In Nemo's Footsteps: U.S. Responses to Verne's Oceanic Internationalism

Nathaniel WilliamsUniversity of California, Davis "In Nemo’s Footsteps: U.S. Responses to Verne’s Oceanic Internationalism"For many Americans, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) defined the... [ view full abstract ]

Nathaniel Williams

University of California, Davis

"In Nemo’s Footsteps: U.S. Responses to Verne’s Oceanic Internationalism"

For many Americans, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) defined the notion that the undersea world could be a suitable climate for human habitation. However, even in the bowdlerized, nineteenth-century English translations, Verne foregrounds politics. His Captain Nemo yokes oceanic exploration with a radical social schema, supporting international struggles for self-determination and praising revolutionaries such as abolitionist John Brown.

Verne’s popularity assured copycat storylines in American boy-explorer dime novels. In a 2011 American Literature essay, I suggested that using Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” methodology could map these technocratic novels' collective portrayal of U.S. imperialism in fiction. The submarine variants of such tales, however, complicate such an approach. Simply put, the oceanic setting—devoid of human habitation and ethno-national boundaries—makes American attempts to graft imperialist themes to the Vernian undersea exploration plot even more pronounced. In works such as Tom Edison, Jr. and his Electric Sea Spider (1891) and Six Days Under Havana Harbor (1898), protagonists use submarines to enforce American law. The former features a Chinese pirate as villain, while the later (by Cuban-American writer Lu Senarens, the "American Jules Verne") features a submarine used for espionage just before the Spanish-American war. Their use of ethnic stereotyping and their militaristic outlook subverts the more utopian aspects of the Vernian voyage, presenting the ocean as one more territory destined for American control.