Hi all,
Considering that the A-level prose exam is tomorrow, I though it would be an apt time to put my notes on the War of the Worlds and the Handmaid’s Tale. Should anyone read them before tomorrow, I hope they help!
The contextual information is a collection of information either already present on the blog or from additional reading.
Good luck everyone!
Hello all,
Below are a set of notes taken from the Massolit lectures on War of the Worlds. I hope they’ll serve useful as application in any of your prose essays on The Handmaid’s Tale and The War of the Worlds. If you’re looking for further information of the former, I’d recommend either the advanced York notes guide for a simplified exploration of the Handmaid’s context and themes, but if you’re looking for some complex analysis then you might want to check out Bloom’s modern critical interpretations. If you’re not looking to purchase anything, I’d also recommend that you take a visit to your local library (or Norwich’s Millennium Library specifically) for their selection of texts on literary analysis where they’re bound to have a number of critical accompaniments to Atwood and the Handmaid’s Tale. You may struggle also to find relevant texts explicitly on War of the Worlds, but have a survey through the index of general literary guides on science-fiction or Victorian literature and you may find some further tidbits of information that you can add to your essays, or even just contribute to your general understanding of the texts and the periods in which they were produced.
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
EVOLUTION AND ETHICS
WARFARE AND NARRATION
ANTHROPOCENTRISM
The following section are notes from Massolit lectures on the War of the Worlds with an additional essay on its opening chapters. Please enjoy!
Mars fever was a phenomenon that gripped the public imagination in the late 19th century. The War of the Worlds is in a way, a response to this, prompted by a series of scientific discoveries about the telescope. Schiaparelli’s map of Mars bolstered theories of fellow astronomers that there could be alien intelligence of Mars capable of creating a network of canals. In order to develop this planetary irrigation and transport system, it was assumed that martians must have long superseded terrestrial technology and had outgrown nation-states. Mars was a world government.
Percival Lowell’s observations were revolutionary for his writing considered the possibility that human beings should embrace a newfound consciousness of immaturity for change. If there was intelligent advanced life on Mars, it would place us on a new external perspective of ‘cosmic humanism.’ Lowell’s theory, if proven correct, would administer a cosmic shock to human self esteem, perhaps even a second Copernican Revolution? This would de-center our place in the universal order of creation and demote human beings to amongst the primitives of the universe.
In fictions concerned with the superiority of martians, even prior to War of the Worlds, in Camille Flammarion’s Le Fin de Monde and George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1894), martian scientists use advanced telecommunications to warn earthlings of a comet on collision course. Other novels visiting Mars gave previews of a super-human future by an anthropomorphic analogy. H.G. Wells’, however, criticised this very notion in his essay, Intelligence Life on Mars (1896), that suggested alternatively that life might evolve in non-human forms according to planetary conditions. Other martian fictions, like Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac (1880) took off from colonial and frontier settings in America and the south Pole that provided degrees of reassurance that humans might eventually overtake their martian neighbours whose evolutionary cycle had already peaked and were sliding from a high-tech utopia to a post-human degeneration.
Wars of the Worlds, as a text, was very different because it envisaged a shocking reverse of what other texts were conveying that alien colonial intervention would irrevocably change home conditions on our planet. Previously, space travellers tended to conform to the Victorian Imperial adventure stereotype, emerging from the encounter with extraterrestrials with their sense of superiority triumphantly confirmed, as the aliens they meet are either not yet human or have already peaked. In Wells’ novel, the martians come as conquerors of space and threaten the very imperial subject on our home planet itself. The emergence of a symptomatic post-colonial alien gaze in contemporary science-fiction was not exclusive to Wells, but he distinguished his text as the “perfect 19th century myth of the imaginary war” (I.F.Clarke).
The alien gaze reverses the colonial perspective contemporary of the time when the novel was written. War of the Worlds was written in 1897 as powerful manifestation of a kind of colonial vision, emerging in the science and culture of the late-Victorian period. The year of its serialisation was also the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and the celebrations on the public’s mind would have increased the public’s shock.
