In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [65]
Similarly, the God of the Old Testament has no wife. Wells called The Island of Doctor Moreau “a youthful piece of blasphemy,” and it’s obvious that he intended Moreau—that strong, solitary gentleman with the white hair and beard—to resemble traditional paintings of God. He surrounds Moreau with semi-biblical language as well: Moreau is the lawgiver of the island; those of his creatures who go against his will are punished and tortured; he is a god of whim and pain. But he isn’t a real God because he cannot really create; he can only imitate, and his imitations are poor.
What drives him on? His sin is the sin of pride, combined with a cold “intellectual passion.” He wants to know everything. He wishes to discover the secrets of life. His ambition is to be as God the Creator. As such, he follows in the wake of several other aspirants, including Dr. Frankenstein and Hawthorne’s various alchemists. Dr. Faustus hovers in the background, but he wanted youth and wealth and sex in return for his soul, and Moreau has no interest in such things; he despises what he calls “materialism,” which includes pleasure and pain. He dabbles in bodies but wishes to detach himself from his own. (He has some literary brothers: Sherlock Holmes would understand his bloodless intellectual passion. So would Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton, of that earlier fin-de-siècle transformation novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
But in Christianity, God is a trinity, and on Moreau’s island there are three beings whose names begin with M. Moreau as a name combines the syllable “mor”—from mors, mortis, no doubt—with the French for “water,” suitable in one who aims at exploring the limits of plasticity. The whole word means “moor” in French. So the very white Moreau is also the Black Man of witchcraft tales, a sort of anti-God.
Montgomery, his alcoholic assistant, has the face of a sheep. He acts as the intercessor between the beast folk and Moreau, and in this function stands in for Christ the Son. He’s first seen offering Prendick a red drink that tastes like blood, and some boiled mutton. Is there a hint of an ironic Communion service here—blood drink, flesh of the Lamb? The communion Prendick enters into by drinking the red drink and eating the mutton is the communion of carnivores, that human communion forbidden to the beast folk. But it’s a communion he was part of anyway.
The third person of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit, usually portrayed as a dove—God in living but nonhuman form. The third M creature on the island is M’Ling, the beast creature who serves as Montgomery’s attendant. He, too, enters into the communion of blood: he licks his fingers while preparing a rabbit for the human beings to eat. The Holy Spirit as a deformed and idiotic man-animal? As a piece of youthful blasphemy, The Island of Doctor Moreau was even more blasphemous than most commentators have realized.
Just so we don’t miss it, Wells puts a serpent beast into his dubious garden: a creature that was completely evil and very strong, and that bent a gun barrel into the letter S. Can Satan, too, be created by man? If so, blasphemous indeed.
7. THE NEW WOMAN AS CATWOMAN
There are no female human beings on Moreau’s island, but Moreau is busily making one. The experiment on which he’s engaged for most of the book concerns his attempt to turn a female puma into the semblance of a woman.
Wells was more than interested in members of the cat family, as Brian Aldiss has pointed out. During his affair with Rebecca West, she was “Panther,” he was “Jaguar.” But “cat” has another connotation: in slang, it meant “prostitute.” This is Montgomery’s allusion when he says—while the puma is yelling under the knife—“I’m damned … if this place is not as bad as Gower Street—with its cats.” Prendick himself makes the connection explicit on his return to London when he shies away from the “prowling women [who] would mew after me.”
“I have some hope of her head and brain,” says Moreau of the puma. “… I will make a rational creature of my