The lost world theory

Masculinity, Virility, Patriarchy

“All good people agree,

And all good people say,

All nice people, like Us, are We

And every one else is They:

But if you cross over the sea,

Instead of over the way,

You may end by (think of it!) looking on We

As only a sort of They!”

Rudyard Kipling Debits and Credits

Abstract:

Like many creators, Doyle's work reflects the time, he was living in. In Great Britain, from the mid-18th century till the end of WWII, the representation of man was defined by his masculinity. The advent of imperialism with the conquest of new territories, “blank spaces in the maps", reinforced that concept closely relating it to courage and patriotism, manly qualities necessary to the making of a gentleman and a defender of colonialist values. To the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the Empire controlled a large number of colonies, making Great Britain the foremost global power. That supremacy, combined with the resurgence of interest in the theories of human evolution, acknowledged Darwinism and Galton’s eugenics and promoted the nationalist ideology pervading the whole Europe, but being definitely radical in Great Britain.

Furthermore, England "lacked adventures", thus British conquests revived the creative flame of various artists, including writers. A new literary genre developed: the adventure novel. This article studies the way the Lost World explored the quest for the “missing link” by the western civilisation and how it grew ideological. The lost-race tale is a subgenre of science fiction literature which highlights the impact it had on cultural, political and social features in British society, in the early 20th century. It was the opportunity for Conan Doyle to introduce his new character, the quick-tempered and egotistical scientist, Professor Challenger. Through him, he acted out the obsession of the time: the fantastic discovery of an ape-men tribe. These primitives symbolised “the missing link”, Doyle’s team of civilised British explorers were in search of. The encounter resulted in a confrontation which ended with the genocide of the savages to the glory of the British civilisation.

INTRODUCTION

This thesis questions the hegemony of masculinity in the British Empire, at the dawn of World War One. The study focuses on Conan Doyle’s fiction The Lost World, published in 1912, at a time when Victorian warriors were only memories in a declining empire. Less than thirty years ago, Doyle was writing the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlett, edited in October 1886, when reading King Solomon’s Mines. He was amazed at Rider Haggard’s famous boys book, published a year before and claimed then, that he was “thinking of trying a Rider Haggardy kind of book called “the Inca’s Eye” dedicated to all the naughty boys of the Empire, by one who sympathizes with them”.

Beforehand, Conan Doyle aimed at writing a popular boys book mingling mystery, adventure and romance. The Lost World marked a change in his career, as the fiction began part one of the Professor Challenger series. Though Doyle was trained as a physician and The Lost World considered as a founding work of science fiction—advocating Darwin’s theories—its plot was more based on pseudoscience than real discoveries. Doyle was a scientist himself and he was often faced with conceited but sterile quacks. However, he was still taken seriously by some scientists of the time. When he published the first Sherlock Holmes stories, he was contacted by Galton, the theorist of eugenics, who was invested in forensic science. Galton foresaw to conduct experiments with Doyle, to whom he was very respectful. He had spotted, that a great deal of Holmes’s investigations were based on acknowledged and scientific elements, but it seems that Doyle did not follow the eugenicist. The writer intended then to change his quality fictions and hero. Thus, he enjoyed writing The Lost World, a sort of wink to his counterparts, many of whom having rejected Darwinism in favour of outliers. Like many writers, his characters were modelled on real individuals’ personalities, then Challenger obviously took on some of his creator’s features. That way, Doyle took revenge on his peers, by featuring the prominent hero, an eminent zoologist considered as a mystifier by his fellows, but victorious over them at the end.

According to The Encyclopedia of Science fiction, Rider Haggard was the pioneer of the lost world stories and he popularised them. The dictionary also implies that the author was really skilled and imaginative, because in the late 19th century, most of the Earth had been explored and charted. Doyle borrowed several literary elements from King Solomon’s Mines, such as the team of adventurers travelling to find out a lost city inhabited by a lost race. Thus, he was not the initiator of the genre and The Lost World is even described as a weak plot, but it is regarded as the most famous (one) and it paved the way to future creators.

The study explores the hegemonic masculinity at the end of the Victorian era and the influence of scientists such as Darwin and Galton, on gender and race superiorities as perceived by early 20th century intellectuals. The first chapter of this research deals with the adventure fiction devoted to the education of boys and young men. Hence, it defines the boys book as a major influence on little gentlemen, because it infused them with a taste for adventure and enabled them to develop their imagination. The boys book would therefore be at the origin of the mythical hero. The second chapter examines the more scientific aspect of masculinity and studies the impact of the conquest of territories on the tenets of racialism, white supremacy and the expansion of nationalism in England. The last part of this analysis discusses the limits of the masculine model in the private and public spheres and the regression of the white man, when he is extracted from his environment and confronted with primitivism.

Plan

II – White Male Patriarchy

a – The Myth of the Victorian Hero

“There Are Heroisms All Round Us”

b – Primitive Masculinity versus Civilised Masculinity: Professor Challenger’s duality

“This old ape-man… was a sort of red Challenger”

c – The Concept of Race and Racialism and the Foundation of British National Identity

a – The Myth of the Victorian Hero

“There Are Heroisms All Round Us” (Doyle, 3)

White male patriarchy emerged in Britain, in the late 18th century onwards, with the advent of new imperialism which turned simple human beings into empire builders; its goal was to secure England’s dominant position over Western territories. Thus, what defined Victorian heroes was “their social success through strength of character and perseverance"(Steyer, 98). This study provides the definition of a Victorian hero and aims at demonstrating that colonialist literature helped fashion its myth. It also highlights the way Imperialism ideals of conquest driven by Darwin’s evolution could turn mere individuals into models for their peers.

In Western culture, Victorian heroes are rooted in the authors’ imaginations and their literary creations. They are part of collective dreams. When several fictions, including Doyle's, began to mentally explore "the heart of darkness", British ethos became even more nurtured with conquests of territories. The creation of male characters in adventure novels partook of imperialist fantasy which delineated "lost worlds" as privileged places for future gentlemen’s training. Imagination exalted young men’s winning and the desire to be confronted with otherness. In England, expansionism and colonization became concepts, closely linked to culture, of which, popular boys’ books like “The Lost World” significantly participated in the development of the heroes worship. Although he had inspired the society of his time and a great deal of authors, Darwin, the British naturalist, asserted that their works overly impacted young men and exposed them to disillusionment. In “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex Vol. I” published in 1871, he recalled, that humans were a palette of various emotions which made them vulnerable, imperfect and sometimes, weak (Darwin, 1871, 70). Thus, such imperfection could not fit the heroic image men wanted to present themselves, because a hero was an exceptional character beyond human being. He did not feel; he acted, driven by an inner impetus, like the protagonists of “The Lost World”.

“The Lost World” recounts the ambitious undertaking of four explorers, who, led by Pr Challenger, a zoologist, embark on a risky expedition to the Amazon jungle ̵ This journey is reminiscent of Darwin's own on the Beagle to South America, less than a century earlier ̵ On a previous journey, Challenger had found out the dying Maple White from whom he took the travel diary