April 8

“The Beetle works to subvert British representations of imperial imperatives. More preoccupied with the penetration of male bodies and the instability of narratives emerging from them than with their solidification, this novel uses the register of the male body to interrogate imperial authority and the physical prowess on which it was frequently based.”

“Written in a period of increasing doubt about imperial stability and anxiety regarding threats from the East, The Beetle explodes traditional conceptions of masculinity while deploying fantasies of sexual subjugation to highlight an unruly porous, and unstable British imagination, underscoring that modes of sexual desire traditionally associated with the East are actually domestic.”

“As Stephen Arata has noted, fin-de-siècle works frequently articulated ‘unwieldy […] anxieties, including, but not limited to, the retrenchment of empire, the spread of urban slums, the growth of “criminal” classes, the proliferation of “deviant sexualities’’,1 and, as I argue here, doubts about the impenetrability of British male bodies and the stability of Western knowledge and narrative authority.”

-Leslie Allen, LEAKY BODIES: MASCULINITY, NARRATIVE AND IMPERIAL DECAY IN RICHARD MARSH’S THE BEETLE

“Fear of the monster is really sort of a desire”

-Jeffery Cohen, Monster Theses

We once again see the relevance of Cohen in this novel, where the fear of the monster is based off of an internal and almost secretive desire. The British are scared of the East and the threats it apparently poses, but deep down they are fascinated by these ideas and this fear combined with underlying curiosity result in this monstrous form.