The Island of Doctor Moreau

by H. G. Wells, 1896

Where to begin?

Firstly, I have to ask your opinions about the book:

• How many of you had read it previously?
• For those to whom it was new, what did you think?
• For all of you, what do you see as the driving forces behind the text?
• Where do you see Wells as standing on these issues?
• If you had to write a critical review on this topic (which you don’t, lucky you!), what would you choose as a central point?

But to go on… the issues I see are, among others to follow, the sense of impending doom, expressed obliquely in Moreau, and explicitly in Yeats

Alex MacDonald presents an interesting (if not very intellectually compelling) discussion of the parallels between Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and Wells’s Moreau.

The parallels can be catalogued as follows:

• Prendick comments on Moreau’s “passionate intensity” on page 107.
• The sense of events working like a “vast pitiless Mechanism, [the characters …] torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels” (Wells 145-46), leading inexorably towards the anarchy that reigns at the climax of the text, is similarly present in Yeats’s poem: the falcon “turning and turning in the widening gyre,” who, like the best people, “cannot hear the falconer.”
• “Their reversion to bestiality suggests Yeats’s beast and the disorder it heralds (MacDonald 40-41).
• Prendick, of course, in his ethical confusion, “lacks all conviction,” and we have seen Moreau “fill with passionate intensity” on more than one occasion.

MacDonald attempts to establish some causality in the relationship, but I think it can be seen far more as coincidence than influence: both express the zeitgeist or as Wells would have it, weltgeist, of the fin de siècle.

To continue with issues in the text… we find obvious reference to

• Vivisection (and by extension eugenics)
• science vs belief
• law vs anarchy
• nature vs artifice
• the Gothic
• but it all begins with Darwin…

Charles Darwin, 1809-1882

It is difficult to know what to say about Charles Darwin and his discoveries, as the theories contained in his publication are now so much a part of our consensus reality.  Few today, at least in this academic and intellectual space, hold staunchly to Creationism or even Intelligent Design as the foundations of the human species.

But in the mid-1800s, Creationism was the one and true belief.

After his Journey of the Beagle (1839, 1845), Darwin spent further years finessing his theory of “natural selection,” which differed from the Herbert Spencer’s previously asserted social theory of “the survival of the fittest” (Wells 200) in that the former was selection through the process of death, while Darwin’s theory posited selection through the active process of selection (in preference of mate, for example; one can see where this may go).

• The Origin of Species (1859)
• The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)
• The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)

Thomas Huxley, 1825-1895

Huxley, although not a name as familiar to the general populace, is equally responsible for our modern common knowledge of the evolutionary process.

Where Darwin implied but did not state the association between the primates and mankind, Huxley did.

He is also responsible for the theory, now accepted, that birds evolved from small carnivourous flying dinosaurs.  And a number of other paleontological and evolutionary discoveries…

Some of his work is premised on the discovery that the fœtuses of animals are indistinguishable until a certain period of gestation, and that the closer the species are biologically, the later the date of positive differentiation.

Suffice it to say that through Wells’s difficult early career, Huxley was the mentor who enabled him in his research, essentially giving us the man who produced a number of ideologically challenging texts, helping to shape the course of modern thought.

H. G. Wells, 1866-1946

This will take a little longer, but I don’t want to dwell too long on biography, when the novel awaits…

Wells was from a relatively poor family, cast on relatively hard times. He was apprenticed to a draper’s shop—a respectable career—but lasted only 2 of his 4 years, whereafter he earned a scholarship to the newly established Normal School of Science (founder and headmaster: T. H. Huxley) in London.

Wells’s sojourn under Huxley was monumentally influential, but he nonetheless failed out in third year, not being as interested in geology as in other subjects, including natural philosophy and physiology; he also became a socialist as well as editor of the school journal (until forced to quit for cutting classes).

At this point, he suffered an injury that caused hemorrhaging of the lungs; diagnosed as consumptive, he took physical and intellectual refuge in the library of the manor house where his mother worked as head housekeeper.  While not TB, his illness was recurring for the next decade or so of his life.

He eventually landed a post as Science teacher at a prestigious boys’ day school, and from there studied and became a professor at a “Tutorial College” preparing students for University of London entrance.

The Island of Dr. Moreau

• What is Wells doing?
• Where does Wells stand?
• What did the text say to contemporary readers?
• What does it say to us?

