Moreau and the Monstrous:

Moreau and the Monstrous: Evolution, Religion, and the Beast on the IslandAuthor(s): E. E. SnyderSource: Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2013),pp. 213-239Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/preternature.2.2.0213 .

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preternature, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.

moreau and the monstrous: evolution, religion, and the beast on the island

E. E. Snyder

abstract

H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau contains apparently monstrous figures in the Beast Men, the human–animal hybrids that Moreau has created and attempts to “perfect” through pain and the repetition of the Law. Yet Moreau’s own philosophy, which attempts to read a purposeful progress out of nonprogressive, Darwinian evolution, is a mon-strous hybrid in itself and results in creating an idea of the human that humans cannot live up to, and punishing that failure.

The central concern of the book is that the Beast Men are much the same as other men, and that in our bodies and beliefs, we are all monsters. We all have the remnants of our evolution in us, and while the teleological argument may state that we can be “improved” until we are “per-fect,” Wells suggest that this expectation (particularly as it is carried out by Christianity, which threatens hellfire for transgressions) is in itself monstrous. The Island of Doctor Moreau demol-ishes the idea of a teleological understanding of species change, and with it any easy compromise between evolutionary readings of human progress and readings based in Christian revelation.

keywords

Moreau; evolution; teleology; Wells; Darwin; monster

The Island of Doctor Moreau begins with an apparent monstrosity: the crossing of animal and human in the figures of the Beast Men. Yet this conceals a deeper mon-strousness, that of Moreau’s hybrid philosophy, which grafts together Darwin’s evolution with the directed, designed world of natural theology. The result is a world designed to cause pain, and designed for its creatures to fail the challenges it sets. Moreau’s definition of humanity is a creature that is not driven by pain, for that takes only rational action; his definition of sanity similarly requires action to be purposeful and directed, taken in the name of progress. However, this definition of the human is a false one, failing to account for the evolutionary



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contingencies that create it. It demands a type of humanity that evolution is not capable of producing. Moreau’s definition of sanity also becomes monstrous when used to describe his actions, which are purposeful in causing suffering.

The Island of Doctor Moreau demolishes the idea of evolutionary progressiv-ism or directionalism, a response to Darwin that was common in the mid to late nineteenth century.1 This understanding of “evolution,” which I shall call “direc-tionalism” (as “progressivism” has alternate meanings and is liable to confusion) claims that species change does not operate blindly but is actually a directed process aimed toward increasing the perfection of human beings. Direction-alism ignores Darwin’s caution that “progress is no invariable rule”2 and his observation that the design of creatures is contingent on a series of historical and environmental circumstances. Moreau renders a directionalist reading of evolution untenable. It sees the attempt to insist on “progress” arising from a nonprogressive process as the central monstrosity of the island.

Evolution’s relationship to progress was an uneasy one even in Darwin’s for-mulation. Although Darwin sees progress as by no means certain, he still uses the language of progressive advancement. In the Origin of Species, he writes, “It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, pre-serving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.”3 This passage performs a rhetorical double move. On the one hand, natural selection works actively toward the “improvement” of organisms. This action is expressed through a variety of verbs implying choice and agency: “scrutinising,” “rejecting,” “preserv-ing,” and so on. On the other hand, this improvement is explicitly placed “in relation” to the organism’s “conditions of life.” Change is meant to be contingent on external circumstances, despite the language of design and intent. Through his personification of natural selection as active agent, working to a plan for the improvement of creatures, and through his sometimes hedging use of language such as “lower” and “higher” to describe organisms,4 Darwin leaves rhetorical space for an idea of evolution resulting in biological progress or advancement.

Wells was a student of T. H. Huxley, the man known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” and was therefore familiar with the theory of descent by natural selection. In Evolution and Ethics, Huxley writes against Hebert Spencer’s philosophy of the survival of the fittest, on the problems of progress and human action:

There is [a] fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called “ ethics of evolution.” It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and



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plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent “survival of the fittest”; there-fore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection. . . . Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the sur-vival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.5

Huxley draws a distinction between physical progress through natural selection and ethical progress through social alteration, but he does not call the idea of progress into question, and easily equates evolutionary change to “advanc[ing] in perfection of organization.” Also, the contention that social progress must preserve those ethically the best suffers from some of the same ethical prob-lems as strict social Darwinism, in that the category of “ethically the best” is not self-evident. Clearly, “progress” is a vexed idea, and its application to the results of evolution through natural selection is contested. Huxley, as noted, does use increasing “perfection of organization,” a term with directional implications, to describe the results of natural selection. Progress is invoked as a process of directional change even by those who understand and argue for evolution through natural selection as a contingent process with no fixed ends.

The distinctions between evolution and directionalism are contested and unclear, and so are the evolutionary distinctions between human and animal in The Island of Doctor Moreau. The Beast Men are the novel’s evident monsters, at least to start with. They are Moreau’s creations, not human yet no longer animal after what he has done to them. The Beast Men represent a confusion between human and animal, a blurring of boundaries. Yet Moreau’s muddled philosophy, which reads designed progress into an evolutionary process, creates a worse con-fusion of definitions and results in making all of humanity monstrous. Moreau, like Gulliver’s Travels, carries its threats from the island into the civilized world; the claims the book makes about animals and humans, reason and sanity, reli-gion, evolution, and a directed universe, do not remain locked on the distant island but follow Prendick back into the narrative space of civilized England. The central concern of the book is that the Beast Men cannot be distinguished from other men, and that in our bodies and beliefs, we are all monsters. We all have the remnants of our evolution in us, and while the teleological argument may state that we can be “improved” until we are “perfect,” Wells suggest that this expectation—particularly as it is carried out by Christianity, which threat-ens hellfire for transgressions—is in itself monstrous. Moreau implies that the



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attempt to extract evidences of design and progression from the “vast pitiless mechanism”6 of the world is both initially comforting and ultimately a futile exercise in self-delusion, leading only to ever more pain and suffering. Prendick escapes from Moreau’s island, but his escape is uneasy, and he carries with him the fear of meaninglessness, of animality, of a lack of teleology.

Some of the worst excesses of human behavior become apparent even before Prendick arrives at the doctor’s island. Moreau is a dark, bloody, angry book, and it starts with a shipwreck and the question of cannibalism: “The water ended on the fourth day, and we were already thinking strange things and saying them with our eyes; but it was, I think, the sixth before Helmar gave voice to the thing we all had in mind” (Moreau, 4–5). The nature of the proposal is never directly stated, but the implications are clear. Prendick’s two companions, Helmar and the sailor, pitch over the side of the dinghy in a fight after the sailor objects to losing the draw. In these first pages, men contemplate breaking taboos and eat-ing one another; this is humanity in extremis, and it does not display civilized, rational behavior.

