Science and Fiction: Racial Science
Session Coordinator: David Shih
Dept. of English, Univ. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
415 Hibbard Hall, Eau Claire, WI 54702
shihd@uwec.edu

"No good for man-making”: Biological Race and Evolution in The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) is one of H.G. Wells’ early scientific romances, and, like many of his works, it deals with humanity’s engagement with and abuses of scientific discovery. Interested in the possibilities of human evolution, Dr. Moreau works toward manufacturing a perfect human-like being—from the vivisected parts of wild animals. Like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which it preceded by three years, The Island of Dr. Moreau ostensibly implies that culture, over biology, matters more in the ultimate determination of human subjectivity. However, in its descriptions of the three main characters (Prendick, Moreau, and Montgomery), the South Sea natives, and Moreau’s “Beast Folk,” the narrative suggests the relevance of the idea of biological race to evolutionary study—in the experiments of both Moreau and Wells.

David Shih
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
shihd@uwec.edu

Race-ing Irish-American Reality: James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan and Scientific Racism

With its startling portrayal of Chicago’s Irish community, the publication of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy launched the author’s career as a popular novelist. Farrell continues to be read because he is seen as an important voice in Irish-American literature. Furthermore, the author’s leftist commitments and treatment of the working class in the trilogy place Farrell among the canon of ‘30’s proletarian writers. But the trilogy’s initial popularity cannot be explained by audience interest in Irish or working-class themes. Instead, the trilogy succeeded because of a widespread perception of realism. But popular notions of the “real” Irish experience were shaped by a popular-scientific discourse that labeled the Irish as a race intrinsically inferior to the putative American Anglo-Saxon norm. With the Irish seen as the offscourings of Europe, we need to ask what raced assumptions about the Irish inform the appeal of Farrell’s realism. Comparing Young Lonigan, the first, and least overtly political, installment of Farrell’s trilogy, with works like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race this paper will delineate the similarities between Farrell’s portrayal of dissolute, tough-talking Studs and the Irish menace of scientific racism.

Mark Decker
University of Wisconsin-Stout
DeckerM@uwstout.edu

A Dangerous Experiment: R. L. Stevenson's Other and his Threat to the Established Authority

This presentation will examine how Stevenson's Hyde uses his Otherness to threaten the rigid order of the established and privileged class of the gentleman or ruling class.

Blake Westerlund
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
westerbr@uwec.edu

Black Magic at Blackwater Park: Miscreants and Medicine in The Woman in White

In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, the Great Exhibition of 1851 serves as a nexus through which seemingly diverse issues--such as xenophobia, property, and medicine--converge. When Count Fosco, a cosmopolitan European, and his foreign friends plot to steal the fortune of the propertied English lady, Laura Glyde, their scheme evolves through the posturing by Fosco and his accomplice, Mrs. Rubelle, as medical experts. Their ability to pose as doctor and nurse allows for their infiltration and penetration of the symbolic heart of England, the country estate, and London. These events, which occur at the mid-century, reflect the xenophobia that was gripping England during the time of the Great Exhibition due to the great influx of foreigners coming to attend this affair. Through his depiction of Fosco and his co-conspirators, Collins gives shape to the fears of Britons that the Great Exhibition would enable a foreign manipulation of their homeland’s most English symbols. Such a depiction captures the mid-Victorians’ obsessive xenophobia and their corresponding desire to classify and dissect the issues of nation and race.

Julie Hipp
Aurora University
juliehipp@sbcglobal.net