Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (27 page)
Authors: David Standish
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BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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Some hollow earth novels are practically Cook’s tours, devoting considerable space to imaginative geographical descriptions, but Lane gives only token sketches of the landscape, brushstrokes of physical detail, little more. Mizora seems to be a large continent surrounded by a forbidding ocean; it is populated enough to have a few large cities and many towns, but these, too, are given only glancing mention. The only real indication that we’re inside the hollow earth comes early on, when Vera observes, “The horizon was bounded by a chain of mountains, that plainly showed their bases above the glowing orchards and verdant landscapes. It impressed me as peculiar, that everything appeared to rise as it gained in distance.”
Lane’s interest lies in elaborating her utopian program. Action is virtually nonexistent. Once Vera gets to Mizora, virtually nothing happens. Drama, conflict, romance, and adventure are elbowed off the stage by an endless examination of the Mizorans’ social mores and technical achievements. The only real plot question pulling a reader through the narrative is, What happened to the men? and the closely related mystery, How do you reproduce without them?
Vera encounters a boat shaped like a fish carrying Mizorans, all of whom are young, female, beautiful, and blond. Brunette Vera soon discovers that dark hair and complexions don’t exist in Mizora. Late in the novel Vera finds that just as Mizora formerly had men, some people had swarthy complexions as well. She presses her guide, the Preceptress, about this, who replies first with a policy statement: “We believe that the highest excellence of moral and mental character is alone attainable by a fair race. The elements of evil belong to the dark race.” Are these utopian Nazis? Vera asks what happened to the dark complexions. The terse reply, not elaborated on, is: “We eliminated them.”
Lane presumably does not endorse this solution, but it’s revealing that a feminist society got rid of men to achieve a state of perfection and did away with troublesome dark-skinned types as well. This was written in a time when race was arguably even more troublesome than it is today. Millions of former slaves were technically free, but Radical Reconstruction had collapsed, Jim Crow laws were created to keep blacks in “their place,” and they were facing a future filled with difficulty and hardship as second-class citizens. American Indians were being shooed west to reservations on land deemed worthless (though not without a fight—the Battle of Little Big Horn took place just four years before
Mizora
appeared). Millions of European immigrants were causing cultural upheaval of yet another sort. Color difference, then as now, was a huge social problem. Eliminating it entirely was a magic-wand solution, though hardly utopian. Vera’s take is that the Mizorans’ “admirable system of government, social and political, and their encouragement and provision for universal culture of so high an order, had more to do with the formation of superlative character than the elimination of the dark complexion.”
Mizora
appeared). Millions of European immigrants were causing cultural upheaval of yet another sort. Color difference, then as now, was a huge social problem. Eliminating it entirely was a magic-wand solution, though hardly utopian. Vera’s take is that the Mizorans’ “admirable system of government, social and political, and their encouragement and provision for universal culture of so high an order, had more to do with the formation of superlative character than the elimination of the dark complexion.”
How did they achieve this social paragon?
Thousands of years ago, men ran everything and women were regarded as inferior. A revolution toppled the original aristocracy, but the new republic had one fatal flaw: a portion were slaveholders, and a civil war soon followed. Sound familiar? The war should have ended quickly, but the corrupt government prolonged it for profit. At war’s end the slaveholders collapsed and the former commander in chief of the free government, “a man of mediocre intellect and boundless self-conceit,” was made president. Could this be a parallel universe U. S. Grant? In Mizora he became a despot, assuming all the prerogatives of royalty he could manage, elevating “his obscure and numerous relatives to responsible offices.” When in a rigged election he is proclaimed President for life, all hell breaks loose. Soldiers called out to protect the government refuse to do so, chaos and faction reign.
Now, up until this point, women had been kept out of government. But in this anarchic time, “they organized for mutual protection from the lawlessness that prevailed. The organizations grew, united and developed into military power. They used their power wisely, discreetly, and effectively. With consummate skill and energy they gathered the reins of Government in their own hands.” And threw all the men out. The new Constitution, the Preceptress tells Vera, “provided for the exclusion of the male sex from all affairs and privileges for a period of one hundred years.
At the end of that time not a representative of the sex was in existence.
” Italics courtesy of the Preceptress. The men aren’t killed off. Instead, when they can no longer run things, spend their time and energy wheeling and dealing and being important, they simply wither away!