Some uncertain amount of time after this, Prendick is picked up by the ship Ipecacuanha. Things are not much better here. Montgomery revives Prendick by giving him some iced drink that seems to be blood, or strongly resemble it: “It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger” (Moreau, 7). One of Prendick’s first responses is to ask for solid food, at which point Montgomery offers him mutton. Prendick eats his meat with vigor: “‘Yes,’ I said, with assurance; ‘I could eat some mutton’” (Moreau, 8). Here, the ingestion of meat and of the blood-like substance is a sign that Prendick is recovering, but they are vexed choices and options: on Moreau’s island, the Beast Men are forbidden to eat meat or fish or to chase (and presumably eat) other men. Prendick’s easy consumption of the blood-like drink and the meat mark him as belonging to a class of humanity apart from the Beast Men. It also sets him apart from the mutton on his plate, which is clearly delineated as food; Prendick’s taste for it is not diminished by his close brush with cannibalism. Humanity and animality are not yet called into question for Prendick, but consumption of meat will serve to distinguish human from Beast Man on the island. This consumption will also mark the “degen-eration” of the Beast Men, their failure to adhere to the principles of the Law that attempts to keep them “human”—though it should be noted that, as this Law prohibits meat for the Beast Men but not for Montgomery, it distinguishes between categories of humanity even as it claims to make the Beast Men human.

The captain of the Ipecacuanha (a name with vomitous associations) is not a sterling specimen of humanity, and Prendick refers to him as a “brute”—a



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word that he also uses to describe animals.7 The captain is drunk and angry and unhappy about his passengers and his cargo. In a fight with Montgomery over the sailors’ treatment of M’Ling, the Beast-Man that Montgomery has brought with him as an assistant, he says, “Who are you to tell me what I’m to do. I tell you I’m captain of the ship—Captain and Owner. I’m the law here, I tell you—the law and the prophets” (Moreau, 16). This statement moves seamlessly from an assertion of command through an invocation of property and law to a pun on religion, all within two sentences. Possession of the ship, the captain states, gives him legal authority; this property right then becomes, through the pun, a blas-phemous assertion that equates his statements with the Old Testament. Thus, early in the book, law is not an absolute; Wells highlights that it is made and enforced by people, and the pun on religion serves to call Christian law based on revelation into question as well. The systems of hierarchy and obedience, within which the passengers and crew on the ship exist, have been developed and car-ried out by human beings. They have no inherent moral weight. The captain asserts the same sort of right that Moreau asserts over his island, when Moreau helps create the Law and acts as its enforcer. The captain’s invocation of created hierarchy calls law and religion into question in a way that foreshadows Wells’s later treatment of both.

Both the inherent righteousness and the impermeability of common and reli-gious laws are called into doubt. Once the ship arrives at Moreau’s island, the captain and his crew throw Prendick over the boat into his dinghy, abandoning him to the mercies of its inhabitants: “‘Overboard,’ said the captain. ‘This ship ain’t for beasts and worse than beasts, any more.’” (Moreau, 24–25). The beasts are, presumably, the cargo, but M’Ling is labeled “worse than beasts.” M’Ling has been so far the greatest success of Moreau’s project of “raising” animals up the chain of being toward humanity, but the captain considers him “worse” than the beast (or beasts) he used to be. The captain’s judgment of M’Ling thus stands in juxtaposition to Moreau’s, which echoes much scientific writing in seeing more complex and more human-like organisms as “higher.” As the cap-tain only mentions “beasts” and “worse than beasts” among his passengers, Pren-dick and Montgomery must also be “worse than beasts,” along with M’Ling.8 This ranking of humans below animals directly opposes Moreau’s hierarchy. The captain’s is the first suggestion that these hierarchies of “higher” and “lower” organisms are not as easy as they seem, and that evolution and increased com-plexity is not enough to make an organism more “perfect.” His observation sug-gests that organisms can fall back down the scale to something lower than they were before.



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The human and the beastly begin to blend in the opening pages of the novel, foregrounding the eventual confusion of terms that will occur with the discovery of the provenance of M’Ling and the other Beast Men. My analysis of this novel focuses on the role of Moreau as both Nature and God in selecting variations on the island, uses of religion and cultural change as opposed to evolutionary change, and the implications of the intermixture of traits coded both “human” and “animal.” Moreau destabilizes easy binaries between the human and the beastly, suggesting that each always contains and involves the other. Evolution by natural selection demands recognition of human descent from animals, rais-ing questions about the definition of the human and how to distinguish it from the animal. For Wells, the distinction is both vexed and continually in the pro-cess of being created. Wells involves both Christian religion and evolution in his discussion of the monstrous. Ultimately, both Christian religion and Moreau in his role of giver of the Law become “beastly” in their attempt to impose a directional reading, a particular spiritual purpose, on the contingencies of evolu-tion. Religion, in the novel, does not serve as a distinguishing feature between human and animal. Insofar as any character does create a working definition of the “human” as distinguished from the animal, it is Moreau, who claims that humans are driven by reason, and animals by pain. However, no humans appear to meet his ideal of “a rational being,” as even he himself is motivated by pain. Prendick has a list of traits that seem human and not animal to him, but it is evident from his description of the people around him that humanity does not always demonstrate these traits, and that they are an ideal rather than an actual description. In a way, then, all of humanity is monstrous.

In Open Fields, Gillian Beer writes:

The question “what is a monster?” and the apparently related question “where is the boundary between mankind and the animal?” haunt litera-ture and theory from the writing of Lord Monboddo in the late eighteenth century to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau in the late nineteenth (a work that comes out of the Victorian anti-vivisection debate as much as the debate on eugenics). In Wells’s novel the forced hybrids between animals and humans, bred in pain, living in slavery, raise the question of what is human not only by their appearance but by the light they cast on the “inhumanity” of the experimenters, the shifting identifications of the narrator.9

As we have seen, it is not only the hybrids in Moreau that raise the issue of boundaries between human and animal; I would suggest that the question



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can be productively rephrased: How is the human constituted? Do Moreau, Montgomery, and Prendick count as human beings? If they count, then do the Beast Men? Does any of the London crowd count, once Prendick has escaped from the island?

The inhumanity of conducting experiments on animals was a central argu-ment of the anti-vivisection movements of the 1870s and onward. A brief word about this controversy is necessary at this point, as it touches on animals, science, and the role and use of pain. Increasing research into and teaching of physiology in the latter half of the nineteenth century brought an increase in vivisection, which was opposed by a vocal anti-vivisectionist movement. A Royal Commis-sion was formed to investigate the practice of scientific vivisection in 1875, and Huxley was a member. Both Darwin and Huxley supported vivisection for the advancement of knowledge, despite qualms on Darwin’s part about the pro-cess10 and Huxley’s own personal reluctance to conduct experiments resulting in pain.11 The issue of the pain felt by the animals was central to the arguments of the anti-vivisectionist movement, particularly as vivisectors did not always use anesthetics. Stewart Richards notes, “Because [the nineteenth century] had grown accustomed to the seeming panacea of anaesthetics, it was the more out-raged by the physiologists’ modus operandi which sanctioned the method of pain for extracting scientific truths, a situation that seemed altogether incompatible with the idea of science as the noble instrument of moral progress.”12 There were potential justifications for the practice of vivisection in that the result-ing knowledge might have practical medical applications, but the process was always necessarily destructive of the life and health of animals.

