The Victorian Fin de Siècle was a period characterized by decay, anxiety and identity
fragmentation. Within the convolution of race, gender and class which was evinced in those
decades, the crisis of masculinity outstands as being closely tied with the state of the British
Empire in the late Victorian Era. This paper aims at scrutinizing a series of underread lateVictorian
texts, namely Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and a selection of Arthur Conan
Doyle’s non-Sherlockian short fiction, to exhibit the intimate relationship between colonial
tropes and (fe)male characters in late-Victorian popular culture. In particular, the contact or
confrontation with the Oriental Other and the negotiation with a violent colonial past are
appropriated to raise alarms over the perceived emasculation of British males and the
weakening of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ manhood. In more general terms, the texts under analysis in this
paper epitomize fin-de-siècle doubts over whether British men were fit enough to deal
with the arduous task of keeping an ever-growing empire and specifically to confront
the Oriental other, which is quite telling at a time when gender roles were increasingly
shaded.
