In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [84]
Next in the line comes H. G. Wells’s 1896 Dr. Moreau—he of the Island, upon which he attempts, through cruel vivisection experiments, to sculpt animals into people, with appalling and eventually lethal results. Moreau has lost the well-meaning but misguided quality of the projectors: he’s possessed by a “passion for research” that exists for its own sake, simply to satisfy Moreau’s own desire to explore the secrets of physiology. Like Frankenstein, he plays God—creating new beings—and the results are monstrous. And like so many of the sinister scientists who come after him, he is “irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on.…”
From Moreau, it’s a short step to the golden age of mad scientists, who became so numerous in both fiction and film by the mid-twentieth century that everyone recognized the stereotype as soon as it made its appearance.
Its lowest point is reached, quite possibly, in the B movie called variously The Head That Wouldn’t Die or The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. The scientist in it is even more seriously depraved than usual. The head in question is that of his girlfriend; it comes off in a car accident, after which incident most men might have cried. But the mad scientist is building a Frankenstein monster out of body parts filched from a hospital, underestimating as usual the monster’s clothing size—why do those monsters’ sleeves always end halfway down their arms?—so he wraps the girl’s head in his coat and scampers off with it across the fields. Once under a glass bell with wires attached to its neck and its hair in a Bride of Frankenstein frizzle, the head gives itself to thoughts of revenge while the scientist himself haunts strip clubs in search of the perfect body to attach to it.
There’s another element in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels that bears mention here because it so often gets mixed into the alchemist/mad scientist sorts of tales: the theme of immortality. On the island of Luggnagg, the third in Swift’s trio of capital-L islands, Gulliver encounters the immortals—children born with a spot on their foreheads that means they will never die. At first, Gulliver longs to meet these “Struldbrugs,” whom he pictures as blessed: surely they will be repositories of knowledge and wisdom. But he soon finds that they are on the contrary cursed because, like their mythological forebears Tithonus and the Sibyl of Cumae, they do not receive eternal youth along with their eternal life. They simply live on and on, becoming older and older, and also “opinionated, peevish, covetous, morose, vain … and dead to all natural affection.” Far from being envied, they are despised and hated; they long for death but cannot achieve it.
Immortality has been one of the constant desires of humanity. The means to it differ—one may receive it through natural means, as in Luggnagg, or from a god, or by drinking an elixir of life, or by passing through a mysterious fire, as in H. Rider Haggard’s novel She, or by drinking the blood of a vampire; but there’s always a dark side to it.
Luggnagg is Gulliver’s last noteworthy Book Three stop. Through his encounter with the Struldbrugs, he’s drawing close to the heart of Swift’s matter: what it is to be human. In Book Four he plunges all the way in: his final voyage takes him to the land of the rational and moral talking-horse Houyhnhnms and brings him face-to-face with an astonishingly Darwinian view of humanity’s essence. The filthy apelike beasts called Yahoos he encounters there are viewed by the Houyhnhnms as beasts, and treated as such; and, much to Gulliver’s dismay, he is at last forced to recognize that, apart from a few superficial differences such as clothing and language, he, too, is a Yahoo.
As Swift’s friend Alexander Pope wrote shortly after the publication