Wells, like Darwin and Huxley, supported the use of vivisection for the advancement of knowledge.13 Shortly before writing Moreau, he discussed the evolutionary use of pain in a way that reaffirmed a hierarchy between humans and animals. In his essay “The Province of Pain,” published in 1894, he argued that “the end of pain, so far as we can see its end, is protection. There seems to be little or no absolutely needless or unreasonable pain in the world, though,” he added, “disconsolate individuals might easily be found who see no good in gout or toothache.”14 He goes on to suggest that, as pain serves to protect those who experience it by acting as a warning and inducing people to avoid it, so animals do not feel much pain because they are not intelligent enough to evaluate and subsequently change their behavior; further, he argues that as humans continue to evolve, pain will not be required: “The lower animals, we may reasonably hold, do not feel pain because they have no intelligence to uti-lise the warning; the coming man will not feel pain, because the warning will not be needed.”15 In his later essay “Popular Feeling and the Advancement of



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Science: Anti-vivisection,” Wells appeals briefly to the use of anesthetics and the relative painlessness of most experiments, but largely defends the practice of vivisection in the pursuit of knowledge, even in cases where pain is caused. He argues that anti- vivisectionists do not “clearly separate [animals and their experiences] from humanity,” while the pro-vivisectionists understand that animals are “limited and simplified cognates of our own infinitely more com-plex and important beings.”16 The hierarchy between human and animal that Wells defines legitimizes the infliction of some suffering on “lower” beings in the course of scientific experiment. The Darwinian revelation of the common descent of all living beings does not enter into this argument, except as proof that the experiments on animals will therefore be revelatory about the con-struction of humanity.

While Wells supports the use of vivisection for science, in Moreau he presents a much more troubling display of the arguments he makes in his later essay. Moreau’s experiments complicate the hierarchy of human/animal that Wells himself clearly believes in. Vivisection raises problems of ethics, of the ends and means of scientific investigation; it pits Huxley’s cosmic evolutionary process against the civilizing ethical process. It is a site of slippage, where the human can become “worse than beasts” in causing deliberate pain, and where the beast can be humanized in its suffering and experience of pain. The two come together in the transformation of the puma into a woman on Moreau’s slab.

The encounter with the leopard–man is one instance where Prendick negoti-ates the humanity of the hybrid Beast Man. At the time, Prendick thinks the leopard–man is and always has been human, although he finds the man unset-tling: “Then suddenly upon the bank of the stream appeared something—at first I could not distinguish what it was. It bowed its head to the water and began to drink. Then I saw it was a man, going on all fours like a beast!” (Moreau, 47). The initial question Prendick asks is what, “what it was,” but this question shifts at their next encounter, when Prendick tries to speak to the man:

I advanced a step or two looking steadfastly into his eyes.“Who are you?” said I. He tried to meet my gaze.“No!” he said suddenly, and, turning, went bounding away from me through the undergrowth. Then he turned and stared at me again. (Moreau, 52)

Prendick’s question becomes not what, but who; he assumes that he is speaking to an individual, a human being capable of reply, and that he can therefore use the pronoun “who.” The leopard–man rejects this question. He speaks, an ability traditionally associated with humanity, but he speaks only to reject the whole



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idea of his identity, and of communication with Prendick. In his use of human speech to reject a conception of his humanity, he actively resists Prendick’s attempt to place him within a hierarchy of creation, and carves out a marginal space of his own.

Later, on the beach, Prendick attempts to persuade the Beast Men to rise up against Moreau and Montgomery; he assumes that they are men who have been vivisected, and does not yet guess the truth of their creation. Moreau and Mont-gomery talk him into coming inside for a conversation, rather than inciting riot on the shore; they conceal the knowledge of how the creatures have been cre-ated through the use of schoolboy Latin and the term “vivisected.” On his way up the beach to talk to the two men, Prendick observes of the group of Beast Men standing under the trees, “They may once have been animals. But never before did I see an animal trying to think” (Moreau, 86). Even in the moment where the promise of understanding and explanation of the Beast Men is held out to Prendick in codified language, the Beast Men display their refusal to fit in those categories. As Michael Pinsky observes, “Moreau is a biologist, part of a science that attempts to bring all life under a singular heading, while at the same time taxonomizing individual entities.”17 The schoolboy Latin Moreau uses to communicate with Prendick without the Beast Men understanding him is also the language of species identification. Moreau pushes his creations toward his grand ideal of a constructed humanity, but the ideal is unrealizable and the Beast Men resist this classification even as he enacts it. They meet the question of their identity with a “No!” rejecting the framing of the question.

Almost all of Moreau’s experimental creations replicate human features, to Prendick’s distress: “I asked him why he had taken the human form as a model. There seemed to me then, and there still seems to me now, a strange wickedness in that choice. He confessed that he had chosen that form by chance” (Moreau, 91). Prendick’s interpretive schema, which assumes that Moreau has chosen the human form specifically, for a fixed purpose, conflicts with Moreau’s own stated rationale—which is not a rationale. Moreau claims to be acting with something like the randomness of natural selection; the human form is an acci-dental result of his alterations. There is reason to doubt his claims, however. The sheer repetitive nature of his continued attempts to produce humanlike Beast Men, the large number of attempts he has made, the extent to which he has created a philosophy around humanity, pain, and evolution, and his refusal to create beasts that are not human after the snakelike beast kills one of the Kanakas (Pacific Islanders who work for Moreau) all suggest that humanity is more than mere chance, and that Moreau deceives himself and Prendick in insisting that he is operating arbitrarily. Although he claims to operate with



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the randomness characteristic of evolution through natural selection, in fact Moreau’s experiments display a great and terrible obsessiveness manifesting in the idea of “progress.”

Moreau reaffirms the idea of a discernible split between human and animal, but he finds them to be intermingled in one case: the human being experiences “animal” responses when subject to pain. Prendick, struggling to understand, asks, “Where is your justification for inflicting all this pain? The only thing that could excuse vivisection to me would be some application” (Moreau, 92). Prendick asks for reasoning, a rational goal for the suffering inflicted; he asks for a progressive interpretation of the pain that Moreau causes, one leading toward some ultimate end. Moreau denies this interpretation, calling Prendick a mate-rialist, and states, “So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick, so long as your own pains drive you, so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin, so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels” (Moreau, 92).

