Becoming (Post)Human: How HG Wells, Upton Sinclair, and DH Lawrence Tried to Alter the ...

262 Pages·2015·1.66 MB·English

Becoming (Post)Human: How H.G.
Wells, Upton Sinclair, and D.H.
Lawrence Tried to Alter the Course of
Human Evolution
Author: Alison Pasinella
Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104050
This work is posted on eScholarship@BC,
Boston College University Libraries.
Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2014
Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.
Boston College

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Department of English

BECOMING (POST)HUMAN: HOW H.G. WELLS, UPTON
SINCLAIR, AND D.H. LAWRENCE TRIED TO ALTER THE
COURSE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

a dissertation

by

ALISON PASINELLA

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2014
© copyright by ALISON PASINELLA
2014
Becoming (Post)Human: How H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and D.H. Lawrence Tried to
Alter the Course of Human Evolution

by Alison Pasinella

Dissertation Advisor: Marjorie Howes

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the dual impacts of evolutionary theory and the
industrial revolution on late 19th and early 20th century transatlantic fiction, particularly
in articulating the concepts of perfectibility and degeneration. Darwinian evolutionary
theory made real the possibility failing to successfully evolve and adapt as a species
could cause humans to go extinct or, maybe worse, devolve into monstrosities. The
industrial revolution, on the other hand, enabled humans to conquer nature to a degree
that suggested a power to become engineers of our own future world and selves. At the
same time, this ability to understand and alter ourselves dissolved the distinction between
humans and machines, and the realities of industrial technology under a capitalist system
revealed that humans could also be reduced to machine-minding cogs. The two
(sometimes conflated) categories of animal and machine, which we have long used to
distinguish ourselves as humans, were breaking down and threatening to undo our
understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
The authors whose works I discuss in this dissertation recognized that human
could no longer be considered a stable category or entity, and they worked from within
the received conceptual language of animals and machines to challenge our ideas about
what being human means. They believed that by using imagery and narrative to re-
articulate human identity and purpose, they could change behavior, morality, politics,
economics, culture, and the future evolution of the species.
In this dissertation, I examine the different approaches that H.G. Wells, Upton
Sinclair, and D.H. Lawrence used to engage this dangerous and exciting problem of
reimagining human meaning and human potential through narrative. By situating these
authors in conversation with each other, I am able to highlight different facets, concerns,
and shortcomings of each approach. This study also reveals that these authors were
already engaging in a dynamic discussion currently gaining prominence and urgency in
our own time as we explore through science, technology, philosophy, and narrative what
we are and what we want to be.
Table of Contents

I. Acknowledgements ii

II. Introduction: (R)Evolutionary Narratives 1

III. Chapter One: “Are we not men?”: H.G. Wells and the Coevolution
of Humans and Technology 21
• The Human Animal 32
• Evolution and Technology 59
• Revolution and War 79

IV. Chapter Two: “A new and higher kind of strength”: Upton
Sinclair’s Precarious Evolutionary Balance Between Animal
Sympathy and Mechanical Efficiency 92
• Predators, Prey, Parasites, and Cannibals 101
• Machines, Technology, and Engineered/Engineering Man 123
• Sexual Selection and Engineered Motherhood 139

V. Chapter Three: “With a hope to quench the malady at its source”:
D.H. Lawrence and the Choice Between Vital Embodiment and
Lifeless Machinery 151
• Mind and Body 167
• Man and Woman 192
• Revolution and War 207

