TY - JOUR
AU - Valentine,, Colton
AB - Abstract Beginning with a little-studied scene linking H. G. Wells’s ‘A Misunderstood Artist’ to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours, this essay argues that a shared gustatory paradox runs from Huysmanian decadence, through the theories of Edwin Lankester and Max Nordau and into Wells’s writings. In each case, both a pragmatic and an aesthetic relationship to food can signify degeneration. The argument has three major stakes. The first is to reconstruct a robust intertextual relation between the oeuvres of Huysmans and Wells. The second is to complicate readings that cast two of Wells’s scientific romances, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, as mouthpieces for imperialist or (pseudo)scientific discourses (Anger, Brantlinger, Budd, Gailor, Gregory, Hendershot, Pick). The third is to build on recent studies of food representation in nineteenth-century literature and propose a novel interpretive method (Cozzi, Gyman, Lee). Taking up William Greenslade’s proposal that fictions construct a ‘network of resistances’ to discursive myths, I argue that gustatory scenes show Wells’s ‘network’ operating in a curious way. They neither kowtow to degeneration nor assume Greenslade’s active role of a ‘critical, combative humanist’. Instead, they give contradictory depictions of moralized eating that play out the myth’s structural paradox. ‘Then I produced some Nocturnes in imitation of Mr Whistler’, recounts a culinary aesthete in H. G. Wells’s short story ‘A Misunderstood Artist’, ‘with mushrooms, truffles, grilled meat, pickled walnuts, black pudding, French plums, porter—a dinner in soft velvety black, eaten in a starlight of small scattered candles. That, too, led to a resignation: Art will ever demand its martyrs.’1 1 H. G. Wells, ‘A Misunderstood Artist’, in Select Conversations with an Uncle (London, 1895), 100–8, 106. Further references to this edition appear in the text. Though the passage cites James Whistler, the image harkens back to his even more decadent predecessor: Joris-Karl Huysmans. In Huysmans’s 1884 novel À Rebours, the misanthropic Des Esseintes absconds from bourgeois Paris to his aristocratic abode in Fontenay. Before entering complete sequestration, he throws a funerary feast to his own virility. Serenaded by death marches, his guests enter on charcoal-sprinkled pathways, seat themselves at black-clothed tables, and feast on colour-coordinated dishes. As in Wells’s story, truffles, black pudding, plums, and porter make an appearance—alongside rye bread, caviar, walnut cordial, and half a dozen wine varietals. In retrospect, Des Esseintes becomes disgusted by the performance, rejecting gustatory art to adopt a life-threateningly ascetic diet. Wells’s chef, however, remains committed to the martyrdom of excess. As such, the scene’s tone is difficult to parse. Is Wells parodying or preaching culinary decadence?2 2 Decadence is broadly defined as a late-nineteenth-century movement exploring artistic artificiality and excess. Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857) is often take as decadent literature’s inaugural moment, Huysmans’s À Rebours as its incarnation. Paul Bourget famously theorized decadence in Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883) as the book’s unity decomposing for the independence of the page, then the phrase, then the word. See Dennis Denisoff, ‘Decadence and Aestheticism’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, 2007), 31–52. By ‘culinary decadence’, I refer to cases in which decadent aesthetics are applied to food preparation and service, both within and beyond literary texts. Critical writing on this passage is scant but tellingly divisive. In his 1961 study on the early Wells, Bernard Bergonzi classified it as a ‘presumably inadvertent echo’ of Huysmans and ultimately a pastiche, a position that remains dominant half a century later.3 3 Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Toronto, 1961), 2. Justin Busch, Robert Slifkin, and Nils Clausson all cite the chef to evidence their discussions of Wells’s anti-aestheticism.4 4 Justin E. A. Busch, The Utopian Vision of H. G. Wells (Jefferson, NC, 2009), 49; Robert Slifkin, ‘James Whistler as the Invisible Man: Anti-Aestheticism and Artistic Vision’, Oxford Art Journal, 29 (2006), 55–75, 63; Nils Clausson, ‘H. G. Wells’s Critique of Aestheticism’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 49 (2006), 371–87, 382. At the other end of the spectrum, Peter Kemp slots the edible Nocturnes into his encyclopaedic account of several-hundred gustatory passages in Wells’s oeuvre. According to Kemp, ‘food-aestheticism’ is an integral part of Wells’s ‘obsession’ with all things edible.5 5 Peter Kemp, H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape: Biological Imperatives and Imaginative Obsessions (Basingstoke, 1996), 65. Taking these conflicting interpretations as its point of departure, this essay will argue that Wells’s writings evince a gustatory paradox shared by both Huysmanian decadence and its subsequent critics: both a pragmatic and an aesthetic relationship to food can signify degeneration. As attested by Kemp’s survey, much of Wells’s oeuvre could serve as source material for this study. But I focus on two scientific romances, The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898), arguing that each presents and then deconstructs a moralized hierarchy between pragmatic and aesthetic eating. I then return to ‘A Misunderstood Artist’, spelling out my case for its deep engagement with À Rebours to show how these same contradictions undergird the decadent relationship to food. The analysis builds on several recent studies of food representation in nineteenth-century literature. Gwen Gyman has read dining scenes as loci for the fraught construction of masculinity, Annette Cozzi as sites where national identity confronts the threat of a foreign other.6 6 Gwen Gyman, Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Athens, GA, 2009); Annette Cozzi, Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York, NY, 2010). Most recently, Michael Parrish Lee has given a narratological take, asserting that a ‘food plot’ intertwines with and destabilizes the traditional marriage plot.7 7 Michael Parrish Lee, The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (London, 2016). Their tension, he argues, is an outgrowth of Malthusian population theory, which made today’s sexual appetite the harbinger of mankind’s future insatiable appetite for food. Yet if this essay shares an object of inquiry with these studies, its method differs. For it eschews reading the literary text as a site of representation for a discourse like imperialism or Malthusianism. Wells’s open engagement with contemporary