This brief passage resembles a passage from Huxley’s lecture “Evolution and Ethics” in its phrasing, and particularly in the repeated use of “so long.” Huxley states:

That man, as a “political animal,” is susceptible of a vast amount of improvement, by education, by instruction, and by the application of his intelligence to the adaptation of the conditions of life to his higher needs, I entertain not the slightest doubt. But, so long as he remains liable to error, intellectual or moral; so long as he is compelled to be perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces, whose ends are not his ends, without and within himself; so long as he is haunted by inexpugnable memories and hopeless aspirations; so long as the recognition of his intellectual limita-tions forces him to acknowledge his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of existence; the prospect of attaining untroubled happiness, or of a state which can, even remotely, deserve the title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. And there have been many of them.18

Huxley’s point, while distinguishing between a state of human perfection and the one attained through evolution, differs from Moreau’s in important ways. Moreau claims that while the fear of pain drives human responses, full human-ity is not yet attained; pain in the body is an evolutionary remnant that can be removed in order to make a more rational, and therefore more perfect, being.



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Huxley argues that while there are mechanisms to “improve” human beings, it is impossible to understand our terrible yearnings, our need to defend against the cosmic process, and our fundamental “incapacity to penetrate the mystery of existence” while simultaneously claiming that we will reach “perfection” or be “perfectly happy.” Progress in happiness is necessarily opposed to evolution, and can only come through education and the other accoutrements of culture brought about by the operation of the ethical process. For Huxley, evolution by itself is incapable of producing untroubled happiness, but this lack of trouble and of pain is Moreau’s goal in mimicking evolution.

Moreau draws a dividing line between the human and the animal, but he does it in such a way that most of humanity (plausibly, all of it, including himself ) is on the animal side of that line. Further, he hopes to get his creatures to attain humanity by subjecting them to animal pain, first in vivisection, and then by the threat of the House of Pain if they break the Law. Moreau links the experience of pain, which is driving force that underlines humanity’s own interpretation of divine laws, explicitly with religion. So long as the fear of hellfire drives humans, then even their religious worship signifies their animal nature. Moreau’s attempt to define humanity demonstrates that it does not yet exist on his terms, nor can his creations reach it; as the Beast Men on the island fail to become human, so all humans fail to be fully other than animal. In addition, Moreau’s argument assumes a directed progress from animal to human that runs counter to the contingent nature of species change through natural selection.

In his discussion with Prendick, Moreau delivers this monologue:

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.

Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be. It may be I fancy 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. And I tell you, pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven or hell. Pleasure and pain—Bah! What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s houri in the dark? This store which men and women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure—they are for us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust. . . .

You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me. That is the only way I ever heard of research going. I asked a question, devised some method of getting an answer, and got—a fresh question. (Moreau, 93–94)



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Moreau, in this speech, claims that evolution grinds out useless things. This is not entirely the case; Darwin himself founds his argument for evolution in part on useless things, the rudiments of previous life forms that are not perfectly adapted to the current situation of the species.19 Moreau’s claim is more ideo-logical than factual. He argues for utility as a measure of progress, and requires some measure of what is good and what is not; he demands a purpose to evolu-tion beyond pure survival. He believes that “pain gets needless” as a method for forcing people and other creatures into looking after their own welfare, once the creatures are capable of rationally considering their options. His evaluation of this needlessness is made without regard to the fact that natural selection has not yet removed pain from existence. Moreau is engaged in constructing and testing the limits of the human, setting ideals for humanity that have not been reached and experimenting in an attempt to achieve them. He pursues this goal, whether he admits it or not, because he believes in the idea of evolutionary pro-gress; as part of this, he believes in a hierarchy that sees humans as “higher” than animals, more rational, less driven by the body.

Second, Moreau claims to be a religious man, and equates this with being a sane man. I will return to this point, but I would like to note that Moreau here makes allusion to natural laws, discoverable by science, as they have been laid down by God. The claim has heavy echoes of natural theology—a system of understanding the natural world, predating Darwin, which sees the world as showing the designing intention and benevolence of God in its creation.20 Further, this argument makes possible a religious interpretation of Moreau’s directionalist–evolutionary statements; pain is not only useless but lesser. It is lower on the chain of being, and what is below human on the chain is beastly. Pain is the mark of that which is animal, but also that which is against God. Classification, collecting butterflies, is not the kind of inquisition that will determine the organizing laws of the world as laid down by God; only Moreau’s attempt to create a rational being of his own allows him to determine God’s laws. Understanding of God, for him, comes only through acting in the role of God as creator.

However, Moreau also tells Prendick, “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” (Moreau, 94). This claim is central to the directional-ist slant of the book. Moreau has laid hold both of the power of creation as in Genesis, the power of making another living being in his own image, and of the evolutionary power of nature. His real failing is in bringing the two together, in not realizing that creation in the biblical sense requires covenants, and a



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relationship between creator and created where both have obligations to the other. Evolution serves no pre-determined ends, and results in no definite “pro-gress.” If his theoretical framework is purposeful and progressive, “advancing” his creatures toward a given idea of perfection, then he is acting purposefully—not as randomly as Nature—and is responsible for his creation. If he does in fact act with the purposelessness and remorselessness of Nature, then his beings cannot aim toward rationality, and cannot “progress” according to a pre-given scale. The natural theological and the evolutionary arguments for change in the world have been grafted awkwardly together, and the places of slippage between them are showing.

Religion and science are both implicated in the failure of Moreau’s experiment to take any account of ethics. Roslynn Haynes writes, “Moreau, then, represents a nightmarish hybrid, the logical and inevitable outcome, as Wells saw it, of the desire to graft on to a deistic belief in an omnipotent Creator, the postulates of Darwinian theory including the assertion of a continuum of creation which acknowledged no gap, no essential difference in kind, between man and his fore-bears. Wells thus deliberately set out to destroy the hope cherished by liberal theologians, that some valid, if tacit, compromise was possible between science and natural theology.”21 Haynes ascribes Moreau’s destruction of any common ground between evolutionary theory and natural theology to deliberate autho-rial intent. I am less willing to speculate on the deliberateness of this portrayal, but I do agree with her summation that the book pits natural selection and a directionalist deism against each other. Moreau creates a system of biological change. He denies directionalism and yet takes action in accord with a direc-tionalist idea of a chain of being; he sees ideal man as entirely removed from the animal. He then takes belief in this chain and the possibility of “upward” move-ment along it as a criterion of “sanity.” I agree with Haynes that Wells believes that Christianity and evolution cannot truly be reconciled, both because Wells understands the ruthlessness of evolutionary action and because, as I will dis-cuss below, Wells deeply dislikes Christianity, and particularly Catholicism. (It is notable that it is not Moreau, but the less sinister Prendick who makes the blasphemous, parodic prophecy of Moreau’s resurrection to the Beast Men on the beach in a passage that, Haynes notes, “cannot but be intended to reflect upon the authenticity of Christian doctrine.”)22 The problem with Moreau is that he constructs himself as a God figure but is too like Nature: he has no ethics. Moreau’s philosophy is a hybrid creation, grafting together two ideas of the point of pain: the evolutionary idea that life is developed through suffering and waste and response to momentary environmental circumstances, and the



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progressivist, natural theological idea that the development of life shows the qualities and the design of the creator. Huxley’s ethical process in opposition to nature is nowhere visible. Moreau’s philosophy is as thorough an amalgamation of “man” and “beast” as the creatures he creates.

