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Reconstructing Biblical History: Garrett Serviss, Pauline Hopkins, and Technocratic Exploration Novels

2012; Routledge; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905495.2012.711616

1477-2663

Nathaniel Williams,

Mormonism, Religion, and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See Clute 368. The naming of Edisonades is, as Clute points out, somewhat anachronistic. The first such dime novel was Edward Sylvester Ellis's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) published two years before Thomas Alva Edison founded American Telegraph Works and over a decade before he found widespread fame for phonograph in 1877 (Stross 14, 30–37). In other words, the Edisonade genre predates even the rise of Edison himself. For an historical overview, see Landon 40–50. Previous scholarship connects early SF and imperialism. Carter Hanson states that British “lost race” novels “provided young male readers with narratives of imperial permanence” (497) and John Rieder's book-length study, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, addresses how the use of technology in such novels ties to the Western imperialist ventures that were being undertaken simultaneously. Rieder notes “the advent of spectacular invention inevitably invokes that embracing pattern of uneven economic and cultural distribution, colonialism, and with it arises the specter of those encounters between cultures with wildly different technological capabilities” (32). For an overview of other Edisonade novels featuring lost-race elements, see Bleiler's Science-Fiction: The Early Years. Of particular note are the lost-race variants found in the long-running series of Frank Reade, Jr. dime novels, including works such as Frank Reade, Jr., in the Sea of Sand and His Discovery of a Lost People from 1891 (556–557), which features a lost race connected to King David, and Frank Reade, Jr. and His Electric Coach and The Search for the Isle of Diamonds from 1893 (551–552), which features a lost Hebrew tribe. Such appeals occur across the spectrum, as writers attempted to either reinforce or overturn the established racial order by appealing to the same source. For more on the use of the Bible to construct an imperialist, Protestant American self-image during the late nineteenth century, see Harris. For another view of how popular literature responded to Protestant Americans' views on evolution, see Smith, 236–7. See, for example, the recently reprinted Over the Andes with Frank Reade, Jr., in His New Air-Ship (1894) (Cox 71–137). The inventor, Frank Reade, Jr., publicly announces his intent “to build an air-ship which will be able to carry a dozen or more persons around the world if need be” (73). He receives thousands of letters from individuals hoping to accompany him on this flight. After a lengthy description of how the air-ship works, he determines to visit the Andes to help one of his traveling companion's family members. In such tales, the location is selected after the creation of the incredible machine. To make this distinction, I am indebted to Robert Bruce's analysis of the professionalization and specialization of American science between 1846 and 1876. While the distinction between “science” and “technology” may appear obvious, the boundaries between the two were frequently blurred during this era, even as they became increasingly differentiated in American minds. As Bruce points out, during the nineteenth century, science moved out of the realm of the “self financed amateur” and into two differing professional roles (135). Pure or applied “science” became the domain of a professional class of scientists whose research was supported by academic posts and grants from government (135). “Technology,” in contrast, developed a class of middle-class engineers and inventors who “carried on no experimental research to derive new principles or generalizations” but “used well-known mechanical principles” to create tangible (and patentable, and lucrative) benefits (155). Despite this increasing split, many American scientists who hoped to vindicate their theoretical work encouraged the idea that all theoretical science would result in some practical application, a trait which, Bruce notes, continues in the sciences today (128). Thomas D. Clareson asserts one additional defining element of the genre: “whatever else it might be, the ‘lost race’ novel was a love story” (123). Clareson calls attention to how these novels promote a narrative in which their Western male protagonists venture to a primitive world and discover happiness with a “pagan” woman. In his study of British “scientific romances” from 1890-1950, Brian Stableford notes the lost-race novel only fleetingly, stating that it had “little scientific romance in it, although some important scientific romances did borrow the format” (21). Hanson concurs, noting that the stories are “almost entirely void of scientific pretence or principle” (523). Rieder links this to Darko Suvin's argument that “cognitive estrangement” remains the key element of science fiction. By taking the known, then adding an element that questions it, these novels do the work of science fiction. Rieder links this directly to colonialism's portrayal of the colonized “other” as somehow pre-historical beings and its colonial venture as a kind of step back in time. “In adventure-oriented lost-race fiction, anachronistic proliferation has to be read as a symptom of colonial discord, the same clash of cultural and economic vales whose structure of abyssal difference and fantastic opportunity underlies” such works (Rieder 52). See Suvin, 3–15. For more on debates regarding science during of this period in the U.S., see Croce, 87–110; 111–148; Numbers, Darwinism, 58–75; Ruse, 83–102, 129–145; and Webb, 29–52. For an overview of the early debate among American scientists regarding Christian religious faith, the age of the Earth, and evolution, see Bruce 119-127. Hodge states “Darwin rejects all teleology or