In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [64]
The Island of Doctor Moreau is also a romance, though a dark one. Consider the shipwreck. Consider the break in the protagonist’s consciousness—the multiple breaks, in fact. Consider the pirates, here supplied by the vile captain and crew of the Ipecacuanha. Consider the name Ipecacuanha, signifying an emetic and purgative: the break in consciousness is going to have a nastily physical side to it, of a possibly medicinal kind. Consider the fluid boundaries between animal and human. Consider the island.
5. THE ENCHANTED ISLAND
The name given to the island by Wells is Noble’s Island, a patent irony as well as another poke at the class system. Say it quickly and slur a little, and it’s no blessed island.
This island has many literary antecedents and several descendants. Foremost among the latter is William Golding’s island in Lord of the Flies—a book that owes something to The Island of Doctor Moreau, as well as to those adventure books Coral Island and The Swiss Family Robinson, and of course to the great original shipwreck-on-an-island classic, Robinson Crusoe. Moreau could be thought of as one in a long line of island-castaway books.
All those just mentioned, however, keep within the boundaries set by the possible. The Island of Doctor Moreau is, on the contrary, a work of fantasy, and its more immediate grandparents are to be found elsewhere. The Tempest springs immediately to mind: here is a beautiful island, belonging at first to a witch, then taken over by a magician who lays down the law, particularly to the malignant, animal-like Caliban, who will obey only when pain is inflicted on him. Dr. Moreau could be seen as a sinister version of Prospero, surrounded by a hundred or so Calibans of his own creation.
But Wells himself points us toward another enchanted island. When Prendick mistakenly believes that the beast-men he’s seen were once men, he says, “[Moreau] had merely intended … to fall upon me with a fate more horrible than death, with torture, and after torture the most hideous degradation it was possible to conceive—to send me off, a lost soul, a beast, to the rest of [the] Comus rout.”
Comus, in the masque of that name by Milton, is a powerful sorcerer who rules a labyrinthine forest. He’s the son of the enchantress Circe, who in Greek myth was the daughter of the Sun and lived on the island of Aeaea. Odysseus landed there during his wanderings, and Circe transformed his crew into pigs. She has a whole menagerie of other kinds of animals—wolves, lions—that were also once men. Her island is an island of transformation: man to beast (and then to man again, once Odysseus gets the upper hand).
As for Comus, he leads a band of creatures, once men, who have drunk from his enchanted cup and have turned into hybrid monsters. They retain their human bodies, but their heads are those of beasts of all kinds. Thus changed, they indulge in sensual revels. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, with its animal-form goblins who tempt chastity and use luscious edibles as bait, is surely a late offshoot of Comus.
As befits an enchanted island, Moreau’s island is both semi-alive and female but not in a pleasant way. It’s volcanic, and emits from time to time a sulphurous reek. It comes equipped with flowers, and also with clefts and ravines, fronded on either side. Moreau’s beast-men live in one of these, and since they do not have very good table manners, it has rotting food in it and it smells bad. When the beast-men start to lose their humanity and revert to their beast natures, this locale becomes the site of a moral breakdown that is specifically sexual.
What is it that leads us to believe that Prendick will never have a girlfriend?
6. THE UNHOLY TRINITY
Nor will Dr. Moreau. There is no Mrs. Moreau