Little Thinks
I just finished rereading H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau and want to make a few brief notes. Surely, everything I say merely repeats a century of literary criticism. To avoid some of that, I’ll skip the obvious intervention it makes in the vivsection debates raging at the time of its publication as well as its place in Wells’s larger concern over scientific progress. Even the back cover notes all of that.
Dr. Moreau’s language uses every colonial trope available: remote land, landscape, tropical island, its discovery, colonization and “making useful,” beast-people, homosociality, absence of women, misogyny toward the feminine (including animals), desire and ultimate escape back to civilization.
Yawn.
These cliches, however, make the text a wonderful teaching tool. Short chapters, captivating narrative, and quick prose will retain undergraduate attentions, while all the colonial tropes make it thick enough for sustained discussion.
Even more, Dr. Moreau narrates colonialism’s origins, or codependence, in the scientific missions of Alexander von Humboldt and numerous others. Objective, scientific daring spurred many expeditions and sustained their financial backing. When the scientific mission fails, producing monstrous quasi-humans, as much New World discourses did, we turn to the religious mission. Dr. Moreau sets up a system, “The Law,” by which his creatures must live lest they turn against him and his assistant Montgomery. When his final creation kills Moreau, our narrator Edward Prendick tells the “Beast-People” that he did not die at all, but merely transferred to a different body and now watches them from the sky. Wells offers a scathing critique of the Christian mythos and its role in colonialism, even if the narrative frame insists that such actions are necessary if our narrator is to survive.
In the next brilliant turn, Montgomery, himself an alcoholic, gives the creatures “drink,” which unlike the abstaining Prendick, they take as “proper Christians.” Montgomery offers the creatures a sacrilegious double baptism, one into earthly indulgence and another into sacred Christian communion. They get drunk, fight and kill each other, including Montgomery. Next, Wells unmasks colonialism. Sort of.
Prendick must fend for himself after both the scientific and religious missions die off, leaving their residual traces and a chaotic island without “The Law.” Now, we have colonialism proper. Prendick picks up Moreau’s bloodstained whip and commands the creatures to do his will. He narrates this as self-protection lest the creatures kill him, and establishes his authority with his stomach in his throat, in fear and trembling, but with access to weapons. This fails quickly and he submits to being a fellow creature; they know humans can die and break their arms as Prendick has. Still, his revolver, hatchet and use of stones keeps him alive. Aiding his protection, the Dog-Man believes Prendick to be The Master, divine like the “Other[s]” before him. Prendick exploits this as well as the residue of colonial training, telling the creatures that the Law still applies because He watches from the sky. The creatures are skeptical but fearful of this neo-religosity.
As Moreau predicted before his death, the creatures begin losing their human traces and revert, slowly, to their bare animality; the revolution begins. Prendick grows wary of their reversion as their desire to walk erect, to socialize and speak lessens. He no longer understands their “gibberish.” (Wells accounts for creolizing language, surprisingly, by making the Ape-Man a talkative imitator with a penchant for combining words in interesting ways; we get “big thinks” and “little thinks” from him.) The colony cannot sustain him any longer and he escapes thanks to the fortunate arrival of a small boat with only two dead sailors as its crew. The colonizer vacates, leaving only the misshapen beasts “snarling at each other;” a sight he cannot bear.
Finally, the colonizer returns to England only to be suspected of insanity and a crazed vigilance, animal-like, that isolates him from fellow beings; Prendick fears the creatures contaminated him, turned him a bit savage perhaps. He can no longer handle life in London and must retreat to the seaside, live in solitude and able to leave the island at any moment.
(Three supplemental notes: 1) The creatures are ‘hybrids’ both because they are “humanised” by Dr. Moreau and because he grafts other animals onto them. Exotic others, after all, weren’t all alike and the language describing them had to adapt, grafting metaphors from other people, places, species. 2) The creatures are produced on the island; they are not native to it but forcibly brought there. 3) Prendick qualifies his use of firearms throughout the narrative and even accuses Montgomery of “wanton” discharges. One wonders if Wells had the Sepoy and Jamaica Rebellions in mind.)
Teaching this text in an early graduate class would also work well. I would link it with Jameson’s provocative thesis—third-world literatures are national allegories—and ask students if an inversion works; Is all English literature an allegory for their Empire? The point wouldn’t be to discount Jameson but raise methodological issues, question the ways allegorical readings work and fail, or better yet, enable and disable. Since the reading posited above is rather obvious, we can discuss what current postcolonial analysis must do since, to borrow Bret Benjamin’s wonderful phrasing, “the disinfecting power of sunshine” proved mythical. That is, revealing colonial tropes and undercutting binaries hasn’t allowed, arguably, for the political work we desire. So, now that we have a series of tools and reading strategies, where do go from here?
