The Island of Doctor Moreau is a story by HG Wells chronicling a mad scientist’s attempt to cross-stitch animals together into humanoid forms by pushing the limits of surgery and hypnosis. The story is told from the perspective of a man, Edward Prendick, who was rescued from a shipwreck by Moreau’s sole human assistant, Montgomery. Upon arriving on the island, Prendick experiences moral outrage at Dr. Moreau’s experiments, vacillating between disgust and empathy for Dr. Moreau’s creations.While Prendick ultimately succeeds in making his way back to England from the tortured island, he is haunted by his experience and cannot escape the ever present sensation that Dr. Moreau’s island of eerie humanoid animals is not a fantasy land completely detached from human activities – rather, it is merely an inversion of life in the real world. While Moreau’s creations attempt to draw the humanity out of animals, the world of polite society is merely a thin façade of repression which masks the animalistic impulses lurking behind the logical explanations we give everyday human behavior.
An important historical note mentioned in the book’s introduction is that Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was freshly controversial scientific theory at the time Wells wrote “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Thus, Wells was likely influenced by humanity’s astonishment at the (now popularized) suggestion that people are merely sophisticated apes. This fact likely explains Wells’s fascination with the relationship between the human and the animal. But what intrigues me is less the biological identity of humans, and more the biological basis for our motivations and behavior. At the end the story, Prendick is slow to reintegrate into society, constantly seeing innumerable parallels between the societies of humans and the organized society of Dr. Moreau’s creations. If Dr. Moreau’s island is really a metaphor for the grotesque underbelly of human societies, what was Wells’s ultimate social commentary? Three themes jumped out during my first read-through: pain and pleasure as objects worthy of concern; the relationship between law, instinct, and behavior; and Prendick’s shifting attitudes towards the creations.
To begin with the question of pain and pleasure, Dr. Moreau explains his thoughts on the matter when Prendick presses him for an ethical defense of his live animal experimentation. Moreau explains that pain and pleasure are vestigial sensations to an advanced organism, and he illustrates his commitment to this idea by stabbing himself in the thigh without flinching. Hence, from Moreau’s perspective, the pain he inflicts on his subjects is inconsequential, either because he is hoping to elevate them to a level of awareness where they will recognize the insignificance of pain, or because he is claiming to be so beyond the sensations of pain and pleasure that he is unable to empathize with the animals any longer.
Either way, Moreau’s description of his motivations betrays his supposed superiority. Moreau describes his motivation for grotesque vivisection as an ineffable drive to continually push the boundaries of scientific knowledge. Moreau’s illustration of the “colourless” ecstasy of continued research reveals the blurring point between simple pleasures and intellectual pursuits, insofar as he seems to continue his research merely for the sake of stimulating some abstract, higher-level pleasure that he gets from resolving biological mysteries. From this perspective, Moreau is in fact more a slave to animalistic pleasure impulses than the creatures he creates. Moreau’s creations have simple and easily manipulated senses of justice and empathy, yet still exhibit concern for the welfare of others. Moreau is satisfied with intellectual masturbation, even at the price of inflicting unspeakable extremes of suffering on his subjects.
Moreau’s descriptions of his motivations demonstrate the second, and most significant, theme of the story: humans are subject to drives and impulses that we have no control over, much in the same way that animals are subject to hard-wired drives. We’re intelligent, clever, and adaptive on an entirely different level from great apes and dolphins (the second most intelligent beings on the planet) but we’re ultimately still driven by dreams, wants, needs, and even partly by instincts. This idea buts against German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s construction of the human mind. He imagined that the mind was irreducible to the brain, hypothesizing our bodies were merely physical vessels remote controlled by our metaphysical minds. But more contemporary neuroscientific research supports Wells’s implicit view on the mind. Dr. Antonio Damasio of UCLA argues that even the most complex human desires, such as the inclination to paint a beautiful picture or befriend someone who shares your interest in military history, are all derivatives of the basic biological impulse to maintain homeostasis. For Wells, the human mind is superior to, but ultimately still resembles, the animal mind, in that our thoughts are populated by alien desires that we attempt to inhibit via law. But law can only take us so far.
