Reading: The Island of Doctor Moreau

     I realized, to my slight shame, that I never finished writing this review for The Island of Dr. Moreau, a book that I read months ago for the first ever assignment for the book club I'm running. So far we've also read Watership Down, Under the Skin, The Lives of the Monster Dogs, and now Cycle of the Werewolf! I'll have to write my reviews for the other books as well, but one step at a time I suppose.

    I'd read a fair bit of H. G. Wells as a kid, being a huge sci-fi fiend and also a precocious early reader that got into a lot of heavier adult books while my peers were still on middle grade or YA books. I'd dug into War of the Worlds and The Time Machine but somehow had missed The Island of Doctor Moreau the first time around. If you've seen any of the movie adaptations, you might be lulled into the idea that you already know the story, but the book offers a lot more complexity and nuance than a lot of film adaptations are able to accommodate- something inevitably always has to be cut for time, or gets lost in translation, or is otherwise something that functions better in the realm of a novel than a film.

    You may likely be aware of the basic premise- a man is shipwrecked and ends up on a mysterious island where the titular Doctor Moreau is working on experiments, with the gradual reveal that he's turning animals into men through horrific acts of vivisection and conditioning. These animal men have internalized a set of rules that function to keep them "human", ie: to prevent them from reverting to their animal nature. They do not eat flesh, they must not hunt, they must not kneel to lap water. There is also social taboo imposed on them- to stay clothed, to be monogamous. The law has a religious function and Moreau himself is a god figure to his creations, though he is largely indifferent to many of them, more interested in perfecting the human form in each following experiment than he is in governing or caring for his creations on the island. The arrival of Prendick disrupts the tenuous balance of life on the island, causing Moreau's creations to question the law and the untouchable authority of Moreau, though it is also something implied to be inevitable, with the lines between man and creation already being transgressed in some ways that prove to be fatal for Moreau and his second-in-command Montgomery.

    When the law is transgressed by a creature on the island, the result is a return to the laboratory for further conditioning- what they call "The House of Pain." It's a pretty gruesome detail. At the time of this book's writing, there was quite a bit of debate about the ethics of animal experimentation and vivisection, an it's interesting to note that in the book, Moreau is already an outcast from the scientific world due to his controversial experiments. Him moving to the island to continue his work is already a sign that something is deeply wrong when Prendick first arrives and gets to know Moreau and Montgomery. 

    Prendick has an odd position on the island. He is a victim of circumstance, being both frightened of his human rescuers and their animal subjects, and his role blurs between that of man and animal. He even spends some time living among the animal people- first in an attempted escape from Dr Moreau, and again when the social structure on the island collapses. The two animal people he finds the most kinship with are a baboon-man- who relates to their both having five fingers- and a dog-man- who through his domestication already has a degree of loyalty to humans. At various times he is regarded as beast by the animal people or as an authority on the level of Moreau and Montgomery.

    What's interesting in reading the novel is how genuinely tense and unsettling the book actually is. You think in being familiar with its premise that some of the horror and suspense will be lessened somehow, but Wells' writing is masterful and grim. Even the shipwreck at the beginning comes with its own degree of horror and tension. I'd reckoned that the events of the wreck of the Essex were well known to people by this point, as well as Herman Melville's Moby Dick being in the popular sphere by this point, so those may have had an influence on the shipwreck portion of the story. Prendick's experiences on the island are deeply eerie and tense too, both in his gradual discovery of Moreau's ghastly experiments- overhearing what he imagines to be person being tortured instead of an animal- as well as his experiences being stalked and hunted by mysterious horrors in the forest.

    The animal people of Moreau bring forth a lot of questions about what makes one human- not just the trappings of society and social expectation, but also about thought and interiority. The animal people are not only molded to look human-like, but their very brains are altered to resemble human brains. They are also given hypnotic conditioning to essentially give them a set of beliefs- including that Moreau himself is an unharmable god among them. The implications that societal rules and taboo are the only things keeping the animal people "civil" is something we can extrapolate to humanity at large too, and it begs an interesting question about what is nature and what is nurture.

    At the time of this novel, Charles Darwin's theories of evolution were well-known, Wells was born around the time that the Origin of Species came out. Wells is working with Darwin's theories as part of Dr. Moreau, and it should also, unfortunately, be noted that Wells believed in eugenics- which is also evident in The Time Machine- but his own feeling was that human beings in their present state weren't advanced enough for eugenics to work. As such, though, there's some pretty awful racial themes in The Island of Doctor Moreau, not just the question of eugenics, but more broadly some disgusting recurring elements of the animal people being compared to other races. In appearance and conception, there is a racialized component to the animal people. Moreau in his experiments is viewing the altered animals as passable for black people, and Prendick also initially mistakes the animal people for indigenous islanders. This is something to keep in mind while approaching the book, and something I find strangely absent from a lot of discussions about The Island of Doctor Moreau. It's especially disturbing that none of the materials presenting the book at a school level aren't touching on the elements of race and the dangerous pseudoscience wrapped up in those elements- I had nosed around in some teaching materials before presenting my first book club meeting and it was sobering to say the least (though I am glad to say my book club members didn't skirt around the topic and we spent a solid hour getting into all the themes of the book).

     The theme of the animal people degenerating or reverting back to their primal states is something that also reflects a lot of the era's anxieties regarding race and the theory of evolution. There was a lot of concern about the idea of the human species degenerating, and it was believed that other races and race mixing could be a contributing factor, as well as the influence of women- who were considered to be already at a lower state than men and more inherently connected to nature. I was recently researching a fair amount of Victorian gothic literature and so much of it is indebted to these racial anxieties present among white people.

    Once you read The Island of Doctor Moreau proper, you end up realizing just how much of contemporary (and past) sci-fi and horror is indebted to it. Reading it certainly put together a lot of puzzle pieces for me regarding both literature and film! Like Frankenstein, there's a legacy  here that changed speculative fiction forever, both in how we approach ethical questions of mad science, and to the more gonzo elements of body horror, transformation, and the monstrous. Even though this novel is from 1896, it remains deeply frightening and compelling. If you can stomach its unfortunate relationship with race, it is a compelling read that I would recommend.