Exclusion of Femininity in Victorian Adventure Novels

Females in Victorian Adventure Literature

This paper analyzes the tendency among Victorian adventure novel authors to exclude women by exploring three novels: H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and John Buchanan's Greenmantle. Through close readings of the texts and comparisons to the authors' other works, as well as a survey of the secondary literature, it becomes clear that, while Victorian adventure authors did create areas of sex-segregated action in their novels, they did so for very different reasons. In Greenmantle and The Lost World, Buchanan and Conan Doyle sought to strengthen the eroding social structure by reinforcing the gender binary that formed the basis (in their minds) of civilized society. Conan Doyle and Buchanan believed that real men were those who were naturally impelled to heroic action and that women should be the passive audience, appreciating male action but not taking part. By contrast, Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau criticized these values by questioning whether man was truly civilized; Wells excluded women because, from his perspective, they were not indicted in man's crimes. Thus, while all three authors excluded women from these particular adventure novels, they did so for radically different reasons.

The Exclusion of Feminity in Victorian Adventure Novels

Even a casual reader of Victorian adventure novels must arrive at the inescapable conclusion that their authors intended to create enclaves of male exclusivity, places where the novels' protagonists could express their misogynist impulses and fears far from the judgmental gaze of mixed gender society. Male exclusivity courses through Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, John Buchanan's Greenmantle, and H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau. Clearly, Robert Louis Stevenson's statement about his own book, Treasure Island -- "women were to be excluded" -- applies equally well to the books named in the previous sentence, yet each author excludes women for radically different reasons. In other words, the exclusion of femininity from Victorian novels was clearly a trope that many authors employed, but the employed it for radically different reasons and to achieve very different purposes.

To fully appreciate the significance of the exclusion of females from The Lost World, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Greenmantle, it is necessary to make some introductory observations about the role of women in Victorian Great Britain. By the end of the nineteenth-century, women's roles in Britain were changing very rapidly, due to a number of factors including national wealth, and the emergence of a women's rights movement. Anxiety over these changes and about the reputed "degradation" of the "white race" due to intermarriage with none whites manifested itself in an aggressive promotion of various forms of masculinity, which historians James A. Mangan and James Walvin explained as, "… an obsessive commitment to physical activity (3). According to Mangan and Walvin, the concept of manliness generated its own opposite in the category of femininity, which the historians described as "… docility, [and a] commitment to domesticity and subservience" (4). In other words, gender relations in Victorian England were dominated by two binary categories that were increasingly idealized representations of a reality that was rapidly disintegrating (if it had ever existed at all). Thus, the books explored in this paper should be understood as the authors' implicitly (and sometimes explicit) engagement with the culture that was rapidly changing around them.

Not surprisingly, this misogyny was expressed throughout the novels of the time. According to professor of English Richard F. Patteson, "imperialist romances," or those novels where "…white men enter a primitive region and ultimately establish a degree of influence among the natives" are "… perhaps more revealing than any [other types of contemporary literature] in [their] portrayal of women" (3). Certainly, The Lost World (white men descend into South America and encounter tribal humans feuding with ape-men), The Island of Dr. Moreau (white man marooned on an island with half-animal, half-men creatures), and Greenmantle (white men live among the Turks) fit Patteson's description of "imperialist romances," so it seems useful to apply his analysis as a broad framework for understanding the genre. According to Patteson, women are typically described as weak, cowardly, treacherous, and lascivious; at best they are helpless but harmless encumbrances but at worst they are villains. As Patteson notes, "One of the worst dangers frequently faced by the explorers is power in the hands of a woman" (Patteson, 5). As a group, Patteson concludes that "… fear and hatred of women [is] evident everywhere in the imperialist romance" (5).

Misogyny is a repeated theme in Arthur Conan Doyle's work; though it appears in The Lost World, it is worthwhile to consider the misogynist elements in Doyle's most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is a confirmed bachelor with an unusually negative opinion of women. For instance, in the "Adventure of the Second Stain," one of the Holmes stories collected in The Return of the Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective tells his faithful friend, Dr. John Watson, that "…the motives of women are inscrutable" (Doyle, 1045). Doyle further expanded on his low opinion of women in the novel The Sign of the Four, in which Holmes declares to Watson that, "Women are never to entirely trusted, -- not the best of them" (Doyle, 149). Professor of English Lawrence Frank asserts that Holmes' misogyny - a reflection of Doyle's misogynistic impulses -- was related to the historical moment in which the character was created. According to Lawrence, Victorian England was embroiled in various controversies over the proper status of women; battles over issues regarding divorce law and the right of married women to control their property provoked debates about gender roles which in turn appeared in Victorian fiction (Frank, 54).

