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H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau is one of those books that, once read, is rarely forgotten. Jorge Luis Borges called it an 'atrocious miracle,' and made large claims for it. Speaking of Wells’s early tales – The Island of Doctor Moreau among them – he said, 'I think they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.'
This has proved true, if film may be considered a language unto itself. The Island of Doctor Moreau has inspired three films – two of them quite bad – and doubtless few who saw them remembered that it was Wells who authored the book. The story has taken on a life of its own, and, like the offspring of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, has acquired attributes and meanings not present in the original. Moreau himself, in his filmic incarnations, has drifted towards the type of the Mad Scientist, or the Peculiar Genetic Engineer, or the Tyrant-in-training, bent on taking over the world; whereas Wells’s Moreau is certainly not mad, and is a mere vivisectionist, and has no ambitions to take over anything whatsoever.
Borges’s use of the word 'fable' is suggestive, for – despite the realistically-rendered details of its surface – the book is certainly not a novel, if by that we mean a prose narrative dealing with observable social life. 'Fable' points to a certain folkloric quality that lurks in the pattern of this curious work, as animal faces may lurk in the fronds and flowers of an Aubrey Beardsley design. The term may also indicate a lie – something fabulous or invented, as opposed to that which demonstrably exists – and employed this way it is quite apt, as no man ever did or ever will turn animals into human beings by cutting them up and sewing them together again. In its commonest sense, a fable is a tale – like those of Aesop – meant to convey some useful lesson. But what is that useful lesson? It is certainly not spelled out by Wells.
'Work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is all things for all men,' says Borges, '… and it must be ambiguous in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author; he must appear to be ignorant of all symbolism. Wells displayed that lucid innocence in his first fantastic exercises, which are to me the most admirable part of his admirable work. Borges carefully did not say that Wells employed no symbolism: only that he appeared to be ignorant of doing so.
Here follows what I hope will be an equally modest attempt to probe beneath the appearance, to examine the infinite and plastic ambiguity, to touch on the symbolism that Wells may or may not have employed deliberately, and to try to discover what the useful lesson – if there is one – might be.
Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Doctor Moreau
1. Elois and Morlocks
The Island of Doctor Moreau was published in 1896, when H.G. Wells was only thirty years old. It followed The Time Machine, which had appeared the year before, and was to be followed two years later by The War of the Worlds, this being the book that established Wells as a force to be reckoned with at a mere thirty-two years of age.
To some of literature’s more gentlemanly practitioners – those, for instance, who had inherited money, and didn’t have to make it by scribbling – Wells must have seemed like a puffed-up little counter-jumper, and a challenging one at that, because he was bright. He’d come up the hard way. In the stratified English social world of the time, he was neither working-class nor top crust. His father was an unsuccessful tradesman; he himself apprenticed with a draper for two years before wending his way, via school-teaching and a scholarship, to the Normal School of Science. Here he studied under Darwin’s famous apologist, Thomas Henry Huxley. He graduated with a first-class degree, but he’d been seriously injured by one of the students while teaching, an event that put him off school-mastering. It was after this that he turned to writing.
The Time Traveller in The Time Machine – written just before The Island of Doctor Moreau – finds that human beings in the future have split into two distinct races. The Eloi are pretty as butterflies, but useless; the grim and ugly Morlocks live underground, make everything, and come out at night to devour the Eloi, whose needs they also supply. The upper classes, in other words, have become a bevy of Upper Class Twitterers and have lost the ability to fend for themselves, and the working classes have become vicious and cannibalistic.