Colonialism at the time underpinned itself with the pseudoscience of social darwinism that tended to natural grotesquely asymmetrical conflict on the grounds of evolutionary competition between races for superiority. It was used to justify the territorial expansion and subjugation of so-called inferior races through the means of superior technology, railways, telecommunications, and naval warfare. Effectively, social darwinism exercised the right a kind of ‘evolutionary prerogative’ (Peter Fitting). War of the Worlds attacks this pseudo-scientific heresy, beginning in chastened retrospect of the near-future as the martian invasion has taken place and have been defeated by shear fluke that they lack immunity to Earthly diseases. Wells makes a poignant reminded about how the Victorian colonialists had set their sights on space, little suspecting their gaze was being reflected with a ferocity that would lead to the destruction of their cosmic outlook.
The disillusionment that Wells presents in the first chapter is that of the naivety of the colonial position of what humans might make of Mars as the martians are looking back from their much more advanced position, intending to make humans subject of the same imperial designs. He draws a stringent parallel to terrestrial colonialism and its history; ironically, the martians have the excuse the humans are not a remarkably related species and are desperate to escape their dying planet. In contrast, Wells highlights that by 1876, British settlers had casually exterminated Tasmania’s indigenous population though enslavement, murder, and imported diseases like smallpox.
Wells is also fascinated with advanced instruments of vision, like telescopes, film cameras, and microscopes all over his early fiction; not only do the advance scientific knowledge, they change how human beings think about theme-selves and relations with others. The War of the Worlds elaborates on an emerging alien gaze — the ability to see yourself through new ways, enhanced by scientific instruments. The text is designed to allow contemporary Britain to evaluate the ethics of its foreign policy from the imaginary vantage point of another species, that of a nightmare vision of the colonial other that was integral to British colonial ideology.
Through his anonymous third person narration (a scientific journalist by profession), Wells creates a double perspective; his narration seems to alternate between that of a loyal British subject and the technologically advanced, extra-terrerstrial looking at us from outer space. E.g., Chapter 7 — ‘How I Reached Home’
“At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.”
At the beginning of the novel, the flashing lights (of cycliners descending to Earth) observed by Ogilvy and the narrator elude to strange lights on Earth, an article from one of Britain’s foremost scientific articles. This noted the popular expectation that extra-terrestrials might be aware of our presence on this planet and were attempting to communicate with us for a mysterious purpose.
The War of the Worlds, not only invokes scientific instruments, it defamiliarises the powers of new visual media that were just being born at time of serialisation. The cinematograph had only been invented in 1895, yet Wells describes the martian’s futuristic heat ray like a film camera or projector. The heat ray was mobilised as a kind of mobile optical device, swooping around panoramically with devastating effect. It spectacularises everything in its visual field, much like cinematic gaze. The tripod upon which it is fixed, suggestible of a portable camera mount, as well as classically a Delphic Tripod that was essential to prophetic visions amongst the ancient Greeks. During the martian occupation, the whole of Earthly reality is presented in a defamiliarised visual perspective; human normality and proportion is disrupted to the degree that the ‘landscape, weird and lurid of another planet.’ (Chapter 6) Both narrator and reader are simultaneously experiencing a kind of evolutionary dethronement brought about by a tilting of visual perspective as human scale is usurped. This perception altering alien invasion, in late Victorian science-fiction and the historical high-point of European colonialisation coincide; the War of the World’s fantastic scenario was already rooted in the very real experience of enslavement, plague, genocide, environmental devastation, and indeed, species extinction that followed the technologically superior Europe’s first contacts with the peoples in the new world.
The following is an essay exploring the opening scenes up to chapter 4 of H.G.Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds.’ Whilst prose texts must be written in conjunction with another, this is a useful exercise in itself. This essay was marked at 19/20 for its well-selected examples, techniques, and close analysis but could have benefitted from a consideration of Wells’ intentions, the narrative form choice, and impact of social concepts.
