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High Noon At The Island Of Dr. Moreau Essay, Research Paper

Everywhere in popular culture today, one finds deep-rooted anxieties about science, technology,

and the fate of the human species. Thus, in recent films such as The Fly, Jurassic Park, Species, Godzilla, and Deep Blue Sea, as well as in shows such as Prey and, of course, The X-Files, the focus is on biological

mutations, experiments gone awry, and the creation of monstrosities.

Such media texts are responding, in part, to chemically saturated, increasingly synthetic, ozone

thinning, global warming world that has produced frogs with one eye or five legs, encephalitic babies,

lower sperm counts in men, and diseased and diminished human beings affected by environmental

chemicals that mimic their hormones and disrupt biological processes. They are also articulating fears

of a powerful technoscience developed without restraint in the service of profit.

Already, science has engineered overgrown mice, cows, and pigs; “pharmed” crippled animals to exploit as drug factories for human medicine; bred millions of acres of genetically modified crops (some mixed with viruses and bacteria) that are spreading beyond control, polluting neighboring fields, cross-breeding with weedy relatives, harming insects and animals in laboratory tests, threatening famine and disease. At the same time, xenotransplantation, the mixing of animal blood and organs with humans, continues to erode species boundaries and portends new plagues.

But one great writer caught these changes in his perceptual traps well before they happened, and that was H.G. Wells, who created what Isaac Asimov called the “science-fiction breakthrough.” Well’s “breakthrough” was his earthly vision that science and technology could transgress the “laws” of nature and create entirely new species from disparate materials, resulting in terrible and unforeseeable consequences. The changes soon to be effected in nature and humanity were anticipated in The Time Machine (1895), which concerns the entropic collapse of human civilization, sharply divided between two warring species/classes (the privileged Eloi who live above ground vs. the super-exploited, subterranean Morlocks), in an allegory of nineteenth century class struggle that mutates into unbridgeable biological differences, such as eugenics might someday create.

But The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), is Wells’ canonical statement of a coming rupture in life processes. A multifaceted exploration, it is a powerful protest against the self-proclaimed right of science to experiment on animals and to engineer new life forms, a critique of dangerous utopian visions of “human perfection,” and a profound meditation on the psychic conflicts tearing apart humanity. Above all, it foregrounds what may happen when science recklessly tampers with genetics and disturbs intricate natural processes that have evolved over billions of years.

Forced to relocate his barbaric animal experiments to a remote Pacific island when exposed by a journalist, Moreau undauntingly advances his project to create new life forms, much as the infamous Dr. Richard Seed has vowed to continue his research into cloning humans in Japan or wherever necessary. Moreau describes his island as a “kind of Bluebeard’s chamber,” an apt description for vivisection laboratories around the world whose hallways echo with the shrieks of brutalized animals.

In fact, Wells not only gave voice to outrage growing in nineteenth century England against vivisection, he anticipated the logical extension of these atrocities in the near future, as the fictional crimes of Dr. Moreau progressed into the real horrors of Dr. Mengele. In the words of Edward Prendrick, the hapless traveler marooned on Moreau’s island, Wells asks the terrible question, “could the vivisection of men be possible?” We know now — through Auschwitz; the Tuskegee, Alabama experiments that withheld penicillin treatment from 399 black men infected with syphilis; the intentional infection of mentally retarded children with hepatitis-B by doctors at Willowbrook State Hospital in Staten Island; numerous radiation experiments on unwitting victims in the U.S.; and countless cases of human “volunteers” for medical “research” who were not informed of the serious risks they were taking — that the answer is affirmative. Upon arriving to the island, Prendrick hears cries from the “House of Pain,” smells antiseptic, and witnesses the sundry “Beast Folk” engineered by Moreau, a grotesque menagerie of transgenic freaks that include mixtures of hyena and swine, ape and goat, bear and bull, and horse and rhinoceros. Initially, he sees them as humans devolved into animals, but Moreau informs him that in fact they are animals he is trying to elevate into humans, changing not only their entire physical reality but also their minds to prohibit any “regression” to animal behavior — anticipating how eugenics tries to weed out of humanity all traits it deems “undesirable.” Amidst lush surroundings, Prendrick see “the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.” On this microcosmic island, symbolic of the isolation of science from the public, there is a constant battle between instinct and morality, desire and reason. The chimeras — the animal-humans — play out the full tension of their being, much as human beings today struggle at the crossroads of past and future evolution, “rational animals” who still have not evolved beyond the primitive urges of war, violence, killing, hatred, and social hierarchy. Encountering the shock of “the strangest beings” he has ever seen, Prendrick realizes the island “is full of inimical phenomena” and he condemns Moreau as a “lunatic” and “ugly

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