Linda Dryden

She: gothic reverberations in Star Trek: first contact

In Gothic, fantasy and horror the representation of women tends to focus on female sexuality, the female as object of the male gaze, and the female as victim, usually in a sexual or erotic manner. Hence much of the imagery and iconography of women in science fiction and related genres is highly sexualized, featuring scantily clad female bodies. Even when the female is an alien, her body is frequently the object of male desire. Thus in Star Trek: First Contact (1996) the villain is a cyborg female, with a recognizably human body, provocatively dressed, who uses seduction to subjugate men. Perpetuating the stereotype of women in science fiction as objects of the male gaze, this Borg Queen is a sexual threat to the fraternity of male officers who seek her destruction and that of her race. Furthermore, First Contact reverts to some of the tropes and conventions of Gothic fiction, demonstrating the close relationship between the two genres and their representations of women.

‘City of Dreadful Night’: Stevenson’s Gothic London

Reflecting back on the nineteenth century in 1927, J. B. Priestley felt that there was ‘nothing Victorian about the way in which Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) tells a story’ (Priestley, 117). In the closing years of the twentieth century some find in Jekyll and Hyde a relevance to the darkest moment in recent European history. Invoking Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Frank McLynn argues that Jekyll and Hyde is concerned with ‘the kind of darkness in the heart of human beings that would produce the death camps of the twentieth century’. It is thus more than a tale of ‘diabolic possession as in Hogg’s Confession or “Thrawn Janet”’, and ultimately for McLynn Jekyll and Hyde deals a ‘devastating blow to Victorian optimism’ (McLynn, 265). In fact, when we come to the later tales, ‘The Beach of Falesa’ and The Ebb-Tide, there is something very modernist about Stevenson’s vision and narrative form, something more akin to the early Conrad than to the writers of nineteenth-century boys’ adventure fiction with whom he is usually associated.

‘Karain’: Constructing the Romantic Subject

In April 1898 Conrad wrote to Cunninghame Graham: ‘I am glad you like Karain. I was afraid you would despise it. There’s something magazine’ish about it. Eh? It was written for Blackwood’ (Letters 2, 57). Those ‘magazine’ish’ elements include a ghost, an exotic Malay chieftain, charms and talismans, love, betrayal, and questions of honour, and it is likely that it was precisely these ‘magazine’ish’ qualities that Conrad was looking for to ensure publication for this short story. In 1896 Edward Garnett had advised Conrad not to continue with The Sisters. Watt suggests that Garnett was effectively warning Conrad ‘against trying to be a more ambitious and highbrow kind of novelist’. ‘Karain’ is evidence, Watt asserts, that Conrad had ‘more or less accepted Garnett’s typecasting’ (Watt, 27). Significantly Conrad is aware of similar qualities in an earlier tale, ‘The Lagoon’ (1897). Writing to Garnett in August 1896, he calls this tale ‘a tricky thing’ and identifies exotic elements that would appeal to a magazine readership: ‘the usual forests river—stars—wind sunrise, and so on—and lots of secondhand Conradese in it. There is only 6000 words in it so it can’t bring in many shekels…Don’t you think I am a lost soul?’ He concludes: ‘I would bet a penny they will take it’ (Letters 1, 301). Cornhill Magazine duly accepted it.

The Shape of War and of Things to Come

The last extant letter from Conrad that mentions Wells is to Elbridge L. Adams, written on 22 January 1923.1 Adams had written an article for the American magazine the Outlook, called ‘Joseph Conrad — The Man’, and Conrad was commenting on a draft prior to publication.2 He advised that Adams’s comment about Conrad’s relationship with Wells ‘could very well come out, as it is a very general statement, dealing mainly with Wells from a critical point of view, and certainly not expressing all my view of Wells, which in many respects is quite appreciative’ (Collected Letters 8: 13).3 By this time their acquaintance had been more or less over for some years, yet Conrad’s comments to Adams are testimony to an enduring regard for Wells’s early science fantasies, and his desire not to be publicly critical. His final extant letter to Wells was written on 23 January 1911. It concerns The New Machiavelli (1911), and Conrad writes in glowing terms: ‘I don’t know what a “masterpiece” may be — but I know what a master-work is when I see it. And this is it.’ He signs off, ‘Ever yours with admiring affection J. Conrad’ (Collected Letters 4: 408). Despite something of a cooling in their relations after his criticisms of Mankind in the Making, Conrad persisted in reaching out to Wells even while knowing that their closeness was at an end; if Conrad knew that the Roumanian captain in Tono-Bungay was a parody of himself, it does not appear to have dampened his enthusiasm for Wells’s best work.

Conrad, Wells and the Art of the Novel

On 19 November 1904, H. G. Wells wrote to the novelist Morley Roberts: ‘What do you think of Conrad? I began the chorus of praise ten years ago, but I’m cooling off considerable. Short stories is his game. Nostromo is desiccated conglomerate’ (Correspondence 2: 58). Wells could not have been more wrong in his judgement. As Cedric Watts says, ‘Nostromo incorporated the most intelligent fictional analysis of international capitalism and of economic imperialism ever written’, and it is, as Watts avers, ‘Conrad’s masterpiece’ (‘Nostromo in T. P.’s Weekly’ 102). Wells’s assessment of the novel implies that it is dry, powdered goods, deprived of all life-giving moisture, texture and sustenance, an amalgam of unrelated narratives: his full implication is that Nostromo has nothing of importance to offer. In fact, ironically, Nostromo is a conglomerate, but not in the way that Wells implies. Watts pinpoints the importance of the novel exactly when he says that ‘the textual multiplicity of Nostromo amplifies its modernistic multivocality and magnifies its postmodernistic indeterminacy’ (‘Nostromo in T. P.’s Weekly’ 112). Conrad himself called the novel ‘my biggest creative effort’, and as Watts points out, Arnold Bennett, a contributor to T. P.’s Weekly where Nostromo was first serialized, ‘would later assure Conrad privately that Nostromo was “the Higuerota among novels”: “the finest novel of this

