By Joseph Hurtgen, Ph.D.
H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is a postcolonial commentary on empire, examining Moreau’s biological construction and rule over a subordinate species. Moreau, mad scientist that he is, fails to civilize his subordinate species, but in his barbaric civilizing attempt demonstrates the savage nature of mankind, civilized or not. The Island of Dr Moreau demonstrates that civilization, created and sustained through war and strife, is savage.
The Violence of Colonization
Similar to Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898), which follows the hostile takeover of England by aliens to reflect on England’s hostile relationship with its African colonies, The Island of Doctor Moreau is not merely an ethnocentric piece about the difficulty of civilizing colonial populations, wrangling non-Westerners into performing Western behavior. With The Island of Dr Moreau, Wells suggests that colonizing is violent, revealing that colonizing powers, behind a façade of polite society and high culture, are savage. Wells argues, in "Human Evolution: An Artificial Process" (1896), that evolution hasn’t occurred in mankind since the Stone Age, but what has developed is "an evolution of suggestions and ideas." This evolution of ideas has resulted in society’s project to civilize and instruct men in acceptable behavior, a necessary project since man is instinctually prone to violence. However, just as in the failure of the beasts to abide by Moreau’s laws, Wells suggests with The Island of Dr Moreau that humanity is more likely to exhibit violence rather than civility.
Biopower - Systematized Violence
Biopower—the political subjection of the bodies of subjects—is a systematized use of violence practiced by developed societies. Developed societies systematize brutality through law. Not believing that violence is escapable, theories of managing violence arise to codify and systematize it. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's, in Multitude (2004), say that biopower is one such systematization, ruling over the death "not simply of an individual or group but of humanity itself." (18-19)
Moreau and his assistant Montgomery adopt eugenics to create a human society out of savages in wild and untamed colonial space. Eugenics is an extreme example of the state use of biopower. But such development isn't easy under the strictures of society. A free space unhindered by law works best for experimentation, and England was flush with colonies containing space at a premium. In colonial space, the law of the Metropole does not apply. Dismissing law allows for the exploitation of people and resources.
Moreau enters colonial space as a result of public horror over his experimentations. The name Moreau, from the French mauresque for "the brown-skinned man" or "dark-skinned," alludes to the mix of different races of beast-men on the island that Moreau vivisects. The name signifies that white, civilized men are no more civil than natives from the undeveloped and exploited corners of the world. Though Moreau is pushed out by civil society, he still serves to represent that society. Indeed, the end of the novel calls English society’s civility into question.
Colonizers often euphemistically refer to those from indigenous populations as beasts or savages, which Wells reifies in his novel, presenting the colonial population as actual beasts. Indeed, Moreau’s beasts are taken from Africa by Montgomery. The identity of the beasts is of Africans colonized or enslaved by the British Empire, playing with a popular idea at the time that colonial Africa was populated by sub-humans, mere beasts. Moreau’s vivisections are torture as discipline. He tortures the native population in a gross parody of the parent disciplining children to enforce good behavior. Moreau forces the evolutionary process through surgery, requiring the animals-as-natives to fit into a Western definition of man.
When Edward Prendick first sees one of the beast folk, he is "astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this black-faced creature." Prendick says, "I had never beheld such a repulsive and extraordinary face before, and yet—if the contradiction is credible—I experienced at the same time an odd feeling that in some way I had already encountered exactly the features and gestures that now amazed me" (Moreau 156). Prendick recognizes his bestial nature in the black-faced creature. Later, on the island, Prendick says: "That these man-like creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear" (Moreau 81). Prendick views the creatures as something like men and is terrorized by their capabilities, but it is his imagination that dreams up such possibilities, which betrays projection of Prendick’s own inner demons or, better, his own humanity upon the beasts.
We've seen that control of the beasts discusses the exertion of colonial power on the colonized, but Wells does not support colonialism or assert the racial superiority of Westerners; rather, Wells traces uncivilized Western behavior, with the beasts reflecting the bestial nature of humans. Indeed, at the beginning of the novel, stranded sailors attack one another in a bid for survival, signaling that the message of the novel is that men are beasts.
That is the Law
After extreme surgery, Moreau hypnotizes the beasts, attempting to instill law and custom into their consciousness. While hypnotized, the beasts are imprinted with the following laws:
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? (Moreau 74)
Wells’s wrote of the evolutionary kinship of contemporary man with his Stone Age brothers. He believed that only ideas separate the lives of the two.
Prendick breaks one of the laws while getting out of a hammock. By breaking a law that wasn’t supposed to be applied to him, Prendick demonstrates that men are beasts, incapable of following the rules of civilization. With Prendick and the beasts going on fours, the distinction between man and brute, colonizer and colonized, is blurred.
Exterminate all the brutes!
Colonizers have often inflicted genocide upon indigenous populations, and by the end of the novel, Montgomery—in a moment worthy of Conrad’s Kurtz—considers killing all the beasts. Killing savages was a regular practice in colonial Africa and ethnic cleansing and genocide continued into the 20th and 21st centuries. If society can rationalize justifications for violent behavior and then codify mediated forms of violence, then acts of violence are ruled civilized rather than savage.
