CEM ORHAN
PAMUKKALE UNIVERSITY
[email protected]
THE CONCEPT OF EVIL IN H.G. WELLS' NOVEL THE ISLAND OF
DR. MOREAU
As one of the governing tenets of the Enlightenment, the human perfectibility
and the idea of progress was confronted by the pessimistic futurism of the late
19th century. The ideal of the Enlightenment, the potantiality of the perfect man
proceeding with reason in alliance with the scientific progress was reevaluated by
the rising utopianism in an age when the expanding spatiality of the White Man’s
colonial realm was at its broadest. However, even in this renewed interest of the
age, the structure of the dramatizations of good and evil was still indispensably –
and initially- scientific, befitting the summarizing formulas of scientific ideology.
The mainstream idea of progress, that still “pervades our political discourse, the
writing of our history, and the unconsciousness of ordinary people everywhere"
(Hamilton, 2003:98), was still in use in integrating the hopes and fears concerning
the ideals of mankind. This paper will discuss the degeneration of the relatively
progressive bourgeois ideals of the past, emerging now only as an alienated
morality of a scientific curiosity in the form of artistic torture, and the
transformation of bourgeois promise of progress into the anti-body of scientific
instrumental reason in H.G. Wells’ famous novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
in the light of the tradition of Frankfurt School and modern theories of criticism.
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The dispositions of H. G. Wells as a philosopher and as a sociologist, manifesting
in the social space of the island will be discussed in accordance with Pierre
Bourdieu’s terminology.
The structure of H. G. Wells’ dystopic vision in which the events take place is
an island “which was of irregular outline and lay low upon the wide sea, had a
total area” and as the protagonist supposes, it is “of seven or eight squire miles”
(Wells, 2005:84). In the confining economy of the novel, the island is only
populated by few: the protagonist, Dr Moreau, his servant Montgomery, and about
“more than sixty” of the “strange creations of Moreau’s art” (Wells, 2005:84).
This narrowness of the social and physical space help to create tension, fear, and
anxiety in a realm of struggle for different ambitions each filled with ambivalance
and unexplainable deceit. It is a social space bound to a debased dualism, the
decadence of the scientist and the confined humanity of the beasts; the two
unequally quarreling ambitions are enough to tore the island apart. Owing to the
colonialistic scientific investigations of Dr Moreau, the life in the island is
ephemeral and unstable. The three –and only- ‘human’ characters launched into
this social space share the common disposition for the Enlightenment in different
referents, means and ends. Prendick, the protagonist and the narrator of the novel
is the corporeal manifestation of H. G. Wells. Before he was stranded on the
island, the protagonist attended the lessons of Thomas Henry Huxley who was
also Wells’ teacher; the scientific perfection of mind “known as a fervent
promoter of Darwin’s theory of evolution” (Pordzik, 2009:80). Wells makes a
selection between the three characters who had an education in biology, and
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Prendick, who is indisputably the most morally weighted characted in the novel, is
Wells’ choice of expression. However he posits the ideal only as long as the
outcome of pure reason is manifested and what is antithetic to reason is evil, or
rooted in evil; Even Dr. Moreau is regularly dispensable when interpreted by
Prendick’s reason; the protagonist states that "had Moreau had any intelligible
object I could have sympathised at least a little with him" (Wells, 2005:99).
Despite he feels disturbed by the outcome of Dr Moreau’s actions –like torturing
animals to submission, producing the caricatures of humanity, the man-animalsthe structural referentiality is stil on reason, and reason alone. In his journey,
Prendick also feels “that for Montgomery there was no help; that he was in truth
half akin to these beast folk, unfitted for human kindred" (Wells, 2005:114). Dr.
Moreau is dismissed for his uselessnes while Montgomery is dismissed for his
contribution to the Beast People, for choosing their playground as his natural
environment. According to Bourdieu, this is "the concern to avoid the confusion of
personas to which novelists so often succumb (when they put their thoughts into
the minds of characters)" (1996:31). Wells uses categories of distinction to
revitalize his concern for science while differentiating himself from both Moreau
and Montgomery, who were not intrinsically ‘evil’ but possessing behaviours
common in all evil, the uselessness of rash actions. Opposing the ideals of the
Enlightenment in guise, uselessness and the loss of control in the island conspire
the hidden evil to set loose.
