?

The choice isn’t an accidental one, and is closely linked with contemporary ideas about the colour. Here’s how Jane introduces it first:

The colour is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

Two important and recurrent associations with yellow are noticeable – yellow is the colour of putrification and also of a milder kind of fading, caused by the passage of time.

Earlier in the century, Dickens had used yellow in the same way, frequently linking the colour to particular characters who are older and somehow linked to decay. This is how Pip first describes the home of Miss Havisham, perhaps the character in the English canon most associated with physical deterioration and the passage of time, in Great Expectations (1860-1):

I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. 

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman is at pains to highlight that the paper is a yellow of these very associations of festering age, rather than say a sunny yellow:

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

Jane even links the rotting smell she finds pervading her room with the yellow paper itself:

The only thing I can think of that it is like is the COLOUR of the paper! A yellow smell.

In doing so, she is not merely exhibiting an increasing monomania with the paper. ‘Jane’, isolated though she is, is acting just like many other writers of the 1890s! For many (especially European) writers of the Fin de Siècle, yellow was the defining colour of the period, with its associations with degeneracy, the wasting away of the age, a sickliness brought on by inbreeding, boredom or excess.

There was a practical link too. In the nineteenth-century, scandalous French novels were bound in yellow paper to warn browsers of their racy contents. It is one of these books which helps to corrupt the impressionable Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published the year before Gilman’s story.

Lord Henry gives Dorian a ‘book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled’. Note how its state of dilapidation is similar to Jane’s paper:

It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down.

Later, in Wilde’s novella, Dorian pins the blame for his moral decline squarely on this book:

"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It does harm."

This suggestion – that a book, even a yellow book, can really poison a mind – is one which Wilde rejects firmly:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

But it is interesting to note that Dorian’s book is not generic. It has a particular model as Wilde’s description of it makes clear. It is À Rebours (1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans (which I reviewed on this blog in September 2013), a novel which is the quintessential story of the degenerate (French) life.

Here’s the effect the novel has on Dorian:

It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

Dorian’s feelings of discovery and revelation here before a later fall match perfectly with the early stages of Jane’s fixation with the yellow wallpaper. The novel and the paper feel incomplete, raiments, something torn, but they inspire what could be described as creativity – Jane’s writing, Dorian’s beautiful life – but could also be identified as self-destructive madness.

When it came to naming a quarterly literary journal in London in 1894, its founders were in no doubt what to name it – The Yellow Book was the perfect descriptor of the age although it (fittingly!) died out before the end of the century (1897). With contributors including Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells and Henry James, The Yellow Book shows just how much yellowness meant to writers of this period.

It is within this context too then that The Yellow Wallpaper should be read. The question is not ‘why is the paper yellow?’. It might rather be ‘how do these ideas of degeneracy, and this link to the Aestheticism of the period, play into to Gilman’s other concerns, with gender, motherhood and madness?’

We’re nearly there! What should be 'Z' in my Victorian Alphabet?? It’s a tricky one so send me your suggestions – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

English Literature Study Skills: Using Criticism

In my previous post I looked at strategies for reading when it comes to approaching a new novel for study, discussing note taking, note reading, pace of progression, reference to additional resources and using introductions as afterwords. In this post I look at the next steps for studying a text – looking at what happens when you start dipping your toe into the scary world of criticism and identifying the best places to start:

Introductions: Here’s where I left off last time. Reading the intro before finishing the text leads to boredom, bias and spoilers, but reading it straight after finishing can be incredibly helpful. A well-written introduction references the key critical ideas when it comes to a text and can point you to some good pieces of criticism from which to start. But beware. That bargain fifth-hand copy you bought on Ebay may not be up to date when it comes to critical reception. And your teachers, tutors or lecturers are going to want to see analysis from you which goes beyond that provided in the most commonly read copy.

Companions: The Cambridge Companions can be a great place to start when it comes to approaching a new author, genre or period. Each Companion is comprised of essays by prominent scholars in the field, covering a range of important issues affecting the topic. e.g. the Companion to George Eliot has essays dealing with her life, politics in her novels, and the representation of gender in her work (among others). What’s great about the Companions is that they serve as a general introduction when read cover to cover without being dumbed down because of the calibre in contributors. Alternatively, they are useful as reference books. The chapter on gender will cite multiple other critics who have dealt with this topic, meaning it can act as a handy guide to their arguments, if this is an area you are also looking at.

