Representations of the body in British science-fiction novels from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century: a study of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's the coming race, H.G. Wells' the time machine and Aldous Huxley's brave new world

Abstract

Many critics have suggested that most of the non-human characters in late-Victorian British science-fiction novels reflect social alienation and the cultural fear of physical, mental and moral degeneration. However, by relying on the concept of critical posthumanism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that attempts to debunk anthropocentrism and emphasise the significance of non-human otherness, this thesis studies representations of the body in three British science-fiction novels: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which provide speculative visions of what humans will be in the future. It demonstrates that an assemblage of the human body and non-human others such as machines and animals creates a new, ambiguous identity that disfigures an ideal image of man and destabilises the anthropocentric belief of human hegemony and natural-unnatural dualism. While The Coming Race presents the electric body of the humanoids with mechanised wings and electric energy under their skin as a cyborg-like creature, the “humanimal” body in The Time Machine illustrates how the human-animal amalgam leads to the end of the human form and aspect. In Brave New World, extreme bio-technology in the early twentieth century leads to the man-made body of the cloned humans whose self and desire are constructed and manipulated by the state. Instead of a clear-cut thematic transition from degeneration to anti-anthropocentrism, this thesis thus argues that the posthuman body can be found in late nineteenth-century British science fiction and continues to gain its clearer depiction in the early twentieth century during the techno-scientific progress.