The opening chapters of ‘The War of the Worlds’ postulate a causal relationship between humankind’s immorality and their consequent punishment, challenging what Wells perceived as a weakening English moral fibre. The arrival of the martians, briefly described as ‘God’s ministers’ form agents for a fictionalised execution for the the decadence and moral degeneracy observed in Victorian England. The beginning of the novel establishes the dual premises upon which Wells’ condemnation of humanity stands: the first, that of the irrationality of the human insistence on order and hierarchy; the second challenges the conceit of scientific progress in face of all that is unknown.
The opening scenes of ‘The War of the Worlds’ emphasise the precariousness of the human sense of order by a reversal of humanity’s hierarchical supremacy. In the narrative allusion to colonial genocide in the 18th century, Wells draws a critical parallel to the martian’s invasion of the Earth by contrasting humanity’s dominion over all other Earthly life with the scientific advancement of the martians prevailing so that man is ‘at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.’ With the assertion of the martian’s biological supremacy, Wells demonstrates a manifest sympathy for the colonised and in doing so, he estranges the contemporary understanding of colonialism by showing Britain in the unimaginable position of the colonial victim. The further ossification and fragility of our hierarchical structures are emphasised by the irony in the presumption prior to the invasion that it ‘seemed so safe and tranquil,’ as a picture of idyllic human life by way of the auditory background ‘shunting trains, ringing, and rumbling.’ This is parenthetically undermined with the scientific interruption that the ‘first missile could have scarcely been more than 10,000,000 miles away.’ The locality of the narrator’s provincial location, ‘serene in their assurance’ of normality inevitably succumb to the same fate given unto others elsewhere in the globe. However, through his reportage of the ‘infinite complacency of man,’ the narrator can tonally condemn the hubristic pursuits of man, whilst disassociating himself from England’s colonial history and affiliating himself in direct injunction to the reader by rhetorically asking, ‘are we such apostles of mercy in the Martians warred in the same spirit?’ assuring himself in in the inherent goodness assumed of himself and the reader. Chapter four, however, undercuts the hypocrisy of such logic; the narrator too is subsumed by the totality of the martian dominance. The newfound victimhood of society gives way to mass terror in the plosive expressions of as ‘tentacles were now, projecting, and began pushing my way back from the pit.’ Our narrator is not excluded from public hysteria of this inconceivable threat, bu equally driven to his individual survival as his latent natural instincts take control (demonstrable in the physicality of the dynamic verbs in ‘running madly, ‘ ‘stumbling’ and ‘ran slantingly’). Thus, we witness the ease with which civilisation can turn to barbarism and savagery and in this anarchic conception, even the most moral of men, give was to the natural instincts at heart of our own biology.
In ‘The War of the Worlds,’ H.G.Wells demonstrates that scientific study is essentially a myopic practice, evading the unknown of our immediate reality. It is this purposes that encapsulates Ogilvy’s narrative function. in chapter one, whilst he takes pride in ‘scrutiny of the red planet.’ The realisation of the potentially destructive implications of his topic of study (suggested by the common association of red colouring to danger, yet forgotten in the relentless momentum of scientific progress) ultimately fall secondary to the mere identification of this phenomenon. Perhaps, Wells is commenting upon the superficiality of scientific knowledge, failing to realise the ‘immensity of vacancy’ remaining between such fragmentary discoveries. Despite his commitment to knowledge as a a man of science, Ogilvy can only provide a vague title of the ‘Thing’ that only demonstrates his inability to comprehend or contextualise the otherworldly object, consequently he trivialises it by reducing it to an indistinct ambiguity with only the capitalisation to suggest its potential significance. The observation nature of science at its core leaves it helpless to the immediate needs required of it. Whilst Ogilvy’s behaviour ‘at the thought of a confined creature; would appear to show a genuine sympathy for the suffering of another, he remains the stereotype fo the Victorian gentleman of propriety within his inaction. The nature of science to observe, but never intervene might be viewed as the root of humanity’s downfall. However, for the reader to concede to the plausibility of the martian invasion, the fantastical element to which Ogilvy ‘scoffed’ at; wells renders his work convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside the extraordinary. As Woking is the site for the initial martian attack, the translation to suburban geographical detail thus intensifies our natural reactions of shock, fear, and perplexity by satirically hyperbolising the scientific rejection of uncertainty and unknowable truths.
