Features of anti-utopia in the novel by H. Wells “The Island of Dr. Moreau”. Course paper

CHAPTER 2. ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL BY H.WELLS “THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU”

2.1. “The Island of Dr. Moreau” as a classic of early dystopian science fiction

The Island of Doctor Moreau is the account of Edward Prendick, an Englishman with a scientific education who survives a shipwreck in the southern Pacific Ocean. A passing ship called Ipecacuanha takes him aboard, and a man named Montgomery revives him. Prendick also meets a grotesque bestial native named M'ling, who appears to be Montgomery's manservant. The ship is transporting a number of animals which belong to Montgomery. As they approach the island, Montgomery's destination, the captain demands Prendick leave the ship with Montgomery. Montgomery explains that he will not be able to host Prendick on the island. Despite this, the captain leaves Prendick in a dinghy and sails away. Seeing that the captain has abandoned Prendick, Montgomery takes pity and rescues him. As ships rarely pass the island, Prendick will be housed in an outer room of an enclosed compound.

Moreau picks his subjects from among the voiceless—animals who cannot protest effectively (no matter how loudly they scream on the table). Moreau has abandoned, or been driven from, London after one of his subject escapes. Its pitiable state rouses public opinion against his work, so he goes underground, to an island “that seemed waiting for me,” he says, as if the hand of destiny had guided him there. Moreau resents even Prendick’s awareness of his work. Moreau is utterly careless of the beasts he destroys and of those on whom his experiments “succeed.” He is not trying to improve their condition or relieve their sufferings; in fact, he states openly that he has “never troubled about the ethics” of his methods or of their results, which Prendick calls abominations. Lost in the “strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires,” Moreau ceases to see “an animal, a fellow-creature” and sees only “a problem” to be solved. Some critics see the beasts that endure Moreau’s experiments as stand-ins for members of the lower classes, exploited, used up, and cast aside by those in power; Wells’ concern for this class is well documented in his writing. Like Jack’s victims—the very underclass of London, women whose existence many Londoners preferred to ignore—the victims of Moreau’s work are less than human and thus at risk of unethical treatment.

Wells studied biology under T. H. Huxley, the evolutionary biologist and zoologist who argued that while pain is the natural law of the universe, the great achievement of the human mind is ethics—the imposition of an orderly justice on the chaos of nature. On the island, Moreau has taken a different view of human achievement by using pain to drive and enforce a new order. To do so, he has had to cast aside ethics and justice, which exist only in the perverted Law. Montgomery, by contrast, cannot lose the ethical impulse. He attempts to ameliorate the beast folks’ plight and, when he cannot shield them from Moreau, drinks to blunt his disgrace. Prendick, through whose eyes readers watch the action, shares Montgomery’s feelings to the degree that he can (revulsion limits him), but he is in danger of losing his ethical sense, readers see, as the puma’s quasi-human cries of pain afflict him less and less the longer he hears them. Ironically, the trauma of Prendick’s experiences on the island renders him unable to sympathize—to feel a common human bond—with the people who surround him in London after his return. It is as if his exposure to Moreau’s experiments in plasticity have revealed to him a fact that he cannot grapple with, the shared animal nature of all creatures of flesh and blood. Rather than moving Prendick toward a more ethical view of his “fellow-creatures,” this fact drives him away from the chaotic, messy realities of biological existence. He finds solace mostly in gazing at the stars, which provide him with a sense (perhaps false) of “the vast and eternal laws of nature.” The distant stars do not, as far as he can see, suffer “the daily cares and sins and troubles of men”; in other words, they make no demands on his shattered ethic. [20]

Over the course of the novel, Prendick moves in and out of a number of communities, and his interactions with these groups inform a central question in the novel: In what ways does community enable, on the one hand, and limit, on the other, human happiness and accomplishment? Readers vicariously experience, through the narrator, first the little community in the Lady Vain’s dingey—not a hopeful presentation of community, as it suggests that individual survival trumps communal bonds. Resources are painfully limited, and the plan for one person to take the fall for the little group fails quickly. Prendick soon finds himself in a larger community about Ipecacuanha. Here he finds both aid, in the form of Montgomery’s medical expertise, and risk, in the form of the division of the community—Montgomery and all associated with him (including Prendick) against the captain and crew. Without this community, Prendick would perish; he needs it for survival. Yet his association with M’ling, the unhuman man, divides him from the community that could prolong his life. The crew’s reaction to M’ling and his defender Montgomery suggests, as does the experience of the three men in the dingey, that community is fragile and easy to disturb.

