Discovering The Past, ThePresent and The Future:Time Machine, An invention

Introduction:

 

The Time Machine is Wells’ first book in the science fiction genre. It is a most famous work based on his idea of a time machine. It is also a critique of utopian ideas. It sets a pattern for science fiction to critique extreme developments of class. In the Time Machine, Wells’ protagonist travels into the distant future - the year 802,701 - to discover that the human race has evolved into two distinct species, the ‘Eloi’ who live on the surface and the ‘Morlocks’ who live underground. The Time Traveller’s observations suggest a utopian society at first; he meets with Eloi, who are beautiful but useless. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings and have a fruit-based diet. However, while at first glance the Eloi seem to inhabit a classless society, when the troglodytic Morlocks come into view, The Time Traveller awakens to another possibility. Has the social separation between rich and poor become so extreme that the two groups have evolved into separate species? This essay will to analyse “The Time Machine: An Invention” in terms of class inequality, evolution and the relationship between science and society.

 

 

 

The class inequality plays a significant role in the Time Machine. The Time Machine, written in Britain in 1895, is the product of an era of great anxiety about social class and economic inequality. The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had generated incredible wealth in Britain. Still, that wealth went almost entirely to the upper classes instead of being equally distributed to the lower-class workers. Thus, The Time Machine, though it is primarily set hundreds of thousands of years in the future, is truly a cautionary tale about the social conditions of Victorian England. This is most apparent in the differences between the Eloi and Morlocks, the two humanlike species of the year 802,701. The Eloi are like the British elite who, through the exploitation of the poor, have created living conditions so easily.  Meanwhile, the Morlocks are like the British working class, have worked underground for so long that they have lost their ability to see in the daylight and have resorted to cannibalism. Wells uses the distinctions between these two species to show divisions between social classes in Victorian England. The Time Machine reflects inequality between social classes. The Time Traveller recounts his journey into the future to a room full of social elites (an editor, doctor, journalist, psychologist, etc.), both because these are his friends and because they are the people who have the power to effect change in British society also. In Wells’ vision, even the Time Traveller’s movement hundreds of thousands of years in the future does not allow him to transcend his class. The Time Traveller is more at home with the Eloi than the Morlocks, just as he was socializing with elites in Victorian England.

 

 

 

The science fiction world of 802,701 is a dystopian projection into the future based on inequality between Victorian social classes, but it is also simply an exaggeration to emphasise the social conditions that were contemporary with Wells’ writing. Through the Eloi and Morlocks, Wells satirizes the English Victorian class system and the wide gap between the ruling capitalists and the working labourers.

 

The time machine takes Darwin’s theory of evolution seriously and explores its possible consequences. In the time machine, present-day humans have diverged into two different species, neither of which is stronger, smarter, or more moral than contemporary people. The Eloi are helpless, the Morlocks are cannibals, and both species have lost the language and intelligence that characterize contemporary humans.  The Time Machine shows readers a projection of one direction evolution might take. As people have evolved from chimpanzees and other primates, so people evolved into Eloi and Morlocks. But this is not the result of environmental factors such as coming down from trees. Instead, it is the result of social aspects. In the late nineteenth century, many thinkers were trying to make sense of Darwin’s new theory. Wells embraced the idea of natural selection itself but rejected social Darwinism, a set of ideas positing that the human species could be improved by selecting only the “best” humans to reproduce.  The Eloi who resemble of British Elite have degenerated into a silly and helpless species, which challenges both the idea of the inherent superiority of the upper classes and the notion that natural selection means that humans will naturally improve forever. Wells sees two classes, ruling and working, and his protagonist sees how the Morlocks live underground and serve Eloi, but become cannibals and prey on them to survive. He believes that the evolution will continue, continuing and that the helpless Eloi and violent Morlocks are the result.

 

Wells also shows a future without humans in Chapter Eleven. Time traveller finds himself on the beach in a distant future in which the only signs of life seem to be giant crustaceans and algae that have washed ashore. Wells’ descriptions of the changed sky, there is no moon, the atmosphere is thin, and the sun is dying, are reminders that the human species is only a minute when considered in the scale of geologic time. The universe and the Earth are much older than humans and both will endure long after humans are unrecognizable or gone. Wells’ treatment of Darwinism serves as a reminder of the limited power of human beings to control their own fate and the fate of the world at large.

 

 

 

 

 

The Time Machine opens with the Time Traveller explaining to his dinner guests the underlying scientific principles that make his invention, the time machine, possible. Time Traveller’s language is full of mathematical concepts and scientific explanations. This language gives the reader a taste of intelligence, creativity and ambition. The basic effort of the Time Traveller is to overcome the limitation of time with technology and science through his time machine. Time machine uses the relativity of time to bring the Time Traveller back to the present not long after he left.  In contrast, the Eloi of the future lack language, technology, and even physical strength. The Eloi’s living conditions are so idyllic that they do not struggle to meet their basic needs, and the Time Traveller interprets this, at first, as a realization of a technological utopia free from worry or deprivation. However, the presence of the Morlocks—who have resorted to cannibalism because their basic needs have not been met—makes it clear that technology has not been a liberating force for everyone.

In the nineteenth century, science became both a tool of understanding and a means of salvation. Wells imagines something more complex: that technological progress could create living conditions so idyllic that human progress and intelligence disappear, and so disastrous that humans could resort to cannibalism. Technology in The Time Machine is then directly linked to both progress and to intellectual decay and violence.

 To conclude; the novel explores the meaning of time. Wells raises the question of whether it is even possible to understand the past or the future because we bring with us too many assumptions from our own time. He refers to “the riddles of our own time” by referring to Oedipus with the “White Sphinx” in the world of 802,701. As Oedipus’ name literally means ‘swollen foot’, and the Time Traveller tells us that ‘I stood up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful at the heel’. When he returns to the present day he is ‘limping’. Is the Time Traveller a modern-day Oedipus, attempting to solve the riddle of man – not throughout one man’s lifetime (as Oedipus’ Sphinx had), but throughout the entire species. The Time Traveller’s analyses of the future society are simple extrapolation from his own time. The Time Traveller seems to assume that when he travels into the future he will find an improved society, a utopia; but he finds a dystopia.  Through this dystopia, Wells can comment on his present society and imply what needs to be done to improve it. Wells is saying that we can’t just rely on the passage of time to make society better.