Just as in Sherlock Holmes stories, where women appear primarily to introduce the mystery and then recede into the background so the men can work, the action of The Lost World is sparked (indirectly) by a woman, Gladys Hungerton. The novel's protagonist, Daily Gazette reported Edward Malone, is passionately in love with Gladys and agrees to go on Professor Challenger's exploration. Malone's pursuit of Gladys, who Doyle described as "…full of every womanly quality" -- was largely unfulfilling; she refused his advances, implying that his love feelings are bestial or primitive (6). She goes onto imply that Malone is not truly a man because he has not looked "Death in the face" without fear (8). Gladys also criticizes Malone for trying too hard to please her because, according to Gladys, men should be heroic because it is natural and unavoidable, not to satisfy a "silly girl's whim" (7). In other words, Gladys -- the embodiment of all womanly qualities -- demands that Malone be a "true" man, which involves repeated, physically heroic actions. Here, Doyle was making a number of important statements about gender relations and gender identity in the early twentieth century. The first is that "true" women (like Gladys) desire "real" men, or individuals who regularly perform heroic actions. The second point is that a woman's appropriate role is support her man and push him to engage in every greater heroic acts. Finally, in denigrating Gladys' opinion as a "silly girl's whim," and telling Malone that he should follow his own instincts regardless of her desires, Doyle is explicitly stating that women's ideas are to be ignored. Edward Malone and Gladys Hungerton clearly embody the binaries described by Mangan and Walvin in Manliness and Morality, which was surely Doyle's intention. Put another way, Doyle constructs a vision of the perfect world as one populated by heroic men driven by natural inclinations to ever-greater feats and by the adoring women whose only role is providing silent adulation and generating future heroes. This was clearly not the world Doyle inhabited because, by 1912, women were agitating for the vote and for greater economic, political and social freedom. The disconnect between Doyle's vision and the world he inhabited underlines another, unintended meaning of the novel's title, for by 1912, his utopia clearly was The Lost World.

This reading of The Lost World may appear somewhat incongruous with Doyle's more nuanced approach to the issue of women's rights, but is in fact fully reconcilable with his history on these issues. On the one hand, Doyle campaigned "vigorously" for divorce reform in Great Britain while at the same time uttering some fairly intemperate remarks regarding the issue of women's suffrage. To appreciate the significance of the exclusion of females from The Lost World, it is crucial to understand the distinction that Doyle drew between these two issues. The divorce laws in Great Britain made it easy for men to divorce their wives but very difficult for wives to divorce their husbands. According to journalist and biographer Russell Miller:

With his high regard for social justice, Conan Doyle recognized that [the divorce laws were] manifestly unfair. He drew a characteristic analogy with the old days of chivalry, when young knights came to the rescue of damsels in distress. By supporting divorce law reform, he said, modern-day knights had the opportunity to rescue tens of thousands of women from 'hopeless lifelong misery, from the embraces of drunkards, from bondage to cruel men, from the iron which fetter locks them to the felon or the hopeless maniac' [my emphasis] (279-280)

In other words, supporting divorce reform allowed Doyle to embody the heroic ideals that Gladys described to Malone. Furthermore, it reinforced the gender hierarchy because it allowed Doyle to "protect" or "defend" women against "villains," or men who failed to embody the chivalric values that defined "true" manhood. This was no stunning act of feminism; if anything, Doyle's support of divorce law reform reinforced the existing social norms (predicated on the established gender hierarchy) in Great Britain at the time. In this light, Doyle's concomitant refusal to support women's suffrage makes much more sense, because he saw women voting as a threat to the social order. Moreover, the militancy associated with the women's suffrage movement in Great Britain (ranging from civil disobedience to bombings and arson) offended Doyle's conservative commitment to the status quo and earned his disdain. As Miller noted, Doyle opposed women's suffrage because "… he considered the suffragette movement [as] more likely to end in social chaos than equality for women" (Miller, 314). Doyle's attitude toward women was fully in line with Patteson's description of them as "helpless but harmless" and incapable of wielding actual power.