The community on the island also protects Prendick, though grudgingly. Had Montgomery not returned for Prendick, and had Moreau not extended his protection, Prendick could not have survived his ordeal. Yet though this community is necessary for his well-being, providing shelter and food, it also limits his freedoms. The tiny room he lives features a locked door that prevents him from entering the enclosure, and another locked door keeps the dangers of the island out. With only M’ling and the taciturn Montgomery as company, Prendick is limited not only in his physical mobility but also in his mental mobility. Because this community is ruled by the dictatorial Moreau, secrets are kept and trust fails spectacularly, leading to Prendick’s flight from the community and to the only community in the novel that functions—ironically, that of the beast folk.

In contrast to Moreau and Montgomery, who shut Prendick out of their confidence and meet (barely) his physical needs only, the community of the beast folk embraces him. Immediately, they take him to their squalid home; right away, they teach him the Law so that he can benefit from the protection of obedience and avoid the House of Pain. They offer him food and physical contact, these not-quite-humans. Even after Moreau’s death and the gradual reversion of the beast folk, the St. Bernard creature maintains community with Prendick; and the pink sloth-like creature, long after she has taken to the trees again and lost all use of language, comes to tell Prendick of his dog-companion’s death.

In the end, Prendick loses this community as each creature’s original nature overcomes its human tendencies, forcing him to flee the predators when they gain dominance over the island. But for a short time, the beast folk are better exemplars of community than any other group in the novel. As for Prendick, his traumatizing experiences at sea and on the island render him unfit for any community but that of the dead and absent, in the form of books, and nature. [20]

Wells uses a tone that combines the journalistic voice of a newspaper with the emotional soul-searching of a diary. We say the novel reads like something out of a newspaper because it has an eye for the facts. However, the diary aspect of Dr. Moreau comes from Prendick letting the reader in on his feelings and thoughts about certain events. Let's look at an example:

But, in the first place, I must state that there never were four men in the dingey; the number was three. Constans, who was "seen by the captain to jump into the gig" [15], luckily for us, and unluckily for himself, did not reach us.

Notice how Prendick takes the time to correct the facts of a newspaper article in his own story. He's detailing his dramatic escape from the sinking of the Lady Vain and quoting from another account of the event. At the same time? Seems kind of silly, right? No one in Titanic took the time to quote a newspaper while the ship gurgled its way into the frigid Arctic abyss. The effect suggests to the reader that Prendick keeps his facts straight, so we can trust what he has to say. It adds a quality of believability to the story.

The Island of Dr. Moreau has a classic horror ending going for it. The protagonist escapes from the horrific place, survives the frequent attempts on his life, and ultimately reaches safety. And just as soon as he lets his guard down, the minute he can breathe, bam, the horror reappears and the story ends. Only the horror returns in a far subtler way than Jason Voorhees jumping out of a closet or Freddie Kruger popping up in your dreams.

Prendick returns to London, expecting to be free of the horrors of Moreau's island. Unfortunately, as he walks through the crowded streets, he cannot

"persuade [himself] that the men and women [he] met were not also another Beast People, animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then that."

Prendick has recognized that the horror of Moreau's society is the horror of all societies. Its members are born of beasts; civilization is only a magic trick meant to hide this truth. And when he sees society this way, "[he] look[s] about [him] at [his] fellow-men; and [he] go[es] in fear". Like all classic horror movies, this is the twist ending, the big "gotcha" moment. The Beast People aren't gone; they're hiding in civilization's closet like a bogeyman.[16]

So, Prendick moves to the country to live his life in peace. There he reads books, studies chemistry during the day and astronomy at night. He does this because he thinks it must be "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 its hope". This is the small light at the end of the dark tunnel, and oddly it seems to echo Moreau's reasoning from earlier in the novel.

Moreau sought the eternal laws of nature through the creation of man as man currently is. Instead, Prendick is looking toward the stars and away from the planet to seek his answer. So, while it may be the same question that drives them, their methods are completely different. And, sometimes, the method really does make it all the difference between horror and hope.