Vivisection

“Both images of Moreau—the dedicated researcher and the sadistic torturer of animals—would have been familiar to Wells’s audience a characteristic of the rhetorical positions of the opposing sides in the late-Victorian debate over vivisection. It is by playing both sides of this controversy against each other that Wells contructs his double-image of Moreau and gives some dark twists to Darwinian theory.  In this story, pain inflicted in animals by vivisection combines readily with the animal descent of the human species as a source of horror.” (Harris 100)

Moreau based partially on Dr. Claude Bernard, a French physiologist whose cruel practices were revealed by a British doctor, George Hoggan, in 1875: “After his denunciation by Hoggan, the anti-vivisection movement saw Bernard as the arch-vivisectionist” (Harris 102).

Harris points out that Bernard was French, a nation with did not exhibit the fanatical affection towards its canine pets that the British did, and that “if the object of this attack had been a British scientist, he might well have found it convenient to leave the country” as Moreau did. (Harris 102)

The Cruelty to Animals Act was passed in 1876, but many scientists, like Moreau, flouted the law.

Where Wells’s text is unquestionably about vivisection, it is not as obviously about eugenics, but his combination of Darwinist ideas and recourse to the vivisection debate leads to a number of critics perceiving the connection between the text and the topic of eugenics that flourished during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“the literature of eugenics does not necessarily derive its effect from what the author set out to do, but from what others wanted it to do.” (Sinclair 241)

Science vs belief

The vivisection debate was, in many critics’ opinions, an effective catalyst for the underlying debate between science and belief: “As Richard D. French points out […] the real issues in this controversy ‘revolved around the place of science and scientists in Victorian culture’ (348). The question was not so much one of scientific method as of cultural dominance—defined most sharply by the emergence of T. H. Huxley as the aggressive statesman and prophet of science.” (Harris 103)

Nature vs artifice

One of the issues that arises obliquely from the Darwinian debate, and is illuminated slightly through consideration of Dr. Moreau, is the schism between nature and artifice.

Thornton points out that “Decadence literature is a literature of failure: of a failure to provide a literary synthesis for the disintegration of life…” (188).  It is “a literature of failure, and a record of a wistful mood of inadequacy in confronting man’s impermanence in a world of appearances (190).

We see this failure explicitly expressed in Moreau, in a psychic form; Prendick is an exemplar of this “wistful mood of inadequacy” in both his physical activity and his psychic response to Moreau and his Beast People.

John M. Munro further notes in 1970 that “English Decadence, as defined by its contemporaries, was concerned with the exploration of abnormal psychology…”; to this, Wells adheres.  But Munro continues, “…it professed to be concerned with Beauty, but with a beauty so bizarre and unconventional that one might feel more justified in calling it ugliness” (qtd. in Thornton 190).

While it would be difficult to consider The Island of Doctor Moreau as expressing any tendency towards æstheticism, the “passionate intensity” Moreau holds for his science, his “art” of creation, can be seen as parallel to the Decadent tendency to excess, to intentionally shock the complacent sensibility of the status quo (as Gautier put it in 1832, épater les bourgeois).

As Lorraine McMullen points out, “a further characteristic of Decadence is the desire to shock. The æsthetic separation of art from moral and social consideration was extended to become a rebellion against middle class morality and hypocrisy” (59).

Lorraine McMullen further asserts that “[o]ne of the main characteristics of Decadence is a desire to improve upon nature; from this the cult of the artificial developed” (57).

Moreau expresses this Decadent perception of art as superior to nature, earlier expressed so succinctly by Charles Baudelaire (1851): “Evil is done effortlessly and naturally; good is always the product of art” (qtd. in McMullen 55).

While McMullen is focusing on the French impetus for British Decadence (hence the earlier dates), and subsequently British Decadent poetry, it is obvious how Moreau fits within this paradigm.

The Gothic

Typical elements of the gothic include

• “Setting in a castle
• An atmosphere of mystery and suspense
• An ancient prophecy
• Omens, portents, visions
• Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events
• High, even overwrought emotion
• Women in distress
• Women threatened by a powerful, impulsive, tyrannical male
• The metonymy of gloom and horror”

Other, more useful indicators of the gothic are such notions as

• Freud’s unheimlich (“unhomely,” or uncanny), which creates a cognizant dissonance: the self recognized in that which is unrecognizable, the unfamiliar recognized as somehow familiar (interestingly, Ernst Jentsch first coined the term in 1906, and it wasn’t until 1919 that Freud wrote his well-known essay on the topic; regardless of nomenclature, it is a narrative element used throughout history).
• Emotional (especially sexual) repression in the characters
• Both terror and horror

A list of gothic novels of the 1880s and 1890s (from Wikipedia) follows:

• “The 1880s, saw the revival of the Gothic as a powerful literary form allied to “fin de siecle” decadence, which fictionalized contemporary fears like ethical degeneration and questioned the social structures of the time. Classic works of this Urban Gothic include
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
• Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
• George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894)
• Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898)
• and […Bram Stoker[’s…] Dracula (1897)”

We must include in this list, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), although, as Mason Harris points out, of Wells’s works, “[o]nly The Island of Dr. Moreau, where science fails, belongs entirely to the Gothic genre” (99).