In Future Present, Pinsky identifies several areas of slippage between the ani-mal and the human, located around the figure of the Beast Men:

Moreau’s use of science—“The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature”—is an attempt to bring the Beast Men under con-trol through medical technology. The act requires the Beast Men to be animals, that is, experimental objects shipped in during Montgomery’s periodic trips to civilization. Moreau’s use of law—the code passed down through the Sayer of the Law—requires the Beast Men to be humans, to conform to a social order, enforceable by the technology of torture. Both technologies meet in the process of vivisection.

The third aspect of the narrative belongs to Prendick, whose roles as amateur biologist and Moreau’s successor as legal authority on the island touch on the other threads of this narrative web. His status as proper Victorian gentleman thrust into the wilderness is undermined by his descent into the realm of the animal. His attempt to tell his story to the reader, to narrate around the Beast Men, is an attempt to assert himself as a thinking subject. After all, animals do not think. But the paranoia that permeates the final scenes of the novel—Prendick’s fear at the suggestion that he and the Ape Man are kin because they have the same number of fingers, the return to civilization where all humans seem to be tainted with animality—inject a sense of the irrational into the narrative. Does Prendick too have a bit of the animal about him? Can he be trusted?23

I would argue that of course Prendick has a bit of the animal about him; in fact, it has been there the whole time, from well before he ever landed on the island or learned of the Beast Men. The paranoia that humanity is a perme-able category, and that humans may not actually be in it, is the paranoia of the entire novel. Moreau’s attempt to defeat the beast in human beings through creating human beings out of beasts does not work. Prendick’s initial confusion about the origin of the Beast Men, his assumption that they were human beings who have, through vivisection, been degraded into lower life forms, makes a certain amount of sense. The Beast Men elude easy categorization, and after all, as Moreau points out, they are humans made out of beasts much as humanity



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itself evolved—if on a much shorter timescale. By the end of the novel, Prendick remarks, “And even it seemed that I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain” (Moreau, 172). If human and animal are to be in any way distinguishable, it must be through definitions that are created and policed—like and yet unlike the definitions that Moreau uses. For Moreau, not only do humans have traces of the animal within them, but full humanity is not yet reached by anyone, including himself; his definition of humanity involves not experiencing animal pain, which is for those who “wriggle in the dust.” Prendick’s—and the novel’s—paranoia is that Moreau may be right: humanity is still largely animal, and subject to reversion.

As Pinsky accurately notes, the subjects to be vivisected are coded as animals for their journey to the island—there is, initially, no question that the puma is a puma. Yet as soon as they are subjected to scientific processes, and to deliber-ate pain, they slip categories into the blurred position of Beast Men, a blurring inherent in the name itself. The rule of the Law is meant to keep their minds aspiring toward “human” behavior, and to act on the evolution of their instincts, even as the House of Pain offers a threat of punishment to their hybrid bod-ies. Some clarification is required of Moreau’s role in creating the Law. While much criticism of the novel treats the doctor as the creator of the Law, he claims that Montgomery and the Kanakas have established it, though he receives its praises: “There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there. Montgomery knows about it, for he interferes in their affairs. . . . I fancy they follow in the lines the Kanaka missionary marked out, and have a kind of mockery of a rational life—poor beasts! There’s something they call the Law. Sing hymns about ‘all thine’” (Moreau, 99).

Moreau clearly knows about the Law, but he disclaims responsibility for it, denies dictating its terms, and blames its existence on Christianity. He does, however, have a closer relationship with the Law than he here admits; he acts to enforce it, punishing transgressions against its mandates with the House of Pain. He says, “And they revert. As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again” (Moreau, 99). When the leopard–man is found to have broken the Law against eating flesh or fish, Moreau enforces this law, demanding that the Sayer recite the litany, stopping him at the broken commandment, and prompting the Beast Men to pronounce the inevitable judgment of the House of Pain with “a touch of exultation in his voice” (Moreau, 116). Moreau is clearly more familiar with the Law than he gives Prendick to believe in their initial conversation. Either Moreau has created the Law and disavowed it to Prendick (which, given the things to which he admits



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with equanimity, is a strange sticking point), or Moreau and the creatures have compiled it between them out of the mishmash of Montgomery’s instructions, the half-remembered phrases of the Kanaka missionary, and the injunctions that Moreau attempts to imprint on the brains of his creation through vivisec-tion and hypnotism.

The institution of the Law, with its perpetual need for reinforcing, implies that all of the creatures of the island are stuck in a recurring ritual, driven by pain. Moreau defines humanity as a creature not driven by pain, and reinforces that the Beast Men are not human by subjecting them to it all the time, expect-ing it to alter them. He continually enacts the boundaries that he lays down and continually transgresses them, as he himself is motivated to use pain as a tool to “improve” his creatures. Through the House of Pain, he polices the borders of humanity as much to keep his creatures out as to bring them within his definitions.

Moreau says, during his conversation with Prendick, “Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own. After all, what is ten years? Man has been a hundred thousand in the making” (Moreau, 98–99). Pain ought to be used to transcend pain, Moreau’s theory runs, but he has yet to succeed in creating a rational creature, one that does not depend in its turn on the threat of pain to maintain its rational behavior. Moreau’s creations echo the making of man, through animal stages and with great suffering; they also echo Genesis, as Moreau strives to make a rational creature in his own image, and baptizes them in his burning bath.

Moreau describes himself as a religious man, “as every sane man must be” (Moreau, 93), which is a fascinating confluence of terms. References to sanity appear in other places throughout the novel; for instance, when Prendick is first brought onto the island, Moreau tells him, “I’m sorry to make a mystery, Mr. Prendick—but you’ll remember you’re uninvited. Our little establishment here contains a secret or so, is a kind of Bluebeard’s Chamber, in fact. Nothing very dreadful really—to a sane man” (Moreau, 36). Anne Stiles, writing on the figure of the mad scientist, discusses the novel’s treatment of insanity:

Early drafts of The Island of Dr. Moreau indicate that the mad doctor’s amorality and single-minded devotion to experimentation result from mental illness. In one rough draft, Moreau’s assistant, Montgomery, excuses his employer’s scientific preoccupation on the grounds of men-tal instability: “This research is only a sane kind of mania. It’s irresistible.



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He’s driven to make these things, can’t help it any more than an avalanche . . . can help smashing a tourist.” . . . Seen from the grim perspective of evolutionary neurology, then, Dr. Moreau’s overdeveloped rationality is the monstrous presence on the island, not the grafted hybrids he creates.24

She suggests that Moreau’s “overdeveloped rationality” is in itself insane, and in that sense, an attempt to make rational creatures in his own image must nec-essarily mean monstrosity and madness. However, in both this early draft and in Moreau’s own language, his mania is labeled “sane” despite itself. Prendick, later in the novel, takes a different view; he describes Moreau’s “curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations” (Moreau, 123). I would suggest that Moreau’s mania is classified as “sane” only insofar as it makes, or creates, sense. Sanity requires a goal, a direction, and a reasoning—elements that link it to religion.

