Newswise — Dr. David Schroeder, an assistant professor of English at Catawba College, was interested in Mars long before that planet's close opposition to Earth this year. In fact, the 38-year-old has been pondering its impact on the literature of the Victorian age and modern day science fiction for much of his professional life.
Schroeder sees the renewed interest in the red planet as a renaissance of sorts and says today's thinking about that faraway world is very similar in many ways to that of the Victorians. "All we are today was fabricated during the Victorian era," he contends. "That's when all our big cultural issues gelled " evolution, Marxism versus capitalism, feminism and empire. I'm very interested in the big ideas that lie behind the literature of that period, and the idea of extraterrestrial life, on Mars and elsewhere, is one of those ideas."
Prior to 1850, Schroeder notes, it was common for scientists to contend that all worlds must be continuously inhabited, because "God wouldn't be so wasteful as to have created so many worlds without people to live on them. Then came the notion of "cradles and graves," the idea that all worlds are inhabited at some point, but not continuously. Only later followed the idea that we live in an essentially dead universe. Today, we're coming back around to the idea that there may be a fair amount of life out there somewhere, although most places -- planets, stars, moons -- are of course uninhabited."
Before 1877, the standard view of Mars was that it was essentially like Earth, with continents and oceans, only smaller, Schroeder says. In 1877, that view changed thanks to the discovery of "canali" on Mars by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. "He saw lines or channels stretching across the surface of Mars," Schroeder explains, and Schiaparelli's discovery was widely reported in the press at the time. "People in the English-speaking world translated "canali" as canals, which implies canal builders."
Others expounded on Schiaparelli's discovery during the late 1800s and the early 1900s, including American astronomer Percival Lowell. Lowell, in his publication, "Mars and Its Canals," propagated the idea that Mars was inhabited by creatures of advanced intelligence who had used their engineering skills to create gigantic canal networks which captured, channeled and carried water from Mars' polar caps to irrigate crops located along the canals. Mars, Lowell contended, was far older than Earth and was practically a desert planet from which most water had escaped.
"For his concept of the canals on Mars to work," Schroeder says, "one had to adopt a utopian view of that planet. All the Martians were politically unified, all spoke the same language, shared the same culture and could collaborate on projects of this magnitude. Many saw this as the future of Earth." Lowell's views became popular and sparked debates that have lasted more than a century.
"In the Victorian age, some people were afraid of Martians and some desperately wanted contact," Schroeder explains. "Many thought contact with Martians would relieve our loneliness as a world. Some even argued that a Martian invasion, of sorts, would be to our societal advantage, since Martians were probably morally far in advance of Earthlings.
"On the other hand, the whole notion that in space things aren't grounded -- that there's no up or down and that everything's entirely relative -- scared some," Schroeder continues. "There was a fear of the moral and ethical relativism that might follow contact with Martians, which could undermine our culture and shake the fundamental ideas, like mathematical principles, that seemed so solid to us. That was disconcerting to the Victorians."
Lowell's Martian ideal influenced minds like that of H.G. Wells. The ideas he shares in his "The Things that Live on Mars," a March 1908 essay published in "Cosmopolitan Magazine," seem diametrically opposed to the views he detailed in his fictional "War of the Worlds." In the 1908 essay, Wells cites Lowell's theory of intelligent life on Mars and seems to buy into the possibility that Martians are "friendly, advanced, intellectual and very cooperative," Schroeder says.
Wells, using scientific reasoning, made speculations in his essay as to the physical appearance of Martians. He wrote:
They will probably have heads and eyes and backboned bodies,and since they must have big brains, because of their highintelligence, and since almost all creatures with big brains tend to havethem forward in their heads near their eyes, these Martian will probablyhave big shapely skulls. But they will in all likelihood be larger insize than humanity, two and two-thirds times the mass of a man,perhaps. That does not mean, however, that they will be two andtwo-thirds times as tall, but, allowing for the laxer texture of thingson Mars, it may be that they will be half as tall again when standingup. And as likely as not they will be covered with feathers or fur.
Wells also speculates in the essay about the "probable appearance of the Martian flora," that there are "no flies or sparrows nor dogs nor cats on Mars," that "we shall probably find a sort of insect life," and that "there are perhaps no fish or fishlike creatures on Mars at all."
Writer Joseph Conrad was familiar with the idea of Martians, alluding to it in his "Heart of Darkness," Schroeder notes, as did George du Maurier in his novel, "The Martian." And Schroeder's research has shown that a whole array of lesser-known writers in the early 1900s used Mars and the possibility of intelligent life there as textual fodder. The Reverend Mrs. Charles Wilder Glass, a spirit medium in Los Angeles, was a proponent of Lowell's canals-on-Mars theory and even claimed to have co-written her three novels, including "Ruth's Marriage in Mars," with the departed spirit of a doctor now living on the planet. And around this time, Victorian science fiction writer George Griffith penned his then-popular, but now obscure, "A Honeymoon in Space."
Even scientists of the period joined the Martian fervor. British hydrologist Charles Housden actually went so far as to explain the way the Martian water system worked in his "Riddle of Mars, the Planet," Schroeder says. Lord Kelvin and Nicola Tesla were other internationally-known scientists who explored Mars in their own ways.
Perhaps the climax of the Martian furor came in the early 1900s, but interest remained well into the 1920s, when, Schroeder explains, the U.S. Navy imposed a day of radio silence "so they could listen for Martians. That was pretty indicative of the seriousness with which some elements in the government took the issue," he continues.
As the world moved deeper into the 20th century, the ideas of Mars and Martians waned for most. "Some scientists of the modern age looked at the old-fashioned Victorian ideas as an embarrassment, but today, NASA has been coming around to the idea that Mars is a place that has water and might have some form of very primitive life," Schroeder contends.
"The current attention to Mars I find exciting, although I still feel annoyed at the suppression of information and interest about Mars during the last century. I admire the Victorians' ability to see Mars in a romantic way, their ability to keep their minds open to speculation and not get entirely bogged down in a purely mechanical understanding of the universe.
"There is something terribly important about imagination. Philosophers have long recognized that the way we look at things is as important, or more important, than the things themselves. I'm ultimately very fond of the Victorian romanticization of Mars. It was daring, intelligent and wonderfully speculative -- and in many ways, it launched us," Schroeder says.
Schroeder, a native of Louisville, Ky., earned his undergraduate degree in English along with minors in creative writing and psychology from Oberlin College, and his graduate and doctorate degrees in English from Indiana University. He joined the faculty of Catawba College in 2002. He has recently written an article concerning Joseph Conrad and Martians and how contemporary ideas about Martians influenced Conrad's characters in "Heart of Darkness." That article is soon to be published in "Victorian Literature and Culture."
(NOTE: Photos of Schroeder and Mars to accompany this story can be downloaded from the Catawba College website at http://www.catawba.edu/dept/news/fall03/schroeder.htm)
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