Transmigrations: Race, Resistance, and Imperial Narrative Strategy in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle

ABSTRACT:In this essay, I examine Richard Marsh’s obscure and eccentric fin-desiècle novel The Beetle (1897) and read its disturbing collusion between racial otherness and gender non-conformity as an act of colonial and narrative subjugation. I examine the ways in which the entirely white cast of narrators entrap the Egyptian beetle within their Eurocentric and cisnormative discourses of gender embodiment. As the narrators tell their stories of this mysterious, shapeshifting, gender nonconforming “Oriental” beetle, I account for their concomitant pronoun panic, and their attempts to quash the beetle through the ever-shifting narrator voices. But the titular character’s voice nonetheless irrupts within these narrator’s voices, defying the narrative parameters that they circumscribe. I explore the beetle’s incursions into the language of these narrators, arguing for their peculiar deployment of free indirect discourse as conceptually coterminous with their “transmigratory” powers. However, despite such prowess with reclaiming forms of narration, I argue that the beetle ultimately absorbs and supersedes the ability to be narrativized.