The language of sanity and religion appears again, linked not only to Moreau, but to the entire world. Prendick observes, “I must confess I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence, and I, Moreau by his passion for research, Montgomery by his pas-sion for drink, the Beast People, with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels” (Moreau, 123). Prendick’s belief that the world is not sane is predicated on its allowance of disorder. Prendick can perceive no ordering prin-ciple to Moreau’s research, and no good that has come of it. Moreau enforced an ordered, directed change on the island, but it was a directionalism always doomed to failure through Moreau’s mingling of it with evolutionary, nonprogressive prin-ciples; there is no indication that his work will be made meaningful or useful in any way after his death. Life, in its complexity and in the failure of the world to develop “for the better,” is the “pitiless mechanism,” and it preys on the weaknesses of each man and beast; none can live up to it. Each has a flaw that will send him to the House of Pain. Evolution adapts creatures to circumstances, and Moreau thinks that should mean toward order and sanity. Moreau himself does not adapt creatures to circumstances; he creates circumstances to which, incompletely, he adapts creatures. But evolution is disordered; it does not work toward any fixed end. Neither evolution, nor Moreau, is sane.

Moreau, in his discussions of sanity, talks about it as being a form of order, and Prendick too uses “sane” to mean “ordered and purposeful.” Yet it is not biology alone that can reflect order. In his initial explanation of the island to Prendick, Moreau discusses the potential outcomes of vivisection, and



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(although Prendick is not convinced) how they go beyond mere physical form: “The possibilities of vivisection do not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily. In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafted upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion” (Moreau, 91). Instinct is biological, and can be “grafted” and modified in ways that we would call cultural and psychological, through the action of hypnosis. The physical alterations that Moreau creates, the Law that has grown out of his injections, and the work of the missionary combine; they all work to alter the animal creature to resemble the human-like creature Moreau hopes to create. This proto-humanity may be what creates the religious instinct in the first place, as the suppression and alteration of instincts experienced by the Beast Men becomes the origin of the Law. At the very least, the Beast Men’s identification as men allows the religious impulse to propagate through the repetitive chant of “Are we not Men?”

The unsigned review of the novel that appeared in The Guardian raised ques-tions of the novel’s treatment of religion; the critic was disturbed by it, writing:

Sometimes one is inclined to think the intention of the author has been to satirise and rebuke the presumption of science; at other times his object seems to be to parody the work of the Creator of the human race, and cast contempt upon the dealings of God with His creatures. This is the suggestion of the exceedingly clever and realistic scenes in which the humanised beasts recite the Law their human maker has given them, and show very plainly how impossible it is to them to keep that law. The inevitable reversion of these creatures to bestiality is very well described; but it ought to have been shown that they revert inevitably because they are only man-made creatures.25

The critic desires to draw attention to the fact that the Law is of human crea-tion; he draws forth the “inevitable reversion” of the Beast Men to an animal state, but does not take up the question of the animal within the human being. He wishes to draw firmer lines between the creation of humanity by God, in His image, and the creation of Beast Men by Moreau. He does not want the one to approach the other, except as a parody doomed to failure, and certainly



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not as Moreau sees it, as the only action that would allow him to understand natural laws laid down by a deity.

The reviewer’s nerves are unsettled with good reason; the novel does not spare religion but critiques religion’s attempt to find purpose in suffering and views it as one of the systems causing pain in the world. I would like to bring in a passage from Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography, in hopes that it will shed some light on the treatment of religion in The Island of Doctor Moreau. The Autobiography was published in 1934; the passage discusses a period of time before Wells was a writer, even before he was a student of T. H. Huxley’s, when he was a draper’s assistant. While the light of retrospect may well illuminate this particular memory, it manifests some recurring concerns about religion and the treatment of ideas. The scene takes place in the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Portsmouth, where a preacher is giving a sermon on the dreadfulness of hell:

My eyes and thoughts went, with all the amazement of new discovery, about the crowded building in which I was sitting, its multitudinous gas and candle flames, its aspiring columns, its glowing altar, the dim arched roof, which had been made to house this spouting fount of horrible non-sense. A real fear of Christianity assailed me. It was not a joke; it was nothing funny as the Freethinker pretended. It was something immensely formidable. It was a tremendous human fact. We, the still congregation, were spread over the floor, not one of us daring to cry out against this fel-low’s threats. Most of us in some grotesque way seemed to like the dread-ful stuff.

. . . I realized as if for the first time, the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been intoning, responding and going through ritual gestures at me. I realized something dreadful about them. They were thrusting an incredible and ugly lie upon the world and the world was making no such resistance as I was disposed to make to this enthronement of cruelty.26

In light of this passage, it is absolutely plausible to read Moreau as Wells in full atheist revolt against institutionalized religion, and in particular ritualized Christianity and the “queer shaven men in lace and petticoats” and “ritual ges-tures” of Catholicism.

The Law reflects the intonation and ritual gestures of the Cathedral. Although I do not wish to promote a strictly biographical reading of Wells’s creation of the Law, I do want to suggest that Wells’s experience of



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abhorrence and fear in the Cathedral sheds useful light on the way the Law is portrayed. The book is very plausibly in revolt against the idea of God, and certainly the codification of God’s laws on earth through Christian churches, and the Catholic Church in particular. The vision of hell that the preacher exults in threatening the congregation with, and the intentness with which the believers listen, resemble the threats of the House of Pain—and in Moreau, the threat will always happen, because its subjects can never hold the Law well enough. They have not been made perfect enough to hold it in the first place. To each comes his or her own failure; this marks a flaw in the creation. The Law both creates and enforces the failure of the Beast men to be human. It reinforces the essential in-betweenness of their condition.

It is from Prendick’s initial encounter with the Beast Men that the fullest description of the recitation of the Law comes; at the time, he still believes that they were originally humans, who have been operated on to make them more like animals:

“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 Flesh nor Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?“Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?“Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

And so from the prohibition of these acts of folly, on to the prohibi-tion of what I thought then were the maddest, most impossible, and most indecent things one could well imagine. A kind of rhythmic fervour fell on all of us; we gabbled and swayed faster and faster, repeating this amaz-ing law. Superficially the contagion of these brute men was upon me, but deep down within me laughter and disgust struggled together. We ran through a long list of prohibitions, and then the chant swung round to a new formula:

“His is the House of Pain.“His is the Hand that makes.“His is the Hand that wounds.“His is the Hand that heals.”