Moreau is a representation of biopower and its excess. Moreau selects and orders his population, fine-tuning them: here a dog, there a puma, and elsewhere a hyena. Through vivisection, Moreau turns his beasts into creatures almost human. However, the physical process is not enough to create a lasting anthropoid species. Moreau says, "Somehow the things drift back again. I mean to conquer that,’ but ‘as soon as I draw my hand back they begin to revert" (Moreau 74, 76).
In, "The Unholy Alliance of Science in The Island of Dr Moreau," (1988) R.D. Haynes argues that "The more Moreau attempts to overcome the limitations of the human condition, the more he uncovers those limitations: the more he determines to humanize his beasts, the more he demonstrates the bestiality of man and his own inhumanity" (18). The beast’s reversion is Wells’s pronouncement upon humanity that nothing can alter the bestial nature of man. In Shadows of the Future (1995), Patrick Parrinder sees the reversion of the beasts as a sped up devolution of man and cites Wells’s 1891 article "Zoological Retrogression" in which he argues against evolution as inextricably moving toward progress, thinking it is as likely for evolutionary processes to result in regress. (58) Wells further reflects on this thesis in The Time Machine (1895).
Forcing the beasts to abide by a code of laws is its own kind of torture because of its impossibility for the man-beasts. Prendick says:
The 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. (Moreau 94-95)
Biopower and the Subjection of Death
Biopower is evident by the "extreme proliferation of the subjection of death" to a population. In the Belgian Congo at the turn of the twentieth century, the proliferation of death was great but invisible to the rest of the world. The proliferation of death through biopower is unseen by the Metropole. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, the work of the scientists is invisible to those not on the island. In Multitude, Hardt and Negri maintain that colonial powers declare war on colonial populations, using war as the "first and primary element of the foundation of politics itself" rather than a tool used as "a last resort in the sequence of power" (21).
The establishment and upkeep of empire sometimes results in the systematized destruction of populations. In The History of Sexuality (1978), Michel Foucault maintains that in biopower, "mechanisms of power work to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it. [Biopower is] bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them" (136). To arrange the population how the state desires, biopower turns into holocaust. Holocaust, a word of French derivation meaning "burnt offerings" expresses its biopolitical use articulately: in biopower, genocide is offered up for the well-being of the state.
Moreau describes his rationale for dehumanization in his answer to the question, "Where is your justification for inflicting all this pain?" Moreau replies, "So long as pain drives men they are still acting as beasts . . . this store which men and women set on pleasure and pain is the mark of the beast upon them" (The Island of Dr Moreau 72). According to Moreau, as long as one is driven by pleasure or pain, they are savage. What Moreau does not address is whether inflicting pain also reveals a savage nature.
Necropolitics - Achille Mbembe
In "Nectropolitics," (2003) Achille Mbembe describes biopower's function as "dividing people into those who must live and those who must die" (16-17). As the beasts revert back to their primal nature, Montgomery raises the question of killing all of them: "I don't know. I suppose those that were made of beasts of prey will make silly asses of themselves sooner or later. We can't massacre the lot—can we? I suppose that's what your humanity would suggest?" (Moreau 106). Killing the beasts is sanctioned by Montgomery's authority as an agent of Western civilization and demonstrates again that humans are bestial.
In the colonial laboratory, experimental acts resulting in death are not classed as murder but research. The use of biopower, the power over the lives and deaths of subjects, is refined in colonial spaces for use at home and abroad, and because biopower is state-mandated, no matter the terrors performed in the name of the state, all is done, ostensibly, for the good of the people.
The Colonizer and the Colonized
Moreau demonstrates the effects of biopower on colonial populations. From the perspective of empire, the colonizer is viewed as more refined than the colonized, more evolved. Wells refutes such a notion in The Island of Dr. Moreau:
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 passion 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. (95)
Prendick lumps both the biopolitical power of Moreau and the baseness of the beasts as belonging to "a vast pitiless Mechanism," suggesting the desire to rule, subjugate, and decide who lives and who dies is no less mechanistic or instinctive than the actions of beasts.
When Prendick returns to London, he has lost faith in humanity. Early in his travels, he says, "My one idea was to get away from these horrible caricatures of my Maker's image, back to the sweet and wholesome intercourse of men. My fellow-creatures, from whom I was thus separated, began to assume idyllic virtue and beauty in my memory," but after his travels, Prendick’s view of mankind darkens (Moreau 43). Prendick’s final thoughts question the civility of mankind:
My trouble took the strangest form. I could not persuade myself that the men and women I 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.
(The Island of Dr Moreau 131)
H.G. Wells leaves us with the unsettling notion that men, even of the highest social order, are as likely to bare their fangs and spring as beasts in a jungle. The trouble is, the more wealth and power man has, the more he is able to shape law so that he is above it. The billionaire has pressed his money into the service of making the law bare his fangs while he rests comfortably in penthouses of gold far above the fray.
The Island of Dr Moreau is in Rapid Transmission's list of the top 100 sci-fi books.
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