VI. Epilogue 222

VII. Notes 233

VIII. Works Cited 244
Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to the nurturing community of Boston College for fostering
my intellectual and personal growth through these years. The wonderful faculty and staff
of the English department made BC feel like a home. I would like to thank Jim Wallace,
Paul Lewis, and Lisa Fluet for working with me on my minor and major exams, helping
establish the foundations upon which this dissertation was built. I am grateful to Chris
Wilson, Robert Stanton, Mary Crane, Jim Smith, and Suzanne Matson for their
generosity and friendship. They made me a better scholar and a better teacher by their
example. I would also like to thank Laura Tanner for guiding and supporting me through
the final stages of the degree requirements.
I am lucky to have had many opportunities to teach at BC, and I am grateful to the
amazing students for their eagerness and enthusiasm and for working with me on some of
the texts and concepts that form the basis of this dissertation.
BC would not have been the same without the warm and supportive community
of graduate students, and Alex Puente, Nick Gupta, Becky Troeger, Katie Daily-
Bruckner, and Alison Cotti-Lowell have been particularly great friends and support. Amy
Witherbee deserves special gratitude for inspiring me early on and helping me make
sense of my own ideas. Matt Heitzman and Wendy Cannella have shared so many special
moments with me that they have become family, and I am grateful to Wendy for sharing
my enthusiasm for this project and being willing to talk through my ideas and challenges.
I can’t thank my dissertation committee members enough for all of the time and
attention they put into this project. Robert Kern’s gentle guidance and belief in me
ii
formed the backbone of my BC experience from my first days on campus. Judith Wilt has
inspired me with her insatiable intellectual curiosity and has strengthened my
understanding of many subjects with her breadth of knowledge and attention to detail.
Kalpana Seshadri’s passion, expertise, and enthusiasm have given new life and depth to
my own work and opened my eyes to new exciting possibilities. I would especially like to
thank Marjorie Howes, who was willing to go with me on a meandering journey that took
us both rather far from where we started or expected to go. I am grateful for her calm
wisdom, her sense of humor, and for her tireless work in reading, discussing, and
challenging the ideas that have evolved into this final product.
I also want to thank my family for all the love and encouragement they have
given me. My aunts and uncles, Betsy Connors, Kassie Randall, and Joseph and Gerard
Fuqua, always gave me an extra boost in confidence just when I needed it most. My
sister, Ashley, has been by my side and shared the intellectual curiosity that got me
started and carries me onward. The love and support of my parents, Ben and Marjorie
Van Vort, have made everything I’ve accomplished possible. And finally, I want to thank
my husband, Brett Pasinella, and our daughter, Imogen, for filling my life with love and
fun and for making everything more worthwhile.
iii
Introduction: (R)Evolutionary Narratives

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not
through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the
fact of having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there,
may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.
Charles Darwin The Descent of Man (1871)

In his 1906 essay “Future in America,” H.G. Wells confesses that he has always
possessed a “mental idiosyncrasy” of looking at life not for what is, but for what it is in
the process of becoming.1 This “anticipatory habit” he shared with many writers and
thinkers of his day, including Upton Sinclair and D.H. Lawrence. Two compelling and, I
will argue, interrelated factors that made the turn of the century in Europe and America a
period preoccupied with change were the increasing influence of the evolutionary
theories put forth by Charles Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck2 and the dramatic and
pervasive impact of the Industrial Revolution.3 The first half of the twentieth century was
a time of destabilization in almost every imaginable way, including social, economic,
political, environmental, and ontological. It was also, therefore, a time of both great
anxiety and great hope. Earlier fears about social decay became imbricated with fears
about species degeneration, and for the first time in history, it became possible to believe
that humanity could and should intentionally evolve into something else.
The authors whose works I explore in this dissertation were attempting to shape
the human species through their writing. They were convinced that at their moment in
history, humanity had reached a crossroads in its evolutionary journey and was veering
toward self-destruction. Their literary mission, at times stated overtly, was to awaken
their readers to the perils of the present course and to galvanize them to actively reclaim
1
and reshape the destiny of the human race. As part of that process, Wells, Sinclair, and
Lawrence sought to redefine what being human means. They attempted to establish new
ethical imperatives and to deconstruct what they considered to be the false belief in a
stable reality, the dangers of capitalist ideology, and the misguided moral values of their
day, aiming their critique at the level of the individual organism and of the social/political
system. While Wells and Sinclair predicted that engineers, doctors, and other middle-
class professionals versed in the sciences of technology and biology would undertake the
management of human evolution, they also clearly believed, as Lawrence did, that
novelists were the best equipped to understand the idiosyncrasies of human nature but
also that they alone had the ability to alter minds and hearts by stimulating imagination
and evoking feelings through narrative engagement. In this respect, they were all
inheritors, to some degree, of the realist tradition of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and
Thomas Hardy. They made the thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations of their
characters available as “knowable communities,” in the words of Raymond Williams,4
for instructive as well as entertainment purposes. They created narrative experiments in
human evolution and they established their challenge to the status quo through a complex
linguistic interplay of animals, nature, and machines—a discourse we now call
posthumanism.
The three authors had broadly the same ambitions and made use of similar
concepts and language, but there are interesting and revealing differences among their
approaches and visions that can be productive in thinking about the stakes involved in
constructing human meaning through and against animals and machines. There has been
a recent interest in unpacking the power structures and assumptions embedded in the
2