War of the Worlds

War of the worlds as an allegorical work

In what ways can war of the worlds be considered allegorical?

War of the worlds can be considered allegorical for a number of reasons. War of the worlds has three key themes that always resurface when an adaptation is made; these themes are paranoia, the fear of ‘others’ and the fear of annihilation.

These themes have been prominent throughout all of the adaptations of the story and this is in order to comment on how society was when that particular adaptation came out.

When the original novel came out in 1898 people in Britain where paranoid of other cultures coming into the empire and destroying the culture that Britain had already established. This came with the fear of immigrants coming into the country and the fear that it would ‘end the world’ and the empire as they knew it.

The fear of others was mainly due to people feeling threatened by the influx of foreign nationals. This caused people to see immigrants as a threat to British culture and cultural ideologies.

And there was a fear of annihilation because people feared the potential collapse of the British Empire due to this influx. These themes help with a getting a better understanding of the majority of people in society during this set time.

These themes of paranoia, fear of ‘others’ and fear of annihilation helped the story to transition to other societies easily in order to comment on the status of society as a whole at the time. As for example when the story reappeared as a radio show during 1938 the general public where paranoid of the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and fascism in Europe, fear of World War and fear of fascism as a whole as it was the direct opposite of capitalism.

The fear of ‘others’ was mainly due to the fear of fascist societies and countries such as Japan, Russia, Germany and Italy.

People had a fear of annihilation because of numerous threats to US National security from Europe and Asia, as well as the emergence of nuclear technology.

War of the Worlds reappeared again in 1953 as a film adaptation, this time in response to the potential threat of nuclear annihilation from the Russians and the fear of communist infiltration. There fear of ‘others’ was because of the USSR backed Communist Global revolution and the conflict with Cuba.  

Finally War of the Worlds was made into a film yet again in 2005, this was in response to 9/11 and the Islamic terror threat.

As you can see even though the situations where different the story was able to change its scenario while still keeping the main themes of the story, this is due to its simplistic nature as it is just an aliens attack and humans try to survive story. The themes further because every human being has these feelings when put into a similar situation. Each version of War of the Worlds always has the aliens represent the enemy of that society, for example the aliens in the 1953 movie represented the communist threat and the aliens tripods where and allegory for there weapons of mass destruction and nuclear bombs. The 2005 version however has the aliens be an allegory for Islamic terrorists. While the enemy is different the general message remains the same.