Female Exclusion in Victorian Adventure Novels: Doyle, Wells & Buchan

The Exclusion of Femininity in Victorian Adventure Literature

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 Buchan'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 these three novels, yet each author excludes women for radically different reasons. In other words, the exclusion of femininity from Victorian adventure fiction was a trope that many authors employed, but they employed it for radically different reasons and to achieve very different purposes.

This paper analyzes that tendency by exploring all three novels through close readings of the texts, comparisons to the authors' other works, and a survey of the secondary literature. In Greenmantle and The Lost World, Buchan 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. Both 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 in it. By contrast, Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau criticized these very values by questioning whether man was truly civilized at all; Wells excluded women because, from his perspective, they were not implicated in man's crimes. Thus, while all three authors excluded women from these particular adventure novels, they did so for radically different reasons.

Women's Roles and Gender Anxiety in Victorian Britain

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" through intermarriage with non-whites—manifested itself in an aggressive promotion of various forms of masculinity, which historians James A. Mangan and James Walvin described 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 characterized 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 truly existed at all. The books explored in this paper should therefore be understood as each author's implicit, and sometimes explicit, engagement with the culture changing rapidly around them.

Not surprisingly, this misogyny was expressed throughout the novels of the period. According to professor of English Richard F. Patteson, "imperialist romances"—those novels in which "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 (a white man marooned on an island populated by half-animal, half-human creatures), and Greenmantle (white men living among the Turks) all fit Patteson's description of "imperialist romances," making his analysis a useful broad framework for understanding the genre. According to Patteson, women in these novels are typically described as weak, cowardly, treacherous, and lascivious; at best they are helpless but harmless encumbrances, and at worst they are outright villains. As Patteson notes, "One of the worst dangers frequently faced by the explorers is power in the hands of a woman" (5). Taken together, he 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 prominently in The Lost World, it is worthwhile first 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. In "The Adventure of the Second Stain," collected in The Return of 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 this low opinion in The Sign of the Four, in which Holmes declares to Watson that "Women are never to be entirely trusted—not the best of them" (Doyle, 149). Professor of English Lawrence Frank asserts that Holmes' misogyny—a reflection of Doyle's own misogynistic impulses—was related to the historical moment in which the character was created. According to Frank, Victorian England was embroiled in controversies over the proper status of women; battles over divorce law and the right of married women to control their own property provoked debates about gender roles that in turn appeared throughout Victorian fiction (Frank, 54).

Misogyny in Doyle's Work and The Lost World

Just as in the 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 reporter Edward Malone, is passionately in love with Gladys and agrees to join Professor Challenger's expedition largely on her account. Malone's pursuit of Gladys, whom Doyle described as "full of every womanly quality," was largely unfulfilling; she refused his advances and implied that his lovesick feelings were bestial or primitive (6). She goes on to suggest 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, in her view, men should be heroic because it is natural and unavoidable—not in order 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. First, "true" women (like Gladys) desire "real" men—individuals who regularly perform heroic actions. Second, a woman's appropriate role is to support her man and push him toward ever-greater heroic feats. Finally, by having Gladys denigrate her own opinion as a "silly girl's whim" and telling Malone to follow his own instincts regardless of her desires, Doyle explicitly states 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 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 his actual world underlines an unintended meaning of the novel's title: by 1912, his utopia clearly was The Lost World.

This reading may appear somewhat incongruous with Doyle's more nuanced positions on women's issues, but it is fully reconcilable with his actual record. On the one hand, Doyle campaigned vigorously for divorce reform in Great Britain while simultaneously making intemperate remarks regarding women's suffrage. To appreciate the significance of this distinction, it is crucial to understand how Doyle himself drew the line between the 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." (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 by allowing Doyle to "protect" or "defend" women against "villains"—men who failed to embody the chivalric values that defined "true" manhood. This was no 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. In this light, Doyle's simultaneous refusal to support women's suffrage makes far 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" (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 analysis has demonstrated that the exclusively male environment of The Lost World was an outgrowth of Arthur Conan Doyle's conservative, misogynist tendencies—tendencies also evident in his other works, most notably the Sherlock Holmes stories. The same cannot be said of H.G. Wells. While both authors created exclusively male narrative environments, Wells did not share Doyle's conservative or misogynist tendencies. In fact, in his Experiment in Autobiography, Wells famously described himself as "a socialist, a feminist, and a sociologist more concerned with the soft than the hard sciences." Wells even wrote 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" under conditions of ignorance and coercion (4).

More strikingly, in 1909 Wells published Ann Veronica, a novel that directly engaged with the issues of women's suffrage and equal rights. The novel's title character is conflicted between her feminism—which demands 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, Ann Veronica appears somewhat similar to Gladys Hungerton in that both crave domestic bliss. The crucial 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 as Gladys does. Ann would never describe her own opinions as "a silly girl's whims," whereas Gladys does so multiple times within 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 must be their choice.

Conclusion: Three Authors, Three Agendas

In reality, as this paper has demonstrated, women may have been excluded from these three Victorian adventure novels, but they were never truly absent. For Doyle and Buchan, the exclusively male preserves they created in The Lost World and Greenmantle, respectively, were opportunities to work out their fears over the changing social conditions swirling around them. As the women's rights movement made impressive gains in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the chivalric world of true manhood that defined Doyle's understanding of the social order seemed to be slipping away. Buchan chose to interpret one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century—World War I—as merely a sideshow to the real battle: the struggle to reinforce traditional gender roles and identities and to resolve the ambiguity raised by the women's rights movement. By contrast, Wells embraced the women's rights movement and used his gender-exclusive narrative environment as a way of demonstrating that the values of so-called "civilized" society—the very values that Buchan and Doyle believed they were upholding—were nothing more than a veneer covering a terrible truth: man was as savage as any animal and, given his advanced intelligence, far more destructive.