‘The difference between us’: Science, Politics and the Human Factor

On 16 February 1905 Conrad wrote to Cunninghame Graham that the ‘grave of individual temperaments is being dug by GBS and HGW with hopeful industry. Finita la comedia! Well they may do much but for the saving of the universe I put my faith in the power of folly’ (Collected Letters 3: 217–18). The problem hinted at here, is that, as Karl and Davies assert, Wells was moving away from the scientific romances that emphasized evolutionary possibilities towards a ‘scientific assertiveness’ that ‘clearly worried Conrad’ (Collected Letters 3: 218). Allied to this was Conrad’s distaste for the Fabians with whom Wells was increasingly becoming involved; and, as a pivotal member of the Fabian Society George Bernard Shaw was amongst the foremost of these new political thinkers.2 The imaginative brilliance and originality of Wells’s scientific fantasies had thrilled Conrad the writer; but when Wells increasingly allied his ideas about scientific progress to political change, Conrad began to have serious misgivings. Science and politics were to become two of the crucial issues that were to define the differences between Conrad and Wells.

Martians, Sleepers, Time Travellers and Hearts of Darkness

It was H. G. Wells’s anonymous article on An Outcast of the Islands in the Saturday Review on 16 May 1896 that was the catalyst for his friendship with Conrad. Wells was already well known as a writer of scientific fantasies, due to the publication the previous year of The Time Machine, but, as Parrinder and Philmus point out, his literary ambitions went well beyond this. He was a perceptive and witty critic who dealt mercilessly with the ‘sentimental fiction and romantic fantasy which made up the major proportion of the literary diet of the 1890s’: ‘No other reviewer of his time was so consistently successful in sifting the good from the bad and in recognising new talent’ (Parrinder and Philmus 2). Conrad was one such talent, and Wells’s review of his second novel caused Frank Harris’s assistant on the Saturday Review, H. Blanchamp, to inform Wells that ‘The Editor … asks me to tell you that he thinks it one of the best pieces of literary criticism in the English Language’ (Parrinder and Philmus 48 [ellipses in original]). This was high praise indeed: the prodigally talented Wells was delighted, and remembered it to the end of his days.1

Conrad, Wells, Ford and the Ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson

In the midst of his work on the story that was to become Heart of Darkness Conrad was collaborating with Ford on Seraphina, a draft of the novel that would eventually be titled Romance. Conrad and Ford worked together on a total of three projects: The Inheritors, Romance and The Nature of a Crime (1909), a short story that was first published in Ford’s English Review in 1909. The Inheritors is not generally considered to be a genuine collaboration, as Raymond Brebach confirms: ‘Conrad readily admitted that The Inheritors was for the most part Ford’s work, and that he put his name on it only to insure [sic] its publication. His role in its composition was more that of editor or critical reader than collaborator’ (Brebach 35). Conrad states as much in a letter of 26 March 1900 to Edward Garnett about Ford and the revisions to The Inheritors: ‘O Lord. How he worked! There is not a chapter I haven’t made him write twice — most of them three times over. This is collaboration if you like!’ (Collected Letters 2:257 ).1 Jocelyn Baines calls The Nature of a Crime a ‘worthless fragment’, which may be harsh, but captures the mood of most critical responses to this short, quite odd story (Baines 277).

Quap, Ivory and Insect Empires

In early spring 1899 Wells cut out the pages of his copies of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine containing ‘The Heart of Darkness’ and sent them to an American archaeologist, Joseph Thacher Clarke.1 Clarke responded, thanking Wells for ‘mutilating [his] periodicals’, which gave him the ‘opportunity of reading Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”’. He was familiar with Tales of Unrest and The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, but Clarke was unimpressed with Conrad’s style in his latest offering, as he explains to Wells: Not that I am at all inclined to agree with your suggestion that his work is superior to — well, that of the very best of our short story tellers. Good as his stories are, and I especially liked his ‘Outpost of Civilization,’ [sic] I think that he has a tendency to excessively high coloring and almost lurid effects. One feels this especially in ‘The Idiots’. The ‘Heart of Darkness’ is certainly most awfully good, but if one should criticise, perhaps a little disjointed and wanting in straightforward simplicity. (Clarke Illinois C. 274)

The Coming Terror’: Wells’s Outcast London and the Modern Gothic

The year 1895 was a watershed for a number of literary careers: in April Conrad appeared on the scene with Almayer’s Folly; by May Oscar Wilde’s career was all but over; and in the same month appeared the book version of H. G. Wells’s first significant literary publication, The Time Machine. Following public reaction to Jude the Obscure in November of that year, Hardy was to abandon novel-writing in favour of poetry. The literary scene was changing: Stevenson had died in Samoa in 1894, and Henry James sensed that a new mood was affecting literary circles. Complaining to William Dean Howells in 1895 that a ‘new generation, that I know not, and mainly prize not, has taken universal possession,’ James saw that the British novel was at a turning point (Anesko, 298). He was, according to Frank Swinnerton, ‘in the midst of literary movements with which he had, and could have, no sympathy’ (Swinnerton, 45).1 This was also the year of significant non-literary publications: Degeneration and The Crowd appeared in Britain capturing the public mood of anxiety, and a growing interest in psychological investigation and psychic phenomena.