Contemporary reviews: You can find collections of these for major authors and you can also usually find them online. They are important for understanding context and can act as good starting points for your own essays – especially if you use one which is less well known.

Journals: Students are often under time pressures and all too often you are quite far into a critical work before you realise it’s not going to be helpful to you - journal articles help solve this problem as they are quicker to read and often state in the first paragraph what their argument will be. Some authors even have whole journals dedicated to them (e.g. The Wellsian on H.G. Wells) which means you can use their catalogues as an index for identifying critics and arguments you want to pursue.

Do you have any other tips when it comes to starting your critical reading? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Teaching (Victorian) Literature; or the True and Lamentable Story of Literary Murder

Along with Shakespeare, the Victorian novel is perhaps the greatest victim of the British schooling system. For many, the only nineteenth-century novel they will ever read is a Bronte, Dickens or Hardy ‘ploughed’ through over months of tedious class group reading and beaten to death through ridiculous exercises and slavish commitment to assessment objectives. During my time in school English classrooms I liked literature despite (not because) of how it was taught and, several years on, here are some personal reflections on what works and what doesn’t when introducing students to weighty, complex but rewarding texts.

A schoolroom

 Don’t pretend English is Maths:
I can imagine this stroke of ‘genius’ as it came to my disgruntled, disillusioned GCSE teacher. Her students hated English, hated her, and seemed certain to hate the selection of Victorian stories on the supernatural we were to tackle for coursework - H.G. Wells’s The Red Room (1894), Wilkie Collins’s The Ostler (1855), Charles Dickens’s A Confession Found in a Prison (1840-1) and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). What if she could only harness our superior attainments in Mathematics! We were soon set to work on graphs, designed to chart how suspense was created and varied throughout a short story, mapping how key moments in plot affected our (hopefully equally susceptible) nerves.

The results were disastrous. Some science-loving students had their suspicions that English was far from academically rigorous confirmed as people bickered over whether a door slamming was a 6, 7 or 8 out of 10. Our teacher muddled her terms, as war erupted over labelling the x and y axes. And most of the room couldn’t even remember the events we were meant to be ranking from the Poe, they had found the prose so impenetrable.

An alternative: Talking about the ways suspense can be created could be really fruitful, but only talking about plot ignores the very language students are meant to be learning to analyse. Why not show students a suspenseful scene from a modern movie dealing with the supernatural and then get them to write it in the first person, using some techniques employed by the authors of these (first person) stories? Concentrating on what language can add – what it is, rather than what it isn’t – is the way to explain its value.

Don’t tell students the ‘answer’:

‘Why does Eustacia marry Clym?’ (in Hardy’s The Return of the Native, 1878), ‘How does Tennyson feel about war?’ and ‘Are we meant to like Nelly?’ (E. Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, 1845-6) were all questions with set answers, which could be neatly bullet-pointed and forcibly ingested ahead of exam time, when I was first asked to consider them. This isn’t fun for anyone, especially not the teachers who have taught the same set texts for years, and it’s not reflective of the moral questioning and skilful ambiguity which pervades much of the writing of the period.

An alternative: Encourage debate, get students to argue a point both (or even more than two) ways and suggest how this potential for discussion can be a strength, not a fault of great writing. This will help those approaching literature academically for the first time get better at differentiating between tones, recognising subversion and appreciating nuances of expression.

Don’t ‘do context’: 

Students who are perfectly capable of A Level standard history work, are routinely fed the kind of facts about Victorians which decorate the walls of primary schools as soon as it comes to adding ‘context’ to their English essays. Apparently, Victorians treated women badly, liked trains, were upset by Darwin, were very uptight about sex and that’s about it (okay, well maybe the last one wouldn’t be included in a younger children’s collage).

The alternative: Context isn’t an extra in English. Historical and social contexts should inform how students read and interpret literature at every point. The best way to approach this is by simply reading more – about the period or just from within the period. Rather than focussing on one novel the whole time, the more successful students will read around the subject. You will perform better if you’ve read more than one novel by the author you’re studying or by one of his or her contemporaries - not because you can name drop, but because you’ll have imbibed more about the time.

What were your experiences (good and bad) of nineteenth-century literature at school? Scarring? Inspiring? And, if you’re a teacher, how do you approach long and difficult novels with your classes? Let me know below, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And if you enjoy the blog, please VOTE for the Secret Victorianist in the UK Blog Awards!