the doctrine of final causes” (52). Teleology also figures into Henry Ward Beecher's qualified acceptance of Darwin; Beecher sums up the issue, stating “The debate is not about the reality of evolution, but, of the influences which produce or direct it.” (109). Fundamentalism proper did not begin in America until after World War I. For more on Moody, Hodge, and the development of fundamentalism, see Butler, Wacker, and Balmer, 292–301. Such events included the dismissal of a science professor at Columbia Theological Seminary and the Episcopalian church's first trial for heresy in Canton, OH in 1890 over Reverend Thomas Howard MacQuery's book, Evolution of Man and Christianity. See Marsden 103–104, Roberts 225–227, and Webb 34–35. Dodel's introduction also complained about a number of larger issues causing the gap in science education in 1890s America, including the use of “surreptitiously” religious textbooks as reading in secular schools (23), the lack of rigorous science courses (24) and the low professional requirements and low pay of teachers (27). A short contemporary review in Popular Science Monthly noted that the translator's preface included “a disquisition on School Reform in the West, the burden of which is the installation of science and the elimination of all religious teaching in all the schools” (“Literary Notices” 274-5). For more on the popularity and influence of Dodel's book in Europe, see Kelly. Such language may be standard for Edisonades, but it is striking given the novel's proximity to the Spanish-American war. As Rieder notes, Serviss's language mimics that of a “new imperial competitor bristling with eagerness to reshape the international order of things” (136). For a standard description of evolutionary theory in War of the Worlds, including T. H. Huxley's influence on Wells, see Gunn's Alternate Worlds 91-94. See also Jennifer Malia's recent treatment of Wells's use of Darwin in the context of satire in War of the Worlds (82–84). Aina's appearance also adds a new component to their mission which deepens the novel's lost-race themes. They now become involved in an internal struggle to free the human slave from Martian captors and to topple the Martian despot who is, Aina reveals, “more directly responsible than any other inhabitant of Mars for all the wickedness of which they have been guilty” (251). The implication is that some Martians would have chosen not to attack the Earth. Thus, the Earth scientists become entangled in the same kind of civil war that Rieder notes is a hallmark of the “romantic,” non-utopian lost-race novel (41). For information on Hopkins's editorial career at Colored American Magazine and the publication of Of One Blood, see Carby's introduction, xxix-xxxvii, xliii-xlviii. For further consideration of utopian and proto-science fiction elements in Hopkins's treatment of race, see Fabi 44–48 and Reid. Contextualizing her enterprise, John Gruesser notes “Hopkins wrote it expressly for a black middle class audience as a kind of antidote at a time when racism and legal discrimination against African-Americans . . . had reached a frenzied peak” (80). Eric Sundquist has called the result “patently escapist fiction” (570). Mark Bould notes, however, that the novel's “narrative excess (which might not have seemed quite so pronounced in serial form) creates a strong sense of the irreducibility of African-American experience to the dominant conventions of literary and commercial fiction” (61). Hopkins's biographer Lois Brown states that the author examined James and other early psychologists, such as Alfred Binet, and considered their approaches approvingly in her own essays in the Colored American Magazine (393–394). For a broader recent discussion of such residuum, particularly spiritualism's role in Hopkins's novel, see Kucich, 140–142. Kucich states “The focus on research into the occult undercuts the Darwinian amaterialism that underlies most of the era's scientific theorizing about race” (140). Susan Gillman's chapter, “Pauline Hopkins and Blood Talk,” (32–72) offers one of the best sustained analyses of the multiple interpretations of race and identity in Of One Blood, particularly in the context of America's fascination with Egyptology and psychology. Gaines states that “Hopkins's writing was part of a broader tendency among marginalized racial, religious and gender minorities who used the idea of civilization at the turn of the century to give credence to their own aspirations to status, power and influence” (435). See also Walter Benn Michaels study of “anti-imperialist” racist literature in America in relation to Hopkins (23-24). In her attempt to counter these insular attitudes, Hopkins follows line of thinking similar to American anti-imperialists. Japtok calls this the “Darwinist trap,” that makes “the ‘worth’ of a people dependent on technological and cultural accomplishments . . . following the same quasi-Darwinian logic that served nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists to ‘justify’ their ventures” (403). “Thus,” Japtok states, “the paradox: Of One Blood reflects a Darwinist outlook on history at the same time that it opposes and undermines racism deeply informed by Darwinism” (409). For more information on how Hopkins uses her narrative to counter racialized pseudoscience of her day, see Gillman, 49–57. For a contrasting view, see Kassanoff, who claims that “although Of One Blood explicitly argues for a brotherhood of man, subtexts of incestuous blood . . . dispute this claim” (171). Kassanoff finds that Hopkins complicates, rather than clarifies, race and identity in her attempt to “rationalize both assimilation and amalgamation” (167). Notably, this shared contact is lopsided in favor of Western religion as much as it is lopsided in favor of African technology. The natives of Telessar are more than willing to adopt Briggs's Protestant faith when he becomes king (563). Despite the lost city's vast social and technological advancements, Protestant Christianity finds a welcome reception.