A Salute to Steam-Powered Cuteness
The fine fellows over at SfSignal recently were asking in one of their Q&A articles, ‘Why has Steampunk persisted for so long?”
Had only they asked me! Had they asked me, they probably would have received a farrago of nonsense in reply, so better that they didn’t.
But had they asked me and had I attempted a sober reply, I would have said this:
Victorian women were feminine, perhaps the most deliberately feminine females of history, and dressed and carried themselves to look the part. Steampunk lasts in part because the Steampunkettes dress in pseudo-Victorian costume, and it looks very cute and very female. It is refreshing change from the dull unisex monotony of modernity.
Cute Pseudo Victorians and the Goggles and Cogwheel Corsets
I would have said further that there is a yearning for beauty which even the modern age cannot utterly uproot from the human soul. Even if only in a backhanded way, at times more in mockery than admiration, Steampunk is an homage to the beauty of the Victoria era, the era of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite artists, the era that paid particular attention not just to the modesty of its women, but to their beauty and allure.
I admit I take a polite disagreement with one or two of the answers over at SfSignal, as is only to be expected. For example, Gail Carriger writes:
“…Part of the appeal, I think, has to do with our own sense of chaos and impending doom. This often causes people to look back and seek out a time that was feels more ridged and controlled, full of polite manners and structured forms of address. It’s a way of escaping into formality…”
Myself, I might have called it a way of escaping from the dull tyranny of informality, effrontery and crudeness. Or an excuse to inveigle a cutie to don goggles and corset while toting a steam-powered blunderbuss.
Maybe this Lady in Corset and Goggles with Escape with You?
Jeff VanderMeer, waxing more philosophical, writes in part:
“…But Steampunk is more complicated than that. One of its precursors, H.G. Wells, was a socialist and wrote anti-Imperial novels and socially aware novels as well. Another precursor, Michael Moorcock, wrote his Nomads of the Air series specifically as a comment on the ills of Empire. Jumping forward to the creation of the term by K.W. Jeter in 1987, you have Jeter’s own Infernal Devices, which satirizes and comments on the Victorian era right there at the start–it isn’t a lovesong to Victoriana.”
Later, he says,
“… In addition, SteamPunk Magazine, properly anarchist and Green in focus, provides a bleeding edge for the field to aspire to politically–a soul, so to speak. … websites like Beyond Victoriana plot a course for Steampunk that include a response to Imperialism and other issues from the point of view of the colonized, creating agency and discourse through new channels…”
Steam-Cutie Pondering her Response to Imperialism by Creating Agency and Discourse through Alternate Channels
The reason for my polite disagreement is not hard to deduce, given the fact that I value precisely those things the modern world despises: namely, logic, and the application of logic to the several areas of morality , manners, ethics, reputation, and political economy, to produce the virtues of self-discipline, courtesy, law and order, honor, industrial and scientific progress, and, in a word, civilization.
A Civilized Young Lady With Goggles and Corset
I like Victorians. They were civilized. They also kicked ass on a global scale, and introduced such Eurocentric niceties as the Christian religion, rule of law, rights of man, trial by jury, in divers places about the globe, while suppressing quaint native customs like burning widows alive on the pyres of their husbands. Now, I have no more wish to be ruled by the British Empire than any other American, but I am glad I speak English, and live under Anglo-American Common Law, which I rank as the greatest, not one of the greatest, accomplishments of civilization.
Another Accomplishment of Civilization: MMO Toons of Pseudo Victorians Kicking Tail on a Global Scale
I am not a fan of things “properly anarchistic” in focus, nor of that genocidal from of vampiric gangsterism called socialism, nor am I a devotee of that cult of the Great Mother to whom the Greens wish to sacrifice their children and our future—the cult is somewhat too Cartheginian for my taste.
The Right to Bear Steam-guns is the Right to be Free!
I am also somewhat baffled when someone describes a civilization more courteous, civil, and refined than our own, a higher civilization, in other words, as “more rigid and controlled.”
I have no argument with the denotation of the words. Civilization is more rigid and controlled than its opposite, barbarism.
Psuedo-Victorians in Goggles and Corsets. Do these girls look rigid and controlled to you?
But I have much the same feeling that a man in the Dark Ages, seeing road and aqueduct long abandoned, and broken statues laying amid ruins that no modern artisan nor architect could match, looking at the hulk of a library whose scrolls the monks had not the manpower to save, seeing the Paynim on the hill and the Viking in the harbor, witnessing the dank and crooked woods and swamps overrunning what once had been garden and plantation, watching a serf barter his freedom away to the landowner of the manor because both coined money and a professional standing army were things of the past now lost, and hearing the universal languages of Greek and Latin degenerate into mutually incomprehensible barbarian jargons — yes, I have much the same feeling that a man would have hearing the Republic of Rome called more rigid and more controlled.
In other words, it is not the denotation of the words, but the connotation which elicits my disagreement.
Cuteness is Responsible for the Persistence of Steampunk.
My own theory as to the causes of the persistence of steampunk?
I have two theories: the shallow and the profound.
Here is my shallow theory. Science fiction is basically daydreams about the future, ad future which, thanks to the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution entering human consciousness, is dreamed to be more scientifically advanced for good or ill or both, than our present.
