“I hope, or I could not live.”
Originally subtitled “A Possibility,” H.G. Wells’s classic science fiction horror novel The Island of Dr. Moreau was later dubbed an “exercise in youthful blasphemy” by the author. Indeed, this short novella brings to light all manner of questions relating to modern science and theology as we venture deep into the unknown regions of the world only to find the unholy abominations that dwell within. It is a book that forces us to consider the ethical implication of conducting scientific experiments on animals and also question the broader bioethical project of creating artificial life. Wells masterfully presents this book as if it is a fragment of little-known news; it is a literary realist work of newly discovered fascination, perhaps not unlike the account of Lemuel Gulliver’s account in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Can this story be trusted? The Island of Dr. Moreau is framed by Charles Edward Prendick (who incidentally appears to be a skeptic), the nephew and heir of the novel’s protagonist, Edward Prendick.
As the story goes, on February 1, 1887, a ship called The Lady Vain sank when it crashed into a “derelict” ten days out from Callao. Eleven months and four days later, a strange and disheveled man –Edward Prendick– was picked up in an open boat “of which the name was illegible” but he was believed to have belonged to the missing schooner called the Ipecacuanha, but he claimed not to remember anything about what happened. The following narrative was found among his papers by his nephew.
With a penchant for natural history, and in seeking a “relief from my comfortable independence,” Edward Prendick claims he boarded a ship called The Lady Vain. But when it sank, Prendick was one of three men who were forced to cast out in a dinghy on the open ocean, and he wound up being the sole survivor (the other two fought to the death after drawing lots). At this point, the novel takes a turn. Just as Prendick is left for dead on the open ocean, he is suddenly rescued by a passing schooner and offered transportation. However, he soon learns this schooner is harboring a dreaded secret. It appears to be filled with a menagerie of exotic animals, many of whom howl and rage throughout the night. The schooner soon arrives at a small, nondescript desert island and a bestial misshapen figure named Montgomery forces Prendick back into his dinghy as he is dispatched toward the “cursed island.”
Prendick is then ushered into a room on the island inside a small stone complex near the beach. The room contains a desk and is filled with surgical works as well as the Latin and Greek classics. Soon, Prendick learns that the master of the island is a man named Moreau – “a prominent and masterful physiologist, well-known in scientific circles for his extraordinary imagination and his brutal directness in discussion.” Moreau published some “astonishing facts” about blood transfusion and was known to be doing valuable work on “morbid growths.” Then his career suddenly ended when a “gruesome pamphlet” was published and a mutilated dog escaped from his house, after which he was booted out of England. He remained unmarried but was regarded as a notorious vivisector.
“As it happens, we are biologists here. This is a biological station –of a sort” (22).
Late into the night, Prendick hears the tortured screams of a puma and a human, and when he investigates the situation, he is horrified to find a bloody mutilated creature in Dr. Moreau’s laboratory. Prendick then flees from the complex out into the island only to discover it is populated with all manner of terrifying, unnatural beings –half bestial creatures with abnormally short legs, who speak a gibberish language (with words like “Aloola” and “Balloola”), with fur and pointed ears, who occasionally crawl on all fours and drink water out of streams. One of them is a sloth-like creature that seems as if he has been a “flayed child.” But they all appear to be cripples and maniacs, like a “grotesque caricature of humanity.” Naturally, Prendick is filled with dread. “Ever shadow became something more than a shadow, –became an ambush; every rustle became a threat. Invisible things seemed watching me” (32).
However, if he returns to the stone facility, he fears becoming Moreau’s next experimental victim. Thus, he ventures further into the island until he finds a disturbing scene –the dwelling place of the creatures. Naturally, Prendick is gawked at by the beasts, and the ones with the power of speech inform Prendick of the laws governing the island. They sing and sway in haunting unison, chanting:
“Not to go on all fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?“
From here, Prendick is soon recaptured and brought before Dr. Moreau who calmly explains the situation. These creatures are “Hi non sunt homines; sunt animalia qui nos habemus –vivisected.” They are not half-human, half-animal per se, but rather they are “humanized animals.”
“The creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my life has been devoted. I have studied for years, gaining in knowledge as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am telling you nothing new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no one had the temerity to touch it. It is not simply the outward form of an animal which I can change. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature, may also be made to undergo an enduring modification, –of which vaccination and other methods of inoculation with living or dead matter are examples that will, no doubt, be familiar to you. A similar operation is the transfusion of blood… Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be. It may be, I fancy, that I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker than you, –for I have sought his laws in my way, all my life, while you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies… To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter… The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature. I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was pursuing…” (58-61).
How exactly has Dr. Moreau managed to biologically create an evolved species of humanized animals? He vaguely describes certain elements of blood transfusions and “brain-moulding” (perhaps a form of brainwashing to keep them from falling prey to their natural animal instincts) but the physical process remains painfully opaque (much like H.G. Wells’s description of the contraption in The Time Machine). Moreau has been living on this island for eleven years conducting his experiments and training the creatures to walk upright, to speak, not to kill, and to treat him like a god. Interestingly enough, there is a powerful religion Dr. Moreau has enforced on the island in order to keep the creatures in line (perhaps this is the playful “blasphemy” H.G. Wells later lamented).