science, his courses with evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, and his late-career interest in eugenics have made him a frequent object for that type of analysis. Michael Budd, for instance, reads Wells’s fictions as responses to his own physical frailty that represented ‘the prevailing “biologisms” of his time’.8 8 Michael Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (London, 1997), 52. Suzy Anger, meanwhile, swaps Gillian Beer’s model of bi-directional exchange between science and culture for a uni-directional reading, by which The Time Machine’s dying sun is ‘perhaps the most compelling literary representation’ of this new hypothesis in thermodynamics.9 9 Suzy Anger, ‘Evolution and Entropy: Scientific Contexts in the Nineteenth Century’, in Robert DeMaria, Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher (eds), A Companion to British Literature, vol. 4 (Chichester, 2014), 52–67, 62. To reintroduce the distinctive literariness of Wells’s writings, I take an approach closer to William Greenslade’s in Degeneration, Culture and the Novel. Building on Frank Kermode’s binary of myth versus fiction, Greenslade reads fictions as distinct forms that both collude with and pierce through myths like degeneration. They do so, he contends, by constructing a ‘network of resistances’, a term borrowed from intellectual historian Dominic LeCapra.10 10 William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1994), 4. When Greenslade turns to the ‘network’ in Wells’s writings, he observes two functions: an embrace of degeneration myth to curry reader favour and a re-appropriation of the myth as cannon-fodder against Victorian complacency.11 11 Greenslade, Degeneration, 7. Wells’s representations of food, I argue, show his ‘network’ operating in a third, more peculiar way. They neither kowtow to degeneration nor assume the active role of a ‘critical, combative humanist’.12 12 Greenslade, Degeneration, 10. Instead, they give contradictory depictions of moralized eating that play out the myth’s structural paradox. I. DEGENERATIVE DIETS AND THE MORAL POLITICS OF GASTRONOMY Before beginning the analysis of Wells’s ‘network of resistances’, I will first sketch the form this gustatory paradox takes in fin-de-siècle degeneration discourse. By applying the same moral politics to digestive complexity and to environmental adaptability, I argue, these theorists present both simplified-pragmatic and refined-aesthetic diets as signifiers of decline. Daniel Pick defines degeneration as the medico-psychiatric and natural-scientific language that arose when urbanization trends collided with discoveries in evolutionary biology and criminal anthropology.13 13 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge, 1999). Degeneration theorists like Cesare Lombroso and Edwin Ray Lankester challenged the positivist vision of Europe, proposing that their era might, like that of the late Roman Empire studied in Edward Gibbon’s six-volume history, have passed its apex and require (eugenic) intervention to forestall further decline. Max Nordau applied that theory to the cultural realm, arguing that fin-de-siècle writers like Oscar Wilde and Huysmans not only embodied, but, like plagued priests, also spread a cult of degeneration.14 14 Though Nordau focuses on the character Des Esseintes, he also holds Huysmans himself culpable, as ‘the classical type of the hysterical mind without originality, who is the predestined victim of every suggestion, began his literary career as a fanatical imitator of Zola, and produced, in this first period of his development, romances, and novels in which (as in Marthe) he greatly surpassed his models in obscenity’. Max Nordau, Degeneration, tr. Anon. from the second German edition (London, 1898), 302. Diet plays a pivotal but peculiar role in degeneration theory. In Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism, Lankester worries that easy access to resources might cause retrogressive metamorphosis: when ‘the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life’.15 15 Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism (London, 1880), 32. To support the position, he cites a study on the vegetative nutrition of Convoluta flat worms. Since they can nourish themselves on the surrounding carbonic acid, ‘their stomachs and intestines as well as their locomotive organs become simplified, since they are but little wanted’.16 16 Lankester, Degeneration, 51. Lankester’s arguments build on the neo-Lamarckism theory of ‘use’ and ‘disuse’, in which repeatedly employing an organ—the canonical example being the giraffe stretching its neck—develops that organ for current and subsequent generations. Not exercising an organ, by contrast, invites its decay. More notably, Lankester posits a hierarchy between higher and lower organismal complexity, discrediting cases in which simplified organs result from improved adaptability. He thus invokes the more controversial neo-Lamarckian concept of ‘orthogenesis’, which deviates from Darwin’s model by placing increased moral weight on the teleological drive toward complexity.17 17 See Peter Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore, MD, 1992); Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, 2002). Francis Galton proposes his own moral politics of diet in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. He first contends that ‘more wholesome and abundant food’ improves athletic prowess, then adds his neo-Lamarckian slant, proposing that this ‘energy’ is preserved not just for current but also for subsequent generations.18 18 Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London, 1883), 23, 25–7. Nordau gives a similar account in the ‘Etiology’ section of Degeneration, which lists several factors for the ‘wearing of the tissue’, then presents modern food as a bulwark: ‘Europeans now eat a little more and little better than they did fifty years ago, but by no means in proportion to the increase of effort which to-day is required of them […] Our stomach cannot keep pace with the brain and nervous system’.19 19 Nordau, Degeneration, 39. Like Lankester, Galton and Nordau are concerned with appropriate resource management and the resultant ‘use’ of the digestive system. They also connect ‘use’ to improvements in human cooking: a biological spin on what Norbert Elias would later describe in The Civilizing Process.20 20 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, 2000). Cuisine furthers orthogenesis, by this account, because it promotes the digestive complexity being mapped onto higher evolution. The contradictions in these moral politics emerge when we situate an orthogenetic theory of cuisine with respect to the nineteenth-century advent of modern gastronomy. For at this crucial moment, food increasingly transcended the status of pragmatic nourishment to become the very thing condemned by degeneration theorists: an aesthetic object. Stephen Mennell dates this turn to the French revolution, when expanding bourgeois dining publics on both sides of the Channel were greeted by the rise of the celebrity restaurateur and gastronome.21 21 Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages (Urbana, IL, 1996). Its patron saint was Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin, whose Physiologie du Goût (1825) gave us the aphorism: ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.’22 22 ‘IV. Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.’ Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Goût (Paris, 1839), 11. All translations are my own. His less-cited maxim—‘The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they nourish themselves’—linked individual diet to national fitness.23 23 ‘III. La destinée des nations dépend de la manière dont elles se nourrissent.’ Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Goût, 11. Yet the Physiologie gives a contradictory picture of optimal national nourishment. At one moment, Brillat-Savarin imperialistically considers Indian rice intake responsible for their subordination to Europeans. In another, he waxes on the dangers of overly refined European starches.24 24 Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Goût, 82–3, 251–2. For more on nineteenth-century digestive anxieties see Ian Miller, A Modern History of the Stomach: Gastric Illness, Medicine and British Society, 1800–1950 (London, 2011); Manon Mathias and Alison Moore (eds), Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History, and Culture (London, 2018). Even more perplexing is the way dietary pragmatism coexists with gustatory aestheticism. There are passages on obesity recommending abstinence from all desserts save fruits and jams but also the epigram: ‘A dessert without cheese is like a woman who lacks an eye.’25 25 ‘Un dessert sans fromage est une belle à qui il manque un œil.’; ‘Il vous reste des fruits de toute espèce, des confitures, et bien des choses que vous saurez choisir si vous adoptez mes principes.’ Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Goût, 13, 263. Elegies to past feast and vast ingredient lists augur the enumerations of Huysmans’s À Rebours—hardly a coincidence, for Brillat-Savarin helped establish a theory of food-as-art perfectly suited to decadence. These tensions between culinary pragmatism and aestheticism point us to the gustatory paradox in degeneration theory. Nordau condemns over-refinement when discussing the Parisian taste for modern art, but he implies the civilizing of cuisine is underdeveloped, faulting Des Esseintes for both his excess and his anaemia.26 26 Nordau, Degeneration, 303. Lankester, meanwhile, attributes degeneration to an apathetic man ‘possessed of a fortune’ and to the ascidian’s lower state of digestive organismal complexity. What then to make of the affluent gourmand who spends lavishly on rare and stimulating foods? This gastronome’s versatile stomach can be read as both the apex of the civilizing process and a sign of his decadent decline. In what follows, I argue that Wells’s fictions play out this exact paradox. Their narratives establish a ‘network of resistances’ by first positing, then deconstructing, a hierarchical binary between pragmatic and aesthetic diets. II. THE TIME MACHINE: MEAT VERSUS FRUIT I turn first to the binary of pragmatic-meat versus aesthetic-fruit put forth in The Time Machine. In this scientific romance, the unnamed Time Traveller recounts to his Victorian comrades a journey to ad 802,701. Humanity has, by this time, subdivided into two species: the upper classes becoming the fragile, surface-dwelling Eloi, the lower classes turning into the virile, subterranean Morlocks. Early in the encounter, the Traveller links frailty to the Eloi’s aesthetic, vegetarian diet. Served in a neo-classical hall lit by half-glazed glass, their exotic produce initially strikes his fancy. Yet that admiration lessens as the Traveller observes the subtle dilapidation of his environs, and more notably as he attempts a post-prandial task: learning the Eloi’s language. Conversation, he finds, will only take place in spurts: ‘And very little doses I found they were before long, for I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued.’27 27 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford, 2017), 29. Further references to this edition appear in the text. The implied link between diet and constitution becomes explicit once the Traveller presents the contrasting case of the Morlocks, underscoring their vitality and carnivorous fare. ‘The too-perfect security of the Overworlders’, he concludes of the Eloi, ‘had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence’ (48). Critics typically cite these passages as cases-in-point of degeneration theory, often linking decline to diet. Pick calls it ‘an exemplary “blue-print” of degenerationist concerns’, while Anger writes: ‘Such a picture of degeneration is forcefully represented in H. G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895) in the future species of the Eloi.’28 28 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 157; Anger, ‘Evolution and Entropy’, 59. Greenslade reads the Morlocks as an example of ‘degraded fitness’ but spies little resistance here to myth, noting: ‘An organism which fails to take up the challenge of the struggle for existence (as the Eloi failed in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895)), will decline into simplicity, parasitism, immobility, reduction in size and the capacity only to consume vegetable matter (the Eloi are indeed vegetarians).’29 29 Greenslade, Degeneration, 39, 32. Perhaps most revealing is James Gregory’s survey of Victorian representations of vegetarianism, for though he identifies cases where the diet signifies improvement as well as decline, he reads Wells’s fictions as advancing only the second position.30 30 James Gregory, ‘Vegetable Fictions in the Kingdom of Roast Beef’, in Tamara S. Wagner and Narin Hassan (eds), Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption, 1700–1900 (Plymouth, 2007), 17–34, 24. Together, these readings posit a strict theoretical scaffold for the text: vegetarianism leads to aesthetic ‘disuse’ of the stomach for the Eloi, while carnivorous fare is a form of ‘use’ for the Morlocks’ organs. The binary fits neatly into the Victorian discourse tying meat consumption to flesh-powered industrial labour and imperial conquest.31 31 See Ron Broglio, ‘“The Best Machine for Converting Herbage into Money”: Romantic Cattle Culture’, in Wagner and Hassan (eds) Consuming Culture, 35–48; Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (Ithaca, NY, 