Fantasy is basically nostalgia for the world as it was, or as it never was, before the scientific worldview: the pagan world of swords and sorcerers, the Catholic and medieval world of quests and crusades.
Steampunk is the best of both: it is nostalgia for the science fictional daydreams of the past. It is fantasy science with the glamour of Victorian nostalgia.
Fantasy Science: Glamor Girl in Steam-Powered Goggles
Now you may ask, why are swords the preferred weapon of the galactic empire, in every yarn from DUNE to STAR WARS? Because swords are more glamorous than guns.
Fantasy Science blended with Science Fantasy: Steam-Leia
Likewise, why is the Zeppelin the preferred mode of transport of the Steamfan, the airship of Robur and the submersible of Nemo? Because of the glamor.
When you are sitting in an airport waiting to be goosed by security to board a jet that to you is no more unusual than a bus, you can read about the daring air-to-air battles where sky pirates fling grappling hooks from the Clipper of the Clouds, or open up with a broadside from their sky-ironclad, et cetera.
Admit it. Steampunk Girls are Cuter.
We live in a Postchristian age: Christians live with hope, and Postchristians (as Gail Carriger correctly states) with a sense of chaos and impending doom.
Unlike the pagans of old, who were obsessed with beauty, Postchristians are obsessed with ugliness, the more ghastly and distorted the better, until even the goggle-eyed gargoyles with grinning jaws of the man-eating gods of the Aztecs seems like high art compared to the products, or, rather, the excretions, usurping modern art museums. But both the delicate beauty of the noble pagans of old, and the in-your-face insolent self-degradation of the Postchristians of postmodernity, spring from the same root: despair.
This is why the steampunks are punks: the punk movement is a self-conscious rejection of civilization. It copies the fashions of barbaric tribesmen, noserings and tattoos and so on, as a proud banner of neo-barbarism. Despair of civilization is the mark stamped on their souls and evidenced in their literature.
Victorian Mohawk Glamor
But at the same time, steampunks are not punks. Part of the movement is indeed a loveletter to Victoriana.
The Victorian Age was the era that the neobarbarians of the 1968’s used as the touchstone and example of all they hated and sought to eschew in their mission to dismantle civility and civilization in the name of freedom and happiness and porn. They were wildly successful: we now live in a cesspool.
When is the last time you saw something fair to the eye or wondrous to behold that was not an echo of a bygone age? There are some, I grant you. I hold Spaceship One made by Scaled Composites to be a work of art, as well as a work of engineering.
Keep your Steam-Zeppelins, Victorians!
But, by and large, everything from Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter is a nostalgic shadow of days past or long past.
Echoes of a Bygone Age
It is only natural that now that the ideas and ideals of the 1968 generation have been unambiguously shown to be fecal, that the next generation, reacting against them, could be attracted to the same Victorian world their Baby-boomer parents hated with such blind hatred.
And yet at the same time, since the last battle the Baby-boomers won was their crusade against the civility and civilization of the Victorian Age, the Steampunk backdrop gives them an alternative history make-believe where they can play out their socialist and anti-Imperialist and anarchist wet dreams without the boorish interruption of logic and history, and revisit the glory days of their last successful battle.
Any Steampunk writer with an itch to write against the hypocrisy of high moral standards cannot set his work in the modern day, an era when homosexual marriage is being discussed seriously and when abstinence before marriage is not: and if he wants to write SF and not historical fiction, he cannot use the real Victorian Era. The only alternative is an alternate world.
An Alternate World of Romance and Mad Science! ALL HAIL AGATHA HETERODYNE!
Both the fans and foes of Victorianism, in other words, can contribute to the health of the Steampunk genre, and both are interested: the Victorian Age is the pivotal point and the symbol of everything Modernity is rebelling against. And so the young rebels in rebelling against the old rebels adopt the look of everything their parents rejected.
Beauty is not an Ideal in the Modern Day
And our world is ugly and dishonorable, and we admire ugliness in the name of authenticity, and we admire dishonorable conduction in our wars and in our government in the name of realism and efficiency. We think nothing of bombing civilian targets from the air. Before World War Two, so blatantly a violation of the written and unwritten rules by which European powers conducted their wars, so cruel a violation of Christian standards of chivalry and decency, would not have been tolerated, not even imagined.
So the nostalgia is not misplaced.
Feel the Nostalgic Attraction
My profound theory is the one mentioned at the beginning of this piece: Victorian women were feminine more-so than any women in history. The Victorians invented the silk stocking, the garter belt, and the corset, feminine unmentionables so feminine that to this day they endure as undergarments used only in the most extreme of feminine situations, or to please a fetish.
Many Victorians in High Society Dressed Thus
Of course, Steampunk has it both ways. Cosplay fangirls can dress up as Victorians, capturing perhaps some of the glamor, but at their will can dress down in immodest ways no Victorian who was not a streetwalker would dream. That is the punk part of the steampunk look.
Speaking of Fetish -- HEY! How did a picture of Catwoman get here?
The secret of the success of Steampunk? Steamguns! Corsets! And Goggles!
The Glamor of Victoriana
Okay, I admit it. The other big appeal of Steampunk is the Airships.
Legal Notice: all pictures used above were swiped at random from the internet, and are no doubt copyrighted by their respective owners. Use here is under fair use doctrine, for commentary and satire.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
