The Dis-Appearance of the Body in an Age of Science: H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man

In the late Victorian period, the British cultural elite turned their watchful eyes to the realm of science, where instances of blatant inaccuracy and conflicting theories seemed to call for higher accountability and uncompromising vigilance. Recent studies have shown that metrology, the science of measurement aimed at the definition of standards, was then an arena for contending positions: on the one hand the need for absolute measures and flawless calculations based on ethical concerns; on the other scientific and commercial disputes between rival entrepreneurs and competing narratives of quantification. The widespread adoption of common standards proved generally insufficient to build consensus, so that each separate case called for provisional choices, largely based on contingent trust, and mostly depending on the supposed reliability of a scientist's trained eye. Sight was perceived as a guarantee and blindness, both figuratively and literally, as a teratological dysfunction. Contemporary British medical reports and fictional accounts associated blindness with disease, rather than with other causes; and patients must either be cured or removed from sight. The blind eye was sometimes described as a sign of monstrosity, of a physical degeneration leading away from shared perceptions and received wisdom. Mass manufacturing of glass concurrently altered British paradigms of objectivity and clarity. The unprecedented diffusion of mirrors and glass panels, including shop-front windows, drew attention to the mediation between seer and seen, so that the bodily experience of sight took on subtle philosophical implications. Moreover, both telescopes and microscopes profited from late-19th century advances in lens technology, which greatly contributed to undermining the general confidence in the immediate clarity of nature by opening up the knowledge of distant worlds and invisible creatures. In the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks to the work of a large number of popularizers, scientific theories and discoveries came to be known to a wider audience, which also included the reading public of H. G. Wells’ scientific romances. Sight and blindness are recurrent themes in Wells’ fiction, where matters of science are used to expose the flaws of society. Scope and vision always rely on some given standard, ultimately linked to issues of morality; it is implied that, in a perfect or desirable world, the un-seen, like the un-measurable, ought to be simply out of the question. And yet, quite abruptly, the un-seen, like a subversive monster, breaks into ordinary perception. Wells’ irruptions often take the shape of monstrous anatomies, evoking with their horrid frames the intrinsic limits and overconfident bias of long-established ways of seeing: the can-brained Martians of “The War of the Worlds”, the sightless community of “The Country of the Blind”, the bandaged-headed criminal of “The Invisible Man”. Such monsters are variously affected by the disappearance of the body, and yet they haunt our imagination with their omnipresent gaze and their unsettling visions.