An Overview...

Seeing as the semester is coming to a close, I wanted to look back on the different texts we read and explore the different images of time travel we read. I was looking at Claire’s blog the other day, and she posted a quote by Henry Austin Dobson that really struck me: “Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, Time stays, we go.” I think that this is a very applicable quote, in that it separates the ways in which we experience and understand time and space as it implies that time remains as it is, and it is we who travel across space. I want to quickly see how time is experienced in relation to space in these novels, and see if I come to any conclusions or see any more common threads across the texts. Although not all of our books included time travel, per se, I want to delve into the commonalities such novels share with such novels as A Connecticut Yankee, Looking Backward, The Time Machine, and Kindred that illustrate time travel. I want to explore, briefly, the different images and concepts of time we are shown in these texts. In relation to these texts, I want to see how Herland and A Handmaid’s Tale can be considered time travel texts.

We explored many different modes of time travel in the different novels we read this semester. Several of the characters fall asleep and wake up in a different time, like Rip Van Winkle and Julian West (in Looking Backward), or are knocked unconscious like Hank Morgan. Although Kindred is somewhat similar in that Dana has no control over her travels, it is different in the sense that she is physically pulled between the two times throughout the novel and has limited control over her travels to the past (although, risking death, she has a bit more control over her returns to the present era). The Time Machine appears to be the only novel wherein the time traveler employs the use of a physical, tangible mode of transport to travel to a different time. Both Herland and A Handmaid’s Tale don’t employ the use of any sort of physical mode of transport. Although the novel Herland doesn’t contain any sort of machine or other physical or mental mode of transporting Jeff, Van, and Terry across space and time, they do travel to a place that exists outside of history, beyond the traditional conceptions of time and space. With A Handmaid’s Tale, Offred travels back and forth between Gilead and ‘the time before’ throughout the novel. Although all of these novels employ different means to carry people across time and space, they all challenge and complicate our traditional notions of linear time, and the different ways in which people experience time.

Additionally, I wanted to look at how many of the characters travel back to their own time. Despite the fact that Hank Morgan returns to the nineteenth century from his time in the sixth, his sanity doesn’t appear to have made the trip with him. In Looking Backward, Julian West only travels back to the nineteenth century in a nightmare, but happily remains in the year 2000 when he awakes. The Time Traveler in The Time Machine returns to the nineteenth century after experiencing different times of the future. In Herland, the main characters travel back to the US (presumably) all except for Terry, who remains in Herland with his wife and child. In the end of Kindred, Dana returns to the twentieth century for the last time after her travels to the nineteenth century, although she is mentally and emotionally scarred by the experience. Lastly, although we aren’t really sure of Offred’s fate in A Handmaid’s Tale, if she was saved, then one could say she would travel back to her original time, “the time before” beyond the confines of the authoritarian state the US has evolved into. But if Offred was simply taken to prison then she remains in Gilead. All of these characters, whether they return to their original time or not, are permanently affected and consumed by the time they spent in these different times and places.