2011), esp. 136–57, where Brantlinger compares representations of feeble Irish potatoes with those of hearty English meats. Yet The Time Machine’s unfolding narrative resists such clear-cut readings by repeatedly linking carnivorous eating to cannibalism. An initial glance at a flesh-clad bone leads the Traveller to realize the Morlocks derive their strength from eating Eloi. Instead of eliciting a disgust reflex, the epiphany invites an odd spout of moral relativism. He notes sardonically that modern man’s tastes are hardly more discriminating, that ‘His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct’ (59). The phrasing anticipates that of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when Marlow observes that cannibals are ‘fine fellows’ and that ‘disgust simply does not exist where hunger is’, as well as the claims of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘We Are All Cannibals’.32 32 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Stanley Appelbaum (New York, NY, 1990), 31, 37; Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘We Are All Cannibals’, in Jane Marie Todd (tr. and ed.), We Are All Cannibals: And Other Essays, tr. and ed. Jane Marie Todd (New York, NY, 2013), 83–9. In these cases, cannibalism, be it Congolese, Melanesian, or Morlockian, holds up a dark mirror to the observer’s own practices, placing on trial the myth of European civilization. The Time Machine stages that trial not only in the Traveller’s open pronouncements but also in the subtler structure of his sentences. Statements describing a longing gaze at the Eloi are repeatedly followed by statements on cannibalism. Three such pairs take place in quick succession. First, the Traveller’s epiphany on ‘clear knowledge’ cedes to a glance at a sleeping Weena; second, he ponders the Eloi dancing before saying, ‘And then I thought once more of the meat that I had seen’; third, and most suspect, he reflects: ‘These Eloi were mere fattened cattle […] And there was Weena dancing at my side!’ (59). By employing the metaphor of Eloi as ‘fattened cattle’, the Traveller adopts the Morlocks’ own perspective, slipping from the erotic gaze to the consumptive one. Lee sees this conflation as ingrained in the anthropological impulse to know and devour the alien other, a spectre of cannibalism that, for him, allies Wells with vegetarian advocates like Howard Williams.33 33 Lee, The Food Plot, 215. Though the argument provocatively inverts prior readings, it involves a peculiar slippage in terms. When citing the link Williams makes between ‘widespread Degeneration’ and ‘wholesale butchery’ in his 1896 revision of The Ethics of Diet, Lee conveniently swaps in the very term ‘Degeneration’.34 34 Lee, The Food Plot, 173. The original text reads: ‘widespread Degradation and Demoralization which are the direct consequence of wholesale butchery’.35 35 Howard Williams, The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating, ed. Howard Williams and Carol J. Adams (Urbana, IL, 2003), 337. Rather than take The Time Machine as either propaganda for or protest against meat-eating, I propose we read its contradictions as symptomatic of degeneration anxiety. The text presents a character playing out the logical conclusion from Nordau and Galton’s diet recommendations: if ‘use’ of the stomach is required to escape vegetarian-decline, the Traveller must take on the practices of a Morlock. Its frame narrative confirms that predicament by presenting the Traveller’s own carnivorous diet as both grotesque and utilitarian. In the two pages before the analepsis begins, there are a half-dozen references to meat: ‘Save me some of that mutton. I’m starving for a bit of meat […] Where’s my mutton? […] What a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again! […] I won’t say a word until I get some peptone in my arteries. Thanks. And the salt’ (18–19). Lest the opening be forgotten by the narrative’s end, the nested story concludes with the very same image: ‘Then I sniffed good wholesome meat, and opened the door on you’ (82). The grotesquery is evident, for in story time, the Traveller has just escaped being devoured by Morlocks and now gladly devours mutton. His rhetorically deceptive terms drive home the irony. ‘Peptone’ lifts a chemical synecdoche from contemporary nutritional discourse to dissociate the victual from its fleshy origin.36 36 See ‘Kemmerich’s Peptone of Beef’, The Lancet General Advertiser, The Lancet, 1 (1885), 21; ‘Peptone of Beef’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1895), 979. ‘Good wholesome meat’ protests too much, with its redundant adjectives, that the product is morally kosher. The utilitarian dimension is subtler, evinced in the parallel between this frame narrative meal and the one shared with the Eloi. In both cases, a crowd communicates with the Traveller in the wake of dining, a connection that Lee again interprets as interlinking the appetites for flesh and knowledge.37 37 Lee, The Food Plot, 177–8. Yet there is a crucial difference in the scenes. In the frame narrative, meat propels the Traveller through 60-odd pages of reportage, whereas fruit barely moves the Eloi to utter a few definitional words. Mutton thus both civilizes the Traveller by granting him human speech and de-civilizes by making him a pseudo-cannibal. It ‘uses’ the stomach, but in forestalling one type of degeneration begets another; the ‘disuse’ of fruit comes to signify humanity’s enduring refinement in ad 802,701 as well as its decline. III. THE WAR OF THE WORLDS: OPTIMIZATION VERSUS CEREMONY In The War of the Worlds, cannibalism will once again deconstruct the moral politics of a pragmatic-aesthetic dietary binary, but its poles are somewhat different. Instead of energized carnivores and fatigued vegetarians, the text juxtaposes Martians consuming for pure efficiency with humans dining for ceremonial and socio-emotional purposes. The contrast appears in the novel’s opening scene, as the anonymous narrator from Woking, Surrey recounts the crowds gathering around the first Martian of the coming invasion. ‘An enterprising sweetstuff dealer in the Chobham Road’, he says, ‘had sent up his son with a barrow-load of green apples and ginger-beer’: two foods chosen for purposes of entertainment not nourishment. Their aesthetic dimensions are underscored by the words’ poetic alliteration and their referents’ colour concordance.38 38 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, ed. Darryl Jones (Oxford, 2017), 19. Further references to this edition appear in the text. When that vendor becomes the text’s very first victim, his wares remain a tombstone-testament to human folly: ‘The barrow of ginger-beer stood, a queer derelict, black against the burning sky, and in the sand-pits was a row of deserted vehicles