In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [66]
Like many men of his time, Wells was obsessed with the New Woman. On the surface of it he was all in favour of sexual emancipation, including free love, but the freeing of Woman evidently had its frightening aspects. Rider Haggard’s She can be seen as a reaction to the feminist movement of his day—if women are granted power, men are doomed—and so can Wells’s deformed puma. Once the powerful, monstrous sexual cat tears her fetter out of the wall and gets loose, minus the improved brain she ought to have, courtesy of Man the Scientist, look out.
8. THE WHITENESS OF MOREAU,
THE BLACKNESS OF M’LING
Wells was not the only nineteenth-century English writer who used furry creatures to act out English sociodramas. Lewis Carroll had done it in a whimsical way in the Alice books, Kipling in a more militaristic fashion in The Jungle Book.
Kipling made the Law sound kind of noble in The Jungle Book. Not so Wells. The Law mumbled by the animal-men in Moreau is a horrible parody of Christian and Jewish liturgy; it vanishes completely when the language of the beasts dissolves, indicating that it was a product of language, not some eternal, extra-lingual, God-given creed.
Wells was writing at a time when the British Empire still held sway, but the cracks were already beginning to show. Moreau’s island is a little colonial enclave of the most hellish sort. It’s no accident that most (although not all) of the beast folk are black or brown, that they are at first thought by Prendick to be “savages” or “natives,” and that they speak in a kind of mangled English. They are employed as servants and slaves, in a regime that’s kept in place with whip and gun; they secretly hate the real “men” as much as they fear them; and they disobey the Law as much as possible, and kick over the traces as soon as they can. They kill Moreau and they kill Montgomery and they kill M’Ling, and, unless Prendick can get away, they will kill him too, although at first he “goes native” and lives among them, and does things that fill him with disgust and that he would rather not mention.
White Man’s Burden, indeed.
9. THE MODERN ANCIENT MARINER
The way in which Prendick escapes from the island is noteworthy. He sees a small boat with a sail and lights a fire to hail it. It approaches, but strangely: it doesn’t sail with the wind, but yaws and veers. There are two figures in it, one with red hair. As the boat enters the bay, “Suddenly a great white bird flew up out of the boat, and neither of the men stirred nor noticed it. It circled round, and then came sweeping overhead with its strong wings outspread.” This bird cannot be a gull: it’s too big and solitary. The only white seabird usually described as “great” is the albatross.
The two figures in the boat are dead. But it is this death boat, this life-in-death coffin boat, that proves the salvation of Prendick.
In what other work of English literature do we find a lone man reduced to a pitiable state, a boat that sails without a wind, two death figures, one with unusual hair, and a great white bird? The work is, of course, The Ancient Mariner, which revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature and concludes that this proper relation is one of love. It is when he manages to bless the sea serpents that the Mariner is freed from the curse he has brought upon himself by shooting the albatross.
The Island of Doctor Moreau also revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature, but its conclusions are quite different because Nature itself is seen differently. It is no longer the benevolent, motherly Nature eulogized by Wordsworth, for between Coleridge and Wells came Darwin.
The lesson learned by the albatross-shooting Mariner is summed up by him at the end of the poem:
He prayeth well, who loveth well