Metamorphosis and Monstrosity in "The Beetle" by Richard Marsh

The chapter offers a multi-layered analysis of "The Beetle" (1897), a novel by Richard Marsh, whose images of metamorphosis and monstrous corporeality testify to the fin-de-siècle resurgence of the Gothic. Long neglected by critics, "The Beetle" has been recently revalued as a text that embodies late-Victorian anxieties about gender and colonial threats. But there are other paths of signification that are worth exploring. Through a detailed reconstruction of the cultural context in which the novel was composed, Mariaconcetta Costantini shows how Marsh grafted a whole cluster of meanings onto his monstrous Beetle, whose body becomes a pivot of different kinds of disquiet (sexual, imperialistic, socio-political, scientific, epistemological). In addition to its cultural meanings, the chapter lays stress on the generic complexity of the novel, whose capacious form was meant to render the growing sense of instability felt at the fin de siècle.