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Samantha Buoye
Dr. Hohenleitner
ENG3014
April 27, 2014
Playing the Man: Feminism, Gender, and Race in Richard Marshs The Beetle
In Richard Marshs The Beetle, a terrifying monster wreaks havoc on a group of
Englishmen and women who all have the misfortune of crossing its path. Originally from Egypt,
the Beetle is in England to pursue revenge on its lost lover, Paul Lessingham, a noted politician
and statesman. Throughout the novel, the Beetle hypnotizes, kidnaps, and sexual assaults both
male and female characters. While this kind of power suggests the Beetles sex to be male, we
discover that it in fact has female sex organs. The juxtaposition of the Beetles actions with its
assumed gender are a huge cause of tension throughout the novel. Richard Marsh uses this
monster to personify the Victorian fear of foreigners, female sexuality, and homosexuality,
implying that the society the story is placed in is being held together by conventions that are
incredibly vulnerable.
The novel is broken up into four separate accounts, all by different narrators. First is Holt,
a newly homeless and starving man who breaks into a house where the Beetle is staying. Second
is Sydney Atherton, a successful scientist who is in love with Marjorie Lindon. Ms. Lindon is the
narrator in the third book, where she depicts her engagement to Paul Lessingham and her
eventual capture by the Beetle. The fourth book is taken from the case-book of Mr. Champnell,
who accompanies Atherton and Lessingham on their mission to save Marjorie from the Beetle.
Each of these allow the read to gain unique insight into the Beetle and its mannerisms.

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One thing that each narrator agrees on, however, is the fact that the Beetle is a racial
Other, a foreigner, an Oriental being that is not native to England. Reading this text through
post-colonialism, the reader can then see how the Beetle is portrayed as attacking the home
land of England. It could then be argued that her attack is one of defense against the English
cultures who fear and do not understand her. When Paul Lessingham encountered her 20 years
pervious to when the novel began, the Beetle was stereotyped as a beautiful, Oriental woman
who seduced him. Kelly Hurley, author of The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, And
Degeneration At The Fin De Sicle, says that the Beetle is an example of the binary between the
East and the West. She states, the Oriental represents a barbaric Other (as opposed to the highly
civilized Westerner), a sexually perverse Other (as opposed to the chaste and cerebral Westerner),
and a magical, supernatural Other (as opposed to the scientific, technologically proficient
Westerner) (126). However, W. C.Harris and Dawn Vernooy, authors of Orgies of Nameless
Horrors: Gender, Orientalism, and the Queering of Violence in Richard Marshs The Beetle,
brought up the idea that, the Beetles revenge plot against [Paul Lessingham] can convincingly
be argued as not merely personally but politically that is, imperialistically motivated,
because she is the East versus the West (354). However, I believe that, due to the sexuality of
her attacks, and the confusion over her sex and gender, that the Beetles attack is more based in a
feminist and queer ideology. However, these ideas all intertwine so tightly in this novel that it is
almost impossible to separate them. I think Hurley best illustrates this connection between the
theories when she says, one must also read [the Beetle] in terms of a Victorian mistrust of

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femininity and feminine naturewomen share with Orientals their irrationality, lack of logic,
superstition, emotionalism, and so forth; they are natural opponents of Western cultural values
(129).
Most unique throughout all of the narrators accounts is the depiction of the Beetles sex.
Holt especially has a hard time deciding whether the beetle is female or male. He at first assumes
her to be a man, saying, that it was impossible such a creature could be feminine (53). Later,
however, he wonders if he could have by any possibility blundered, and mistaken a woman for a
man; some ghoulish example of her sex, who had so yielded to her depraved instincts as to have
become nothing but a ghastly reminder of womanhood(61). However, from this point on, Holt
still uses the pronoun he. His description of the beetle is gruesome, calling her supernaturally
ugly, her face an amazing mass of wrinkles with blubber lips, none of which are phrases that
would be used to describe any kind of feminine being(53). Here, the confusion stems from his
pre-conceived notion of gender roles. In this scene, the beetle has captured and sexually
assaulted him, so Holt assumed her to be a man. There is no way, in Holts mind, that a woman
could yield such power over him. The beetle is an example of literal androgyny, or even an
example of gender on a spectrum as opposed to the traditional binary.
Feminism,or more specifically, feminist sexuality, is a concept heavily challenged in The
Beetle. In this society, women were taught to be obedient wives and mothers. There is an
underlying assumption in the text that women should not have power or any kind of overt desire.
The only woman who illustrates these is the Beetle, who is deemed as a disgusting shadow of
femininity. This is further proven by Marjories fate: when she tries to wield power and help find