At the end of that time not a representative of the sex was in existence.
” Italics courtesy of the Preceptress. The men aren’t killed off. Instead, when they can no longer run things, spend their time and energy wheeling and dealing and being important, they simply wither away!
With them out of the picture, Mizoran society soars toward perfection.
And the key to it all, indeed, the key to the novel’s purpose, is female education.
Prior to their takeover of Mizora’s government, “colleges and all avenues to higher intellectual development had been rigorously closed against them. The professional pursuits of life were denied them”—just as they were in the United States at the time.
Women in 1880 were largely still supposed to be only mothers and homemakers. But things were changing in small ways. One effect all those new factories popping up had, for better or worse, was to give women jobs working in them, taking them out of the home in previously unthought-of numbers. Emancipation of former slaves by constitutional amendment added impetus for women’s suffrage as well, and such leaders as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who had organized the first women’s rights convention in 1848), and Susan B. Anthony had started the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869 and repeatedly petitioned Congress to give women the vote. Higher education was still primarily male. Oberlin College had been one of the first to admit women in the 1830s. The first all-women’s college opened in 1836 as Georgia Female College (now Wesleyan College), and Mount Holyoke had begun as a female seminary in 1837. Vassar didn’t come along until 1861, Hunter College in 1870, and Smith and Wellesley in 1875, making them brand-new institutions when Lane was writing. But most women were stuck at home, doing housework and raising kids, stuck, too, up on that pedestal, where sentimental worship, far from elevating them, kept them from acting on any professional aspirations they might entertain. Educated, accomplished women were in the main regarded as “unnatural.” Anything beyond a little schoolmarming was suspect, and that was regarded as the province of unfortunate spinsters unable to perform women’s “true calling”—childbearing and housekeeping. The pressures to restrict women to their “special province”—the home—were still tremendous in 1880.
Lane envisioned a life for women with none of these restrictions.
Vera is ensconced in the National College to learn their musical language and soon finds that universal education is of the highest importance to the Mizorans—and that
teachers
are not only the highest-paid profession of all, they represent the pinnacle of Mizora’s intellectual aristocracy. Dream on, Mary Bradley. “The idea of a Government assuming the responsibility of education, like a parent securing the interest of its children, was all so new to me,” Vera thinks, “and yet, I confessed to myself, the system might prove beneficial to other countries than Mizora.” She reflects that in her world, “education was the privilege only of the rich. And in no country, however enlightened, was there a system of education that would reach all.”
teachers
are not only the highest-paid profession of all, they represent the pinnacle of Mizora’s intellectual aristocracy. Dream on, Mary Bradley. “The idea of a Government assuming the responsibility of education, like a parent securing the interest of its children, was all so new to me,” Vera thinks, “and yet, I confessed to myself, the system might prove beneficial to other countries than Mizora.” She reflects that in her world, “education was the privilege only of the rich. And in no country, however enlightened, was there a system of education that would reach all.”
The rest of the novel details the fabulous rewards of Mizora’s education policy.
One has been to provide a terrific standard of living for all. The Preceptress admonishes Vera regarding the potential benefits of universal education for her world: “The bright and eager intellects of poverty will turn to Chemistry to solve the problems of cheap Light, cheap Fuel and cheap Food. When you can clothe yourselves from the fibre of the trees, and warm and light your dwellings from the water of your rivers.” They’ve figured out how to create cheap energy by reducing water to its two separate elements by zapping it with electricity, then burning the result. “Eat of the stones of the earth, Poverty and Disease will be as unknown to your people as it is to mine.”
Better living through chemistry.
Lane does come up with a number of nifty sci-fi devices. The preferred conveyance is a low carriage “propelled by compressed air or electricity.” They also have airplanes—this nearly twenty-five years before successful heavier-than-air flight, though many at the time were working on it. More predictive is the Mizorans’ “elastic glass” (plastic by any other name) “as pliable as rubber.” Almost indestructible, among its many uses, “all cooking utensils were made of it” and “all underground pipes were made of it.” It’s also spun into “the frailest lace,” which “had the advantage of never soiling, never tearing, and never wearing out,” sort of a precursor of that old Alec Guinness movie,
The Man in the White Suit.