with their horses feeding out of nose-bags or pawing the ground’ (23). That ginger-beer barrow sets off a pattern of scenes in which the narrator disparagingly links food to hedonism and thoughtless ceremony. A dinner with his wife invites retrospective self-reproach for treating the Martians with such nonchalance: ‘With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my life, I grew, by insensible degrees, courageous and secure’ (32). Later, he becomes embroiled with a curate whose sin of gluttony—‘He ate and drank impulsively in heavy meals at long intervals’—risks disclosing their hiding spot to the Martians (117). Decadence reaches an apex when he banters with an artilleryman over whether to drink champagne or ‘Thames-side burgundy’—while the rest of humanity starves (143). Aesthetic eating, in each of these scenes, becomes a signifier of humanity’s decline. On the other end of the spectrum, the text presents the Martians who have optimized their diet for absolute efficiency. Like the Morlocks, they derive their strength from humanoid flesh, or rather human blood injected directly into their veins, a pseudo-cannibalism given the narrator’s remark that they are ‘descended from beings not unlike ourselves’ (113). As in The Time Machine, that diet elicits an unexpected comment on moral relativism: ‘The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit’ (112). The passage then veers towards praise and even envy: The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process. Our bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning heterogeneous food into blood. The digestive processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our strength, colour our minds. Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted above all these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion. (112) Having shown the undesirable nature of the ‘tremendous waste of human time and energy’ from the ginger-beer vendor to the gluttonous curate, the text now explicitly theorizes the Martians’ higher evolution with the terms ‘advantages’ and ‘lifted above’. But in correlating them with simplification, with the avoidance of ‘waste’ of both ‘time’ and ‘mood and emotions’, it proposes an explicitly non-orthogenetic model.39 39 Digestive simplification is, however, only a successful form of adaptation for the Martians because it is paired with the technological complexity of their inventions. In his 1904 novel The Food of the Gods, Wells would localize that scientific-biological tension within the very object of food. The titular victual is an engineered substance that makes children grow into adult giants, granting them superhuman strength but an ostracized, subhuman position in society. These ‘Gods’ thus issue a further challenge to orthogenetic hierarchy. The War of the Worlds, then, sets up a different type of dietary hierarchy. Here, an aesthetic diet is not linked to ‘disuse’ of the stomach but instead to too much ‘use’; digestive complexity becomes a liability not an asset. Its starkness again neatly coheres with a body of scholarship reading the text as a mouthpiece for discourse: the Martian invasion representing the imperialist anxiety of a weakening Britain.40 40 See Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals; Cynthia Hendershot, Paranoia, the Bomb, and 1950s Science Fiction Films (Bowling Green, OH, 1999); Denis Gailor, ‘“Wells’s War of the Worlds”, the “Invasion story” and Victorian moralism’, Critical Survey, 8 (1996), 270–6. If we let the binary stand, ‘heterogeneous food’ and its related ceremony would belong in Nordau’s etiology as a factor that that ‘sap[s] our strength’, or wears out the tissue. Cuisine would no longer further what Norbert Elias calls the civilizing process but instead contribute to civilization’s degeneration, exposing it to invasion.41 41 As Kemp points out, optimized diets are a common motif for Wells: The Sleeper Awakes juxtaposes the riotous and stormy Victorian meal with the sanitized decorum of the future; Anticipations imagines a world in which kitchen appliances are replaced with hyper-productive models; ‘The Man of the Year Million’ achieves the acme of digestive efficiency: humans feeding via immersion in nutritive fluid (H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape, 58–9). Once again, it is the work’s literariness that introduces resistance to the myth: a plot in which the narrator degenerates by aping the higher-order beings. He does so first by eliding all ceremony to turn food into pure fuel. Taking charge of the curate’s gluttony, he decides ‘to begin a discipline’, then pursues ever more ascetic patterns, ‘not daring even to crawl out for the drink for which I craved’ (122, 125). After abandoning the artilleryman’s den of gourmandise, he says, ‘I got food—sour, hard, and mouldy, but quite eatable—in a bakers shop here’, conveying moral relish in having swapped epicurean wines for mere mouldy calories (145). Seen in the Martians, such behaviours denote an evolution away from ‘organic fluctuations of mood and emotion’, but when located in the narrator, they manifest as a de-civilizing process. Evolution and degeneration collide, once more, in the act of cannibalism. There is no explicit reference that the narrator’s dietary mimicry includes blood sucking, but several grotesque intimations are made. When raising his hand against the curate, the narrator uses a ‘meat-chopper’ (123). While hallucinating, he dreams of ‘sumptuous dinners’, then compares the red light around him to ‘the colour of blood’ (126). In a passage describing his scavenging, a vague pronoun reference leaves open a reading that he has masticated on human bones: ‘Near Roehampton I had seen two human skeletons—not bodies, but skeletons, picked clean—and in the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones of several cats and rabbits, and the skull of a sheep. But though I gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from them’ (131). Relocated in the narrator, the evolved eating habits of the Martians become signifiers of degeneration: the loss of not only complexity but also humanity. As in The Time Machine, this paradox manifests on the level of parallel sentence construction, through juxtaposed descriptions of human and animal eating. Recall how in the first scene, the derelict ginger-beer barrow is followed by an image of horses munching by the deserted vehicles. Animal consumption, here, figures as a superior survival mechanism to human decadence. On the other hand, when the narrator proposes that the perception of human diet by an ‘intelligent rabbit’ is analogous to perception of Martian diet by humans, he sets the animal on a lower evolutionary plane. But just a few lines later, he debases ‘heterogeneous food’, implicitly casting the