The Tropical Empire: Exotic Animals and Beastly Men in The Island of Doctor Moreau

In the Island of doctoR Moreau (1896), H. G. Wells spares none of his characters. If there are no fully human characters in this post-Darwinian novel, then there are also no heroes in this story of imperial collapse working against the grain of those standard adventure tales that had gained popularity in nineteenth-century England. Typically, such colonialist stories featured upper-class or aristocratic heroes bringing progress and civilization to their perceived animal-like primitive Others in the outposts of a growing empire. Unlike the idealized heroes of British adventure fiction, the upper-middle-class characters of this narrative are coded as degenerates, failing to establish productive relations with any of the non-European natives or the lower-class members of British society in the tropics. In this analysis of Moreau, which is often studied as a science fiction¹ work that stages a cross-species conflict between a vivisector and his grotesque Beast-Folk, I argue that the portrayal of British sailors in this narrative deserves more critical attention for the twinned purpose of understanding their class-inflected animalization and involvement in the overseas trade of exotic animals.

Gothic studies critics of Moreau have produced thought-provoking commentaries on the racial and gendered implications of degeneration encoded here. The arguments of Kelly Hurley in The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin-de-siècle (1996) and Cyndy Hendershot in The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (1998) first drew my attention to the recurring topic of degeneration in the Gothic studies strand of Wells scholarship. Like Hurley, Hendershot has incisively examined the ways in which the first-person narrator, the scientist, and his assistant are all figured as decadent Englishmen, struggling to maintain their masculinity and imperial authority in a tropical outpost. Hurley and Hendershot offer useful insights on the treatment of race and gender in Moreau, but their readings do not tie the central human-animal problematic to the critique of animal trade that is conveyed in the novel. By focusing on the representation of British sailors who are associated with such trade, I build on the analyses of these scholars. In what follows, my goal is to link the animalization of British sailors to the role played by them in the reification of exotic animals in the tropics. Initially, exotic animals of this story are not just objects of scientific research or aspects of an anarchic feminized nature. First and foremost, they are presented as trade goods. I argue that the novel employs animal representation paradoxically, both to critique the capture and commodification of exotic animals and to sustain alienating views about animals and human animality, and this is most clearly revealed in the portrayal of the representatives of British commerce and imperialism.

Imperial Menagerie

The paucity of criticism on the narrative function of the sailors is surprising, given that the first quarter of the novel focuses exclusively on their encounters with the shipwrecked narrator Edward Prendick. The opening five chapters urge us not to read the central setting of the story—an unnamed tropical island in the South Pacific—as a self-contained space. Most critics misread the novel in exactly this way. For example, in her 2003 article “The Unholy Alliance of Science in The Island of Doctor Moreau,” Roslynn Haynes claims that “it is clear from the outset that Moreau embodies several stock characteristics of the alchemist. Thus he lives in such rigorous seclusion that he even intends to deny the shipwrecked Prendick access to his island (itself a physical symbol of his isolation), and his work is conducted in the strictest secrecy in a locked laboratory” (56). Haynes continues, “Moreau, like Frankenstein, has cut himself off from the humanizing influences of society” (57). The main problem with this reading is that it conflates the island with the scientist inhabiting and governing that island. To claim that Moreau “cuts himself off from the humanizing influences of society” is to overlook the link that the novel subtly draws between his scientific project and imperial commerce. Moreau has severed...