To illustrate Wells’s commitment to this idea, Prendick observes the rudimentary social and legal structures concocted by Moreau’s creations. One noteworthy creature, the hairy silver beast, is the “sayer of the law.” He leads long, ritualistic chants that demarcate the boundaries of acceptable behavior by the creations. The chants include commands such as walking upright, drinking water properly (not lapping it up), and refraining from eating meat. At some point, it is revealed that Moreau has strategically implanted these rules within the psyches of the creations in order to guarantee internal regulation of their behavior. Moreau doesn’t want them to develop a taste for blood. Moreau doesn’t want them to revert back to their animalistic habits. Moreau doesn’t want them to question his authority. Therefore, he strategically incepted each of them with ideas that would guarantee they not only understood the rules he so desired, but feared extreme suffering (the return to the house of pain) should they violate the law.
Prendick’s first encounter with the complete set of creations involves him observing the cult-like synchronized regurgitation of the law with all of the different creatures chanting together. Wells juxtaposes Prendick’s horror at the deformity of the creatures with the sophisticated language they utilize and concepts they are expressing. Wells shows us an old model of human law in the guise of animal law – simple demands issued by a king, complied with by subjects, backed by the threat of violence. Such was the way of the old sovereigns.
However, Moreau warns Prendick that all of his creations slowly revert to beasts as time progresses. This is a metaphor for the breakdown in a system of law that demands unrealistic acquiescence from its subjects – a system that demands its subjects rid themselves of impulses and desires that are inherent parts of who they are. The system clearly fails for two creatures, the pig man and the leopard man, who revert to eating meat despite the law. And the fragility of the system is revealed whenever the creatures see Prendick get hurt and later when they see Moreau die. Perhaps the lesson here applies equally to, for example, abstinence-only programs, which historically produce higher levels of teen pregnancy (http://mic.com/articles/98886/the-states-with-the-highest-teenage-birth-rates-have-one-thing-in-common). The attempt to simply command that people not express the very human urges to express their sexuality with one another outright fails for some, and ends up collapsing when others realize that their promiscuous peers aren’t riddled with the STDs their simplistic sex ed programs threatened them with. This is because humans haven’t evolved into transcendent, rational minds that float around in space and remote control our bodies. We are flesh and blood beings, fundamentally embodied, and substantially influenced by desires and impulses that are fundamentally biological in origin.
In the closing pages of the book, Prendick has returned to England, but is haunted with images of anthropomorphic animals superimposed over human figures on the streets. Perhaps this is Wells’s attempt to make explicit that the happenings on the island were not merely commentary on animal experimentation, but were in fact commentary on the very nature of human social organization. Prendick is anxious at the possibility of his peers bursting from their human skin and revealing themselves in all their hedonistic glory. However, the last scene is a very interesting one. Wells writes (from the perspective of Prendick):
“There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and hope. I hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.”
I don’t know what Wells intended with this ending. I don’t know why hope was Prendick’s final thought, nor what the stars have to do with that. But I have an interpretation that pleases me. Perhaps Prendick realizes the true source of his discomfort came from his attempt to render his friends, family, and neighbors predictable, to control them through the law. It’s not our animal origins that scare him – it’s that we can’t escape our animality. This is why he is not disgusted with animals that walk by, yet is disgusted by the half-animal half-human creatures on the island, as they reflect Prendick’s own animality to him. Yet, staring into the sky, it is clear that our attempts at control are ultimately fruitless, as we are insignificant specks in comparison with the vastness of the universe. I don’t know exactly what Prendick hopes for, but I do believe that recognizing our smallness in the universe could provide him with precisely the solace he seeks. Moreau wanted to know all, and to control all. Perhaps the drive for knowledge and the drive for control are inherently wedded to one another, and letting oneself go in a moment of unknowable rapture is a necessary part of connecting with something that transcends our physical bodies.
P.S. I think my favorite phrase in the book was when Moreau described his desire as the desire to test the plasticity of the organism. What an awesome concept… testing the limits of the body to see how much we can change.
HighDigger 