Wells was neither an Eloi nor a Morlock. He must have felt he represented a third way, a rational being who had climbed up the ladder through ability alone, without partaking of the foolishness and impracticality of the social strata above his nor of the brutish crudeness of those below. But what about Prendick, the narrator of The Island of Doctor Moreau? He’s been pootling idly about the world, for his own diversion we assume, when he’s shipwrecked. The ship is called the Lady Vain, surely a comment on the snooty aristocracy. Prendick himself is a 'private gentleman' (p. 3) who doesn’t have to work for a living, and, though he – like Wells – has studied with Huxley, he has done so not out of necessity but out of dilettantish boredom – 'as a relief from the dulness of (his) comfortable independence.' (p. 9). Prendick, though not quite as helpless as a full-fledged Eloi, is well on the path to becoming one. Thus his hysteria, his lassitude, his moping, his ineffectual attempts at fair play, and his lack of common sense – he can’t figure out how to make a raft because he’s never done 'any carpentry or suchlike work' in his life, (p. 122) and when he does manage to patch something together, he’s situated it too far from the sea and it falls apart when he’s dragging it. Although Prendick is not a complete waste of time – if he were, he wouldn’t be able to hold our attention while he tells his story – he’s nonetheless in the same general league as the weak-chinned curate in the later War of the Worlds, that helpless and drivelling 'spoiled child of life'.
His name – Prendick – is suggestive of 'thick' coupled with 'prig,' this last a thing he is explicitly called (p.105). To those versed in legal lore, it could suggest 'prender,' a term for something you are empowered to take without it having been offered. But it more nearly suggests 'prentice,' a word that would have been floating close to the top of Wells’s semi-consciousness, due to his own stint as an apprentice. Now it’s the upper-class turn at apprenticeship! Time for one of them to undergo a little degradation and learn a thing or two. But what?
2. Signs of the Times
The Island of Doctor Moreau comes not only midway in Wells’s most fertile period of fantastic inventiveness; it also comes during such a period in English literary history. Adventure romance had taken off with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in 1882, and Rider Haggard had done him one better with She, in 1887. This latter coupled straight adventure – shipwreck, tramps through dangerous swamps and nasty shrubbery, encounters with bloody-minded savages, fun in steep ravines and dim grottos – with a big dollop of weirdness carried over from earlier Gothic traditions, done up this time in a package labelled 'Not Supernatural'. The excessive powers of 'She' are ascribed, not to a close encounter with a vampire or god, but to a dip in a revolving pillar of fire, no more supernatural than lightning. 'She' gets her powers from Nature.
It’s from this blend – the grotesque and the natural – that Wells took his cue. An adventure story that would once have featured battles with fantastic monsters – dragons, gorgons, hydras – keeps the exotic scenery, but the monsters have been produced by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian England as the bright, new, shiny salvation of mankind: Science.
The other blend that proved so irresistible to readers was one that was developed much earlier, and to singular advantage, by Jonathan Swift: a plain, forthright style in the service of incredible events. Poe, that master of the uncanny, piles on the adjectives to create 'atmosphere'; Wells, on the other hand, follows R.L. Stevenson and anticipates Hemingway in his terse, almost journalistic approach, usually the hallmark of the ultra-realists. The War of the Worlds shows Wells employing this combination to best effect – we think we’re reading a series of news reports and eyewitness accounts – but he’s already honing it in The Island of Doctor Moreau. A tale told so matter-of-factly and with such an eye to solid detail surely cannot be – we feel – either an invention or an hallucination.
3. Scientific
Wells is acknowledged to be one of the foremost inventors in the genre we now know as 'science fiction'. As Robert Silverberg has said, 'Every time-travel tale written since The Time Machine is fundamentally indebted to Wells … In this theme, as in most of science fiction’s great themes, Wells was there first.'
'Science fiction' as a term was unknown to Wells; it did not make its appearance until the late 1920s, in America, then coming to prominence in the 1930s, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in brass brassieres. Wells himself referred to his science-oriented fictions as 'scientific romances' – a term that did not originate with him, but with a lesser-known writer called Charles Howard Hinton.
