The War of the Worlds

As London and its environs lay in total waste, the only thriving lifeform is the Martian red weed. The artilleryman tells the narrator, “This isn’t a war […]. It never was a war, any more than there’s war between men and ants” (168). The artilleryman’s logic is undeniable, and it forces us to consider what other connotations Wells might have intended with his title. If Mars and Earth cannot be meaningfully said to be at war, Wells must be using the terms “war” and “worlds” metaphorically, at least in part. Sure enough, Wells’s novel reveals as much about the conflicts between the strata of life on Earth as it does between the dominant lifeforms on the two separate planets. Wells’s Martians, though terrifyingly destructive on their own, succeed in part because their invasion exploits the lack of harmony between the various worlds of life on Earth, such as between the elite and the disadvantaged, between men and women, between the clergy and the laypeople, between the military and those they protect, and between humans and other Earthly species.

The risks encountered by the less privileged classes in the novel are often greater because their normal struggles blind them to the dangers around them. The landlord from whom the narrator rents the cart is busy “in his bar,” presumably working, and so is “quite unaware of what was going on behind his house” (46). By the time this character recognizes the danger he is in, his mistake proves fatal as he has rented his only means of escape to the privileged and better-informed narrator, who is at least humble enough to admit his own selfishness in the matter: “At the time it did not seem to me nearly so urgent that the landlord should leave” (46).

Many of the novel’s other common folk meet similarly grisly ends, and, while their wealthier counterparts are by no means spared, the special attention Wells devotes to the absurd demise of an apparently lower-class man during the exodus from London emphasizes the insidious contributions of class oppression to tragedies such as these. When the man’s handbag bursts, spilling his money across the road, he “stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and sent him reeling” (111). Instead of abandoning the money, which might reasonably have been predicted to become valueless given the apparent fate of England under the Martians, the man “flung himself, with both hands open, upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half rising, he had been borne down under the horse’s hoofs” (111). Even when the narrator’s brother puts his own life at risk to attempt to help the poor fellow, the man “still clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering at his arm with a handful of gold” and soon thereafter “bit the wrist that held his collar” (111-12). To his dying breath, the man clutches his money.

This man’s death, which is presented in more detail than any other with the possible exception of the curate’s, is entirely avoidable. However, after a life spent struggling in a deeply unfair system for what little wealth he now possesses, the man is unable to act logically to save his own life. Significantly, he distrusts and attacks the narrator’s brother, whom he likely identifies as a member of the oppressing class and yet whose attempts to help, as an example of the sort of interclass harmony that the narrator himself fails to exhibit toward the landlord, are the sort of actions necessary to resolve the war between these two men’s worlds.

Wells’s female characters, who labor under the intense misogyny of Victorian England, find themselves similarly disadvantaged, the lack of harmony between them and men another source of danger. The narrator’s wife is supremely helpless, her survival completely attributable to her husband’s efforts. So docile is she that she does not even attempt to encourage her husband to remain in Leatherhead with her, a desire so strong he is able to deduce it confidently from “Her face […] very white as we parted” (49). Had society permitted or even encouraged her to express this desire and him to heed it, both would likely have been spared much physical and emotional turmoil.

Mrs. Elphinstone is similarly dependent on her husband George, so much so that “she would listen to no reasoning, and kept calling upon ‘George’” (106). Mrs. Elphinstone has been so enfeebled by a life of sexist subservience that she fears leaving England to escape the Martians: “Her great idea was to return to Stanmore. Things had been always well and safe at Stanmore. They would find George at Stanmore” (118). Mrs. Elphinstone’s plan is, of course, insanely dangerous, and, since her hesitation might have cost the three travelers passage on a vessel departing earlier, it may be partially to blame for the three travelers’ brush with destruction at the hands of the Martians. However, society has conditioned her to defer to her husband. In his absence, she appears to be incapable of meaningful contribution.

The notable exception to this sexist discord is Miss Elphinstone, George’s sister, who is a complete foil to her sister-in-law and the narrator’s wife. From brandishing a pistol to defend the narrator’s brother to bravely steering the carriage to safety through the chaotic exodus to convincing her sister-in-law that crossing the English Channel is the most rational path to take, Miss Elphinstone repeatedly “proved her quality” to the narrator’s brother (112), her lack of direct relationship with an oppressive male figure seeming to allow her to function more harmoniously across the divide between the worlds of gender.

The curate and artilleryman, when seen as stand-ins for organized religion and the military, speak to two other dangerous dimensions of disharmony among the worlds of humanity. The curate should find strength in Christianity and use it to help people survive and manage the coming of the Martians. Instead, the scope of the catastrophe incapacitates him, rendering him useless in his inaction at best and dangerous in his frenzied repentance at worst. When the narrator asks the curate early in their relationship, “What good is religion if it collapses at calamity?” (118), he is voicing the legitimate anxieties of many in Wells’s time who watched in horror as Christianity balked before the increasingly abject inhumanities modern nations were visiting upon one another, tragedies brought about more often than not than not by the mighty militaries of the Western World. These armies had been built up to protect, but frequently they served as instruments of greed and unjustifiable conquest, a role the artilleryman neatly parallels in Book 2. Though he claims his plan will “sav[e] the race” (173), he soon reveals himself to be “a strange undisciplined dreamer” obsessed with “drink and gluttony” (178). Even were he meaningfully committed to his plan, it is at its core violently divisive and self-aggrandizing. With echoes of eugenics and genocide, he proclaims that in his society “the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race” (173). Later, the narrator notes that “there was no question that he personally was to capture and fight the great [Martian] machine” that would allow him to see his plan through (177). Just as was the case with the actual militaries of imperial Europe, the artilleryman violates his responsibilities to his fellow human beings out of lazy self-interest and in the vain pursuit of power and “purity.”

Finally, there is the relationship between the world of humans and the world of other terrestrial lifeforms. Decades before it would become a hot-button issue, Wells recognized in The War of the Worlds the immorality and danger of abusing nature. Having experienced the helplessness of being at the mercy of a dominant lifeform, the narrator proclaims, “Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity—pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion” (165). Wells underscores the value of living in tune with nature by repeatedly using animals, in particular dogs and birds, to awaken the narrator from his traumatized daze and lead him toward survival. A dog that leads him out of the house where he hid with the curate, and dogs and birds alert him to the defeat of the Martians. Most significant is the defeat of the Martians at the hands of Earthly bacteria, devastation humans are able to survive because of the delicate balance they have unwittingly achieved with microorganisms over countless ages: “These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our pre-human ancestors since life began here. […] By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth” (185).

Wells knew nothing of the impact that medical advances and reckless use of antibiotics would have on disease resistance in the last century, but he probably would have been sad to see how neatly this too played into his understanding that perils abound when we promote wars between worlds.