The Beetle: A Betrayed Rhetoric
As Jeffrey Cohen says, “the monstrous body is pure culture. A construction and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is ethimologically, ‘that which reveals’, ‘that which warns’ ”. Social problems about national poverty, racial discrimination, gender, and some effects of the imperial policies are interconnected and inscribed in the body of the Marsh’s monster or revealed by the plot.
The beetle’s flesh is aesthetically grotesque. It surpasses the limits of normality. Like all uncertainness about its age, origin, gender, and human condition, it works as a representation of social disorders. Atavism, animalization, homosexuality and modern femaleness constitute the network of collective fears made a foreign monster that breaks imperial principles and invades Great Britain. Published in 1897 -year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee-, The Beetle uses the monster as a rhetoric figure centred on the defence of the metropolis menaced by foreign evil forces.
However, that rhetoric figure is also the manifestation of a hidden and revealed collective unconscious; it is a projection of the British self overwhelmed by a feeling of responsibility and guilt involved in that monstrosity. Although it is clear enough that The Beetle is not an anti-imperialist fiction, it reveals some fissures in the colonial discourse. By means of ambiguities proper of the Freudian uncanny and the Gothic sublime, Marsh created a text that destabilizes many of the chauvinistic fundamentals of British imperial ideology by exposing a social system that produces what it condemns and does not convince with its arguments. Its contemporary readers were confronted with a dark view of the metropolis that is far from the pristine model of progress and civilization divulged by propaganda.