There are several interpretations of the term 'science'. If it implies the known and the possible, then Wells’s scientific romances are by no means scientific: he paid little attention to those boundaries. As Jules Verne remarked with displeasure, 'Il invente!' The 'science' part of these tales is embedded instead in a world-view that derived from Wells’s study of Darwinian principles under Huxley, and has to do with the grand study that engrossed him throughout his career: the nature of man. This too may account for his veering, throughout his career, between extreme Utopianism (if man is the result of evolution, not of Divine creation, surely he can evolve yet further?) and the deepest pessimism (if man came from the animals and is akin to them, rather than to the angels, surely he might slide back the way he came?). The Island of Dr. Moreau belongs to the debit side of the Wellsian account book.
Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man were a profound shock to the Victorian system. Gone was the God who spoke the world into being in seven days and made man out of clay; in its place stood millions of years of evolutionary change, and a family tree that included primates. Gone too was the kindly Wordsworthian version of Mother Nature that had presided over the first years of the century; in her place was Tennyson’s 'Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine.' The devouring femme fatale that became so iconic in the 1880s and 1890s owes a lot to Darwin. So does the imagery and cosmogony of The Island of Doctor Moreau.
4. Romance
So much for the 'scientific' in 'scientific romance'. What about the 'romance?'
In both 'scientific romance' and 'science fiction', the scientific element is merely an adjective; the nouns are 'romance' and 'fiction'. In respect to Wells, 'romance' is more helpful than 'fiction'.
'Romance', in today’s general usage, is what happens on Valentine’s Day. As a literary term it has slipped in rank somewhat – being now applied to such things as Harlequin Romances – but it was otherwise understood in the nineteenth century, when it was used in opposition to the term 'novel'. The novel dealt with known social life, but a romance could deal with the long ago and the far away. It also allowed much more latitude in terms of plot. In a romance, event follows exciting event at breakneck pace. As a rule, this has caused the romance to be viewed by the high literati – those bent more on instruction than on delight – as escapist and vulgar, a judgment that goes back at least two thousand years.
In The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye provides an exhaustive analysis of the structure and elements of the romance as a form. Typically a romance begins with a break in ordinary consciousness, often – traditionally – signalled by a shipwreck, frequently linked with a kidnapping by pirates. Exotic climes are a feature, especially exotic desert islands; so are strange creatures.
In the sinister portions of a romance, the protagonist is often imprisoned or trapped, or lost in a labyrinth or maze, or a forest that serves the same purpose. Boundaries between the normal levels of life dissolve: vegetable becomes animal, animal becomes quasi-human, human descends to animal. If the lead character is female, an attempt will be made on her virtue, which she manages miraculously to preserve. A rescue, however improbable, restores the protagonist to his or her previous life and reunites him or her with loved ones. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, is a romance. It’s got everything but talking dogs.
The Island of Doctor Moreau is also a romance, though a dark one. Consider the shipwreck. Consider the break in the protagonist’s consciousness – the multiple breaks, in fact. Consider the pirates, here supplied by the vile captain and crew of the Ipecacuanha. Consider the name Ipecacuanha, signifying an emetic and purgative: the break in consciousness is going to have a nastily physical side to it, of a possibly medicinal kind. Consider the fluid boundaries between animal and human. Consider the island.
5. The Enchanted Island
The name given to the island by Wells is Noble’s Island, a patent irony as well as another poke at the class system. Say it quickly and slur a little, and it’s no blessed island. This island has many literary antecedents, and several descendants. Foremost among the latter is William Golding’s island in Lord of the Flies – a book that owes something to The Island of Doctor Moreau, as well as to those adventure books Coral Island and The Swiss Family Robinson, and of course to the great original shipwreck-on-an-island classic, Robinson Crusoe. Moreau could be thought of as one in a long line of island-castaway books.
