by Laura Miller
Bizarre as it now seems, the “hollow Earth” theory was seriously pondered by geologists of the early nineteenth century, and still held the status of folkloric belief when Burroughs was writing. The leading proponent of hollow-Earthism, John Cleves Symmes Jr. (1779–1829) urged the U.S. government to sponsor a voyage of exploration to the center of the earth via what he fanta-sized as “the North Pole Hole” and plant the Stars and Stripes at the earth’s core. It would, as modern geology informs us, need to be made of asbestos given the fiery temperatures there.
Novelists had too long fantasized about a world under our feet (see Ludvig Holberg’s, The Journey of Niels Klim, 1741, here). Edward Bulwer Lytton broke the earth’s crust, so to speak, with his early science-fiction novel, The Coming Race (1870). It documents the journey of an American engineer, who penetrates to the center of the earth, discovering a race (dominated by superwomen) who have identified a new, hugely powerful energy source—“vril.” (A beef essence manufacturer was quick to capitalize on the popularity of Lytton’s novel with Bovril—“the vril of the bull, bull being “bos” in Latin). Likewise, Jules Verne’s voyage imaginaire, A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), played with the same idea, even before Lytton and Burroughs. It, by contrast, imagined a prehistoric subterranean world, but all of these fables were inspired by the advance of geology (principally for mining) in the nineteenth century—a century fueled by coal.
The profligacy and popularity of these novels are testimony to our never-ending fascination with what may lie beneath our feet—as wonderful as anything that may one day be found in the stars.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
HERLAND (1915)
Gilman’s utopian novel presents an idealized world populated entirely by women, resulting in a society free from war and organized as a gigantic family.
The country of Herland, like Arthur Conan Doyle’s eponymous Lost World (1912, here), which was published three years earlier, is situated on an inaccessible plateau surrounded by jungle. Created by the American writer, editor, and feminist activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), it is a utopia of calm, tolerance, and plenty, but its main distinguishing feature is its population. This fantastic land is peopled entirely by women, who reproduce asexually, and have never come into contact with men—that is, until the arrival of three male explorers. By contrasting life in Herland with the descriptions the three men offer of the world they have left behind, Gilman demonstrates the falsity of contemporary male assumptions about the intelligence, competence, and, written as it was in 1915 when the campaign for women’s rights was at its peak, the political capacity of women. It would be another five years before the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave American women the right to vote; in Britain, women over thirty were given the vote in 1918.
The women the explorers meet when they are captured after landing in Herland are “calm, grave, wise, wholly unafraid, evidently assured, and determined,” and without any of the supposedly “feminine” characteristics the explorers expect to find. They have short hair and no interest in fine clothes or decoration, and although they are horrified at displays of violence, they show no fear and assert their will over the intruders through sheer force of numbers (aided when necessary by deftly applied doses of chloroform).
Wars and natural disasters had wiped out all the men in the country two thousand years earlier, and the modern population was descended from one woman who miraculously became pregnant and gave birth to five daughters. The community the explorers find is organized as a single gigantic family, with property owned in common. Political authority is exercised on the basis of experience, wisdom, and respect. The women are vegetarian, and are dismayed by the waste and profligacy of the world their guests describe.
Herland was originally published in serial form in Forerunner, a magazine edited and written by Gilman, who was a leading campaigner for the equality of women, particularly within marriage. In 1898 she had argued in her book Women and Economics that women needed full financial independence as well as voting rights, and her 1903 study The Home—Its Work and Influence had drawn attention to the oppression that women suffered by being confined to the domestic sphere.
In Herland, these injustices no longer exist, and the narrator, Van, one of the three explorers, becomes completely converted to the feminist philosophy of the country. His colleague Jeff also accepts the superiority of life there, although his response is tinged with an idealistic chivalry that seems to ignore the athleticism, strength, and endurance of the women he meets. However, Terry, the third explorer, is unable to accept the idea that women are as capable of ruling themselves as men.
The attitude toward sex is a major point of difference between the population of Herland and the three explorers. The women argue that the only value of sexual intercourse lies in procreation and the passing on of desirable personal characteristics to strengthen the community, while the men believe that pleasure and the expression of love are important as well. All three men marry Herland women, encouraged by the population, who believe that involving men in their community can only improve their society, but Terry, seeing himself as a “masterful” man, provokes a crisis by attempting to force himself on his unwilling wife.
Gilman, whose life was blighted by severe bouts of depression, killed herself in 1935 after a diagnosis of terminal breast cancer. It was another forty-four years before Herland first appeared in book form (1979), but with its quiet and insistent irony it has now established itself as an early and influential feminist view of a peaceful and tolerant world.
CECILIA MAY GIBBS
TALES OF SNUGGLEPOT AND CUDDLEPIE: THEIR ADVENTURES WONDERFUL (1918)
A children’s fantasy set in a miniature world inhabited by the “gumnut babies” who embody the Australian native flora.
