Bill Kerwin's Reviews > The Island of Dr. Moreau

Popular historian and utopian novelist H.G. Wells is sometimes thought of as the “anti-Gibbon”: whereas Edward Gibbon devoted himself to studying a culture’s “decline and fall”, H.G. Well’s celebrates the march of progress, showing how our culture, despite many obvious setbacks, moves on toward greater and greater achievements. But Wells, although an optimist by nature, was also a gifted literary artist, and when he seized upon an idea with disquieting implications, he did not hesitate to explore them. The Island of Dr. Moreau, perhaps the greatest and most disturbing of his “scientific romances,” is an example of his uncompromising art at its best.

The plot is straightforward. The shipwrecked Edward Prendick ends up on an island presided over by the once notorious but now discredited surgeon Dr. Moreau, who has dedicated his life to transforming animals into humans by a series of painful operations. His more successful failures (all his works are failures) have formed a society on the other side of the island, where—with the doctor’s help--they have created an ethical system that “men” like them should follow, and a religion too, in which above all else Dr. Moreau and his laboratory (the House of Pain) are both reverenced and feared.

The book has many themes, the most obvious of which are the morality of both animal experimentation (or “vivisection,” as it was called in Well’s time) and the use of pain in experimentation, but also touches upon the twin processes of evolution and degeneration, the nature of religion, the character of a man who would play God, and—yes—even the character of God himself and the deplorable semi-human beings that he “creates.” This last theme is perhaps the reason why an older Wells once referred to this book as “an exercise in youthful blasphemy.”

To give you an idea, here is a bit of the most blasphemous portion of the book, in which Dr. Moreau explains himself to Prendick:

“So for twenty years altogether — counting nine years in England — I have been going on; and there is still something in everything I do that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied, challenges me to further effort. Sometimes I rise above my level, sometimes I fall below it; but always I fall short of the things I dream...These creatures of mine seemed strange and uncanny to you so soon as you began to observe them; but to me, just after I make them, they seem to be indisputably human beings. It’s afterwards, as I observe them, that the persuasion fades. First one animal trait, then another, creeps to the surface and stares out at me. But I will conquer yet! 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!...They go. I turn them out when I begin to feel the beast in them, and presently they wander there. They all dread this house and me. There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there...There’s something they call the Law. Sing hymns about ‘all thine.’ They build themselves their dens, gather fruit, and pull herbs — marry even. But I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that perish, anger and the lusts to live and gratify themselves. — Yet they’re odd; complex, like everything else alive. There is a kind of upward striving in them, part vanity, part waste sexual emotion, part waste curiosity. It only mocks me….And now,” said he, standing up after a long gap of silence, during which we had each pursued our own thoughts, “what do you think? Are you in fear of me still?”