Arabella of Mars post- Kaitlin Scott

I knew relatively little about Steampunk and Neo-Victorian subcultures. I’m a little familiar with the related gothic Lolita Japanese clothing style but only because I had to do a project on it for an anthropology course. From what I understand, steampunk imagines an alternative past where steam power was common, and electricity never replaced it. Neo-Victorianism, however, applies the Victorian look to modern technologies.

The themes of imperialism directly relate to Victorian times. The Mars Trading Company is almost certainly meant to be the East India Company. The Martian uprising could be read as a kind of Sepoy rebellion. There are certainly parallels that we can draw with the time of the British Raj. The Martians work as servants in their own land. Arabella’s nanny is a Martian. Arabella’s interracial attraction to Captain Singh is also interesting. There might be some reference there to Captain Nemo. I don’t know if we’re meant to draw parallels to A Passage to India although that novel wasn’t written until the 1920s.

I think one of the most striking reasons that Arabella of Mars is a contemporary novel and not one from the Victorian Era is that the main character is woman who defies traditions in a way that female characters of the time likely would not have. She dresses in drag. For some frame of reference, Isabel, the main character in Henry James’ 1880 novel, The Portrait of the Lady, doesn’t wear a corset during a costume party. Given the character she has come in costume as, it’s a historically-accurate choice. However, it all but ruins her socially. Arabella dresses as a young man. I don’t know how much Victorian readers would have supported this. Not only does she dress as a young man, but the novel shows her physicality in a way that I don’t think Victorian’s were comfortable with women’s bodies: “Arabella now found herself one of a long line of men from every division, all hauling on a line that ran through a block at the masthead to the head of the spare mast, while another gang of men did the same at the mast’s foot” (121). This description brings to mind the euphoric working sailor scenes from Moby Dick. Perhaps I am underestimating the average Victorian reader, in much the same way that Ganges warns us not to, but I don’t know how comfortable a reader would have been imaging her performing physical labor side by side with men, particularly working class men who were assumed to have baser instincts. The classist nature of the Victorian age likely would have been a factor here too. Along these lines, there’s the scene were Gowse, not knowing Arabella is a girl, strips her shirt off to prevent her wound from festering: “And then, in one smooth move, he broke Arabella’s grip on her chest and stripped her shirt off of her body. The hard, chill rain struck her exposed skin like a slap” (245). It’s hard to imagine Victorian readership handling that scene well.

On the note of physicality, there’s a fascinating book by Joan Jacobs Brumberg called Fasting Girls: the History of Anorexia Nervosa. It’s essentially a social history thinness and extreme dieting in Europe. The chapters on the Victorian Era discuss the eroticizing of deathliness and illness. Tight corsets and fainting spells fit into this. Arabella in no way embodies this behavior.