Other gizmos anticipate television, e-mail, and holography. The key to most of these advances is electricity, and naturally all of the living spaces and city streets in Mizora are bathed in bright artificial lighting. This was more a sign of the times than some visionary stroke, since even as Lane was writing, tireless Thomas Alva Edison was slaving away in his lab looking for the perfect filament for his revolutionary incandescent lightbulb, and in 1879 the first electric streetlights in the United States were turned on around Public Square in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Man in the White Suit.
Other gizmos anticipate television, e-mail, and holography. The key to most of these advances is electricity, and naturally all of the living spaces and city streets in Mizora are bathed in bright artificial lighting. This was more a sign of the times than some visionary stroke, since even as Lane was writing, tireless Thomas Alva Edison was slaving away in his lab looking for the perfect filament for his revolutionary incandescent lightbulb, and in 1879 the first electric streetlights in the United States were turned on around Public Square in Cleveland, Ohio.
Such gadgets are a commonplace in the futuristic hollow earth novels from this time. What sets
Mizora
apart is its vision of an ultimate matriarchy, where women have done away with men entirely. Here mothers produce only daughters and live with them in harmony until the daughters in turn become mothers. Lane is vague about how this asexual procreation is achieved. She says they have discovered “the secret of life” and suggests something like in vitro conception.
Mizora
apart is its vision of an ultimate matriarchy, where women have done away with men entirely. Here mothers produce only daughters and live with them in harmony until the daughters in turn become mothers. Lane is vague about how this asexual procreation is achieved. She says they have discovered “the secret of life” and suggests something like in vitro conception.
Like the narrator of
The Coming Race,
Vera at last decides to go back home with her friend Wauna, the Preceptress’s daughter, to show her world a shining example of Mizoran society and to proselytize for universal free education. But it doesn’t work. Vera finds that her husband and son, who had migrated to the United States, are both dead. The brutality of the surface world overwhelms Wauna, and she dies attempting to return to Mizora. Nearly her last words are: “The Great Mother of us all will soon receive me in her bosom. And oh! my friend, promise me that her dust shall cover me from the sight of men.” True to her school to the very end.
The Coming Race,
Vera at last decides to go back home with her friend Wauna, the Preceptress’s daughter, to show her world a shining example of Mizoran society and to proselytize for universal free education. But it doesn’t work. Vera finds that her husband and son, who had migrated to the United States, are both dead. The brutality of the surface world overwhelms Wauna, and she dies attempting to return to Mizora. Nearly her last words are: “The Great Mother of us all will soon receive me in her bosom. And oh! my friend, promise me that her dust shall cover me from the sight of men.” True to her school to the very end.
In 1882, just a year after Lane’s story was serialized, a novel titled
Pantaletta
appeared. It described a comic dystopia written with broad-stroke vaudeville flourishes that reads like a send-up of the serious feminism in
Mizora.
The author was Mrs. J. Wood, likely the pseudonym of a man unappreciative of efforts toward women’s rights.
58
Pantaletta
appeared. It described a comic dystopia written with broad-stroke vaudeville flourishes that reads like a send-up of the serious feminism in
Mizora.
The author was Mrs. J. Wood, likely the pseudonym of a man unappreciative of efforts toward women’s rights.
58
The narrator is an American named Icarus Byron Gullible. After demolishing the family fortune starting a newspaper but fortuitously marrying a wealthy young woman, he devotes his time after serving in the Civil War to invention, and the result is an aircraft he calls the American Eagle.
Gullible’s goal? The North Pole. He wants to get there “to stop the further sacrifice of heroic lives by polar expeditions.” With success he plans to “patent my invention and organize a company” to manufacture his Eagle airships, these to “carry all kinds of passengers to the new American possessions, at remunerative rates.” His Eagle flies, but not very fast, so the trip to the pole takes days. He passes “leagues of glistening ice” and then “below me, apparently boundless in diameter, rolled the gulf of gulfs,” a combination of the open polar sea and the great polar abyss. He flies on, the temperature rises, he sights land unknown on maps, and comes to earth at last, of course, in some Edenic country—“a spot which rivalled the garden of our first parents in beauty.” He is immediately nabbed by a group of martial women wearing strange garb and taken prisoner. His chief captor is the Pantaletta of the title, a half-mad virago given to loony, disjointed Lady Macbeth soliloquies who’s also captain of the army. Gullible is drugged and dragged off to meet the president of the Republic of Petticotia, a topsy-turvy land where women have assumed power as well as men’s clothing, while the remaining men (millions have fled) are forced to wear what were formerly women’s clothes and perform all the duties formerly relegated to women. Petticotia is a cross-dresser’s paradise, where transvestitism has the rule of law. The word “man” has been banned as well. Former “men” are now called “heshes,” while women are “shehes.” The absurdity of this is a clear indication of the writer’s attitude toward women’s equality.