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the Beetle, she is captured and defeminized all together. When Paul and Sydney go to find her,
they discover that she had been stripped naked, dressed in mens clothing, and the Beetle has cut
off all of her hair. This kind of cross-dressing, though unwillingly done, can be seen as a warning
to women who attempt to be independent in their patriarchal society. Victoria Margee, author of
Both in Mens Clothing: Gender, Sovereignty and Insecurity in Richard Marshs The Beetle,
says that her capture and rape can be blamed on her desire for masculinity. In this society,
women who claimed political and sexual rights for women, called New Women(74), were seen
as a kind of transexual. If they desired any kind of freedom outside of their gender roles, it was
assumed that they wanted to be male. This is the result of pre-existing gender ideals and the fear
of anything that falls outside of the norm.
While Margee believes that Marjorie is the New Woman in the novel, but Harris and
Vernooy disagree. They believe that she may, to some extent, have a desire to be politically
independent, but they point out that she only does so in order to gain attention from her fianc,
Paul Lessingham. They offered Dora Grayling, another female character, as a possibility, but she
too uses her position and money in order to try to win Sydney Athertons heart. (It eventually
works, and they marry at the end of the novel.) However, they point out that the Beetle is by far
the most dangerous and destructive female figure(348). The only woman in the novel that
would be considered a New Woman would be the Beetle herself, if we are reading the text so
that she is fully female. The Beetle, if she does anything, claims her own sexual rights. It is
hinted that she rapes Holt, Lessingham, and Marjorie in an attempt to gain power and get her
vengeance on Paul. She uses her sexuality as a source of power and not as a bargaining chip in a

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relationship, again blurring the gender lines because Victorian women were not supposed to have
sexual desire.
In the Victorian age, where this book takes place, gender roles were seen as rigid,
unwavering positions. The novel, however, questions these roles by the repetition of the phrase
play the man, which was a Victorian phrase similar to todays man up or be a man. While
this was a common phrase at the time of the novels publication, it is repeated so often that it
calls attention to the idea of gender being a performance. The men in the story must perform
their gender roles as stereotypical men. For example, Holt, who was most obviously emasculated
in the novel, uses the phrase when he first encounters the Beetle. However, during the sexual
assault, he says, for the time I was no longer a man; my manhood was merged into his. I was, in
the extremest sense, an example of passive obedience.(54) This statement is a kind of castration.
He loses his manhood to the powerful Beetle, a woman who plays the man more than any of
the male figures in the novel. Kelly Hurley states that, Aggressive feminine desire is portrayed
by the novel as a devouring force which emasculates its male object and literally dehumanizes
the sexualized female(141). The Beetles desire, personified as her transmutation, is what makes
her so truly terrifying.
The Beetle preys on both men and women, and even with the gender confusion, this hints
at several homosexual encounters. She captured Lessingham and raped him as a female, but Holt
was under the impression that the Beetle was a male when he was violated. Hariss and Vernooy
take this reading a step further, and use Eve Sedgwicks Between Men to support their argument.
Sedgwick wrote extensively on the idea of the racial other, and proposed that there is a literary
pattern that illustrates a homoerotic connect between the Orientals and Englishmen. That being

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said, because the Beetles power creates a masculine role for her, we can then read the novel with
a more Oriental and homosexual undertone, no matter in what sexual state the Beetle is attacking
in.
While there are deceptions of both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, it is the
homosocial relationships that drive the plot, and by extension, the society in which this novel
takes place. The power struggle between Paul and Sydney over Marjorie is the conflict that
causes her abduction. They are both vying for her affection and her attempt to save Paul leads
her to entering the house where the Beetle takes her. Hurley states that, the two rivals Atherton
and Lessingham snarl and snap at each other over Marjorie because they both desired her (138).
Harris and Vernooy, however, see their competition as homoerotic. They believe that Athertons
reverence for Lessingham as a politician can be read as homosexual desire. Harris and Vernooy
commented on the fact that Atherton refers to Lessingham as well-hung, and that even in that
time, that was still considered a sexual term (359). If read in this way, the novel can be focused
on Athertons jealousy because he has sexual desires for Lessingham, not Marjorie.
The novel focuses on the signifiers and the way that they are challenged, as we have seen
with the ideas of gender and cultural binaries. One of the most important signifiers in the role of
author. It is assumed that an author is someone who writes a piece of work, but The Beetle
challenges this. While Champnell and Athertons books are definitely written by their own hand,
Holt and Marjories are not, causing their reliability to be brought into question. Because Holt
died during the novel, his piece was compiled by what he told Marjorie and Atherton. Therefore,
there is no way that he can prove or disprove any of the statements made. Marjories book was

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written in her own hand, but, as many critics have pointed out, it was compiled from her journals
after her encounter with the Beetle. In Champnells record, the readers learn that after she was
saved from the Beetle, she went into a semi-catatonic state, where she wrote these entires over
and over. Because of her trauma and memory loss, she too could be considered an unreliable
narrator. However, these are both supposedly the authors of their specific books. Authorship is
not just written by ones own hand, but can be other variations as well.
The Beetle, the novel once sold as a simple Gothic horror, is full of the complexities of
gender, sexuality, and race. All of these ideas, illustrated through the Englishmens point of view,
are portrayed in an Oriental monster, a gender-bending queer. Whether intended or not, Marshs
commentary on Victorian culture is crucial to understanding the society that he and his characters
lived in.

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Works Cited
Harris, W. C., and Dawn Vernooy. "'Orgies Of Nameless Horrors': Gender, Orientalism, And The
Queering Of Violence In Richard Marsh's The Beetle." Papers On Language And
Literature: A Journal For Scholars And Critics Of Language And Literature 48.4
(2012):338-381. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 27 Mar. 2015.
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, And Degeneration At The Fin De Sicle.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.
Margee, Victoria. "'Both In Men's Clothing': Gender, Sovereignty And Insecurity In Richard
Marsh's The Beetle." Critical Survey 19.2 (2007): 63-81. MLA International
Bibliography. Web. 27 Mar. 2015.