Friday, October 5, 2012

The Island of Doctor Moreau

The Island of Doctor Moreau
By H. G. Wells
Published in 1896

H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1890s novel full of things that will make you feel very uncomfortable, both physically and intellectually.

It's a typically 19th-century first-person account, from the point of view of an innocent European who finds himself stranded on a remote tropical island, with the infamous Dr. Moreau, his assistant Montgomery, and a large number of things which are animal-like humans, or human-like animals -- it's difficult to tell which at first.

The island is the venue for Moreau's attempts to make various species of animal more humanoid, both in terms of their physical shape and their mental abilities, for no practical purpose that Moreau is able to satisfactorily explain, other than 'for SCIENCE!'.  The book was written long before science fiction writers knew about DNA, so Moreau does his thing entirely through old-fashioned 19th-century surgery and grafting, which is every bit as horrifying as you can imagine.

The most advanced work Moreau is able to do before the plot shuts down his scientific research for good yields creatures which look almost, but not quite, look human, and are capable of speech but don't have anywhere near the brainpower to displace human beings from the jealously guarded summit of the intellectual pyramid. (Nine decades later came David Brin's Uplift series which also features animals with improved brainpower, and his universe includes chimpanzee professors. It seems human science fiction writers had grown less insecure about the mental abilities of uplifted animals by then.)

The Island of Doctor Moreau is a product of the late 19th century, and of course Wells unconsciously writes bits that rankle us today. One of Moreau's early subjects was a gorilla, which Moreau transformed into 'a fair specimen of the negroid type', and I can't help but assume Wells' enlightened 1890s British readers were supposed to think of course it would be easier to transform a gorilla into a human 'of the negroid type' than into a more European-looking specimen (fewer steps, after all).

That said, it's not necessarily a racist work when looked at as a whole, and if it's taken as a commentary on the dark side of colonialism it can be seen as almost progressive -- if you ignore the fact that the colonized 'people' in this story are literal wild animals that the White Man is trying to make more human.

No comments: