“Exploring the Island of Dr. Moreau”
A Panoramic View of The Island of Dr. Moreau
The remote island setting of The Island of Dr. Moreau is a microcosm for the conflict between human conscience and the immorality of animal experimentation.
(Please feel free to play the music in the background while reading this post.)
The music is Comptine D’un Autre EteL’apres Midi by Yann Tiersen.
The mournful music helps set the tone to this literary criticism.
Contents
Part I: From Pain Into Power—Vivisection in The Island of Dr. Moreau
Part II: Blurring the Boundary Between Man and Beast
Part III: Fall of the House of Pain & Righteous Insurrection
Part I: From Pain Into Power—Vivisection in The Island of Dr. Moreau
“These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes” [1]
—The Island of Dr. Moreau
1
vivisection — (vĭv`ĭ-sěk`shən) noun the act or practice of cutting into or otherwise injuring living animals, especially for the purpose of scientific research [2]
The novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, published in 1896, concerns a mad surgeon-turned-vivisectionist who, in his laboratory on a secluded island, performs macabre experiments in an attempt to transform animals into men. The Island of Dr. Moreau chronicles the harrowing escapades of protagonist Edward Prendick, a castaway who becomes shipwrecked on the island where the infamous Dr. Moreau performs his grisly vivisection experiments. When Prendick is cast ashore on the island, he finds it inhabited by disturbing creatures which seem human and yet remind him of animals: “He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders….The black face…was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle.”[3] Prendick soon discovers that these “Beast Folk” are Dr. Moreau’s vivisection experiments—animals that have been mutilated, “carven, and wrought into new shapes”[4] to resemble humans.
The isolated island setting is a microcosm for the conflict between human conscience and the immorality of animal experimentation. As “ruler” of the island, Dr. Moreau is a sinister personification of the scientific quest to control and manipulate the natural world and, ultimately, human nature itself. Moreau heartlessly declares, “To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.”[5] Moreau’s project is the resurrection of animals to the ranks humanity, but it is evident that the pain he inflicts on animals, rather than his quest for knowledge, becomes his sole interest. Prendick, horrified at Moreau’s grotesque experiments, exclaims, “Where is your justification for inflicting all this pain?”[6] Prendick’s question is lost on Moreau, who has no viable justification for inflicting pain. Moreau’s reasons for experimentation are solely self-aggrandizing; Moreau exemplifies the hubris of man striving to create life in his own image. Moreau is on a quest to raise himself to the ranks of God by trying to raise animals to the ranks of men.
2
“Where is your justification for inflicting all this pain?”
Moreau’s interest in vivisection parodies the work of the Creator of the human race. Moreau mutilates animals in hopes of “humanizing” them. It is Moreau’s drive to dominate human nature and animals that propagates his fascination with animal experimentation. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, pain and vivisection are double-edged swords: “if [pain’s] individual experience is mediated by collective knowledge, collective knowledge/power is produced by deployment and utilization of individual pain.”[7] In other words, pain is transformed into control; Moreau’s infliction of pain thus becomes a metaphor for man’s perverse need for power and demonstrates power outstripping moral control. By engaging in these barbaric endeavors, Moreau loses touch of his humanity; his greed for power exacerbates all the moralistic implications that make him human. Prendick, who slowly grows accustomed to Moreau’s grotesque experimentation, is proof of all the antivivisectionist arguments. He is proof that people who are forced to participate in acts of cruelty or who watch scenes of torture will “lose all sense of compassion and pity, becoming dead to feeling.”[8]
Through vivisection, Wells attempts to give animals a voice and decries the unwarranted cruelties bestowed upon animals. While Dr. Moreau operates on a puma, the animal cries out in ireful agony. Prendick describes the scene:
The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.[9]
3
Ireful Agony: The Cry of the Cat
Wells asserts that vivisection continues to exist because animals do not have a “voice,” or rather, humans choose to ignore an animal’s voice. It is only when an animal’s pain becomes audible that humans choose to listen. The puma becomes a representation of all the animals that have suffered under the vindictive hands of man: “It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice.”[10] Prendick’s failure to stop Moreau’s operation on the puma, despite its cries of agony, are an admonition to the apathy of the human race.