The Australian bush—a wonderland or the site of unimaginable terror? Certainly, from the earliest days of white settlement, terror was the prevailing opinion. The fear of being lost in the bush, where lurking horrors from both European folklore and Aboriginal legend became wildly intertwined, haunted real life as well as the country’s evolving literature. The lure of Australia’s utterly novel landscape became a fatal attraction as convicts and then free settlers became lost and perished. And the epitome of the Australian image of a devouring landscape was international news with the ill-fated end to the Burke and Wills Expedition in 1861.
Nineteenth-century adventure stories set in the bush were replete with such scenarios from writers including Henry Kingsley, Marcus Clarke, and Henry Lawson. And as late as 1911 a popular London publication entitled Life in the Australian Backblocks warned: “The mother… knows the horrors that wait the bushed youngster. So she tells them that… in yonder scrub, there is a ‘bogy-man.’”
Only five years later, however, this threatening wonderland was to be completely inverted into a place of enchantment and fantasy.
Although May Gibbs (1877–1969) was born in England, her earliest Australian experiences as a four-year-old child who emigrated to that country with her family in 1881 became fundamental to the creation of her gumnut world. In both text and illustration her children’s books established a completely original image of native flora and fauna. This enriched the country’s pictorial vocabulary and made Gibbs a household name across Australia.
After sailing to London three times between 1900 and 1909 to study art, Gibbs returned to Australia in 1913 on the eve of World War I. She then settled in Sydney, a highly sensible move considering that it housed the offices of the leading publishers and magazines of the day. A wartime demand for patriotic and nationalistic images helped inspire the creation of her miniature world that mirrored the human world beyond the confines and protection of the bush. Appearing on magazine covers, in syndicated comic strips, and on a range of ephemera, her gumnut babies soon conquered the nation.
As a professional illustrator trained in London schools such as the Chelsea Polytechnic and Blackburn’s, she began a series o
f five small booklets somewhat reminiscent of Beatrix Potter. The emerging appreciation of nature education, outdoor recreation, and even conservation in Australia fostered an unprecedented demand for her work and her first full-length children’s book, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, added new names to the literary pantheon:
Cuddlepie [lived] side by side with Snugglepot.… One day a wise old kookaburra came to the neighborhood.… He said… “I have seen Humans!… They can scratch one stick upon another and, lo, there will be a Bush Fire.”… “I want to see a Human,” said Snugglepot. “In the distance,” said Cuddlepie.
Contemporary reviews all across the British Empire were fulsome in their praise. The publisher could rightfully boast that the book was “a link which binds together the children of the Empire.” They maintained that Australia was “in every line and picture” in which Gibbs’s “bears, kangaroos, possums, and kookaburras have all the human virtues and weaknesses.” Like other twentieth-century creators of wonderlands such as Mervyn Peake (here), Gibbs added her own visual dimension to her texts that greatly solidified her creation in the public imagination.
Since Gibbs’s death, her book has inspired a ballet, a musical, and a series of postage stamps. The cottage she created as her home and studio looking over Sydney Harbour was saved from developers and has become as iconic to visitors as Beatrix Potter’s Hilltop Farm.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
WE (1924)
Set in a futuristic, authoritarian dystopia, We follows D-503, an engineer, who lives, perpetually observed by spies and secret police, in the vast glass conurbation of OneState, where individuality has almost all but been eradicated.
Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We was written in 1920, but considered so incendiary the Soviet Union blocked its publication until the glasnost year of 1988. However, an unauthorized unofficial English language translation appeared in New York in 1924. We is set in a futuristic world called “OneState” in which every aspect of life is controlled by a secret police, the Bureau of Guardians. Citizens have numbers rather than names, and live in transparent apartments so they can be observed at all times. The plot concerns a mathematician and engineer, D-503, who is helping to build a spacecraft called the Integral, designed to export OneState’s regime to other planets. He keeps a journal in which he expresses his increasing doubts about the supposedly utopian world in which he lives.
If the world of We seems familiar, it is because Zamyatin established many conventions of classic dystopian fiction. Indeed, the novel was a direct inspiration for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949, here), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932, here), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). OneState is presided over by the dictatorial “Benefactor,” citizens are surveilled at all times, and every hour of life is mapped out by a schedule known as “the Table.” Everybody dresses in light-blue overalls, eats the same synthetic food, and exercises at the same time. OneState is surrounded by a vast, “Green Wall,” allegedly built to keep the wilds of nature out, although we later learn that earlier a global war had killed all but 0.2 percent of the population, and the world outside the wall is a ruined landscape. Within OneState friendships, relationships, and breeding are rigorously controlled, and all sexual contact is limited to state-approved partners. It is, perhaps, the only flaw in Zamyatin’s dystopian imagination that the transparent walls of apartments are occluded only when people have sex. It seems unlikely that OneState would respect its citizen’s privacy at such a time.
We is written in a series of short sections or “records.” Their tone contrasts the chilly, regulated world against the often rich and moving thoughts and emotions of D-503: happy and optimistic in the beginning, and increasingly despairing as it goes on. And this contrast is also echoed in the landscape of the novel: Inside the Green Wall everything is systematically ordered, with clarity and precision. (Even some aspects of mathematics are not allowed since they are too chaotic: For example, D-503 mediates on such forbidden quantities as the square root of minus 1.) Everything imprecise is banished, including human passions such as those D-503 experiences in an illegal affair with the sprightly female I-330, who does such illogical things as smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and flirt.