All those just mentioned, however, keep within the boundaries set by the possible. The Island of Doctor Moreau is, on the contrary, a work of fantasy, and its more immediate grandparents are to be found elsewhere. The Tempest springs immediately to mind: here is a beautiful island, belonging at first to a witch, then taken over by a magician who lays down the law, particularly to the malignant animal-like Caliban, who will obey only when pain is inflicted on him. Doctor Moreau could be seen as a sinister version of Prospero, surrounded by a hundred or so Calibans of his own creation.
But Wells himself points us towards another enchanted island. When Prendick mistakenly believes that the beast-men he’s seen were once men, he says: '(Moreau) had merely intended …to fall upon me with a fate more horrible than death, with torture, and after torture the most hideous degradation it was possible to conceive – to send me off, a lost soul, a beast, to the rest of (the) Comus rout.' (p. 50)
Comus, in the masque of that name by Milton, is a powerful sorcerer who rules a labyrinthine forest. He’s the son of the enchantress Circe, who in Greek myth was the daughter of the Sun and lived on the island of Aeaea. Odysseus landed there during his wanderings, and Circe transformed his crew into pigs. She has a whole menagerie of other kinds of animals – wolves, lions – that were also once men. Her island is an island of transformation: man to beast (and then to man again, once Odysseus gets the upper hand).
As for Comus, he leads a band of creatures, once men, who have drunk from his enchanted cup and have turned into hybrid monsters – they retain their human bodies, but their heads are those of beasts of all kinds. Thus changed, they indulge in sensual revels. Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market, with its animal-form goblins who tempt chastity and use luscious edibles as bait is surely a late offshoot of Comus.
As befits an enchanted island, Moreau’s island is both semi-alive and female, but not in a pleasant way. It’s volcanic, and emits from time to time a sulphurous reek. It comes equipped with flowers, and also with clefts and ravines, fronded on either side. Moreau’s beast-men live in one of these, and since they do not have very good table manners it has rotting food in it and it smells bad. When the beast-men start to lose their humanity and revert to their beast-natures, this locale becomes the site of a moral breakdown that is specifically sexual.
What is it that leads us to believe that Prendick will never have a girlfriend?
6. The Unholy Trinity
Nor will Doctor Moreau. There is no Mrs. Moreau on the island. There are no female human beings at all. Similarly, the God of the Old Testament has no wife. Wells called The Island of Doctor Moreau 'a youthful piece of blasphemy', and it’s obvious that he intended Moreau – that strong solitary gentlemen with the white hair and beard – to resemble traditional paintings of God. He surrounds Moreau with semi-Biblical language, as well: Moreau is the lawgiver of the island; those of his creatures who go against his will are punished and tortured; he is a god of whim and pain. But he isn’t a real God, because he cannot really create; he can only imitate, and his imitations are poor.
What drives him on? His sin is the sin of pride, combined with a cold 'intellectual passion' (p. 74). He wants to know everything. He wishes to discover the secrets of life. His ambition is to be as God the Creator. As such, he follows in the wake of several other aspirants, including Doctor Frankenstein and Hawthorne’s various alchemists. Doctor Faustus hovers in the background, but he wanted youth and wealth and sex in return for his soul, and Moreau has no interest in such things: he despises what he calls 'materialism', which includes pleasure and pain. He dabbles in bodies, but wishes to detach himself from his own. (He has some literary brothers: Sherlock Holmes would understand his bloodless intellectual passion. So would Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry Wooton, of that earlier fin de siècle transformation novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
But in Christianity, God is a trinity, and on Moreau’s island there are three beings whose names begin with M. Moreau as a name combines the syllable 'mor' – from mors, mortis, no doubt – with the French for 'water', suitable in one who aims at exploring the limits of plasticity. The whole word means 'moor' in French. So the very white Moreau is also the Black Man of witchcraft tales, a sort of anti-God.
Montgomery, his alcoholic assistant, has the face of a sheep. He acts as the intercessor between the beast-folk and Moreau, and in this function stands in for Christ the Son. He’s first seen offering Prendick a red drink that tastes like blood, and some boiled mutton. Is there a hint of an ironic Communion Service here – blood drink, flesh of the Lamb? The communion Prendick enters into by drinking the red drink is the communion of carnivores, that human communion forbidden to the beast folk. But it’s a communion he was part of anyway.
