Deaglán Ó Donghaile

Anarchism, Socialism and The Invisible Man

Despite The Invisible Man’s engagement with anarchism and revolutionary individualism, many critical interpretations of H. G. Wells’s 1897 novella have avoided discussing these issues in close detail. Recently, Steven McLean has read it as a discourse on scientific responsibility by drawing attention to the contrast between the professionally educated invisible man, Griffin, and the simple, inarticulate rustics he encounters in Iping. McLean reads Wells’s villain as a scientific, rather than political, individualist whose ‘downward evolutionary course’ explores ‘the potential complexities inherent in the (conflicted) relationship between scientist and society.’[1] In his seminal study, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study in the Scientific Romances, Bernard Bergonzi depoliticised the invisible man by reading him as an anachronistic figure, or ‘alchemist’ at odds with the modernizing imperatives of late Victorian Britain. Suggesting that Wells was, essentially, writing about magic, Bergonzi read the novella as a rural comedy that pits an eccentric villain against slow-witted but amusing country folk.[2] Although John Hammond viewed the text as a political allegory, his interpretation focused on the invisible man’s pursuit of power in rather general terms, arguing that ‘[w]hat is demonstrated […] is the truism that without social morality men are less than human: that power without moral control is dangerous and irresponsible.’[3]

While The Invisible Man undoubtedly has its comic moments, its political subject matter outweighs the slapstick that Bergonzi found so amusing. In The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (1981), Frank McConnell complained of such interpretations, claiming that Wells used invisibility as popular literary shorthand for revolutionary violence, as Griffin serves as a ‘perfect’ revolutionary, terrorist and symbol for the spread of egoistical anarchism.[4] Emphasising the tale’s anti-capitalist moral, expressed through the invisible man’s conflicted role as a cultural signifier of the ‘pure consumer’, Paul A. Cantor has suggested that his condition is complicated by his dependence on commodities, such as food (which he must conceal during digestion) and clothes, along with the money that he steals in order to survive.[5] In H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies, Keith Williams proposes that the novella anticipated totalitarianism, making it ‘aesthetically ahead of its

time’,[6] but while Wells was fascinated with mass politics, as is evident in later fictions like When the Sleeper Wakes (1907) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), The Invisible Man concentrates on the earlier and more individualistic type of revolutionary discourse of anarchism.

The argument presented here draws on the tale’s subtle ideological resonances. As Simon J. James has argued, Wells’s scientific romances are rooted in the political concerns of their moment, a feature that often explains the inability of his protagonists to resist the very real and material circumstances against which they struggle. In offering fantastic but paradoxical narratives that refuse the possibilities of escape that are so characteristic of late the Victorian romance, Wells subverted its traditional function, manipulating it for his own, socialist ends. This explains why Griffin experiences such difficulty in establishing his reign of terror: despite the freedoms that it promises, invisibility is ultimately of little use in late Victorian England, where severe restrictions are placed on the invisible man’s autonomy and ability to move.[7]

The only study to identify the invisible man as an anarchist is Linda Dryden’s The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, which discusses Griffin as a product of the destabilizing and identity-eroding imperatives of fin de siècle modernity. According to Dryden, he is a product of the late Victorian gothic imaginary, whose violence is a consequence of urban alienation, much like the metropolitan chaos found in Wells’s other fictions. The tale, therefore, fits within a wider series of attempts to ‘destroy the offensive (metropolitan) environment, a desire that is realized in The War of the Worlds.’ As Dryden argues, ‘Griffin is a terrorist, out of place in the “normal” city landscape, but he is also a Gothic monster in the sense of the Gothic subject’s fragmented identity, and a body that is prone to metamorphosis and fluctuability.’[8]

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 601