rabbit’s digestive simplicity as higher evolved. Therein lies the gustatory paradox: ranking pragmatic above aesthetic eating makes humans lose their orthogenetic superiority over animals. Lankester’s ascidian becomes both the most evolved and the most degenerate form. That paradox culminates in the text’s deux ex machina: a microbe infection that enters the Martians through their digestive tract. ‘But there are no bacteria in Mars and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow’, says the narrator, once more reversing his prior position. His language reintroduces the orthogenetic equation of complexity and adaptation, unexpectedly ranking human digestion as more developed ‘by virtue of this natural selection’ (145). Yet the ending invites a second interpretation, in which the Martians perish because they remain too complex. If their only hamartia is the residual need to eat, another few millennia of stomach ‘disuse’ might be a more effective adaptation than microbe-stimulated ‘use’. Strung between these two readings, the text once more dissolves any hierarchy between simple-pragmatic and complex-aesthetic diets. The ceremony around ‘heterogeneous’ eating, epitomized by that ginger-beer 'derelict', makes humans both more and less evolved than the Martians. IV. A DECADENT LINEAGE Through different mechanisms, the narratives of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds both play out the gustatory paradox within degeneration theory. The first proposes then undermines the position that pragmatic diets which ‘use’ the stomach have a civilizing effect, the second enacts the same double-move on the position that aesthetic diets result in degenerate ‘disuse’. In repeatedly linking food to gluttony and grotesquery, these readings might seem to cast food in Wells’s oeuvre as an indelible locus of sin, best excised away. Yet Kemp’s well-evidenced survey of Wells’s gastronomical ‘obsession’ shows that repulsion coexists with earnest allure. To explore this tension, I now return to the short story ‘A Misunderstood Artist’ and spell out my case that, far from a glancing or chance reference, the Nocturne feast reveals Wells’s deep engagement with Huysmans’s novel À Rebours. Both texts, I argue, showcase a dialectic of attraction and disgust toward culinary art, which renders aesthetic food a double-signifier of refinement as well as decline. The gustatory paradox in degeneration discourse reveals itself to be tellingly endemic to the cultural decadence it sought to critique. We have only circumstantial evidence that Wells read À Rebours, but the evidence is strong. Although the novel was not translated into English until 1922, it was well known in Wells’s cosmopolitan circles. Henry James wrote to Thomas Perry of À Rebours in September 1884, just two weeks after George Moore’s review of the novel had appeared in the St James’s Gazette.42 42 Henry James to Thomas Perry, 16 September 1884, in Virginia Harlow (ed.), Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography and Letters to Perry from William, Henry, and Garth Wilkinson James (Durham, NC, 1950), 317; George Moore, ‘A Curious Book’, St James’s Gazette, 2 September 1884, 6–7. Richard La Gallienne gave Huysmans as an example of ‘the decadent attitude’ in an 1892 piece for the Century Guild Hobby Horse, while Arthur Symons called the novel Huysmans’s ‘unique masterpiece’ in his 1893 essay ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’—an epithet he would later upgrade to ‘breviary of the Decadence’.43 43 Richard La Gallienne, ‘Considerations Suggested by Mr. Churton Collins’ “Illustrations of Tennyson”’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, 7 (1892), 77–83, 81; Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s Magazine, 87 (1893), 858–69, 866; Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 2nd edn (London, 1908), 139. More notoriously, the book’s cameo as the yellow ‘poisonous book’ in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) was raised by Edward Carson in cross-examination during the 1895 Queensberry trial.44 44 For more on the novel’s early reception in England see G. A. Cevasco, The Breviary of the Decadence: J.-K. Huysmans’s A Rebours and English Literature (New York, NY, 2001); Kirsten MacLeod, Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke, 2006). In Wells’s 1911 lecture, ‘The Contemporary Novel’, meanwhile, he showed himself capable of reading challenging French novels in the original, observing of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet: ‘It is not extensively read in this country; it is not yet, I believe translated into English; but there it is—and if it is new to the reader I make him this present of the secret of a book that is a precious wildness of wonderful reading.’45 45 H. G. Wells, ‘The Contemporary Novel’, Fortnightly Review, 96 (1911), 860–73, 864. Finally, as a critic for the Saturday Review, Wells himself reviewed Charles Kegan Paul’s 1896 translation of Huysmans’s later novel En Route, and in an 1897 review of Robert Hichens’s Flames and Maurus Jokai’s The Green Book, he noted: ‘For the uncleanness of M. Huysmanns [sic] is the uncleanness of Mr. Hichens. Music, flowers, furniture—the nastiness of sexual suggestiveness is over it all.’46 46 H. G. Wells, ‘Whither?’, Saturday Review, 82 (1896), 139; H. G. Wells, ‘Flickers of Imagination and a Flare’, Saturday Review, 83 (1897), 355–6, 355. For attributions, see Robert Philmus, ‘H. G. Wells as Literary Critic for the Saturday Review’, Science Fiction Studies, 4 (1977), 166–93, 190, 193. Wells was, at the very least, intimately familiar with Huysmans’s writing and with its crucial decadent topoi. Though context can serve to triangulate, texts will provide our best evidence. The penultimate tale in Wells’s Select Conversations with an Uncle, ‘A Misunderstood Artist’ appears just after the 12 main dialogues with the eponymous (fictional) family member and just before a final one on physiognomy. Its title refers, in fact, to not one but two maligned aesthetes: a poet and cook who discuss their respective misanthropies with two gentlemen, one typified by a Jovian coiffure, the other by a gold watch. The poet grumbles at being asked what the symbols ‘mean’ in his sonnets, while the cook complains of queries received on whether his fare is ‘nutritious’ (104). The parallels between gustatory and fine arts approach a synthesis when the cook speaks of the ekphrastic meal in the quote cited at the start of this essay: ‘Then I produced some Nocturnes in imitation of Mr Whistler, with mushrooms, truffles, grilled meat, pickled walnuts, black pudding, French plums, porter—a dinner in soft velvety black, eaten in a starlight of small scattered candles’ (106). Read in isolation, the image could, in the words of Bergonzi, be a ‘remarkable though presumably inadvertent echo’ of À Rebours.47 47 Bergonzi, Early, 2. Clausson and Slifkin also treat the story apart from the broader collection. But when the passage is considered in the context of the surrounding story and that of the frame narrative, those echoes grow loud enough to seem purposive. In addition to their penchant for onyx feasts, Wells’s aesthete-chef and Huysmans’s Des Esseintes share several qualities. Both have a penchant for artificiality, the misunderstood cook noting he would swap prussic acid for almond flavour, Des Esseintes taking to the kitchen to experiment with enema concoctions. Both elevate their recipes to the status of art objects: Des Esseintes classes his researches as a ‘protestation against the base sin of gourmandize’, strictly those of a ‘false gourmet’.48 48 ‘Quelle énergique protestation contre le bas péché de la gourmandise ! […] il se surprit tout à coup à méditer sur des combinaisons de faux gourmet.’ Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris, 1983), 305. Further references to this edition appear in the text. Wells’s cook considers his to be ‘compositions’: ‘At home I have books and books in manuscript, Symphonies, Picnics, Fantasies, Etudes’ (108). Their broader misanthropy is even phrased in quite similar terms. ‘Always. The awful many will never understand’, says the cook (106), a sentence remarkably close to the epigraph À Rebours borrows from Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec: ‘I must rejoice beyond time, although the world may be horrified by my joy and in its coarseness not know what I mean’ (49).49 49 ‘Il faut que je me réjouisse au-dessus du temps […] quoique le monde ait horreur de ma joie, et que sa grossièreté ne sache pas ce que je veux dire.’ The most striking parallel, though, is the way their aesthetic eating is inspired by Edgar Allen Poe. Poe’s stories move Wells’s chef to prepare a hard-to-stomach cuisine of the ‘Bizarre’: ‘a beautiful Japanese thing, a quaint, queer almost eerie dinner, that is in my humble opinion worth many digestions’ (106). The Gothic writer also invites dyspepsia in À Rebours, when Des Esseintes’s newfound love of Charles Dickens inspires an impromptu trip to London. While stopping in Paris, he visits a bodega and takes a glass of amontillado, shivering as he thinks of Poe’s story on Fortunato’s intoxicated interment. That drink becomes a symbolic aperitif for literary-inspired eating when Des Esseintes pauses in a tavern before his train departs to London. There, entranced by the Dickensian Englishmen devouring English fare, he unexpectedly gorges—oxtail soup, haddock, and roast beef are followed with stilton cheese and rhubarb pie, all washed down with ale and porter—till pacified, and presumably ill, he cancels the trip and returns to Fontenay. Just like with the funerary feast, literary-inspired eating is a source of both allure and disgust.50 50 In the resultant period of abstinence, Des Esseintes again models his diet on a Poe character, comparing his anaemia to that of ‘the wretched Usher’ (‘le désolant Usher’) (283). In Poe’s short story, the narrator recounts how Roderick Usher: ‘suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses. The most insipid food was alone endurable’. Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales (New York, NY, 2006), 117–37, 123. These parallels grow stronger when ‘A Misunderstood Artist’ is placed in the context of the broader collection, for the uncle’s decadent behaviours repeatedly mimic those of Des Esseintes. The very first dialogue, ‘Of Conversation and the Anatomy of Fashion’, details his contempt for modern society, while ‘The Use of Ideals’ describes his reactive aesthetic seclusion. Comparing ideals to furniture as the ‘drapery of the mind’, the uncle turns writers into literary fengshui: ‘Does it strike you your furniture is sombre, a bit Calvinistic and severe—try a statuette by Pope, or a classical piece out of Heine’ (19). An analogous process takes place in À Rebours, with Des Esseintes transmuting rooms into literature—‘He resolved, at last, to bind his walls like books, with Moroccan leather, coarsely grained, with Cape skin, polished by strong plates of steel’—and literature into furniture, enshrining three poems from Charles Baudelaire in ‘a marvellous church canon with three separate compartments’ (87–8).51 51 ‘Il se résolut, en fin de compte, à faire relier ses murs comme des livres avec du maroquin, à gros grains écrasés, avec de la peau du Cap, glacée par de fortes plaques d’acier, sous une puissante presse […] un merveilleux canon d’église, aux trois compartiments séparés’. In ‘Bagshot’s Mural Decorations’, the uncle applies decadent taste to visual art, in ‘On Social Music’ to song, and in ‘An Unsuspected Masterpiece’ to food. In this conversation, he lavishes orotund language on an egg, likening its yolk to an Arabian Nights genii, summoning its allegorical use for the Great Schism in Gulliver’s Travels—‘Surely it is a most potent egg, a gallinaceous Swift’—and addressing it as a contemporary Norwegian playwright: ‘I must try and understand you, Ibsen Ovarum’ (80–1). The scene ends with the uncle requesting the egg be placed on a bookshelf beside ‘some yellow-covered books there, and Swift, some comedies by a gentleman named Ibsen’ (83). When leaving unnamed those ‘yellow-covered books’, Wells perhaps had in mind the one recently made famous by Picture of Dorian Gray: À Rebours itself. Taken together, these conversations evince a significant engagement with both specific images and broader thematics in À Rebours. In adopting the vision of a culinary aesthete, Wells’s fictional uncle and misunderstood artist both mimic Des Esseintes’s aesthetic relationship to food. But the anti-aesthetic stance noted by Bergonzi and company remains ever present. The Ibsen Ovarum will end by rotting on the shelf, and the hyperbolic diction in Select Conversations undoubtedly dips into revolting pastiche. What many Wells critics miss, however, is that those twinned reactions are also present in À Rebours. Des Esseintes indulges only temporarily in the tavern and funerary feasts—briefly playing Petronius’s Trimalchio in his beloved Satyricon—till the repasts elicit his disgust reflex and subsequent dietary asceticism.52 52 For more on gustatory repulsion in À Rebours see Edward Rossmann, ‘The Conflict Over Food in the Work of J.