The third person of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit, usually portrayed as a dove – God in living but non-human form. The third M-creature on the island is M’Ling, the beast creature who serves as Montgomery’s attendant. He too enters into the communion of blood: he licks his fingers while preparing a rabbit for the human beings to eat. The Holy Spirit as a deformed and idiotic man-animal? As a piece of youthful blasphemy, The Island of Doctor Moreau was even more blasphemous than most commentators have realized.
Just so we don’t miss it, Wells puts a serpent-beast into his dubious garden: a creature that was completely evil and very strong, and that bent a gun-barrel into the letter S. Can Satan, too, be created by man? If so, blasphemous indeed.
7. The New Woman as Catwoman
There are no female human beings on Moreau’s island, but Moreau is busily making one. The experiment on which he’s engaged for most of the book concerns his attempt to turn a female puma into the semblance of a woman. Wells was more than interested in members of the cat family, as Brian Aldiss has pointed out. During his affair with Rebecca West, she was 'Panther', he was 'Jaguar' (p. xxxvi). But 'cat' has another connotation: in slang, it meant 'prostitute'. This is Montgomery’s allusion when he says – while the puma is yelling under the knife – 'I’m damned … if this place is not as bad as Gower Steet – with its cats' (p. 46). Prendick himself makes the connection explicit on his return to London when he shies away from the 'prowling women (who) would mew after me' (p. 129).
'I have some hope of her head and brain', (p. 75) says Moreau of the puma. '… I will make a rational creature of my own' (p. 128). But the puma resists. She’s almost a woman – she weeps like one – but when Moreau begins torturing her again, she utters a 'shriek almost like that of an angry virago' (p. 95). Then she tears her fetter out of the wall and runs away, a great bleeding scarred suffering female monster. It is she who kills Moreau.
Like many men of his time, Wells was obsessed with the New Woman. On the surface of it he was all in favour of sexual emancipation, including free love, but the freeing of Woman evidently had its frightening aspects. Rider Haggard’s She can be seen as a reaction to the feminist movement of his day – if women are granted power, men are doomed – and so can Wells’s deformed puma. Once the powerful monstrous sexual cat tears her fetter out of the wall and gets loose, minus the improved brain she ought to have courtesy Man the Scientist, look out.
8. The Whiteness of Moreau, the Blackness of M’Ling
Wells was not the only nineteenth-century English writer who used furry creatures to act out English socio-dramas. Lewis Carroll had done it in a whimsical way in the Alice books, Kipling in a more militaristic fashion in The Jungle Books. Kipling made the Law sound kind of noble, in the Jungle Books. Not so Wells. The Law mumbled by the animal-men in Moreau is a horrible parody of Christian and Jewish liturgy; it vanishes completely when the language of the beasts dissolves, indicating that it was a product of language, not some eternal God-given creed.
Wells was writing at a time when the British Empire still held sway, but the cracks were already beginning to show. Moreau’s island is a little colonial enclave of the most hellish sort. It’s no accident that most (although not all) of the beast-folk are black or brown, that they are at first thought by Prendick to be 'savages' or 'natives', and they speak in a kind of mangled English. They are employed as servants and slaves – a regime that’s kept in place with whip and gun – they secretly hate the real 'men' as much as they fear them, and they disobey the Law as much as possible, and kick over the traces as soon as they can. They kill Moreau and they kill Montgomery and they kill M’Ling, and, unless Prendick can get away, they will kill him too, although at first he 'goes native' and lives among them, and does things that fill him with disgust, and that he would rather not mention.
White man’s burden, indeed.
