The unnatural, framed: narratives of evolution and the science fiction of H.G. Wells

The purpose of this study is to examine the ways in which H. G. Wells's scientific romances reinscribe the narrative of evolution set out in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.Drawing on recent advances in the field of unnatural narrative theory, this study aims to examine how the romances, specifically through the device of frame narration, reinscribe dynamics of knowledge transmission that encumbered Darwin throughout The Origin.The first chapter reads The Origin as an unnatural narrative, gesturing to the many natural processes Darwin describes but is unable to provide definitive material evidence for.I offer the term "natural narratee" to describe the kind of implied reader Darwin imagines, one who is likely to confront challenges with his theory for the very reason it disrupts and defies the parameters of reality as they know and experience them.Chapter Two turns to Wells's romances, both novels and short stories, to examine how different framing strategies in his novels and short stories negotiate the Darwinian unnatural by beginning in a more familiar mode of discourse.Looking to how the frame narratives variously represent the Victorian everyday, I analyze each for their proximity to the fantastic and thus as a mediation between familiar scenes of Victorian life and the evolutionary unnatural.The third and final chapter moves to reconcile the unnaturality of The Origin with its narrative re-inscription in the scientific romances.Contrary to recent scholarship that reads evolution as an "unnarratable" concept, I suggest the romances imagine a different kind of narratee who, unlike Darwin's implied reader, is better able to contend with the incommensurability of natural selection.A short coda closes this study by examining the final chapter of The Island of Doctor Moreau, wherein the novel's principal narrator transgresses the boundaries of the frame to reflect on having borne witness to the unnatural and its permeation into the everyday scenes of Victorian life.This research hopes to offer a model for reading literature and science dialectically through attention to differences in narrative form, as well as introduce unnatural narrative theory as a useful and timely intervention in the cultural study of science and its place in the literary imagination.Darwin's various asides to the reader suggest a far more generalized audience -one adjudicating not only the scientific acumen of his theory but its implicit challenges to everyday perception.Thus, chapter six of The Origin begins with an appeal to "the reader" who "long before has arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him" (133).The Origin was read widely in the years following its publication, garnering reviews in newspapers and magazines in addition to technical publications and scholarly journals.While not intended for nor read solely by an expert audience, Darwin concedes that "it is hardly possible for [him] to recall to the reader who is not a practical geologist, the facts leading the mind feebly to comprehend the lapse of time [necessitated by the theory]" (OOS 266).Harkening back to Charles Lyell's work on geological time, which similarly imagined a vastly more ancient Earth, Darwin warns that "[h]e who can read the Principles of Geology and yet does not admit how vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume" (OOS 266).What may be perceptible by deduction to the trained eye of the paleontologist remained invisible to most late nineteenth-century readers in whom Darwin recognizes a want of more direct experiential evidence.It is this absence of a connection between the experiential and the narrated that makes evolution appear unnatural in its cultural context.It is this link that Wells's frames work to forge. 1 My reading of the frame narratives in Wells's science fiction draws principally on Jonathan Culler's notion of literature as a strategy of "naturalization," a mode of reading the world through which "the strange or deviant is brought within a discursive order and thus made 1 Prior to beginning his work on the scientific romances, Wells studied biology at the Normal School of Science under Darwin's close collaborator and staunch defender Thomas Henry Huxley (Inventing Tomorrow, 13).Following his graduation, Wells went on to teach biology at the university level and publish multiple textbooks on the subject and thus had a better understanding than most late Victorians of the evolutionary process as articulated by Darwin.

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