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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACTS
This essay argues that H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau is best understood in the context of feminist critiques of science, animal studies, and antivivisectionism. This context allows us to see that the novel's themes are concerned with the very foundational assumptions of science as a practice that objectifies and 'tames' nature and all those (non-whites, women, the working classes) who are associated with the body and nature. A comparison of Wells's novel with David Brin's Uplift series--more explicitly concerned with imagining animal sentience--reveals that Brin's failure to critique the values of science crystalized in the 'unmarked' body of the 'scientist' (white, male, bourgeois, Homo sapiens) results in a more conservative treatment of subjectivity and ethics in this latter work.
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H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, (1) published in 1896, is deeply concerned with the relationship between scientific development and moral progress, and the consequences of the former outpacing the latter. It tells the story of a mad scientist who alters animals in order to make them more human; and in our present-day world of genetic engineering and xenotransplantation, as well as advocacy of animal legal and civil rights, its subject matter has never seemed more pertinent. Just as Darwinian science, the context for this and other Wells novels, created a moment of incredible disruption for Victorian society by connecting human and animal life in ways previously unimaginable, recent research in animal cognition, communication, and social organization similarly threatens to challenge and perhaps displace our cultural assumptions about human and non-human life.
Building on Claude Levi-Strauss's assertion that 'animals are good to think with', I want in this essay to bring together a reading of The Island of Doctor Moreau with recent scholarship in the emerging field of animal studies. I argue that the focus on how the human/animal boundary is articulated in Wells's novel enables us to perceive more clearly the critique of science contained within it. If we examine the work from the point of view of animal studies, it becomes clear that its critique of science extends beyond specific practices contemporary with its publication, to a critique of the founding assumptions that shaped scientific practice as it emerged in the seventeenth century. Wells's concerns have much in common with recent feminist critiques of science, and also connect The Island of Doctor Moreau with the feminist and antivivisectionist positions prevalent at the time he was writing. Finally, I compare Wells's treatment of these themes with the more recently published Uplift series by David Brin. Brin's work is also concerned with modifying animals genetically to be more like humans. He specifically positions his work as more progressive than what he terms the 'morality tales' of Wells and other earlier science fiction, arguing:
I noticed that nearly all these tales assume that human 'masters' will always do the maximally stupid/evil thing. In other words, if we do meddle with animals to raise their intelligence, it will be in order to enslave and abuse them. [...] I feel it is now unlikely our civilization would behave in a deliberately vile way toward newly sapient creatures, because the morality tales did their job! (2)
By comparing the relationship that Wells and Brin, respectively, have to the feminist critique of science, I argue that, despite Brin's explicit desire to present humans and animals as equals, his failure to question the speciesist assumptions that have shaped Western science and metaphysics undermines the ability of his work to achieve this goal. Thus animals studies give us further insight into Moreau as a 'mad scientist', and enable us to see that his madness exemplifies some of the problems with Western science conceived as a discourse of taming nature, a madness that persists unexamined in Brin's Uplift novels.
Many critics have noted the correspondence between The Island of Doctor Moreau and late nineteenth-century racism. (3) Without challenging the insight provided by such readings of the novel, I want to suggest that thinking about the beast men as animals rather than as metaphors for animalized racial others can provide additional insight into the novel's critique of science and vivisection. In order to do this I shall first look briefly at a text that possibly influenced The Island of Doctor Moreau--Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (1627). (4) In her work on animals in the Renaissance, Erica Fudge describes The New Atlantis as a fictional tale of shipwreck as well as the 'bible' of the new science and a manual for vivisection. (5) Francis Bacon is one of the most influential and vocal defenders of the new experimental science emerging in the seventeenth century. As Fudge explains elsewhere, Bacon associated science both with power over nature and with man's proper place as separated from animals and close to God. For him, the Fall separated man from an innate understanding of other species, and thus learning is now required to restore man to his 'position as sovereign and commander of creation'. (6) Science and experimentation give man knowledge, which is also power, a power of exploitation that becomes 'proof of humanity [...] To experiment on animals--a means of understanding, "naming" them--is to place the human in a God-like position'. (7)
The New Atlantis, this manual for dominating nature and recovering man's proper place, like The Island of Doctor Moreau, 'presents experimentation which sounds very much like the contemporary practice of genetic engineering: the alteration of appearance and reproductive faculties, the creation of new hybrids'. (8) Thus the mad scientist Moreau, who encourages his modified animals in a cult that worships him as Master, whose Hand 'makes', 'wounds', and 'heals' them in his 'House of Pain', (9) is the model of the perfect New Scientist, who asserts his own humanity by forcing nature to submit. The founding moments of science thereby rely on the assertion of the human/animal boundary because 'dominion, with its inevitable consequences for the natural world, is the means to fulfil human potential: the exploitation of animals is a necessity'. (10)
Victorian society in particular seems to embrace the exploitation of animals as a way to further scientific knowledge. Rod Preece argues that animal experimentation remained 'isolated and occasional until the publication of Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine in 1865', after which 'the capacity and propensity to use animals as a mere means of human welfare grew rapidly'. (11) Bernard, in fact, might well be the model for the figure of Moreau. Coral Lansbury points out that he encouraged an ethos of sanctity, of a new priesthood, around the practice of science, and, again like Moreau, he felt that there were no limits on the capacity of science to master and modify nature, including the nature of human being. The introduction to Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine presents a portrait of the ideal scientist that seems a blueprint for Moreau:
The physiologist is no ordinary man: he is a scientist, possessed and absorbed by the scientific idea that he pursues. He does not hear the cries of animals, he does not see their flowing blood, he sees nothing but his idea, and is aware of nothing but an organism that conceals from him the problem he is seeking to resolve. (12) This vision presents the vivisector in terms of values also proposed by Bacon and which by this time had become exemplary of scientific practice--objectivity, detachment, distance, narrow and specific focus. In Wells's novel, however, we see these same qualities turned into sadism, the distorted delusion of a man who has made himself into a god.
Moreau was banished to his island due to vivisectionist cruelty, driven from London by the combined scandal of a sensationalist pamphlet exposing conditions in his laboratory and 'a wretched dog, flayed and otherwise mutilated, [that] escaped from Moreau's house' (p. 23). Moreau is characterized as the Baconian sort of scientist from The New Atlantis who embraces the domination of the natural world, but Wells ensures that Prendick--and we--regard this version of scientific practice with...
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