To conclude, ‘The War of the Worlds’ draws a caustic correlation between human sin and the retributive justice at the hands of the martians. The hubristic rejection of both the unknowable and the insistence upon hierarchical structures form critical articles in humanity’s inevitable downfall.
— Tara Flynn
Hello,
Below is a short post regarding a potential interpretation of the War of the Worlds in relation to the invasion story and Victorian morality. Whilst not a full essay, the following might provide a few ideas for future essays.
War of the Worlds is distinctly an ‘invasion story.’ Invasion literature emerged between 1871 and 1914 that reflected increasing feelings of anxiety and insecurity as international tensions between European Imperial powers escalated towards the outbreak of the First World War.
One factor that has been mentioned in the influencing invasion literature is the collective fear that the English would lose their manliness and their ‘Englishness’ and will be punished for their decadent behaviour.
Another influence is the ambivalent attitude towards the ‘enemies’ found in many invasion stories. Again and again, it is hinted that the real ‘enemies’ are not the Germans (French, Russians, etc.) at all, but someone in England (the ‘lower orders’, socialists, decadents, etc.). Overall, vulnerability to invasion is linked to a weakening English moral fibre.
It is important to establish the simple fact that the story is set in England. another, he could have opted for a less obviously English setting. It is also significant that the action in The War of the Worlds gradually moves towards London. This has motif might be pertinent to the a (German) invasion story.
The attitude of an invasion story writer is often one of condemnation of the immoral behaviour and awareness of his own people that give him a sense of moral and intellectual superiority. The stance of such a prophet can be visibly seen in The War of the Worlds, for Wells provides an explicitly moral twist in ‘what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races’. We see that Wells is chiefly concerned with English Imperialism. He claims openly of his disdain for their hubris and deserving punishment for the ‘infinite complacency’ of men ‘serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.’
The fears that Well’s possessed for the world surface in his desire to frighten his reader. He had a very repressive upbringing, largely at his bigoted mother’s hand. The decision to write a tale about an attack by Martians may well have responded to the need to visualise and hence exorcise the punishment he himself feared, and to imagine it striking others. In his imagination, he thus ceased to be the victim of punishment, and became its dispenser. The Martian attack drives us to ask, ‘What sins have we done?’ to postulate a causal relationship between immorality and punishment, in which the Martian’s are ‘God’s ministers.’
The way in which the Martians are eventually defeated is interesting also; although they appear to be invulnerable, yet they suddenly begin to die due to their lack of natural immunity against bacteria that men live with. Perhaps, the bacteria are the symbol of a corruption and an evil with which, being corrupt, human beings, and in particular English people, can live, implying that they are impure and deserve punishment.
Hi all, this is my coursework plan. I have chosen to focus my coursework on the nature of belief systems and their influence within ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood and ‘The War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.
Title: “Excessive dedication to a belief system will blind people”
In light of this statement, explore the problematic nature of the authoritative exploitation of excessive dedication to belief systems in Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’, and compare the ways in which these texts have been read.