This world might strike a reader as implausibly schematic and simplified, but Zamyatin makes it work by making schematization the very logic of the society he portrays. It helps that his prose is vivid, colorful, and evocative, and that the human dilemma of D-503 is so engagingly rendered. As such, We remains one of the most prophetic and powerful dystopias ever written.
FRANZ KAFKA
THE CASTLE (1926)
Kafka’s unfinished and ambiguous story of one man’s struggle to comprehend the absurdist, labyrinthine world in which he finds himself reflects complex truths about the nature of existence.
The Castle, in any traditional narrative sense, goes nowhere. In the same traditional sense it is plotless. Franz Kafka (1883–1924) never finished writing it. The story breaks off mid-sentence and one could argue that, like the fallen-down “ruins,” with which romantics liked to ornament their estates, the incompleteness of The Castle is its reason for being. A statement is being made by its refusal to give a statement.
K.—a land surveyor—arrives at a village, somewhere in Middle Europe. His mission is to call on the Count who lives in the fog-shrouded Castle that looms, ominously, over the village. The young man has arrived at dusk and he finds himself unwelcome. Peasants glare at him and fall silent. What mystery, one wonders, awaits the visitor? What world have we entered?
Kafka wrote The Castle in 1922, two years before his death and three years after the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart with the end of World War I. The period is indisputably “modern”—there are telephones and electric lights in the village. But where, if anywhere, is the 1914–18 cataclysm? Has it happened? Is it about to happen? Or are we in a universe where it never happens? There is no echo of the carnage to be heard in The Castle. Kafka has imagined the biggest event of the century out of existence.
Everything shivers with enigma. K. is a name, but no name. It is twilight—that nothing time between day and night. K. is on a bridge, suspended in the space between the outside world and the village. Fog, darkness, and snow shroud the Castle. Is there anything in front of him but emptiness? And is there anything behind him? Where has K. come from? We learn in the first chapter that he has traveled for a long time from far away. What country are we in? Most of the village inhabitants have German names, but in chaotic breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which Kafka was writing, leaves geography uncertain.
K., fatefully, crosses the bridge. At the Bridge Inn, the innkeeper grudgingly allows K. a straw mattress on the taproom floor. It stinks of beer and peasant sweat and rats run over his feet, and he is almost immediately roused from his fitful rest by an emissary from the Castle who roughly asks what he is doing in the domain of “Count Westwest.” Does he have the necessary “permit”? A flustered K. declares himself to be a “land surveyor,” “sent for by the Count.” Is he making it up?
Initially, the Castle’s representative, denounces K. as an impostor. Then, following a phone call, he radically changes his tune. The stranger, he now accepts, is what he claims he is. An emboldened K. goes on to say that his assistants and equipment “are coming tomorrow by carriage.” In fact, two assistants do turn up on foot the next day, but from the Castle. They know nothing about surveying (or anything else) and have no “instruments.” Bizarrely, K. claims to know them, identifying them as his “old assistants”—yet he does not know their names, which, with preposterous high-handedness, he conjoins as “Arthur.” To add further confusion, a comically inept messenger named Barnabas, is charged with arranging K.’s communications with the Castle. He does not.
The main obstacle between K. and the Castle is apparently Klamm, the Count’s man-in-the-village. Klamm never speaks to anyone on business, and hastens from the room when any official matters are mentioned. He is a cartoon burea
ucrat, stout, suited, with a pince-nez, and smoking a Virginia cigar. Critics have noted that Klamm bears a striking similarity to photographs of Kafka’s father, Hermann. K., denied access to the man himself, now seduces Klamm’s current mistress, the barmaid Frieda.
Kafka was familiar with the work of Sigmund Freud and it is tempting to interpret these events and others in the novel in a Freudian reading. However, in a more romantic narrative one might call it love at first sight. After one look at K., Frieda surrenders herself to him, sealing the arrangement with a passionate coupling in the beer puddles under the counter in the taproom. Thereafter she refers to herself as his fiancée. K. informs the landlady that he intends to marry Frieda. However, the first chapter obliquely noted that K. already has a wife and child.
The “authorities” in the Castle decide they do not require the services of a surveyor and reappoint K., in a surreal move, as a temporary school janitor. Remuneration, of an indeterminate amount, he is informed, will be forthcoming at some indefinite future point. Perhaps. K. sees it as a victory, but he promptly loses the job after robbing the school woodshed in order to keep him and Frieda warm at night.
The first half of The Castle is a quixotic quest. In its second half, it modulates into a conversation novel. Having lost the faithless Frieda to one of his assistants, K. becomes closely involved with Barnabas’s sisters, Amalia and Olga. The daughters of a once-thriving shoemaker have fallen on hard times. Amalia made the mistake of declining to surrender her body to a lecherous bureaucrat and the family were duly reduced to penury. As restitution, Olga—a woman of impeccable morality—surrenders her body twice a week to the “insatiable” Castle riffraff. She suffers this heroically, in a religious spirit of self-sacrifice.