9. The Modern Ancient Mariner
The way in which Prendick escapes from the island is noteworthy. He sees a small boat with a sail, and lights a fire to hail it. It approaches, but strangely: it doesn’t sail with the wind, but yaws and veers. There are two figures in it, one with red hair. As the boat enters the bay, 'Suddenly a great white bird flew up out of the boat, and neither of the men stirred nor noticed it. It circled round, and then came sweeping overhead with its strong wings outspread' (p. 125). This bird cannot be a gull: it’s too big and solitary. The only white seabird usually described as 'great' is the albatross.
The two figures in the boat are dead. But it is this death-boat, this life-in-death coffin-boat, that proves the salvation of Prendick. In what other work of English literature do we find a lone man reduced to a pitiable state, a boat that sails without a wind, two death-figures, one with unusual hair, and a great white bird? The work is of course The Ancient Mariner, which revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature, and concludes that this proper relation is one of love. It is when he manages to bless the sea-serpents that the Mariner is freed from the curse he has brought upon himself by shooting the albatross.
The Island of Doctor Moreau also revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature, but its conclusions are quite different, because Nature itself is seen differently. It is no longer the Nature eulogized by Wordsworth, that benevolent motherly entity who never did betray that heart that loved her, for between Coleridge and Wells came Darwin.
The lesson learned by the albatross-shooting Mariner is summed up by him at the end of the poem:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
In the Ancient-Mariner-like pattern at the end of The Island of Doctor Moreau, the 'albatross' is still alive. It has suffered no harm at the hands of Prendick. But he lives in the shadow of a curse anyway. His curse is that he can’t love or bless anything living: not bird, not beast, and most certainly not man. He has another curse, too: the Ancient Mariner is doomed to tell his tale, and those who are chosen to hear it are convinced by it. But Prendick chooses not to tell, because, when he tries, no one will believe him.
10. Fear and Trembling
What then is the lesson learned by the unfortunate Prendick? It can perhaps best be understood in reference to The Ancient Mariner. The God of Moreau’s island can scarcely be described as a dear God, who makes and loves all creatures. If Moreau is seen to stand for a version of God the Creator who 'makes' living things, he has done – in Prendick’s final view – a very bad job. Similarly, if God can be considered as a sort of Moreau, and if the equation 'Moreau is to his animals as God is to man' may stand, then God himself is accused of cruelty and indifference – making man for fun and to satisfy his own curiosity and pride, laying laws on him he cannot understand or obey, then abandoning him to a life of torment.
Prendick cannot love the distorted and violent furry folk on the island, and it’s just as hard for him to love the human beings he encounters on his return to 'civilization'. Like Swift’s Gulliver, he can barely stand the sight of his fellow-men. He lives in a state of queasy fear, inspired by his continued experience of dissolving boundaries: as the beasts on the island have at times appeared human, the human beings he encounters in England appear bestial. He displays his modernity by going to a 'mental specialist', but this provides only a partial remedy. He feels himself to be “an animal tormented … sent to wander alone' (p. 129).
Prendick forsakes his earlier dabblings in biology, and turns instead to chemistry and astronomy. He finds 'hope' – 'a sense of infinite peace and protection' in 'the glittering hosts of heaven' (p. 129). As if to squash even this faint hope, Wells almost immediately wrote The War of the Worlds, in which not peace and protection, but malice and destruction, come down from the heavens in the form of the monstrous but superior Martians.
The War of the Worlds can be read as a further gloss on Darwin. Is this where evolution will lead – to the abandonment of the body, to giant sexless bloodsucking heads with huge brains and tentacle-like fingers? But it can also be read as a thoroughly chilling coda to The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Links
Ann Veronica
A Modern Utopia
The First Men in the Moon
The History of Mr Polly
The Invisible Man
The Sleeper Awakes
The Time Machine
The War of the Worlds
Tono-Bungay
Kipps
Love and Mr Lewisham
The New Machiavelli
The Shape of Things to Come
The War in Air
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