| Section 1 key argument | Content/ Quotations | Significant Contextual Factors | Critical Writing/ Views |
| Excessive dedication to belief systems. Marxism Liberation Theology True Believers – WOTW rebel groups are formed of multi-faith members, the curate – their belief systems give them hope – THT – The Christian faith is still observed in its true form – Offred still prays her version of the Lord’s prayer – Ustopia – Belief in God, and Christianity, is still prevalent despite the defamation of Christianity by the theocracy of Gilead | The curate, in WOTW, is A religious man who has spent his life working for the church. His conception of life is based on his faith, which fails to help him account for the arrival of such malicious creatures. The evacuation of London, arguably the seat of Western civilization at the time, is pure chaos. People are starving, dying of thirst, and acting no better than animals as they fight to survive. This decline is what the narrator identifies as the rout of civilization – “And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede… It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind” – “We can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space” THT – “May the Lord open” – the classic response to “blessed be the fruit.” It also suggests that they’re praying for God to bring fertility to the Handmaid – asking God to “open” the Handmaid’s womb to a new soul. | Marx’s class theory portrays capitalism as one step in the historical progression of economic systems that follow one another in a natural sequence. They are driven, he posited, by vast impersonal forces of history that play out through the behaviour and conflict among social classes. According to Marx, every society is divided into social classes, whose members have more in common with one another than with members of other social classes. Fundamentalism, northern Protestants who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries united in opposition to theological liberalism. It is a form of militant opposition to the modern world – the core concerns of the movement that emerged within American Protestantism, defending the authority of the Bible and both separating from and saving their sinful world. Ustopia – Belief in God, and Christianity, is still prevalent despite the defamation of Christianity by theocratic power. | Offred is “of Fred” or “belonging to Fred.” “Ofglen” means … Those words grant Offred the faith that her own narrative – David S. Hogsette Religion was not completely rotten, in Wells’ eyes, nut suspect as providing a self-centred escape from the facts of the human condition. In The Open Conspiracy (1928) he suggested it might be adequately providing an avenue “for service, for subordination, for permanent effect, for an escape of the distressful pettiness and mortality of the individual life”, but that it more surely led the majority to intolerance and ignorance. – ‘Flashes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the War of the Worlds’ |
| Section 2 key argument | Content/ Quotations | Significant Contextual Factors | Critical Writing/ Views |
| How belief systems are manipulated/ exploited. Societal conformityAbuse of power Superiority of authorityWOTW – Martians – relentlessness WOTW – Artillery Man – warped ideology of patriarchal society – women subservient to the women – The Handmaids “blessed are the meek”THT – Gilead as a theocracy – patriarchal society ensuring societal conformity under the guise of Christianity – indoctrination THT – Aunts – convinced they are doing good – only act in the name of power for the sake of personal salvation | According to the artilleryman, the Martians have destroyed London and set up a camp at the north end of the city. He claims it is “all over.” Humankind is simply “beat.” – “the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord…These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety.” “Blessed are the meek” shows the extent of the manipulations of the patriarchal theocracy of Gilead as the Handmaids are subjected to only approved and warped sections of the Bible in order to ensure submission and conformity – the continuation of the bible quote that the Handmaids are not subjected to is “for they shall inherit the earth” therefore depicting the revolution of the oppressed. Gilead believes the kind of freedom existed in past was some of the reasons that anarchy occurred – Aunt Lydia tells the handmaids – “There’s more than one kind of freedom, freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.” | Fundamentalist doctrine of “divine inspiration” was far more demanding than any previous form of traditional Protestant belief. Certainly, all Protestants believed the Bible was true. Since the 16th-century Reformation they had upheld it as a completely trustworthy guide in all matters of belief and practice, the unique and undisputed word of God. A theocracy is a system where the priests are the rulers of the people, often doing so in the name of gods or one true God – most theocracies are oligarchic by design, with only a few ruling the many. During the days of the Holy Roman Empire, it was the Pope who was placed in charge of the entire government, making decisions that ranged from war declarations to wedding certificates. Some of the rulers in a theocracy are often treated as being anointed under claims of divine commission, even if the primary structure is ecclesiastic. | In Foucault’s term, knowledge is power, and power has control over knowledge, therefore the Republic forces the transitional generation to gradually