Abstract
This chapter explores the influence of Darwinism on the representation of vegetarianism in the foundational science fiction and utopian works of H. G. Wells. It begins by examining the often-ambiguous treatment of vegetarianism in Wells’s early and extremely influential scientific romances The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1888). The examination then turns to Wells’s later utopian works, which display an increasing impatience and hostility towards vegetarians. However, as the analysis shows, the popular reception and interpretation of his novels has meant that many of the Romantic vegetarian ideals he sought to undermine continued to be promoted throughout the early twentieth century, during which many of the genre’s most popular and lasting tropes were established.
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Notes
- 1.
The first of Erowhan’s chapters concerns a prophet promoting vegetarianism to increase happiness and “prosperity,” with the increasing legal and religious sanctions against the consumption of further animal foods driving many of the Erewhonians to insanity and self-harm (Butler 263). The second chapter sees a botanist philosopher—secretly a “great meat-eater” himself—attempt to expose the “absurdity” of the newly established Puritan Party by extending such restrictions to vegetables, with fatal results (272). For further analysis, see Joshua Bulleid, “Better Societies for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.” Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction, edited by Zachary Kendal, Aisling Smith, Giulia Champion, and Andrew Milner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 53.
- 2.
Even if conscious, the Eloi apparently have no choice in their vegetarianism, since all other animals appear extinct—the Time Traveller’s inference that the Morlocks are responsible for Eloi garments adding an extra layer of horror by suggesting their “leather” belts are, in fact, made from their own skins (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 23, 27, 58).
- 3.
English translations more conventionally attribute the lion’s violence to a general human nature, although the original Latin specifies its effect on the “stomacho” (Horace line 1.16.16).
- 4.
Atwood argues Moreau’s name “no doubt” derives from combining the syllable “Mor” from the Latin word mors or mortis (meaning death) with the French word for “water” (l’eau)—“suitable in one who aims at exploring the limits of plasticity”—so that “The whole word means ‘moor’ in French,” thereby rendering “the very white Moreau … also the Black Man of witchcraft tales” (161). Exactly why Wells would want to name Moreau either “black man” or “death-water” is unclear and Maupertuis’s historical precedent seems far more likely and logical.
- 5.
For further discussion of Moreau’s relationship to Bernard, see Harris 102; Philmus xli–xlii; and Vint, “Animals” 87.
- 6.
One person seemingly unfazed by The Island of Doctor Moreau’s graphic depictions of vivisection was Wells’s grandson, marine biologist Martin Wells, who gloated in a 1998 interview about how he and his wife would eat their “experimental animals” (Dreifus). The younger Wells’s speciesist attitudes are also reflected in his only published novel, Second Coming (2008), wherein the intensely misogynistic protagonist (and likely author-avatar) Miles Wallace—a biologist who finds animals’ insides “often more interesting than the[ir] outsides”—investigates an evolutionary anomaly, brought about by a Moreau-like eugenicist (M. Wells 8, 96).
- 7.
Humanity’s submission to Wellsian alien invaders is explored in John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy (1967–68). None of its novels engage with vegetarianism, however, and although their narrator notices how “the Tripods hunt men, as men hunt foxes” and claims he could not tolerate their rule “any more than a sheep could walk through a slaughterhouse door,” he does so only while pilfering the “beef and ham” that keep the protagonists pleasantly fed throughout the first novel (Christopher 40–41).
- 8.
The War of the Worlds contains numerous other allusions to Biblical imagery, particularly Revelation and the divine retribution imposed upon Sodom and Gomorrah. However, while its narrator’s trek across a deserted London while ruing the failures of Romanticism owes much to Shelley’s The Last Man, there are no explicitly lapsarian allusions, with only the reported absence of a “Major Eden” hinting at any “Paradise Lost” (H. G. Wells, Worlds 37).
- 9.
A traditional English soup made by boiling a calf’s head, in lieu of an actual turtle.
- 10.
Regarding Tolstoy’s vegetarianism, see his essay “The First Step,” which was originally published as the introduction to his Russian translation of Howard Williams’ Ethics of Diet (1883), in Leo Tolstoy: Selected Essays, translated by Aylmer Maude, edited by Ernest J. Simmons (Random house, 1964), 232.
- 11.
Stapledon also endorses a diet of synthetic food concocted entirely from vegetable matter in the utopian portion of his 1942 novel Darkness and the Light (146).
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Bulleid, J. (2023). You Are What You Eat: Bestiality and Other “Carnal Cravings” in the Works of H. G. Wells. In: Vegetarianism and Science Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_3
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