At any rate, the creatures all refer to the central stone facility as the “House of Pain” and they live in fear of Dr. Moreau conducting further live vivisecting experiments on them. The creatures’ consciousness and ability to feel pain (as well as articulate their own fear) raises all manner of moral dilemmas relating to the scientific method, bioethics, and the philosophical problem of suffering in a purely rational world. It also highlights a certain ‘progressive’ view of evolution in which humans are regarded as the apex creature on the evolutionary timeline –Dr. Moreau, himself, claims that pain is more animalistic, whereas truly evolved humans experience no pain (Moreau slices himself with a knife at one point and has no reaction). Notably, Dr. Moreau once tried to create an entirely new serpentine animal but it slithered across the island and preyed on other creatures so he killed it and decided to simply stick with animals to humans. This little anecdote serves as a key window into his project. It brings to mind the accidental unleashing of evil while scientists pursue elemental question of life, such as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Also of note, the creatures on the island are able to produce offspring, but the deformities of their offspring render the newborns unviable.
“There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there… and have a kind of mockery of rational life, poor beasts! There’s something they call the Law. Sing hymns about ‘all thine.’ They build themselves their dens, gather fruit, and pull herbs –marry even. But I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but souls of beasts, beasts that perish, anger and the lusts to live and gratify themselves. –Yet they’re odd; complex, like everything else alive. There is a kind of upward striving in them, part vanity, part waste sexual emotion, part waste curiosity. It only mocks me” (65).
Over the course of six weeks, Prendick comes to understand more about these grotesque beasts and he even pities the creatures. There is the Leopard-Man (whom Prendick had first seen drinking on all fours) as well as a creature made of hyena and swine, bull-creatures, the silver-haired Sayer of the Law, Montgomery’s servant named M’Ling, and a satyr-like ape-goat creature, as well as a mare-rhinocerous, wolf-creatures, bear-bulls, a Saint Bernard-man, an Ape-man, an old woman made of vixen and bear, and a collection of smaller sloth-like creatures. In total, there are approximately threescore creatures. And when one of the creatures (the Leopard-Man) disobeys the law and partially eats a rabbit, Prendick takes pity on the creature. He fires a revolver and kills him, thus avoiding more suffering in Dr. Moreau’s “House of Pain.”
“Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau –and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me” (80).
However, chaos ensues when Dr. Moreau’s puma escapes from the “House of Pain” and it eventually battles Dr. Moreau to the death. Once word gets out, Prendick and Montgomery track down Moreau’s bloody body (with his hand nearly severed off) lying in a clearing on the island. Now, with the death of the creatures’ god, all hell breaks loose on the island. Soon, Montgomery and M’Ling are killed by the beasts, and in the chaos, Prendick accidentally knocks over a lamp that starts a fire and burns the interior of the “House of Pain” along with all of its food rations. With no options left, Prendick decides to join together with the beasts. He lives among them for ten months on the island (as they continue to devolve back into animalistic beings absent the influence of Dr. Moreau to temper them, and Prendick gradually loses all sympathy he once had for them). One day, by happy accident, a boat carrying two dead men drifts near the island (one has red-hair, perhaps indicating he may have been the captain of the ship that brought Prendick to this god-forsaken island). Prendick fashions the boat for escape and is miraculously rescued, as described at the outset of the novel. He pretends to have lost all his memory (save for when he speaks with one unnamed individual who apparently believes his story). Prendick then returns to England, but fails to readjust to society in London, so he relocates to the remote countryside where he devotes his days to reading chemistry and astronomy, hoping to find solace and hope in the stars above. But the whole time, he cannot help fearing the latent bestial side of humanity which lurks just beneath the surface.
“…I have confided my case to a strangely able man –a man who had known Moreau, and seemed half to credit my story; a mental specialist,– and he has helped me mightily, though I do not expect that the terror of that island will ever altogether leave me. At most times it lies far in the back of my mind, a mere distant cloud, a memory, and a faint distrust; but there are times when the little cloud spreads until it obscures the whole sky. Then I look about me at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright; others dull or dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere, –none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale” (114).
Thus concludes The Island of Dr. Moreau, a novel which gives a shockingly bleak, grotesque image of biology and Darwinian evolution –we might call it an account of the dangers of trans-humanistic experimentation and its discontents. It brings to mind contemporary scientific experiments with respect to cloning, synthetic embryos, and genetic manipulation. But rather than employing the Aristotelian view of physics which offers a theoretical well-ordered natural world striving toward the “form” of each “thinghood” by means of four chief causes, in The Island of Dr. Moreau, the world is chaotic and formless, and the possibility of new constructions and abominations is suddenly awakened (consider the serpentine creature concocted by Dr. Moreau which suggests evil creations are indeed possible). Life seems to be little more than a wild roll of the dice –and not without reason. In closing, I offer the following quotation from Montgomery to Prendick early in the novel, shortly after Prendick was rescued from his dinghy on the open ocean:
“’It’s a chance, I tell you,’ he interrupted, ‘as everything is in a man’s life. Only the asses won’t see it! Why am I here now, an outcast from civilization, instead of being a happy man enjoying all the pleasures of London? Simply because eleven years ago –I lost my head for ten minutes on a foggy night’” (13).
Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. Seawolf Press, Orinda, CA (2020, based on the original 1896 Stone and Kimball edition). The substance of Chapter XIV (“Dr. Moreau Explains”) was previously published as an article in “The Saturday Review” in 1895.