H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau: Ethics and Evolution

Introduction: Relevance in the Post-9/11 Era

There is reason to pay close attention, in these post-9/11 and post-Hurricane Katrina days, to works such as H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. While Wells' honor may be reserved, perhaps, for The Time Machine as the more accessible story, The Island of Doctor Moreau allows significant reflection on current conditions — despite its place in the annals of horror genre fiction and suspense. Its theme is, after all, particularly cogent at a time when we are not sure, collectively, about what constitutes good or evil, patriotism or belligerence, sanity or fanaticism, or logical responses to the baser drives of humanity versus ill-reasoned reactions to those drives that result in even baser events worldwide.

Thematic Foundations: Darwin, Huxley, and the Ethics of Evolution

In much of literature written after Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the essential attributes of humanity became a primary subject of exploration. Darwin's earth-shaking book was published in 1860. By 1871, its effect on human thought was sufficiently established that Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), a rabid proponent of Darwin's work, had already grappled with the ethical problems that work presented (UCMP Web site, undated). Huxley was a biologist who did original research in zoology and paleontology, making him the ideal voice not only to support Darwin's theories but also to issue considered critiques of them — something Huxley also did, pointing out certain problems, though he apparently did not find them of sufficient magnitude to dissuade him from his support of Darwin's ideas.

Huxley founded a dynasty of British thinkers, including several noted scientists. Among them was his grandson, who became Sir Andrew Huxley and won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology for his work on nerve impulses and muscle contraction (UCMP Web site, undated). Another grandson, Aldous Huxley, perhaps became the most well-known of the family because of his anti-utopian novel Brave New World.

While these connections are only tangentially related to H.G. Wells' work, it would be difficult to imagine that Wells did not have an effect on Aldous Huxley. Indeed, the fantastical aspect of Aldous Huxley's novel certainly owed something to the fantastical aspects of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Certainly the idea of casting some men as beasts and others as fully human was derived, at least in part, from Wells' work. While the man-beasts were gross and physical in Wells' novel, by the time the concept had filtered through another generation of writer-scientists to reach Aldous Huxley's era, it became possible to create a more subtle man-beast — one elevated from the forest floor to the heights of government.

One of Thomas Huxley's central ideas was "Administrative Nihilism" (Graff, 2001, p. 33+). This idea demonstrated the "consequences of an insufficiently developed ethical process: namely institutional paralysis and ignorance" (Graff, 2001, p. 33+). He thought of ethics as a social concern rather than an individual choice, and believed that the greatest political danger to humanity at the time — a thought that would carry through Wells' work to Aldous Huxley's — was the belief that failing to act constituted effective conduct. He attributed the increasingly common failure to act to several factors as he perceived them, including:

• Men's convictions becoming less and less real
• Men's tolerance for aberration increasing as their belief decreased
• The conviction that government would do better to leave things alone unless it had clear knowledge of what action to take
• The suspicion that the knowledge of those in government may in fact be no greater than that of the common man (Graff, 2001, p. 33+)

Huxley proposed that there had been a loss of faith not only in religion but also in the permanency of secular knowledge — a very logical conclusion, it would seem, in light of the way Darwin had so recently set accepted and seemingly permanent knowledge of the human condition on its ear. Huxley well understood that new research and theories promote knowledge while simultaneously fostering disorientation, as people realized their current knowledge is probably:

• Going to be supplanted by different or deeper knowledge
• Inadequate to explain life and how to conduct it (Graff, 2001, p. 33+)

These two concepts are easy to see in The Island of Dr. Moreau, even though that book was published more than twenty years after Huxley lectured on these ideas (1871). Indeed, they would continue to resonate beyond Wells' novel into the early works of Aldous Huxley and his contemporaries. The theme of humanity being less than it had once seemed — akin to the animals, as most people suspected Darwin was suggesting, even if they had not actually read his work — formed a substrate for fiction for generations. The Island of Dr. Moreau perfectly exemplifies "the confusion in the face of the growing complexity of the world, which is especially unsettling if human advancement can be upset or undermined by errors in judgment or some mysterious atavistic tendency toward reversion to a primitive state, as Darwin implies" (Graff, 2001, p. 33+).

Genre Classification and Gothic Innovation

It is not easy to classify The Island of Dr. Moreau. While it might be tempting to place it in the same category as other Victorian horror stories — such as Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — it seems to have ascended the ladder of terror, moving from the impossible to the merely implausible, if one predicates that possibility on the increasing understanding and acceptance of Darwin's theories.

