Abstract
Although Richard Marsh’s The Beetle has been read as an example of imperial or trance Gothic or as representative of imperial anxiety over the waning of the empire and growing influence of the East, a close examination of the title character, a reprehensible figure whose actions are sometimes portrayed in erotic terms, allows the novel to be read as a political statement. The Beetle’s behavior represents a counterpolitics that violates existing institutions and structures, while also reflecting late nineteenth-century anxieties over the encroachment of the inhuman on the human. Through its multiple forms and identities, most particularly the figurative connections that Marsh invites between insect and woman, the Bettle demonstrates the horrifying results when the politically marginalized exact their vengeance.
Man is by nature a political animal
— Aristotle, Politics
Man still bears in his bodily form the indelible stamp of his lowly origins
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Notes
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This dress was immortalized by the painter John Singer Sargent, and was restored in 2011 by the UK’s National Trust.
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Gamiani, attributed to Alfred de Musset, features women having sex with dogs (58), a caged orangutan (92), and a donkey (102); Le Diable au Corps features a frontispiece depicting a woman and a dog, and a group of women with a donkey (176).
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“Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapours of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom. Sometimes the quick cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair. Often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant.” (Lewis 2004), 343.
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For example, Mario Ortiz-Robles (2015) suggests that in “the script of eighteenth-century gothic fiction” there are “no animals to speak of” (15)—a feature that the passage from The Monk cited above clearly refutes. Moreover, Ortiz-Robles uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as his case study, in a reading that also overlooks how the novel explicitly aligns the Creature with the animal. For a counterpoint to Ortiz-Robles, see Effinger (forthcoming).
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One might also think of the growth during this period in visual representations of pubic hair, such as Francisco Goya’s painting La Maja Desnuda (c. 1797–1800) or Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Origine du Monde (1866), the latter of which features a close-up view of female genitals.
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Effinger, E. (2017). Insect Politics in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle . In: Mazzeno, L., Morrison, R. (eds) Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_13
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