For Moreau, each animals’ cries of anguish feed his hubris. Vivisection allows Moreau to turn his subjects’ pain into his power. In fact, the laboratory where Moreau performs vivisection is aptly named the “House of Pain” by the experimental animals. When Prendick encounters the man-animal hybrids, they eerily chant:
His is the House of Pain.
His is the Hand that makes.
His is the Hand that wounds.[11]
Moreau’s “House of Pain” becomes a metaphorical Auschwitz for animals. Through this motif, Wells succeeds in animalizing the cruel nature of man.
4
Auschwitz for Animals: The problems that stem from the co-existence of animals and humans result from racist views of this “sub-human” species. Therefore, it would not be impertinent to suggest that Dr. Moreau’s animal experimentation parallels the bigoted cruelties seen at Nazi concentration camps.
Part II: Blurring the Boundary Between Man and Beast
“In this way I became one among the Beast People in the Island of Doctor Moreau.” [12]
—The Island of Dr. Moreau
5
Amalgamation of Man and Beast: Dr. Moreau’s harrowing experiments sought to cut up animals until they resembled human form.
Wells argues that no matter how much Moreau may operate on creatures, animals are by nature animals, not men: “The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals, humanized animals,—triumphs of vivisection.”[13] However, Wells condones the unnecessary cruelties that arise from the fact that animals may not be equivalent to humans.
The “Beast Folk,” or “Beast Men,” are animals who have undergone vivisection to become slightly more human. The Beast Men in Wells’ novel carry some semblance of humanity, while still retaining their bestial façade. They are also endowed with the ability to feel, the gift of speech, and the rudimentary capacity to reason. Prendick grapples with the idea of these animal-man hybrids, these (m)animals. Upon visiting the numerous Beast Men of the island, Prendick relates, “They may have at once been animals. But I never before saw an animal trying to think.”[14] Though he realizes their animalistic tendencies, he also sees them demonstrate humanistic attributes. These beings are capable of benevolence, altruism, empathy—attributes absent in the merciless Dr. Moreau.
Wells notes that the roots of racism arise from a strict dichotomy between two opposing factions. In the case of “animal racism,” the dividing line is drawn between “human animals” and “nonhuman animals.” The picture below provides commentary on this phenomenon. In the photo below, the majestic jungle cat and the malignant man are amalgamated into one being. Yet there is still a discernable divide between the two fused faces. There is a constant continuum that exists between man and beast. The less you notice the man, the more he becomes the animal. Contrariwise, the less you notice the animal, the more it becomes the man.
6
”The less you notice the man/animal, the more he/it becomes the animal/man.”
Throughout the novel, Moreau refers to the Beast Men as “mockeries,” “travesties,” and “grotesque caricatures”[15] of humanity. The irony of his degradations is that he is no better than the “beasts” he operates on. Wells challenges preconceived Victorian-era distinctions between man and beast. The commonplace belief during the time Wells’ novel was written was that intelligence separated man and beast. Wells challenges this idea by giving the Beast Men humanistic traits, depleting Moreau of his humanistic qualities, and asserting that it is the ability to feel—not intelligence—that separates men from animals. The Beast Men suffer immensely at the hands of their maker; Moreau obviously feels no remorse for vivisecting animals, and he thereby renounces any semblance of humanity.
The Beast Men are animals who have undergone vivisection to become slightly more human. The humans, like Dr. Moreau, carry out these hideous experiments to become slightly more animalistic. Beast Men are animals with the hint of man; Dr. Moreau, in particular, is a man with the hint of a beast. His barbaric nature makes him no better than the animals that suffer under his surgical blade.
Though Wells places importance on distinguishing the differences between man and beast, the novel compellingly shows that no humanity is possible without the “mark of the beast.” The Beast Men’s transformations, from animality to humanity and back again, “graphically demonstrate the unbroken continuity between the human and animal estates.”[16] It is the animalistic tendencies that make the beasts human:
It may seem a strange contradiction in me,—I cannot explain the fact,—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realized again the fact of its humanity.[17]
2 Looking into that animal’s eyes was like looking at a window into my own soul.
Fear. Pain. Confusion. There was nothing I did not see there that made me doubt its humanity.
Furthermore, in two parallel chapters entitled “The Crying of the Puma” and “The Crying of the Man,” Prendick hears the sounds of pain. He first mistakes the cry for an “animal ululation” and then interprets the second cry as the “articulate sobbing of a human being.”[18] But it is the same pain and the same voice. This continuity of anguish “undermines Moreau’s dream of escaping the beastly flesh.”[19] Prendick cannot differentiate the cry of the beast from the cry of the man. They are one in the same. This syllogistic analogy provides insight into Wells’ message that man and beast are derivatives of each other. We share common physiological traits, common emotions, and common rights to life.
When Prendick is cast among the animals of the island, he meets the “Sayer of the Law,” who recites the Beast Man creed:
Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?[20]
7
Are we not Men? Moreau’s experiments defy the laws of
nature by blurring the lines between animal and man.
Prendick becomes appalled as the other Beast Men eerily recite this incantation in unison. “The Law,” a prevalent motif in the novel, was written by Moreau and taught to his man-animal hybrids. Moreau’s attempts to instill “The Law” in his creations demonstrate his struggle to make the Beast Men as human as possible by confining them to certain societal conventions and moral dicta that distinguish man from animals. The epistrophe of, “Are we not Men?” is ironic because Wells does not directly answer the question in his novel. The message that Wells intends to impart to the reader at the end of the novel “deals with the futility of trying to defy the laws of nature – that is, of trying to transform a savage beast into a civilized human being. This is because ‘the deep-seated, ever rebellious cravings of their animal natures’ override the teachings that Moreau instills in them concerning civility.”[21]
However, as Prendick spends more time with the Beast Men, he finds it difficult to distinguish the differences between man and beast:
I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things that had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me…I would see one of the bovine creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself trying hard to recall how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labors.[22]
This juxtaposition of “bovine creatures” and “human yokels” demonstrates shared traits regarding their movement, their work ethic, and their nature. Prendick suggests that animals and humans are seemingly alike.
The Island of Dr. Moreau imminently breaches the boundary between man and beast. Wells provides a ceaseless dialectic on the intermingling characteristics between these two diametric forces.
Part III: Fall of the House of Pain & Righteous Insurrection
“ ‘He is dead, he is dead, the Master is dead,’ said the voice of the Ape Man
to the right of me. ‘The House of Pain—there is no House of Pain.’ ”[23]
—The Island of Dr. Moreau
8
Fall of the House of Pain
By the end of The Island of Dr. Moreau, the animals ensue in righteous insurrection by rebelling against their Creator. The puma that Prendick heard cry in anguish is the murderer that exacts revenge against Moreau. Moreau dies a poetically ironic death. He spent his life butchering, vivisecting, and mutilating animals. And in his death, his corpse, “battered in by the fetters of the puma”[24] becomes just as raw, bloody, and maimed as the bodies of his vivisected animals. In a twisted turn of fate, the hand with which he operated on his victims is “almost severed at the wrist” by the violence and vengeance of the Beast Men.
Afterwards, the other Beast Men mutiny and revert to their former animalistic natures, yet traces of their humanity still remain, which surprises Prendick:
They were reverting, and reverting very rapidly…. Of course these creatures did not decline into…ordinary bears, wolves, tigers, oxen, swine, and apes. There was still something strange about each…And the dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a pitiful attempt to walk erect.[25]
Wells continues to blur the boundaries between man and beast. The passage above demonstrates the “dwindling shreds of humanity” that still taint Dr. Moreau’s vivisection experiments.
