The Beast Re-Asserts Itself - Vitalism in the Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (original) (raw)

Expressions of vitalism run throughout the fiction of H. G. Wells, although the writer himself did not acknowledge the concept as central to his thinking. Instead vitalism emerges, in the voices of various characters, as a tentative thesis to explain life, or an expression of culminating purpose that Wells considered poetic mysticism rather than scientific truth. In this article I examine several instances of vitalist thought in Wells’s work, and attempt to decipher from the critical reception of those works why these ideas remain largely undetected. Specifically, I contend that readers confined within the discourse of Man versus Animal have difficulty apprehending statements about Life itself, and that Wells cleverly satirizes the “othering” of animal or potential superhuman, to demonstrate the common man’s inability to understand Life within a larger framework. I use four texts — The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Food of the Gods (1904), Things to Come (1935) and Star-Begotten (1937) — to demonstrate a vitalist undercurrent in the writings of this most scientific of all fiction writers.