accept the ideal system of the Republic. The regime believes in future they will have ultimate control over the past generation’s thought and belief in order to disempower their attack against the official language. As a means to gain the power of language, the authority manipulates the language for their own purposes – Maryam Kouhestani Wells presents a drastic opposition to this reasonable protagonist when he introduces the curate. The curate’s life was dedicated to religion, and when the Martians destroyed the church at which he preached, as the narrator put it, “this tremendous tragedy had driven him to the very verge of his reason.” The narrator noticed immediately that the curate was not in a right state of mind. By adding this character as the narrator’s unwanted sidekick, Wells is implying that “religion collapses under calamity” and is therefore a weaker belief system than science and reason. – Alex C. Hawley |
| Section 3 key argument | Content/ Quotations | Significant Contextual Factors | Critical Writing Views |
| What hope do they offer as an antidote to the manipulation/ abuse of power? The influences of good/ change as a catalyst for the fragmentation of manipulation – the breakdown of the systematic abusive of power present in both texts Liberation of the masses – liberation theologyFreedom of choice – WOTW – humanity is seen in two aspects; those who submit to authority for the sake of harmony, and those who resist to the power of the authority for the sake of what “is right”The resistance – THT Hope is a fundamental catalyst for the opportunity to break away from a corrupt and abusive authority | In response to Aunt Lydia, “blessed are the meek”, Offred retorts, “And blessed are those who suffer for the cause of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven” – June is acknowledging that the quote in its entirety speaks to the ultimate uprising of the ‘meek’. “No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle – how much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were organized, disciplined, working together?” – recognition of those who were in opposition of the suppressive authority and power of the Martians. “We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance. Quince. Zygote. I hold 7 the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it” – Offred uses the word freedom, as if to say that for an instance she is uncontrolled. In other words, for the moment, she controls language, language does not control her. | Liberation theology, religious movement arising in late 20th-century Roman Catholicism and centred in Latin America. It sought to apply religious faith by aiding the poor and oppressed through involvement in political and civic affairs. It stressed both heightened awareness of the “sinful” socioeconomic structures that caused social inequities and active participation in changing those structures – liberation theologians believed that God speaks particularly through the poor and that the Bible can be understood only when seen from the perspective of the poor. They perceived that the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America was fundamentally different from the church in Europe—i.e., that the church in Latin America should be actively engaged in improving the lives of the poor. | The Handmaids’ Tale beautifully shows different ways in which language can manipulate humans’ minds and make them behave obediently… Sometimes, the power that is everywhere needs to penetrate any aspect of individual life secretly and in a hidden way. One of these hidden ways is through language. By showing the power of language, Margaret Atwood becomes a strict critique of societies in which individuality is undermined. – Mahshid Namjoo He (the Artillery Man) sounds very much like a man who refuses to become the slave of any colonizing power with overwhelming firepower. His resistance has a brutish appeal to those who can assure themselves that his blunt eugenics will be kind to them. – ‘Flashes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the War of the Worlds’ |
A selection of practice questions for you and a couple of model essays:
Read More »I must confess my notes on ‘The War of the Worlds’ are slightly limited. We’ll start with the context and wider reading:
Martians and Marxism: a detailed history on the time in which Wells was writing. Very useful. You can use this to make a comparison between the contextual influences of your two chosen texts: there are bound to be some similarities. Please read the article before the notes. http://geekchocolate.co.uk/martians-and-marxism-a-socialist-critique-of-h-g-wellss-the-war-of-the-worlds/
The following are articles focused on 3 different aspects of the novel and its contextual influences – the symbolism of spiders, the journalism industry (explains many of the literary techniques in the novel) and the origin of the form of the invasion story:
These notes are a collation of research about Surrey, the setting of the novel, in the late 19th – early 20th century. Try to relate the impact of the events (such as industrial expansion and multiculturalism) to events in the book – e.g. industrial expansion, which Wells was against, influenced the technologically superior martians and their easy destruction of humanity (a metaphor for wells’ prediction of the impact of industry).
These are my notes on War of the Worlds (most of which came from Mrs R) – most of the techniques in the novel are used in the first 11 or so chapters of the novel and hence repeated after that. I hope they are still helpful.
WymCol English Blog 