A Victorian Alphabet: E is for the Eloi and Elysium

In an earlier post I dealt with some misconceptions people often have about nineteenth-century literature. And proving it’s not all frills, frocks and runaway marriages is H.G. Wells – one of those with a claim to the title ‘Father of Science Fiction’.

Wells gives us invading aliens, mad scientists carrying out warped experiments and the kind of time traveller who has become archetypal. It’s a leap in terms of medium, but not in content, from Wells to films which form most people’s experience of the genre today. The same fears surface again and again, in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Wells and in twenty-first century cinema, – our potential inferiority to another species, the isolation of being trapped in a different time and, perhaps most pointedly for the issues currently facing the planet, the unsustainability of our current population levels.

Watching 2013 summer blockbuster Elysium recently the echoes of Wells were even clearer. The central premise is very close to that of 1895 novel The Time Machine. At a future date (much more distant in the Wells) society is divided – the rich live above in luxury (on the surface of the Earth in Wells, in a spaceship in the movie), while the poor live and toil below (on Earth in Elysium, under it in The Time Machine). But how closely does this parallel run? Are Wells’s idle Eloi so very like those who live in Elysium and what can the differences teach us about the fears of our own age and that of the Victorians?

Film poster - Elysium

An interrogation of labour conditions and industry is one thread tying this text and film together. Matt Damon’s Max (central character in Elysium) is one of the unlucky ones, and works in a grimy factory which would certainly fail to pass a health and safety inspection. And initially, Wells’s time traveller thinks the underground Morlocks must be similarly ill-kept workers:

‘At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.’

Reflecting on our own labour market – with foreign unseen factories providing many of our (luxury) goods - Max’s factory is far distant from Elysium. Out of sight and out of mind, and peopled with a range of racial groups speaking various languages, so that it seems universally ‘foreign’. Wells likewise draws on experiences of industry in his own time, and even quotes examples of subterranean labour, with corresponding social commentary:

‘No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you—and wildly incredible!—and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply. Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein, till, in the end—! Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?’

There is, however, a key difference. The time traveller is wrong. This is not all that he is witnessing. Elysium suggests the only difference between humans is their level of wealth – the commentary is economic – and physical superiority is determined by access to medical attention, not genetic predisposition. It shies away from telling us how people were picked for this spaceship world to start with and is clear on the fact that you can ascend with the help of money. But what happens in The Time Machine is evolutionary division between the haves and have nots, demonstrating Wells’s interest in emerging evolutionary theory.

Wells had trained under Thomas Huxley (‘Darwin’s bulldog’) and was an active participant in contemporary evolutionary debates. His Eloi demonstrate the potential threat of degeneration. They don’t have to fight to survive and become too weak to fight when necessary. And in his Morlocks he rejects the idea of ethical evolution. Moral behaviour is not innate, nor the necessary result of biological ‘progress’. Ultimately cosmic evolution will win out, as the time traveller sees when he ventures even further forward in time, and man will be obliterated.

Elysium takes on none of these issues. The ‘superior’ beings up above are made by machines – those which doctor to their ills or the military exoskeletons which allow them to participate in killer action sequences. But its democratic ideology will not allow for biological division.

There is one last major difference. Elysium ends just when things are about to get ethically interesting. The film refuses to address the fact that everyone cannot live in Elysium. Are we meant to presume that there were always enough medical resources but that those above weren’t sharing? But the screenplay has specifically told us this is not the case. Wells’s Morlocks bite back (literally). Damon and crew also put up a fight but in order to achieve a universal happiness and prosperity which is obviously unachievable. Wells isn’t afraid to ask the big questions about humanity’s future and to propose at times unsavoury answers. And that’s why his work remains the standard for science fiction.

Are you a victorianist? Or do you just like films? Let me know what you made of Elysium and its flirtation with Wellsian ideas below, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Review: One Thousand and One Ghosts, Alexandre Dumas (1849)

This small collection of short stories, linked by their retelling at a dinner party gathered under gruesome circumstances, is an eerie read. Dumas’s novella is about points of crossover – between life and death, science and superstition, the body and the soul, reality and fiction. Heads roll but continue talking, a vampire pierces his victim at night, criminals return to hang the hangman. Dumas begins (and ends) matter-of-fact-ly - the narrator is none other than the writer himself. What is terrifying is the commonness of these tales, despite their strangeness.

