DEGENERATION AND INVASION FANTASIES IN BRITISH FIN-DE-SIÈCLE NOVELS

Abstract

Historians have suggested that, at the end of the nineteenth century, people in Britain lived their lives in fear and anxiety caused by the negative consequences of the Industrial Revolution and uncertainty about their future. The works by influential nineteenth-century European scientists such as Bénédict Augustin Morel’s Treatise on Degeneration (1857), Cesare Lombroso’s The Criminal Man (1876) and Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), which attempted to clarify the causes of the fears and the anxieties of the time through the concept of degeneration, made people to strongly believe that the Caucasian race would be physically degraded and, later, faced extinction because of moral and cultural decline. Writers in this period captured the anxieties about degeneration by representing them in the form of invasion fantasies in which Britain was threatened by the degenerates who transmitted moral and physical corruptions. Relying on the social and cultural context of nineteenth-century Britain, this thesis will explore how the three chosen novels that deal with invasion fantasies illustrate the problem of degeneration in their three different forms: sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), race in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and human qualities in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). The thesis will argue that the novels do not simply depict threatening images of degeneration through invasion fantasies, but they also suggest resolutions to alleviate the fears and anxieties of the fin-de-siècle period by reasserting Victorian values and emphasizing the Victorians’ ability to deal with the period’s social and cultural changes of their time.