Vegetarianism as a Mirror of Human Morality in the Speculative Worlds of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915)

Abstract

By following the narrators travelling to the two fictive societies of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), this paper considers how vegetarianism was perceived by socialist and feminist authors in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time, fearful concerns about humanity’s future prevailed in human thought: the rapid increase in world population sparked fear of competition, starvation, and a decline in hygiene standards, while the relatively new theory of evolution suggested a closer-than-comfortable, even familial relationship to the rest of the material world. Assisted by ecofeminist critique, the paper then discusses how vegetarians have been presented by the two authors. It suggests that food reform serves as a device of defamiliarisation, prompting the ‘old world’ travellers to question and critique the society from which they depart as well as their own individual viewpoints.