-K. Huysmans’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2 (1973–1974), 61–7; Marc Smeets, ‘Tastes of the Host’, in Lawrence R. Schehr and Allen S. Weiss (eds), French Food: On the Table, on the Page and in French Culture (New York, NY, 2001), 83–9; Raymond Prier, ‘Consumption to the Last Drop: Huysmans’ Dyspeptic Tale of Eating, À Rebours’, in Lilian R. Furst and Peter W. Graham (eds), Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment (University Park, PA, 1992), 185–98. On Des Esseintes and The Satyricon see Shafquat Towheed, ‘Containing the Poisonous Text: Decadent Readers, Reading Decadence’, in Paul Fox (ed.), Decadences: Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature (Stuttgart, 2014), 1–31. Indeed, this dialectic is the fundamental structure of his decadent projects. From the exotic greenhouse to the jewel-encrusted tortoise shell, obsession repeatedly gives way to abnegation. The dialectic’s poles—grotesque ‘use’ versus enervating ‘disuse’, decadent ceremony versus ascetic optimization—are precisely those that generate the gustatory paradox of degeneration theory, the same one played out in The Time Machine and The War of The Worlds. To show the coherence in this tripartite lineage, I close by turning to a later scientific romance in which Wells would explicitly cite Huysmans: A Story of the Days to Come (1899). In this dystopian work, lovers Elizabeth and Denton confront a twenty-second century London segmented between skyscraper-housed upper classes and subterranean lower classes: potential Eloi and Morlocks given another ∼801,600 years. The text’s nod to decadence arrives through a burlesque of instrumentalized religion: we learn the affluent Bindon purchases his spiritual consolation from the ‘experienced and sympathetic Father of the Huysmanite sect of the Isis cult’.53 53 H. G. Wells, A Story of the Days to Come, in Tales of Space and Time (London, 1900), 165–324, 304. Further references to this edition appear in the text. This time, the other side of Des Esseintes’s dietary dialectic is invoked—not the orgiastic feast but the monastic asceticism. The Huysmanite sect offers a retreat, where ‘the penitent man of pleasure might enjoy all the pleasures of loafing and all the satisfaction of distinguished austerity’, taking in ‘the simple and wholesome dietary of the place’ (306). As with ‘A Misunderstood Artist’, the passage might seem a mere parody of À Rebours, in which ‘distinguished austerity’ and ‘wholesome dietary’ bring Des Esseintes to the brink of death. Yet in Wells’s text, the sect’s methods are entirely effective: ‘And after these excursions, Bindon would come back to London quite active and passionate again. He would machinate with really considerable energy’ (304–5). By linking decadence’s dialectic of excess and abnegation to degeneration theory’s fixation on ‘energy’ and resource management, this passage shows how they operate with parallel contradictions. Bindon’s diet can be interpreted as both a form of aesthetic ‘disuse’ and of pragmatic ‘use’; his routine in this futuric Fontenay is both ceremonial and optimized for efficiency. Since Bindon evolves on the same frugal fare that degenerates Des Esseintes, they collectively confound the maxim of Brillat-Savarin. Tell me what these two characters eat, and I will tell you they are becoming both Eloi and Martians.54 54 Wells may also be drawing on Huysmans’s En Route (Paris, 1895), in which protagonist Durtal follows a Trappist monastery’s strict dietary regimen. That programme elicits significant resistance, as Durtal bemoans that his stomach will suffer without access to the blood of meats (‘le sang des viandes’) and proceeds to stuff his suitcase with sugar and chocolates (178, 216). Yet once he finally commits to the regime, the effects are both spiritually and physically salubrious. By ranking the monastery’s ascetic ‘disuse’ above Durtal’s excessive ‘use’, En Route reshuffles the dietary binary in À Rebours, only confirming how unstable this hierarchy is within Huysmans’s own oeuvre. A shared gustatory paradox, then, can be traced from Huysmanian decadence through its critics like Nordau and into Wells’s writings. Both aesthetic and pragmatic foods operate as sites of allure alongside disgust, signifying evolution as well as degeneration. It is tempting, here, to read that paradox as a stand-in for broader fin-de-siècle anxieties: a sense that ‘complexity’, be it in technological innovation or in Whistler’s Nocturnes, could signal either a new epoch of Elias’s ‘civilizing process’ or another instance of Gibbon’s ‘decline and fall’. This is a fair allegorical reading, but I would suggest that the corporeality of food makes it a special case. Mutton is linked to the body no matter whether it is called ‘peptone’, as in The Time Machine, or distilled into an enema concoction, as in À Rebours. As a physical necessity, food becomes a narrative necessity once the body’s demands are allotted space in the textual diegesis. A first representation may be straightforward—ascetic or lavish, grotesque or rococo—but as the object resurfaces, the contradictions in those representations will begin to emerge. This process, I think, proposes a useful addition to Greenslade’s model of how fictions construct a ‘network of resistances’. When it comes to food, Wells’s fictions neither embrace nor actively oppose fin-de-siècle myths. Instead, their narratives play out the myth’s internal inconsistencies. So though we might speculate on Wells’s own reading practices, we need not resurrect the dead author and posit his intent to be a ‘critical, combative humanist’. We need simply track resistance within the unfolding of the texts. Wells himself would provide a model for this approach in ‘The Literary Regimen’, a jocose piece linking diets to moods and to resultant forms of writing. Oysters on an empty stomach, he proposed, would induce melancholia, cold tea and hard biscuits were suited to detective fiction, and Shakespeare likely lived on bacon. But Wells also found those inspirational foodstuffs physically damning. ‘It is imperative’, he warned, ‘if you wish to write with any power and freshness at all, that you should utterly ruin your digestion’.55 55 H. G. Wells, ‘The Literary Regimen’, Pall Mall Gazette, 13 June 1894, 3. Taken metaphorically, we might say that a writer’s mental digestion must be ruined by the surrounding discourse. When the discourse consumed is as paradoxical as degeneration theory, its contradictions aping those of the decadence it presumed to critique, the writer’s fictions are bound to metabolize, manifest, and, in doing so, resist these myths. These texts could not have been digested without the guidance of Sally Shuttleworth and Emilie Taylor-Brown and the support of the Ertegun Scholarship. Thank you. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press 2020; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - H. G. Wells and the Fin-de-Siècle Gustatory Paradox
JF - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgaa002
DA - 2020-03-12
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/h-g-wells-and-the-fin-de-si-cle-gustatory-paradox-QwioHLDCpd
DP - DeepDyve
ER -