Eat or Be Eaten:
H.G. Wells’ Time Machine
Kathryn Hume:
• Professor from Penn State University
• She specializes in contemporary fiction
• She has written a number of books and
innumerable amounts of articles and literary
criticisms.
• Just as time travel is overlooked by those within
the book at first, so is the “comprehensive
functions of oral fantasies in the Time
Machine”(Hume 202).
• Comprehensive functions are the fourth
dimension of the text, the other three being
entropy, devolution, and utopian satire
• These pull the entire text together
• They connect the three time frames: Victorian
England, Realm of the Sphinx and the Terminal
Beach
• This was Wells’ first scientific romance to get to
a canonical level
• There is much hidden within the text of the
book, the main surface story is only the tip of
the iceberg.
• Hume wants to start with exploring the
symbolism behind the public ideologies of
power, size and gender, then will move onto
comparing the two future worlds to Victorian
England
• Ideology: “the unexamined assumptions as to
what is natural and inevitable and hence
unchangeable” (Hume 203).
• The values of power, body size, and gender are
so closely intertwined that pulling them apart is
nearly impossible to do and study them
individually, however in this passage Hume
attempts to do just that.
Hume takes the reader on a journey,
imagining the reader to be a British soldier
• Living in the nineteenth century, white, male,
nominally Christian, and well equipped
• You march into another country lacking these things
and take whatever you wish; cheap labor, land, raw
material, or valuables.
• The “inferior” race has no choice but to let you for
their technology is no match for yours.
• This is how the Traveller looks at the aliens of the
future.
• “His strength, technological know-how, and culture
elevate him in his own mind” (Hume 203).
• “He sees himself as having the right to whatever
he wants, and cherishes himself for being the
only ‘real’ human and therefore the only
creature with rights” (Hume 204).
• A portion of these thoughts come from his size
and physical power, size has permitted him to
feel superior to them, just the same as a British
man would with members of a shorter race.
• The Traveller admires the ruins from the prior
civilization, not questioning why they were built
or how, but rather just because they are big
• The third element Hume writes about is gender
• The Traveller almost immediately feminizes the
Eloi and this is another prop on which he pulls
himself up better than they.
• Every description of the Eloi get more and
more feminine as the book goes on
• To Wells manliness and size prove to be the
way to determine who is better, and this is
found in his other books as well
• Eat or be eaten: term which stems from political
and economic sources of power.
• The Wells’ work has evidence of cannibalism and
the notion of humans being fatted food for a
superior group.
• Examples: the aliens in The War of the Worlds,
the Morlocks eating the Eloi, the crabs and
centipedes in the New Review version of The
Time Machine, and the Sphinx which invites the
time traveler inside of it.
• Oral fantasies sometimes take the forms of
engulfment: one can be overwhelmed, drowned,
swallowed by darkness, or rendered unconscious.
• The protagonist faces engulfment of body and
mind. When he returns to his own time, he
responds by eating something.
• The time traveler is swallowed up by time in the
end of the story.
• Humanity dies away in the future as
communism takes control. This, apparently,
drained the human brain to become that of an
animal.
• The explicit reason given for degeneration is
Darwinian.
• Gender is symbolic within the story.
• Male: culture, light, the Sun, law, reason,
consciousness, the right hand, land, ruler ship.
• Female: chaos, darkness, the Moon, intuition,
feeling, the left hand, water, unconscious.
• Eloi: sunlight, ruler ship, happiness, beauty,
absence of poverty, uninterrupted leisure, yet
weak and frail.
• Morlocks: sinister, powerful, predatory
aggression, masculine darkness.
• Both the Eloi and the Morlocks appear to be
feminized in ways that render them less than
masterful.
• The critic believes that when reading The Time
Machine, the reader focus is on biological or
social systems?
• The critic points out that Wells’ presents an
interesting argument as to whether the Eloi and
Morlocks will be able to evolve or not.
• The critic states that Wells’ offers no solution to
the possibility of both biological and social
conditions improving.
• The critic believes Well’s has disguised the
importance and dangers of an environment
without competition.
• The critic summaries the last chapters of The
Time Machine as desolation and despair.
• The critic believes Wells’ has amplified and
elaborated basic ideologies which affect the
plot, including the disappearing of mankind.
• The critic notes that Wells’ projects a decline in
social structure.
• The critic believes the return of the repressed is
important to the dynamics of this tale.
• He even states that the Time Traveller is
somewhat responsible for the limited vision and
rendered alternatives of civilization.