Beetle
{{The Beetle}}
Basic Info
- Author: Richard Marsh
- Year: 1897
- Type: #primary1
Summary (brief)
-The introduction helpfully explains the ways Marsh was embodying late Victorian anxieties: the desire of national identity maintenance, the fear of foreigners/others, of syphilis as a paralyzing disease, fear of identity and places and being permeable & hauntable, fear of the fin de siècle…
Major Themes
- #otherness
- #monstrous-femine
- #monstrous-masculine
- #gender
- #craft/body/fragmentation
- #monstrous-landscape
Key Passages / Quotes
Quote 1
quote:: “otherness, this alterity, is never in any simple fashion external to Englishness. It erupts in numerous places from within that national identity, causing that process of self-questioning…”
page:: 12
themes:: otherness, identity, nationalism
Quote 2
quote:: “such potentially ruinous fragmentation of identity through the emergence of the multiple and heterogeneous aspects of alterity come to haunt the very form of the novel itself”
page:: 12
themes:: otherness, fragmentation, form
Quote 3
quote:: “The conventional and respectable classes could justify and articulate their hostility to the deviant, the diseased, and the subversive through ‘degenerationism’”
page:: 14
themes:: otherness, class, degeneration
Quote 4
quote:: “Whether or not I had been the victim of an ocular delusion I could not be sure”
page:: 145
themes:: perception, uncertainty, reality
Quote 5
quote:: “The body is grotesque because it is unstable, excessive, ambiguously traced by so many fragments of identity”
page:: 19
themes:: body, fragmentation, identity
Quote 6
quote:: “For the time I was no longer a man; my manhood was merged in his. I was, in the extremist sense, an example of passive obedience”
page:: 54
themes:: gender, masculinity, power
Quote 7
quote:: “though every second the strands of my manhood, as it seemed, were slipping faster through the fingers which were strained to clutch them”
page:: 66
themes:: masculinity, fragmentation, identity
Quote 8
quote:: “if I were a woman, would you not take me for a wife?”
page:: 86
themes:: gender, monstrosity, sexuality
Quote 9
quote:: “papa always regards a speechifying woman as a thing of horror”
page:: 189
themes:: gender, patriarchy, voice
Quote 10
quote:: “I felt as powerless in her grasp as if she held me with bands of steel”
page:: 24
themes:: gender, power, bodily control
Quote 11
quote:: “there was something so unnatural, so inhuman… I could have destroyed her with as little sense of moral turpitude as if she had been some noxious insect”
page:: 241
themes:: monstrosity, dehumanization, violence
Quote 12
quote:: “the nauseous nature of that woman's kisses. They filled me with an indescribable repulsion”
page:: 242
themes:: sexuality, disgust, monstrosity
Quote 13
quote:: “He warned me that I should find myself in prison… I am not sure that he did not hint darkly at the gallows”
page:: 201
themes:: gender, violence, punishment
Quote 14
quote:: “I found myself cowering against the wall, as if I expected something or someone to strike me”
page:: 203
themes:: fear, embodiment, gendered violence
Quote 15
quote:: “he had become, on a sudden, more like an automaton than a man”
page:: 222
themes:: masculinity, dehumanization, control
Quote 16
quote:: “dominated by something as hideous as, and infinitely more powerful than, the fascination of the serpent”
page:: 207
themes:: environment, monstrosity, power
Quote 17
quote:: “the dark room… the nasty apartment… animal noises… the train crash”
page:: 207–318
themes:: environment, Gothic space, chaos
Genre Notes
-Craft is used to mimic the monstrosity of the body
Characters / Concepts (if relevant)
Theory Connections
Related Texts
My Argument / Interpretation
Dissertation Relevance
How could this matter to my project?