Through an ingenious role reversal, Wells not only bestows animals with traces of humanity, but also provides humans with tidbits of animalistic rapacity: “I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then that.”[26] When Prendick leaves Dr. Moreau’s island and returns to civilization in London, Prendick is haunted by his experiences. Delusions of civilization reverting into animalistic savagery follow him throughout London:
I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me, furtive craving men glance jealously at me…it seemed that the preacher gibbered Big Thinks even as the Ape Man had done; or into some library, and there the intent faces over the books seemed but patient creatures waiting for prey….it seemed that I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal.[27]
The humans Prendick describes share some of the bestial traits of Moreau’s experiments. The people of the city are described as “prowling…furtive…creatures.” Wells compares humans to animals, to lower life forms. Wells poses the rhetorical situation of man reverting into animal form, an unconventional notion unheard of in the Darwinian age of the Victorian-era.
Exploration of The Island of Dr. Moreau, allows readers to think about the relationship between humans and animals in a different perspective. These two seemingly diametric entities are inseparable: Wells argues that animals have humanistic traits, while the “mark of the beast” is also prevalent in humans; the beast within man is inescapable. In a paradoxical stroke of literary ingenuity, H.G. Wells turns the tables on the preconceived Victorian-era distinction between man and beast.
WORD COUNT (WITH QUOTES): 2,618 words
WORD COUNT (WITHOUT QUOTES): 1,886 words
Media Cited:
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFLF-gh4C2M
2. http://www.heathersanimations.com/eye.html
Illustrations Cited:
1. Vivisection Illustration: http://terresacree.org/concentr.htm
2. Monkey Vivisection: http://www.animal-holocaust.net/vivisection.html
3. Cry of the Cat: http://h3llzcupcake.deviantart.com/art/Scream-91232170
4. Concentration Camp Collage: http://www.animal-holocaust.net/vivisection.html& http://www.trumanlibrary.org/photographs/displayimage.php?pointer=3864
5. Moreau Illustration I: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seriykotik/206402078/
6. Man vs. Beast: http://www.deviantart.com/
7. Moreau Illustration II: http://theabones.deviantart.com/art/Human-Animal-41702564
8. House of Pain: http://theabones.deviantart.com/art/we-are-coming-to-terms-108750965
[1] H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Dover Thrift Editions, (New York: Dover Publications, 1996), 53.
[2] “Vivisection,” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
[3] Wells, 6.
[4] Wells, 53.
[5] Wells, 56.
[6] Wells, 54.
[7] Elana Gomel, “From Dr. Moreau to Dr. Mengele: The Biological Sublime”, Poetics Today 20, no. 1 (2000), 393-421.
[8] Coral Lansbury, From the Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 73.
[9] Wells, 26.
[10] Wells, 26.
[11] Wells, 43.
[12] Wells, 92.
[13] Wells, 52.
[14] Wells, 51.
[15] Wells, 44.
[16] Gomel, 399.
[17] Wells, 72.
[18] Gomel, 410.
[19] Gomel, 411.
[20] Wells, 43.
[21] Gomel, 415.
[22] Wells, 63-64.
[23] Wells, 94.
[24] Wells, 81.
[25] Wells, 96-98.
[26] Wells, 102.
[27] Wells, 103.
Kelsi said,
February 23, 2009 at 9:23 pm
I love Comptine d’un autre été and yann tiersen. I spent an entire summer learning how to play this song.
2010 in Review « Circumspect Speculation said,
January 2, 2011 at 3:01 pm
[...] “Exploring the Island of Dr. Moreau” February 2009 1 comment Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)#1 Page and Top 3 Posts In 2009RebootAdam’s Blog on Helath Care Issue LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]