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English 1102 Genetic Modification EcoHorror

Dr Moreau Cover 1

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The Island of Dr. Moreau - Summary The Island of Dr. Moreau is about a man named Prendick who is shipwrecked and rescued by a ship carrying a variety of animals. Onboard the ship, he meets a former medical student named Montgomery and his assistant. When they arrive at an unnamed island, Montgomery unloads the animals but refuses to take Prendick. The ship’s captain refuses to let him stay and abandons him in a dinghy. Montgomery then takes pity and tows him ashore. There, he meets Dr. Moreau, who is secretive about the strange creatures on the island; he refers to it as “a biological station–of a sort” (Wells 22). Prendick realizes that Moreau is the notorious vivisector who had been banished from England after the public learned of his brutal experiments, and begins to put together the pieces of the isolated island, secretive doctor, and distorted beast-men. He believes that Moreau is experimenting on humans, and he may be next. He attempts to escape by running into the woods and meets an ape-man who brings him to the creatures’ forest home. There, they make him participate in a ceremony honoring ‘the Law’, a set of rules that Moreau instilled in the beast-men to make them act more human. The Law includes the threat of punishment, as well as a kind of deification of Moreau.

When Moreau and Montgomery catch Prendick, Moreau tries to justify his actions of ‘playing God’ and Prendick is placated for the moment. Then Moreau sees evidence of the beast-men breaking the Law and calls a meeting to punish the culprit. When they confront the Leopard-man, Prendick kills it instead of letting Moreau experiment on it again. Then, one day, the puma Moreau was currently working on escapes and kills Moreau with its fetters when he attempts to recapture it. After realizing that the humans were not invincible, the beast-men decide to kill Montgomery when he’s drunk and vulnerable. Prendick attempts to maintain the illusion of a god to survive and befriends a dog-man to protect him. He sees the men slowly begin to revert to their original animal forms. Long after the deaths of Moreau and Montgomery, a boat with dead men in it washes up on shore. Prendick drifts in the ocean until a ship finds him and brings him back to London. He physically recovers but continues to be haunted by his time on the island and can’t handle the noise, people, and overall environment of the city. He doesn’t feel human anymore and lives the rest of his life trying to find peace with the “animal within” (Wells 115).
The Island of Dr. Moreau - Analysis
One theme in The Island of Dr. Moreau is ‘nature fights back’. Moreau cruelly vivisects animals in an attempt to make them humanoid. He is selfishly motivated by renown, as his work does not have any practical use. Moreau justifies his work to Prendick by stating that “this extraordinary branch of knowledge has never been sought as an end, and systematically, by modern investigators until I took it up!” (Wells 59). He only wishes to prove himself to the scientific community by doing something that has never been done before. However, he does not stop to consider why that may be. Moreau ignorantly states that he is “puzzled why the things I have done here have not been done before” as if the unnecessary pain inflicted on the animals isn’t enough of a deterrent (Wells 57). And although Moreau has justified his actions in his own mind, the following events suggest he is at fault. Moreau physically and mentally alters these creatures to resemble humans, but they always revert to their original animal forms over time. He attempts to counteract this by introducing the Law to scare the beast-men away from animalistic behaviors, but he is ultimately unsuccessful. This can be seen in the Leopard-man ‘sucking his drink’ and killing rabbits. When his puma escapes and Moreau attempts to recapture it, they both end up dead. After Moreau dies, Montgomery follows. They both had to die to restore the balance of nature. Moreau died for his experimentation, and Montgomery because he supported him, or at least turned a blind eye. Prendick survives because he saw the wrong in Moreau’s experiments and even works against him, like when he shot the Leopard-man instead of letting him be recaptured. When Prendick eventually leaves the island, the beast-men have lost most of their human characteristics. They can no longer speak and live wild in the forest. So although the animals had to suffer through Moreau’s vivisection, they fight back and ultimately outlive him. This restores nature to equilibrium, how it should have been.
Another theme is the exploitation of animals. In his explanation of his work, Moreau denies the importance of the animals’ pain. Prendick asks him, “Where is your justification for inflicting all this pain?”, to which Moreau responds with:
"Oh, but it is such a little thing! A mind truly opened to what science has to teach much see that it is a little thing. It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust, invisible long before the nearest star could be attained–it may be, I say, that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur. But the laws we feel our way towards–Why, even on this earth, even among living things, what pain is there?” (Wells 60).
He denies the importance of all pain, not just animals’, and tries to prove his point by driving a penknife into his thigh. Moreau downplays his cruelty by putting it in the perspective of the universe. But if we have such little impact, doesn’t that make the actions we do have control over more important? And doesn’t that make each person/creature’s experience more significant to themselves? In attempting to discount their suffering, Moreau effectively supports a moral argument against his own work. This theme is commonly used in ecohorror because it explores the idea that animals may be justified in fighting back against people. In the case that they do, we may deserve it by our own moral standards. The beast-men’s victory at the end suggests that Wells supports the idea of animal sentience and how it should be considered when deciding if an experiment is worth the consequences. Wells’s opinions are valid to this day, as genetic engineering fields continue to grow and scientists must determine what it means to go ‘too far’.