Malaise and Cannibalism: Wells’ Fate of Humanity

The character known as the Time Traveler begins his story by demanding, “Follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted”[1]. His request serves as a catalyst for H.G. Wells to metastasize our contemporary world into the futuristic landscape depicted in The Time Machine (1895). In this novel, Wells provides the reader with a depiction of the pinnacle of the modern city’s evolution. While the city itself evolves into its most efficient form, its citizens degenerate into beings that are barely recognizable as humans.

London circa 802,701 A.D. consists of two separate human subspecies sharing the same urban space. On the surface, the Eloi spend their time “playing gently, bathing in the river, making love in a half-playful fashion, eating fruit, and sleeping”[2]. Conversely, their counterparts, the Morlocks, populate a subterranean industrial realm devoid of any light. London itself is a picturesque urban landscape devoid of any trash, crowds, or industry. Numerous parks and gardens accent the urban space with a slight pastoral serenity. Also, the Eloi live in giant palaces as opposed thousands of individual houses. The vegetation provides a renewable food source while the Thames supplies pristine drinking water. Initially, Wells’ future London appears to be the paradigm of urban living.

After telling the tale of this travels to his dinner guests, the Time Traveler laments, “I grieved to think how brief the dream of human intellect had been. It had committed suicide”[3]. As the Time Traveler explores this immaculate city, he begins to realize that as the city grew, humanity died. Already in 1895, Wells noticed the city pushing the industrial zones to its outskirts in order to maintain a more desirable living space. Soon, as the Time Traveler explains, the city identifies a “tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization” such as subways, sewers, and eventually industry[4]. Just as the city pushed its industry further from society, the factory workers themselves slowly traveled beyond the pale of humanity. The Time Traveler proposes the rhetorical question, “Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?” as a contemporary allegory to explain how the Morlocks came into existence. These “East-end workers” eventually became so adapted and conditioned to their labor, they paradoxically became “as happy in their own way as the upper-world people were to theirs”[5]. Differently put, the factory workers became so alienated from a socially acceptable form of existence, they elected to embrace a life of oppressive labor and toil as “normal”.

Wells identifies another theme of alienation common to this project: labor having a physical effect on the worker. For the Eloi, their labor is pleasure. They spend their days laying on cushions, eating fruit, and having sex. Accordingly, the Time Traveler declares they “decayed into a mere futility”[6]. The Eloi are illiterate and barely have enough mental capacity to form two word sentences. Without any physical labor, their bodies are soft, androgynous, and frail. In other words, they are cattle. On the other hand, the Morlocks evolve into nimble underground dwellers. Hundreds of thousands of years worth of mindless, mechanized labor transformed the factory worker into a “human rat” who only scurries to the surface to capture and later eat the Eloi.

Contrasting Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, Wells’ futuristic London runs on no schedule other than that of the moon. Clearly, the Eloi have little need for time, as do the Morlocks. However, the Time Traveler learns that the Eloi dread a new moon as a result of the pitch-black nights creating an ideal circumstance for the Morlocks to hunt. After eons of living in the dark, the Morlocks developed both supreme night vision and an aversion to light. Accordingly, a new moon provides a perfect time for them to prowl the surface in search of Eloi. Although the city became so efficient it no longer needs time to keep its minions on schedule, Wells suggests that nature will take control of time to enable the survival, and further evolution, of earth’s inhabitants.

Another common component of this project absent in The Time Machine is the reliance upon personal collections to abate alienation. Both the Eloi and Morlocks dwell in what the Time Traveler describes as absolute Communism. Not once throughout his adventure does the Time Traveler interact with anything that qualifies as private property. Everything in London is shared from the Eloi’s living space to the cannibalistic haul of a Morlock hunt. Furthermore, there is no form of currency in Wells’ world. For both the Morlock and the Eloi, their labor yields a tangible reward: the Morlock receives food while the Eloi earns pleasure.

Upon further reflection, one can argue there is no alienation in Wells’ London of the future. The Oxford Dictionary’s definition of alienation is “the state or experience of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or in which one should be involved”[7]. Both the Eloi and Morlocks evolved both physically and social beyond our understanding of “humanity”. Thus, we are unable to effectively declare a baseline of normal behavior based upon the Time Traveler’s brief adventure. Therefore, we do not witness the attempts to combat alienation prevalent throughout this project in The Time Machine. There is no sailor showing a bunch of drunks a switchblade he bought in Italy nor does anyone own a photo of a pretty girl named Daisy. In Wells’ world, there are only two types species of beings embracing the only life they will ever know.

The Time Machine illustrates the potential fate for a humanity that continues to chose physical comfort at home and mindless labor in the work place over a life based on the search for intellectual enlightenment and defense of the individual will. While the modern city continues to lull us in a false comfort in exchange for our submission to its grand design, we slowly convert from human to automaton. Wells’ tale serves as a staunch warning to the reader: defend the existence of human intellect.

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[1] H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995), 3.

[2] Ibid., 35.

[3] Ibid., 65.

[4] Ibid., 41.

[5] Ibid., 42.

[6] Ibid., 48.

[7]“Definition for Alienation,” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed 31 August 2012, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/alienation?region=us&q=alienation.