Moreover, in the willful disregard of ethics inherent in The Island of Dr. Moreau, as Graff notes, although the novel was written only a year after The Time Machine (an example of utopian satire), The Island of Dr. Moreau is "much more ambiguous and horrific. Though Wells would use evolution in most of his utopias and dystopias, it is in The Island of Doctor Moreau that he first establishes a skeptical pose" (Graff, 2001, p. 33+).

Graff notes that human nature is the issue at the base of the action in the novel, observing that others have called it "a parable of the cruelty, savagery, and arbitrariness of the cosmic process as it has created man and determined his nature" (Hillegas, p. 36, qtd. in Graff, 2001, p. 33+). It is in relation to his usurpation of a divine prerogative by arrogant mankind, Graff suggests, that Wells invents a new genre — one comprised of the horrific physical elements of earlier Victorian Gothic works, but adding a soupçon of mental, emotional, and spiritual anguish that was, in large part, absent from the simpler horror stories that had captured the otherwise constrained sensibilities of the Victorian reader.

In his own work, Thomas Huxley had "highlighted the tension between evolution and ethics and argued that we needed to devise an ethical process that could limit the impact of evolution" (Graff, 2001, p. 33+), and certainly the events on Dr. Moreau's island underline that argument amply. Later, Graff notes, Wells himself borrowed from the conceptual work of Huxley, calling for "artificial evolution" — a kind of evolution of the mind and society that would have an impact on the cultural environment (Graff, 2001). "In The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells is laying a foundation for that later argument by bemoaning the absence of an ethical process capable of effectively responding to Moreau's actions, not the arbitrariness of evolution itself" (Graff, 2001, p. 33+).

In fact, evolution does not appear to be arbitrary in the novel. If it were, Wells seems to say, then the animals altered by Dr. Moreau's surgeries would stay altered. It is debatable whether their metamorphosis would continue or whether they would all become incapable of producing offspring with the new characteristics. In any case, Wells allows the nature of the beasts to resist Dr. Moreau's interference with natural selection, finally returning to some "semblance of their original form" (Graff, 2001, p. 33+).

Although it is not stated directly, it seems plausible that readers would wonder — as they might in more modern transformation narratives such as Flowers for Algernon, or the film Awakenings, in which Robin Williams plays a doctor who briefly restores normal intelligence to a mentally disabled man — whether the patient would recall his brief introduction to normalcy and grieve for it. In a similar way, one might wonder whether the man-beasts have some intimation of a so-called higher state and grieve for their loss of it.

Graff notes that Wells' novel "has no ethical center" and that Dr. Moreau is "a symbol of 'science unhindered by ethical consideration' (Bergonzi, 25)" (Graff, 2001, p. 33+). It is possible to see this Victorian horror narrative as somewhat comparable to modern television reality shows. Graff observes that in The Island of Dr. Moreau, "The animals are not enlightened by the experience of transmogrification. In fact, they are debased by it as their sole consideration — even though they appear to be climbing an evolutionary or natural hierarchy — becomes survival" (Graff, 2001, p. 33+).

In a similar way, the participants in "desert island" television reality programs are also debased — and certainly not uplifted — by the experience. While the winner receives a large sum of money for supposedly being the strongest human, the strongest human is, in fact, merely the one who employs the greatest amount of self-centered cunning and brute force. If one is to define humanity, especially in the post-Darwinian age, it would seem that humanity — to be set apart — must depend on altruistic feeling and the use of intelligence rather than on selfish impulse and brute force alone. In this respect, there is little to separate the producers of reality television from Dr. Moreau, and, by extension, little to separate the participants from the man-beasts. While this is certainly a cynical viewpoint, it would seem that those who participate in such shows might be assumed to be as dimly aware of their condition as the man-beasts are after their reversion to a more animal state.

Conclusion

Whether Wells had a direct impact on Maugham — or any other early twentieth-century writer — is impossible to say with certainty. But his very modern marriage of pure science and a view of humanity that compares it more directly with apes than with angels may well be indisputable. The Island of Doctor Moreau remains a remarkably prescient work, one whose ethical questions about the limits of scientific ambition and the definition of humanity continue to resonate in an age still struggling to answer them.

Works Cited

Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances. Manchester, Eng.: Manchester UP, 1961.

Graff, Ann-Barbara. "'Administrative Nihilism': Evolution, Ethics and Victorian Utopian Satire." Utopian Studies 12.2 (2001): 33+.

Hillegas, Mark. The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.

Sirabian, Robert. "The Conception of Science in Wells's The Invisible Man." Papers on Language & Literature 37.4 (2001): 382.

Thomas Henry Huxley. University of California Museum of Paleontology. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/thuxley.html