The guillotine

For the general reader: This isn’t gripping from page one, but the relatively slow opening is soon succeeded by an array of memorable and haunting stories once the scene is set. The intrusion of murder into the everyday is sudden and startling, and the initial, almost detective story opening, is replaced by a world in which nothing is certain and there are more questions than answers. Little is wrapped up, and while the guests may pose questions about the nature of existence, they certainly come to no conclusions. I found this gory enough to still be effective in a somewhat desensitised age. Highly recommended (if not for bedtime reading!).

For students: As well as (obviously) appealing to anyone with an interest in the Gothic, the novella is also an interesting example of literary responses to the French revolution, with its preoccupations with the guillotine, political intrigue and the lingering effects of national violence. Its viscerality (an eight year old drowning in the trough of blood at the Place de la Révolution, a worker being dragged into quicklime by the bodies of kings excavated from their graves) is in stark contrast to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which also deals with the threat of execution. The narrative technique employed for the dinner party stories reminded me of Wells’s (later) The Time Machine (1895), where occasional returns to the ‘real’ setting suddenly catapult the reader back to the ‘present’ in the same way. It could also be interesting to consider how the narration is gendered. The final story (and only one narrated by a female character, the pale and listless Hedwige) is very distinct from the others in style, with Hedwige’s ordeal recalling those of many virgins in Gothic fiction, and her slower pacing reminiscent of Ann Radcliffe’s style of suspense.

Which lesser-known work of nineteenth-century literature should The Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know here, on Twitter (@SVictorianist) or on Facebook!

Misconceptions about Victorian Literature

In a previous post I took on the view that Victorian fiction is by default long and unwieldy by recommending some shorter works you might want to give a go. Today it’s time to debunk a few more myths about nineteenth-century writing which I've come across whenever I tell people what I like to read.

1. There’s no sex: Yes, yes – we all know those Victorians. They fainted at a glimpse of ankle, right, and covered up table legs. They were all so prudish it’s a miracle they had any children at all, regardless of the massive population increase in the UK in the period, and the example of the very fertile monarch herself. Victorian literature is crammed with sex, even if the novels are (thankfully) not quite Fifty Shades of Grey. Try George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) for discussion of prostitution and bawdry, Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) deals with rape and John Sutherland even detects a reference to sodomy in Hardy’s earlier The Woodlanders (1886-7). Meanwhile, Ellen Wood’s bestselling sensation novel East Lynne (1861) centres on a heroine who commits adultery because she wants to, finds her lover attractive and is bored by her dependable husband, in a initial plotline which could easily be taken from a modern paperback (before a railway disaster, facial disfigurement and high levels of infant mortality situate it firmly in the 1860s!). If you want even more, you can always trust the French to turn things up a notch, but once you've glutted yourself on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1851), I’d suggest turning to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s A Doctor’s Wife (1863). Laurie Garrison argues surprisingly convincingly that while here the heroine Isabel doesn't commit adultery like her model Emma Bovary, her novel-reading obsession is code for an addiction to masturbation. Erotic rewrites of Victorian novels are hot property for publishers right now, but often the sexual content is already there in the originals.

The Secret Victorianist spots Wuthering Heights erotica on sale at a European airport

2. It’s only for girls: First up, this is sexist. And I very much doubt Dickens, Trollope, Tennyson, Browning and the rest of the century’s celebrated male writers would agree. My guess is when people say this they mean that the literature is all about marriage and relationships, even if these (whisper it) obviously affect men too. But don’t despair, those who’d rather die than wear pink, there are battles (try Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson), trade union disputes (Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855)), aliens (H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898)) – all sorts of things girls couldn't possibly understand.

3. It’s very romantic: The reality is that reading nineteenth-century novels has seen my romantic notions disposed of as brutally as Marianne Dashwood’s. Marriage is a mercantile business and the century’s novelists are much more likely to go into the details of household economy (cf. particularly Braddon’s Hostages to Fortune (1875)), than rhapsodise over weddings. Marriage ceremonies are, despite their ubiquitous concurrence with end credits in television adaptations, usually dispensed with in their entirety – to take three famous examples, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). When they are detailed, it is also for their legal irregularity (Wilkie Collins’s ‘Miss or Mrs?’ (1872) and The Law and the Lady (1875).

4. It’s all about the rich people: It doesn't get much grittier than Arthur Morrison’s tale of London slum life A Child of the Jago (1896), or Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), set the other side of the Atlantic. Inner city life in all its squalor and violence is rendered hyper-realistically, with Morrison’s attention to dialect particularly impressive. Both works are the products of research and firsthand experience – unapologetically un-sanitised and not for the faint-hearted.

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