So what is it that constitutes the gothic in Moreau?

As in the Canadian gothic, the Imperial gothic projects the insecurities and fears of society on an “otherwhere”: the land and nature in Canadian literature; the island jungle and the laboratory of Dr. Moreau in Wells’s text.

Similarly, “Wells’s choice of vivisection to generate gothic horror endows the story with a deep ambivalence towards science and contributes much to the mood of anxious uncertainty in which it ends. […] Moreau’s uncanniness arises from a liminal ambiguity which renders him permanently mysterious” (Harris 99).

And Wells’s uncanny parallels Mary Shelley’s and Henry James’s: “Both Frankenstein and Moreau reject their creations as revoltingly physical and both resist acknowledgement of the conflicted consciousness which their creatures develop, preferring to dismiss them as unacceptable lumps of matter.” (Harris 107)

Similarly, “[l]ike Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, this is a story where uncertainly itself becomes the final horror” (Harris 109).

Satisfying the definition of gothic horror, Moreau’s island is “infect[ed…] with a painful liminality: the Beast People alternate between animal and human, Moreau between the images of dedicated researcher and wanton sadist, while Prendick reacts to the these discontinuities with conflicting responses and points of view which he can never resolve into a coherent consciousness. […] the theory of evolution becomes both a fact taken for granted in the story and a Gothic secret the implications of which can never be openly acknowledged” (Harris 110).

“Prendick fulfils the Gothic role of narrator as passive victim in the tradition of such distressed narrators as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and James Hogg’s Robert Wringham [sic: Wringhim].  As with them, we cannot trust his fragmented vision at the end.” (Harris 110)

The Way of All Flesh

What falls out of all this? Where (according to Wells’s text) is humanity headed?

The difference between literature with a social agenda and literature which refuses to articulate a specific ideological position:

“Literature is able frequently, if not habitually, to move into areas that are alternative to what is expressed in public discourse. In so doing it acts as a type of social fantasy as it explores through the realm of the imagination those things that might happen. This area of discussion therefore concerns a different type of imaginary in which the imagination indeed plays a part, but does so in order to ‘play,’ that is, to consider a range of possibilities, without actual engagement in any specific point of view. This means that literature comes to provide what the psychoanalyst Winnicott (1953) would have termed a ‘transitional space’.” (Sinclair 240-41)

Well’s novel, a novel of the age of transition, refuses to engage in any specific position in the scientific debates it employs.  We are left with an uncertainly regarding Wells’s own view both of his creation and his world: the proponent of vivisection has created a work which suggests the horrors possible through vivisection.

Harris suggests “that in composing this Gothic science-fiction story Wells found the temptation to evoke the horrors of vivisection too strong to resist, and that in doing so he undermined the authority of science more thoroughly than he intended, thus depriving himself of his own basis for ‘a reasoned attitude towards life’” (101).

But did he? I agree, rather, with Ehlam, Mel-Lynda, and Lindsay, that in showing Moreau’s excesses, Wells articulates the limits beyond which we must not go.

Wells does not seem to support either science or religion in his novel—as Harris says, “Wells, a disciple of Huxley, was throughout his career an ardent supporter of the scientific world-view, except, it seems in The Island of Doctor Moreau, where he presents a savage parody of religion but at the same time renders suspect the attitudes of the new scientific elite who opposed religious belief and sought to replace it with a higher reason” (104).

But this does not negate the possibility of our being correct.

And how does Moreau fit in our current worldview? Christine Fergusson notes that “Moreau is a novel whose time has now come.  Long the least studied and taught of Wells’ early scientific romances, it has earned new prominence in recent years due to increased public fascination in the new issues of cloning and genetic modification that its plot anticipates…” (116).

Works Consulted

Harris, Mason.  “Vivisection, the Culture of Science, and Intellectual Uncertainty in The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Gothic Studies 4.2 (2002): 99-115.  Print.

Fergusson, Christine.  “The Law and the Larynx.” In Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue.  Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.  105-30.  Print.

MacDonald, Alex. “’Passionate Intensity’’ in Wells’s ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ and Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’: Constructing an Echo.” ANQ 9.4 (1996): 40-45.  Print.

Sinclair, Alison. “Social imaginaries: the literature of eugenics.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 39 (2008): 240–46.  Print.

Thornton, R. K. R. The Decadent Dilemma. London: Arnold, 1983.  Print.

Wells, H. G. The Island of Doctor Moreau.  1896.  Ed. Mason Harris.  Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009.  Print.