The Island of Doctor Moreau

"Both emerged from a late-Victorian concern with scientific ethics. In particular, the ethics of vivisection was a very emotive and powerful political subject. A whole range of people including socialists, feminists and religious figures were united by their opposition to vivisection. The initial audience of The Island of Doctor Moreau were horrified by it. It is a very disturbing work, soaked in pain. It is one of the archetypal mad scientist stories. However, this is not to say that it is an anti-science story. Wells later described this story as a ‘theological grotesque’, which makes me wonder whether his target was not science, but a notion of humanity playing God. Moreau thinks of himself as a creator. The language of the Beast Men—the language that Moreau seems to have given them—is very much a Biblical language. They have a series of interdicts—‘the Law’—which sound very much like the Ten Commandments. Wells himself was a rather gifted student of science. He studied zoology under T H Huxley at the Normal School of Science (which is now Imperial College, London). He had a degree in natural science, and made a modestly successful career for himself in the early years of the 1890s as a writer of popular science. Doctor Moreau comes out of Wells’s engagement with T H Huxley: it is one of the great post-Darwinian novels. The last major work that Huxley wrote was a treatise called Evolution and Ethics . This was a counter-argument against social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer who claimed that there was no connection between the impersonal material forces of science and individual human ethics. Huxley argued that this was not the case, and that scientists had to be ethical. In fact, their job was to fight against the most disturbing aspects of evolution. I think so. Wells’s visions of the future of humanity in the 1890s tended to be bleak and pessimistic. Edward Prendick, the narrator of Moreau , escapes from the island but ends up mad in London. He is revolted by humans whom he can now see only as beasts. More generally, in John Carey’s famous phrase from The Intellectuals and Masses , Wells loved ‘getting rid of people’. He completely devastated London in The War of the Worlds . He wrote letters in which he confessed to cycling around the suburbs of London, singling out places to destroy in the most eccentric and gruesome ways. Yet the complete destruction of humanity is also in keeping with the tenor of late-Victorian science. The second law of thermodynamics, which was formulated in the 1860s and ’70s, seemed to point towards the inevitable heat death of the sun, and thus the destruction of all left on earth. That’s what we see at the end of The Time Machine : the destruction of the last vestiges of life under a dying sun. But even before that, we witness the biological degeneration of humanity into two distinct sub-species: the Eloi and the Morlocks."

"Well, it is a book that is again based in Wells’s biological understanding of things. It is all about an evil doctor who is trying to vivisect animals so that they can advance on the evolutionary scale. What happens instead is a degeneration, and the ‘beast folk’—having reached a certain primitive humanity—steadily become ever more bestial. It ends with an amazing description of a degenerate civilisation. Edward Prendick eventually escapes the island and goes back to London, but feels that all the inhabitants are venal, feral animals that are barely civilised. He walks the streets in fear, waiting for his fellow beasts to tear him to bits. So it is based on the science of biological regression, but, on the other hand, it is written in an exaggerated Gothic and highly sensational mode. I think it is one of the origins of the more visceral ‘body horror’ genre. It explores the horrific malleability of human form—the idea that the animal is barely hidden beneath the surface. Readers were horrified by that book, and felt that the young upstart Wells had gone too far. I agree. It was filmed in 1932 as the Island of Lost Souls , a film that I recommend. It is impressively nasty—Charles Laughton’s portrait of Doctor Moreau is of a louche, camp, and utterly evil man. The film was seen as so scandalous because it picked up on a sense that maybe the white captives on the island were going to crossbreed with the animalistic women-beasts. It toyed with the taboo of miscegenation (representations of mixed race relationships were banned by the Hollywood ‘ Hays Code’ ). The film was instantly banned in 1932, and you could not see it in England until the late 1960s. It was banned in Australia, and given a new classification as being ‘not suitable for Aboriginal people’, because it portrays a revolution by the beast folk against the white people. Colonial audiences thought that it would foment revolution. The traditional Gothic novel dates from the 18th century. It is a form that we associate with Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe . They write about labyrinthine castles and women being menaced by strange and unnerving foreigners—they are always set in Spain, or Italy. The threat here is external: it is always the virtue of the woman being menaced by libertines, by nuns, by ghosts coming from somewhere else. Classic Gothic is also concerned with a religious kind of horror. It is a genre that tends to be written by northern Protestants terrified of southern Catholic Europe. It has a framework of religious transgression. When you get to Wells, a hundred years later, there is very little religious framework. It is a biological framework, and the horrors are not coming from outside, but from within you. Although they don’t have the term ‘genetic’ yet, we could say that monstrosity is encoded in the biological history of the genes. What you come from, aeons ago, is going to erupt back, take you over from the inside. There is the idea that there is a kind of feral cannibalistic creature inside you—think of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . “You’re never quite sure where the sympathies lie, and that ambiguity is why I think they endure” Think of the film Alien , and that creature bursting out of your chest—that is the core of body horror. The problem has been planted inside you, and you cannot do anything about it. You cannot do anything about your genetic inheritance because this was decided millions and millions of years ago, when your ancestors unwisely crawled out of the sea. Doctor Moreau is not the first example of body horror, but it is an influential one. You can see its influence, say, in H. P. Lovecraft’ s ‘The Dunwich Horror’, in which there is a cross between man and demonic creature: tentacles and all kinds of crazy stuff thrown into one being. Stephen Asma talks about monsters as ‘mosaic beings’, made up of many different creatures. That’s what physiological body horror relies upon."