The novel ends with Gullible popping up out of the interior world at the North Pole and winging his way south toward Greenland, eager to report that “the North Pole is discovered and is ours.” Filled with emotion, he rhapsodizes, “Oh, my native land, my soul goes out to thee … Long seems the time since I stretched me under thy umbrageous trees and felt the gentle influence of thy emerald face.”
After
The Coming Race, Mizora,
and
Pantaletta,
novels of the 1880s and 1890s set in the hollow earth both multiplied and took on a certain sameness. It would be tedious to consider every one in detail. Indeed, it would be impossible, since several of them, while continuing to exist on various bibliographical lists, have proved impossible to turn up despite considerable searching. But the number of hollow earth novels produced between 1880 and 1915 is remarkable. The list includes:
The Coming Race, Mizora,
and
Pantaletta,
novels of the 1880s and 1890s set in the hollow earth both multiplied and took on a certain sameness. It would be tedious to consider every one in detail. Indeed, it would be impossible, since several of them, while continuing to exist on various bibliographical lists, have proved impossible to turn up despite considerable searching. But the number of hollow earth novels produced between 1880 and 1915 is remarkable. The list includes:
Mizora
by Mary Bradley Lane (1880).Pantaletta: A Romance of Sheheland
by Mrs. J. Wood (1882).Interior World, A Romance Illustrating a New Hypothesis of Terrestrial Organization &c
by Washington L. Tower (1885).A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
by Anonymous [James DeMille] (1888).Under the Auroras, A Marvelous Tale of the Interior World
by Anonymous [William Jenkins Shaw] (1888).Al-Modad; or Life Scenes Beyond the Polar Circumlfex. A Religio-Scientific Solution of the Problems of Present and Future Life
by Anonymous [M. Louise Moore and M. Beauchamp] (1892).The Goddess of Atvatabar
by William R. Bradshaw (1892).Baron Trump’s Marvellous Underground Journey
by Ingersoll Lockwood (1893).Swallowed by an Earthquake
by Edward Douglas Fawcett (1894).The Land of the Changing Sun
by Will N. Harben (1894).From Earth’s Center, A Polar Gateway Message
by S. Byron Welcome (1894).Forty Years with the Damned; or, Life Inside the Earth
by Charlies Aikin (1895).The Third World, A Tale of Love & Strange Adventure
by Henry Clay Fairman (1895).Etidorhpa
by John Uri Lloyd (1895).Through the Earth
by Clement Fezandie (1898).Under Pike’s Peak; or Mahalma, Child of the Fire Father
by Charles McKesson (1898).The Sovereign Guide: A Tale of Eden
by William Amos Miller (1898).The Last Lemurian: A Westralian Romance
by G. Firth Scott (1898).Through the Earth; or, Jack Nelson’s Invention
by Fred Thorpe (1898).The Secret of the Earth
by Charles W. Beale (1899).Nequa; or, The Problem of the Ages
by Jack Adams [pseud. of Alcanoan O. Grigsby and Mary P. Lowe] (1900).Thyra, A Romance of the Polar Pit
by Robert Ames Bennet (1901).
Intermere
by William Alexander Taylor (1901-1902)The Land of the Central Sun
by Park Winthrop (1902).The Daughter of the Dawn
by William Reginald Hodder (1903).My Bride from Another World: A Weird Romance Recounting ManyStrange Adventures in an Unknown World
by Rev. E. C. Atkins (1904).Mr. Oseba’s Last Discovery
by George W. Bell (1904).Under the World
by John DeMorgan (1906).The Land of Nison
by C. Regnus [pseud. of Charles Sanger] (1906).Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
by L. Frank Baum (1908).The Smoky God
by Willis George Emerson (1908).Five Thousand Miles Underground, or The Mystery of the Centre of the
Earth
by Roy Rockwood [pseud. of Howard Garis] (1908).Upsidonia
by Archibald Marshall (1915).
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