The preceding paragraphs have demonstrated that the exclusively male environment of The Lost World was an outgrowth of Arthur Conan Doyle's conservative, misogynist tendencies that were also evident in his other works (most notably various short stories and novels featuring Sherlock Holmes). The same cannot be said of H.G. Wells because, while both his and Doyle's work features exclusively male environments, Wells did not share Doyle's conservative or misogynist tendencies. In fact, in the Experiment in Autobiography, Wells famously referred to himself as "… a socialist, a feminist, and a sociologist more concerned with the soft than the hard sciences." Wells even went so far as to write the introduction to The Pivot of Civilization, Margaret Sanger's 1922 book in defense of legalized birth control, in which he criticized the "…monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children" (4). More interesting, in 1909 Wells published Ann Veronica, a novel that directly considered the issues of women's suffrage and equal rights. The novel's title character, Ann Veronica, is conflicted about her feminism, which demands that she enjoy economic and political freedom and social equality with the men in her life, and her desire to be loved and married. Subtitled "A Modern Love Story," the novel explored the apparent difficulties of reconciling feminist demands with women's traditional, and seemingly universal, desire to be a wife and mother. In a very superficial way, then, Ann Veronica appears quite similar to Gladys Hungerton in that both crave domestic bliss. The difference between the two characters, and between Doyle's misogyny and Wells' feminism, is that Ann Veronica demonstrates her independence by choosing the role of wife and mother, rather than passively and unquestioningly accepting it like Gladys Hungerton. Ann would never describe her opinions as "a silly girl's whims," whereas Gladys does so multiple times in the span of a few pages. In other words, Ann Veronica is a stinging rebuke to conservatives like Doyle who saw only social chaos resulting from the women's rights movement; as Wells makes clear, many women will choose traditional domesticity, but it needs to be their choice.

Surprisingly, while Wells and Doyle had very different political and social views, both created worlds of male exclusivity where women were either invisible or relegated to minor supporting roles. This paper has already explored the meanings and reasons for Doyle's decision to exclude females from his works, so it must now turn to Wells. As the preceding paragraph made clear, Wells had the capacity for creating sophisticated, nuanced female characters, begging the question "Why are there no women in The Island of Dr. Moreau?" The answer is simple: Wells is criticizing men for their purportedly animal natures. Unlike Doyle, who uses the exclusively male environment as a setting for his male characters to perform heroic physical feats and thus assert their chivalry, Dr. Moreau's island is a horrific setting designed to illustrate man's depravity. The men in The Island of Dr. Moreau are not heroic; in Wells' estimation, Moreau is clearly committing crimes against nature and Montgomery is a psychological weakling and a drunk whose weaknesses eventually contributes to the breakdown of the island's society. These are actually the characteristics that, according to Patteson, are usually ascribed to women in imperial romances,

Thus, The Island of Dr. Moreau is a sustained critique of "civilized" men who pride themselves on their distance from the animals (and non-white colonial subjects) but are, in reality, nothing but animals in clothes. For instance, Edward Prendick asserts that, "An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie" (Wells, 225). Here, Wells is presenting the converse of Doyle's impression of real men. For Doyle real men (as expressed by Gladys Hungerton) are noble and heroic, latter-day chivalric knights dedicated to achieving great feats and protecting the weak. For Wells, by contrast, men are nothing more than animals who have the added ability to lie, a point driven home at the end of the novel when Prendick returns to civilization and is overwhelmed by fear that, at any moment, the people around him will revert to their animal instincts.

Like both The Lost World and The Island of Dr. Moreau, Greenmantle is almost entirely bereft of female characters. The novel's plot -- soldier/spies Richard Hannary, Sandy Arbuthnot, and Peter Pienaar fighting wars and engaging in espionage for king and country -- certainly conforms to the description of manhood that Patteson argues characterizes imperial romances. Certainly, Greenmantle reflects Patteson's statement that, throughout imperial romances, the characters are "… preoccupied with their masculinity, frequently congratulating one another on their manly qualities" (5). Only two women appear in the novel. The first is a poor old woman who nurses Hannay back to health following his bout of malaria, contracted (improbably) during his trek across the snow-covered countryside. Though the woman does not exemplify Patteson's binary -- she is neither a treacherous villain nor a giggling buffoon -- and her she successfully exercises some power over Hannay in the novel, she is nonetheless implicitly an example of the sort of nameless, faceless female designed to observe and applaud male action without actually exerting any real influence over it. Buchanan depicts her as a simple German mother, unable to even understand the basic causes of the Great War that has taken her husband and left her and her children desperately malnourished. She reminds the reader that women in Victorian adventure novels, when they appear at all, are like the audience at a movie; necessary for the movie to be successful, but without any real power to affect the movie's outcome.