And so on for another long series, mostly quite incomprehensible gib-berish to me, about Him, whoever he might be. I could have fancied it was a dream, but never before have I heard chanting in a dream. (Moreau, 72–73)



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The resemblance of the list of proscribed activities to the Commandments is clear; like the Commandments, this list exists in the negative. Denial and pro-scription are supposed to prove that the Beast Men are men. Yet, the final ques-tion, “Are we not Men?” leads in its negative phrasing to an evident answer, “No, we are not Men.” This repetition of negatives only enforces necessary failure; a list of proscribed activities is required only for those who are capable of per-forming those activities in the first place.

Further, the religious atmosphere and experience of the Law is “contagious.” All the characters on the island come within its system but fall short of fulfilling it. It is one half a designed thing, created through instinct and hypnotism and vivisection, and one half grown out of the old missionary teachings and the role of Moreau as creator. Prendick, Moreau, and even Montgomery find themselves within the system of the Law but cannot fully experience or embody it, as it is designed for failure. Those within it must always then be driven by pain, and it gains its power through repetition and threats of further pain. As a built system, it requires failure, and exists only insofar as it is not met (“We are not Men”). Prendick claims that, deep within himself, he does not agree with the proceed-ings, but chooses to participate anyway. This passage displays real fear: a fear of the power of the ceremony to induce others to go along with it, and a fear that these prohibitions against the “maddest, most indecent” things are created only to be broken, and the transgressions punished. We can see in Prendick’s response to the reading of the Law something of Wells’s own response, standing in the cathedral, not “daring to cry out against this fellow’s threats”: “Superfi-cially the contagion of these brute men was upon me, but deep down within me laughter and disgust struggled together.” The Guardian critic is right that Moreau is a mockery of Christianity: the Beast Men’s experience of religion is based on pain underlying their propositions about sin, and the whole experience of religious feeling is a farce with terrifying power. The Beast Men praise “Him, whoever he might be,” in context clearly meaning the false God Moreau, but also God who punishes with a hell of pain those who break His commandments, which each must break.

After his time spent with Moreau and with the Beast Men, it is unsur-prising that Prendick cannot see human beings without finding them animalistic:

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.



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I know this is an illusion, that these seeming men and women about me are indeed men and women, men and women for ever, perfectly reason-able creatures full of human desires and tender solicitude, emancipated from instinct and the slaves of no fantastic Law—beings altogether dif-ferent from the Beast Folk. Yet I shrink from them. (Moreau, 171)

Prendick’s hope is contradicted by the earlier irrationality of the human charac-ters, by the plausibility of Moreau’s hypothesis that pain drives human action, and by Wells’s own experience in the Cathedral, watching an audience yearn after descriptions of its own perpetual torments. For the student of Darwin, men and women have not been men and women forever. Humanity has not been human forever—indeed, for Moreau, humanity may not yet be human. Prendick clings to the hope of tender solicitude, the compassionate impulse set in opposition to the ruthless “every man for himself ” version of evolutionary nature, but the evidence that humans are not, as Prendick would wish, “eman-cipated from instinct” and “slaves to no fantastic Law” has already appeared within the novel. A slippage down the chain of being to something “less” than what we would call human is threatening, and all of Prendick’s wishing cannot hold it off. Finally, considering the vision of the eventual death of the planet that Wells had presented in The Time Machine, Prendick’s refuge from the inhuman appearance of humanity in astronomy does not seem like much of a refuge.

By the time Wells wrote “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process,” pub-lished in 1896 but composed alongside the final draft of Moreau,27 he had begun to believe that physical evolutionary change was no longer a plausible factor for the advancement of humanity. He writes: “In civilised man we have (1) an inherited factor, the natural man, who is the product of natural selec-tion, the culminating ape, and a type of animal more obstinately unchangeable than any other living creature; and (2) an acquired factor, the artificial man, the highly plastic creature of tradition, suggestion, and reasoned thought.”28 Human beings, Wells argues, have become resistant to change through natu-ral selection; they are more liable to change through culture. Wells goes on to note his view of the relation of the inherited and acquired factors: “What we call Morality becomes the padding of suggested emotional habits necessary to keep the round Palaeolithic savage in the square hole of the civilised state. And Sin is the conflict of the two factors—as I have tried to convey in my Island of Doctor Moreau.”29 Wells’s early hopes of transcending bodily pain through evolution have vanished. Instead, he hopes that the conflict between the desires of the round savage and the requirements of the square hole of civil society can



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be amended. Through this argument, Wells claims to “[reconcile] a scientific faith in evolution with optimism. The attainment of an unstable and transitory perfection only through innumerable generations of suffering and ‘elimination’ is not necessarily the destiny of humanity. If what is here advanced is true, in Education lies the possible salvation of mankind from misery and sins.”30 From his mentions of gout and toothache in “The Province of Pain,” Wells switches rhetorical registers to “misery and sins” in this essay, published only two years later. He no longer defines “progress” as the “perfection” achieved by the painful methods of natural selection. The Island of Doctor Moreau, however, does not fully make this change, and indeed throws doubt on the idea that it is possible to save humanity from “misery and sins” at all.

Many years later, in his preface to the collection of The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells, Wells looked back on the process of composing Moreau. He called the book “an exercise in youthful blasphemy,” and added, “Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time, and I did my best to express my vision of the aimless torture in creation.”31 In Moreau, Wells advanced a set of ideas from which he quickly retreated, taking refuge in the hope that human beings could be saved from misery and pain by education, if not by biology. He returned frequently to the argument advanced in “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process”; aspects of it are still visible in the Outline of History, published in 1920. Wells writes in the Outline, “All human history is fundamentally a history of ideas. Between the man of to-day and the Cro-Magnard the physical and mental differences are very slight; their essential difference lies in the extent and content of the men-tal background which we have acquired in the five or six hundred generations that intervene.”32 He goes on to argue that this changing mental background should be systematically educated, and this education brought to bear on poli-tics. Education will result in a system of social sciences that will accurately and completely describe the most perfect arrangement of human affairs, and the creation of a “world league of men”33 who will work tirelessly for the good of all human beings. In his plan, religious feeling “will reappear again, stripped and plain,” as a spirit of devotion and service to the improvement of humanity.34

After the composition of Moreau, Wells embraced an idea of progress and of the perfectibility of human society. Education and the development of culture along scientifically determined lines were supposed to remedy misery and suf-fering, and to cover over the “hideous grimace” of the evolved world with its pointless pain. Moreau’s lasting effect on Wells’s thought is, perhaps, best found in the finality with which he rejected his own nightmarish vision of the extent



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to which human beings remain animal, and hunger for teleological systems that predict their own necessary failure. Instead, Wells embraced an idea of human-designed progress, arguing that even if evolution does not result in progress and perfection, we are not bound to suffer for our animal bodies and instincts and their conflict with our human society.

