The
Apocalyptic
Fables of H.G.
Wells
Alycia Ford
Soschia Owens
Robby Wrench
Tiffany Seeman
• In the book Going to Miami, author David Reiff
shows total outrage at having to share a flight with
two students from University of Miami
• A “Muscular looking, blond downed white boy” and
“A tall black girl”(213)
• Reiff stereotypes the students as stupid, even
though the man is reading an intellectual book.
• Reiff says that the students “have a collective IQ
barely above room temperature”
• Reiff compares the students to Eloi
• “These kids across from me, incapable of uttering a
humane sentence, were Eloi. There was nothing
whatsoever in their heads and. . . I wanted to eat
them” (214)
• Reiff has a similar experience when he sees a young
man in a museum dressed in a bright ‘U of M’ shirt.
• Rieff states his thoughts “I wanted to shout ‘get out
of here Eloi, go back to your vacation” (214)
• The correlation between Wells and Reiff is that they
focus on ‘classic conflict, sexual hostility,
cannibalistic transgressions, racial fantasy, gender
confusion, and. . . the final breakdown of civilized
ethics.’(214)
• These themes are seen more so in Wells’ writings The
Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau
• Most quest writings took place in Africa or a dark
area in the East.
• This is where the sexual and racial images merged.
• Africa was most chosen because it was a blank
canvas with a dark-skinned race.
• Both Reiff and Wells had a yearning to escape from
the social norms of the time period evident within
their writings.
• Many of Wells’ writings showed a desire for
escaping the Victorian belief system.
• In both The Time Machine and The Island of Dr.
Moreau, the antagonist returns to find the terrors of
their travels depicted in the London streets.
Helen Cixous
• Talks of how metaphorically, the Dark Continent
was usually associated with the female body, even
more specifically the black female body.
• Idea that men conquer her and make haste to
depart from her borders
• “One could understand how a man, could
confusing himself for his male desires and rushing in
for the attack, might feel resentment and fear of
being ‘taken’ by the woman, of being lost in her,
absorbed or alone.”
Joseph Boone
• Women’s novels of the 19th century primarily ended
in marriage while the men’s novels were more
about flight from marriage
Judith L. Sensibar
• Argues wilderness may be sought as a place where
people could go and more successfully mask
homosexual panic and avoid threats that existed in
the “homophobic” civilized world.
• Makes a tie between Wells divorcing Isabel to marry
another woman with the character of Weena and
her anxieties/distress when the Time Traveler leaves
her
• This insisting that Amy Catherine would prove to be
a less possessive and tiresome wife
Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Fantasies of male self-creation (i.e.: duplication or
cloning) were also themes of the time.
• Able to avoid contact with the maternal body
• The ‘safe and secret place’ is the Male Imagination
• The social standards are well set in the time period
from where the Time Traveler departs, however he
continually guesses wrong on the standards of the
future.
• Wells’ thinking of a time machine long before
airplanes is seen as prophetic
• Many imagined the time machine looking like a
bicycle
• Wells loved cycling because it was “. . .one of the
few activities in which men and women could enjoy
each others company without
chaperones”(Bachelor qtd. In Showalter 219)
• The second way the time machine is pictured is a
moving picture projector
• The third way to see the time machine is as a
bachelor machine
• The third reading of the time machine is as a
machine celibataire or bachelor machine
– Comes from Machines Celibataires, describes the literary,
artistic, and scientific construction between 1850 and 1925
of ‘anthropomorphized machines to represent the relation
of the body to the social, the relation of the sexes to each
other, the structure of the psyche, or the workings of
history.’
• The bachelor machine is ‘typically a closed, self
sufficient system.’
– Common themes are frictionless, sometimes perpetual
motion, an ideal time of the magical possibilities of its
reversal, electrification, voyeurism and masturbatory
eroticism, the dream of the mechanical reproduction of
art, and the artificial birth or reanimation.
• The bachelor machine has obvious associations
with the male body
• Freud claims ‘it is highly probable that all
complicated machinery and apparatus occurring
in dreams stands for the genitals and as a rule the
male ones.’
• The time machine (reproduction) stands in contrast
to the White Sphinx (a suggestion of disease)
• The Sphinx is a union of sexual opposition,
suggesting that the time travelers experience will go
beyond his training
– The Eloi (little pink hands, consumptive beauty,
vegetarianism, and perpetual leisure) are hyper feminized.
• When the time traveler enters the labyrinths of the
Morlocks, the time traveler seems to be leaving the
feminity of the surface and entering the male body
itself.
– The Morlocks are being who are hyper masculinsed,
technological, rapacious (greedy/gluttonous), and
cannibalistic.
– They embody the upper class fear of working-class
revolution, and the feminist dread of male violence and
lust.
• Sphinx is referential to Oedipus and his riddle
– Oedipal and self-referential riddles are made explicit by his
descent to underworld through wells
• Wells emphasized the wells leading to the unconscious, into
the creative, violent, and sexual self.
• The Morlocks also correspond to Wells’ writing
process.
– Wells’ descended into his own unconscious, pulling out
primitive images
– Fin-de-siècle fiction= end of the century fiction
THE APOCOLYPTIC FABLES OF
H.G. WELLS- PGS 213-221