The tenured reason of the protagonist as an opposition to the gradual loss of
humanity which is ironically represented by the protagonist as a "mockery of a
rational life" (Wells, 2005:82), structures the poles of good and evil in the novel.
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Dr. Moreau stands as a colonizer scientist, Montgomery situates himself as the
servant, and the protagonist excels as a purified hybrid of both, even though his
fallibility is affirmed still when he loses his potency of reason at the moments of
crisis. Prendick is not basically different in feeling sheer disgust and hatred when
facing the socialized –but still savage- servants, the Beast People; he is filled with
“laughter and disgust” (Wells, 2005:61). As Merleau-Ponty notes, the classical
thinkers of the Enlightenment viewed animals either “as machines” or “as
prototypes of human beings” (2004:70). However, in this instrumantalization of
the colonial servants of Moreau, only a few qualify for use. There is no way of
utilizing the monsters; the only sufficient use of these creatures is thus in the
laboratory, as a part of a vivisection tasked to supersede the nature itself.
However, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer state, "any attempt to break
the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that
compulsion." (1997:9). The evil emerge owing to the dichotomy bred by the limits
of nature and reason; an abomination, part of both, faithful to none. The perennial
theme of fear constructing the unnatural evil in the novel is the scarcity of reason;
the confined space of the island jeopardize the last remnants of reason with a
swarm of evil abominations. The White Man’s Burden, Dr Moreau succumbs to
death chronicled consistent to a master-slave dialectic, when his tortured
abomination is ready to retaliate for his pain. As Marc Ferro denoted, “what
brought together the French, the English, and other colonizers, and imparted to
them the consciousness of belonging to Europe, was the conviction that they
represented Science and Technology and that this knowledge enabled the societies
they subjugated to realize progress." (1997:20). As an embodiment of science, the
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bearers of the universal goal of reason, the last ‘humans’ in the island ironically
"lived in a fear that never died" (Wells, 2005:99). The failure of a split society
manifests itself in the dialectic between the beast folk, and the humans; the
ceaseless fear constructing the dominant positions in the social space keeps the
illusion of being together.
H. G. Wells targets the existence of animality; the ‘other’, the 'evil' is defined
according to its bestial characteristics; as a taint of fear, the protagonist constantly
feels “beast in them" (Wells, 2005:81). This dialectic of fear, defined by the
protagonist as a "general revolt" (Wells, 2005:95), and the "aimlessnes of things
upon the island." (Wells, 2005:99) liquidate any possible optimistic inquiry of a
regulatable and controllable future. The way Prendick perceives the social space is
the way Wells as philosopher envisages his world. Wells maintained that “the
existence of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ people could not be denied.” (Pordzik,
2009:85). However, the prime evil, the ‘desecration’ of humanity in the corporeal
shell of the Beast People is a hyperbolic representation of the evolutionary
historical process. H.G. Wells understood the “heart of the problem” in eugenics
fostered by Sir Francis Galton (Gillham, 2001:329). Although Wells did not
favour the creation of the ‘perfect’, his protagonist, Prendick never stops to urge
himself to commit the destruction of the lower, the Beast People. Wells’
orientation with the eugenics movement represents a negation of eugenics while
the impact of ‘otherness’ reveals a tendency towards negative eugenics. The
‘orher’, deprived of all the fine qualities of reason, would best disappear from the
eyes of fine men. According to the narration, one of the Beast People, a gorilla
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looks like “a fair specimen of the negroid type“ (Wells, 2005:79). The savage
evil, the ‘other’ shatters the imagination of the characters either representing a
race, class, ability, or a decadent body. Only after Dr. Moreau spends days, or
even weeks torturing his animal victims they become a threat for the enlightened
mind. The revolt of nature is viewed by Wells as an apostate manifestation of
nature; the perspectives of Wells’ habitus restructure the reality to fit into an evil
affiliation against the concept of humanity which is only a recent construction in
the historical process. Franco Moretti states that “while professing to save a reason
threatened by hidden forces, the literature of terror merely enslaves it more
securely" (2005:107). Wells’ insistence on fear and disgust shrouds the condition
of nature, and the Beast People dragged away from their habitat is exposed to the
vivisection of a totalitarian Enlightenment, to a superimposed raison d’être. The
new quest of existence, and the educated behaviours failing the creed of their
masters ignite a life of a fledgling, similar to the social space Wells’ work of art
was produced in. As Marx puts into words in his Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, “man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active
in any but his animal functions -eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his
dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels
himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is
human becomes animal." (1988:74). In the confined space of the island, the Beast
People inhabit an existence in a purgatorial cycle between a commodity and a nonproductive material. The loss of value in the instrumental use generate a loss of
interest on the produced body, which ironically represents the proletariat in Wells’
own social space. The genesis of the literary field of Wells’ work of art, the late
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19th century capitalism, when the year 1857 brought the “Indian Mutiny”, and the
Boer Wars “revealed the limits of empire” (Pordzik, 2009:81), the idea of the split
society, with a diminishing hope for a spatial relief , found its expression as the
fear of threat on all sides. However, the promise of the Enlightenment, aiming “at
liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters" (Horkheimer,
2007:1) fail on both sides of Wells’ good and evil. Progress is squeezed in the
aftermath of every fearful moment; liberation is viewed a an impossibility.