Moreau’s pessimistic take on the “pitiless mechanism” of the world was largely ignored by contemporary readers, judging from the reviews it received. Wells, a few years later, reflected on this response: “I should say that The Island of Doctor Moreau, although it was written in a great hurry and is marred by many faults, is the best work I have done. It has been stupidly dealt with—as a mere shocker—by people who ought to have known better. The Guardian critic seemed to be the only one who read it aright, and who therefore succeeded in giving a really intelligent notice of it.”35 There is some doubt about which review he is prais-ing. I have above discussed the review in The Guardian, an Anglican weekly; the novel was also reviewed by the Manchester Guardian, and Mason Harris argues that this is probably the review that Wells praises. The Manchester Guardian treats Moreau as philosophically slighter but more enjoyable than does the Anglican Guardian, calling it a “curious fantasy, with [a] quasi-scientific founda-tion,” and noting that “the impressions should not be put to the test of analysis or reflection.”36 While largely positive, the review treats the novel as a romance. Many of the other reviews collected in the Critical Heritage are negative. They do not dwell on the philosophical monstrosity of Moreau, nor do they identify what it is about evolution and progress that makes the “hideous grimace” so inevitable. They read it, as Wells says, as “a mere shocker,” and are duly horri-fied by the bloody nightmare of the island. Apart from the Anglican Guardian, which noted both science and religion as potential targets for satire in the novel, the reviews ignore the implications of Moreau’s philosophical monstrosity.

I would argue that Moreau represents a point in Wells’s thought when the idea of human progress, marked by increasing rationality and the lessening of pain, appeared an impossibility, doomed by the nature of evolution and humanity’s animal heritage. Moreau’s failed philosophy grafts together evolu-tionary ideas of change with directed, purposeful progress. Religion, and par-ticularly Christianity, is implicated in this failure—like Moreau’s philosophy, it is directed and purposeful, demanding correct action and threatening a hell of pain as punishment for transgressions. Yet all humans have remnants of the animal within them, and therefore all will go to the House of Pain. The fatal flaws of Moreau’s philosophy are also evident in the mechanisms of education and culture that attempt to fit the round Paleolithic savage into the square hole



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of civilization. The evolutionary optimism that characterizes Wells’s “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process” and his later educational writings is denied in this novel, as Wells demonstrates that the attempt to make a rational, more “perfect” creature cannot succeed given the materials provided. Expecting that it is possible to remove the experience of physical pain, or the mental suffering of misery and sins, is simply partaking of Moreau’s sane lunacy.

The Island of Doctor Moreau shows the conflict of natural theological and evolutionary ways of understanding human change, and finds the attempt to unite these two theories monstrous. The attempt to find a meaningful design, a creator within evolution, means that pain must be designed and purposeful. Not only are all creatures fated to feel pain, but all are intended to fail the test of the Law. Its promise of salvation is created so as never to be reached. Further, Wells suggests that we, as human beings, take a perverse sort of pleasure in finding that we are intended to suffer. The legacy of our evolution lives on in us, in our propositions about sin, in our instincts, and in our frame; the category of “human being” cannot be firmly divided from the category of “animal.” Prendick applies a false idea of the human when he says, with Moreau, that a human being should be a rational creature, should display the “calm authority” of a “rea-sonable soul.” We are all monsters here, all beastly in some way, Wells suggests. To expect us to be otherwise is monstrous.

notes

E. E. Snyder completed her Ph.D. at the University of Sheffield, with a thesis on “The Record of the Rocks: Writing Science in the Nineteenth Century.” She has worked as a Research Associate on the Digital.Humanities@Oxford project at the University of Oxford, and is currently the Digital Arts and Humanities Manager at the University of Nottingham.

1. For examples of Victorian misreadings of Darwinian progress, see John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

2. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray 1871), introd. John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Part 1, 177.

3. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray 1859), introd. Ernst Mayr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 84.

4. See for example his note that “recent forms are generally looked at as being, in some vague sense, higher than ancient and extinct forms; and they are in so far higher as the later and more improved forms have conquered the older and less improved organic beings in the struggle for life” (ibid., 476). Darwin also uses the language of man and the lower animals in The Descent of Man; see for instance Part 2, 394.



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5. T. H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” in T. H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, Evolution and Ethics: 1893–1943 (London: Pilot Press, 1947), 81.

6. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau: The Sleeper Awakes, vol. 2 of The Works of H. G. Wells, Atlantic ed. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), 123. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

7. Ibid., 15, 24. See also pp. 14, 23 for descriptions of animals as brutes.8. In the Broadview edition, based on the first American edition, the line reads “beasts

and cannibals and worse than beasts,” lumping Montgomery and M’Ling together, but labe-ling Prendick instead for the cannibalism he didn’t manage to commit. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Mason Harris (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2009), 85.

9. Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 122.

10. Rod Preece, “Darwinism, Christianity, and the Great Vivisection Debate,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 3 (2003): 412–14.

11. Stewart Richards, “Drawing the Life-Blood of Physiology: Vivisection and the Physiologists’ Dilemma, 1870–1900,” Annals of Science 43 (1986): 53.

12. Ibid., 32.13. H. G. Wells, “Popular Feeling and the Advancement of Science: Anti-vivisection,” in

The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Harris, 266–69.14. H. G. Wells, “The Province of Pain,” in H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science

Fiction, ed. Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 194.

15. Ibid., 198.16. Wells, “Popular Feeling and the Advancement of Science,” 269.17. Michael Pinsky, Future Present: Ethics and/as Science Fiction (Madison: Fairleigh

Dickinson University Press, 2003), 63.18. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” 59.19. See for instance his discussion of transitional habits, where for one example he

observes that “the webbed feet of the upland goose may be said to have become rudimentary in function, though not in structure” (Darwin, Origin of Species, 185).

20. For instance, see the argument in Paley’s Chapter XXVI, “The Goodness of the Deity,” in Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 237.

21. Roslynn D. Haynes, H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 34.

22. Ibid.23. Pinsky, Future Present, 66–67.24. Anne Stiles, “Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist,”

Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 2 (2009): 333.25. “Unsigned Review in Guardian, 3 June 1896, 871,” H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage,

ed. Patrick Parrinder (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 53.26. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very

Ordinary Brain, 2 vols. (London: Gollancz and Cresset Press, 1934), 1:164–65.



e . e . snyder 239

27. Mason Harris, introduction to The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Harris, 32, citing Robert M. Philmus, The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Variorum Text (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 188.

28. H. G. Wells, “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process,” in H. G. Wells, ed. Philmus and Hughes, 217.

29. Ibid., 217.30. Ibid., 218–19.31. H. G. Wells, “Preface,” The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells (London: Gollancz, 1933),

in The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Harris, 183.32. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, rev. ed.

(London: Cassell and Company, 1920), 565.33. Ibid., 603.34. Ibid., 602.35. “Unsigned Review in Guardian, 3 June 1896, 871,” H. G. Wells, ed. Parrinder, 53, citing

Young Man, August 1897, xi, 256.36. Manchester Guardian, April 14, 1896, 4, in The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed.

Harris, 190.



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