However, Wells’ fictionalization refuses any action of the Beast People to break
free from the dominant logic. The only way for the salvation or the liberation of
the beasts is an utter obliteration. However, as Adorno explains, “freedom can be
defined in negation only, corresponding to the concrete form of specific
unfreedom.” (2005:231). According to Wells, there is no escape from evil as there
is no escape from pain, disgust and fear. The side of ‘evil’ manifests itself as
dehumanization, and the other side of humanity, men of science whom the Beast
People occasionally call “master” (Wells, 2005:125) appear as Gods to the
savages. The values of the Enlightenment, despising all of myth and magic as
superstitution transforms itself into one. H. G. Wells employs a distinction
between Dr. Moreau and himself to abolish the taint of the deification of science.
However, the common ‘virtues’ of reason, fail to establish a different
conceptualization of the evil of the savages.
H. G. Wells as a philosopher and as a sociologist unveiled the laws governing
the minds of the scientific habitus of the late 19th century by fictionalizing the
ontology of man and its space while also becoming a subject of the habitus of
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scientists, who were notorious for the intolerant practices of the instrumental
reason. The elements of evil, exercised on all bodies entering the social space of
the caricature of a colonial island is reminiscent of Wells’ own social space; the
collapse of the scientific reason, and the attempt to revitalize it resists the
distinctions Wells himself has orchestrated during the delevopment of the novel.
As Marc Ferro denotes, “colonization presents itself as the third side of this
scientistic conviction. In his great goodness the white man does not destroy the
inferior species. He educates them, unless they are deemed to be not “human”, like
the Bushmen or the aborigines of Australia who were not even given a name—in
which case, he exterminates them." (1997:20). Despite Wells’ orientation of
socialist outlook, in his reappraisal, the motor force of the Enlightenment, the
colonialization and stratification is neither expectedly praised nor seriously
criticised. The dispositions of Wells’ environment as a part of a scientific
epistemology raised new questions about the nature of evil. However the same
dispositions help to sympathize him with a negative eugenics, insisting on the
oblivion of the ‘other’, emerging in the novel as ‘evil’.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W. (2005), Negative Dialectics, Continuum, New York.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1996), The Rules of Art, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Ferro, Marc, (1997), Colonization: A Global History, Routledge, London.
Hamilton, Clive, (2003), Growth Fetish, Allen & Unwin, Adelaide
Horkheimer, Max, Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (2007), Dialectic Of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Stanford University
Press, Stanford.
Marx, Karl, (1988), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the
Communist Manifesto, Prometheus Books, New York.
Moretti, Franco, (2005), Signs Taken For Wonders, Verso Books, London.
Ponty, Maurice Merleau (2004), The World of Perception, Routledge, Abingdon,
Oxfordshire.
Pordzik, Ralph, 2009, Futurescapes: Space in Utopian and Science Fiction
Discourses, Rodopi, Amsterdam
Wells, H.G. (2005), The Island of Dr. Moreau, Bantam Classic Books, New York.
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