What a wild ride this was. The research, the reading, the story itself. I honestly learned so much about the victorian era obsession with the worst science. I hope you enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed forgetting that I had that dumb forehead cross on my trip to the grocery store after and wondering why I kept getting looks from literally everyone.
The full video can be viewed on youtube at https://youtu.be/DMwjp77E2Sc
Below is the full shooting script for the video, but beware, I might have changed a couple lines here and there. Enjoy!
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The Island of Dr. Moreau
The very concept of kinship with lower animals, of being on some kind of a level playing field with the skittering, lurking mammals of our world, the domesticated and subservient lower lifeforms on which we depend, is a terror which strikes at the cold heart our human identity. How can we, the dominant species on the planet and perhaps the galaxy, the ones who built the wonders of the world and visited the moon, how similar can we ever be to dogs, cats, and other trans girl stereotypes? H G Well’s vision of a scientist with no ethical or moral constrains sought to ask this question to Victorian England, and he was vivisected for it by the press. They hated it. Today we’re discussing a piece of classic furry literature The Island of Dr. Moreau, and the questions it posed to a public who had figured out machines guns but just could NOT get enough mummy dust for their seance parties.
Dr. Moreau is a scientist who creates monsters in his own image. When Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein, she breathed life into a story about an unethical doctor who creates life from pieces of other humans, who wants to play god but abandons his child at the absolute earliest opportunity. Well’s unethical doctor moreau, on the other hand, breathes life into a society of abominations, and rather than abandoning them, seeks to control them through religion, society, and law like a kind of paternal dictator daddy figure. And if there’s one thing we know about furries its how much they like to follow orders from daddy. Just kidding, they kill him. Spoilers, oh yeah, spoilers sorry he dies it’s great.
Prendick is the sole survivor of a shipwreck and yes his name is Prendick this is a very normal name. On the brink of death, the wilting Prendick is rescued by a passing ship carrying live animals bound for the island. It is on this ship we are introduced to the alcoholic assistant to Dr. Moreau named Montgomery, and it is also here we first meet some of the “crew”. Of primary interest is the Captain, who despises Mongomery and the work they do for this client. While there’s some talk of superstition among sailors, Prendick too is curious to know the reason for the puma aboard the ship. So upset and angered by the constant yowling and misery of the creatures aboard that he kicks everyone off the boat at the earliest opportunity, and sends Prendick back into his little life raft, who’s towed to shore by Montgomery. At this stage of the story, Prendick is (along with the reader) suspicious of the apparent animal abuse at the hands of Montgomery. Wells also takes a lot of space to pin suspicion on Montgomery’s assistants, who are referred to with some racially charged language I won’t repeat here, but suffice it to say that British imperialism and racism is a contributing factor in Prendick (and by extension the contemporary audience) coming late to the ultimate conclusion – that Montgomery’s crew are not, in fact, human.
The late Jane Goodall may have spearheaded modern study into great apes, but scientists in the field of biology writ-large refer to those creatures by another name – non-human apes. Science understands, arguably better than the populace, that humans exist as a piece of a greater puzzle, one singular entry in the vastness of the tree of life. The hubris of humanity is to assume we rule nature, to scream relentlessly into the heavens of our human superiority over nature, when we are ultimately ruled by it. We are a planetary common cold, a thin film of galactic pond scum, a biological flake to be sloughed off by powers beyond our comprehension, let alone our ability to control. And the madness of Dr. Moreau is many-faced, but perhaps his biggest failing lies in his central misunderstanding of humanity’s place in the natural system.
We’re not even the only humanoid to walk the earth. Several other now-extinct species of humanoids have eaten our food, painted our caves, and sometimes to this day even make accounts on Reddit. Neanderthals coexisted with humans for centuries, competed for our resources, and ultimately fell for reasons science doesn’t really understand. One thing science DOES know about neanderthals is that lots of humans on earth today, maybe even you, carry neanderthal genes, suggesting our ancestors knew these other humanoids and bred with them. Furry stuff, IRL.
As soon as Prendick makes it to the island, he’s sequestered in a “guest room” where he’s kept under lock and key and forced to listen to the high pitched and “strange” screams of the puma from the ship like some kind of low tech havana syndrome. The screaming goes on for days, slowly driving Prendick up the wall. His only interactions are limited basically to Montgomery and his “assistant” M’ling. There is obviously something different about M’ling.
Just as I was thinking of him he came in… Then astonishment paralysed me. Under his stringy black locks I saw his ear; it jumped upon me suddenly close to my face. The man had pointed ears, covered with a fine brown fur!
Prendick and by extension the reader are meant to believe that Dr. Moreau’s experiments are centered around somehow tf-sequenceing humans into animals. Prendick’s suspicions are all but confirmed when he escapes his little room only to run directly into a laboratory where Dr. Moreau is operating on the puma, who bears a grotesque humanoid shape. Frightened, Prendick flees the compound for what he believes is the safety of the surrounding jungle, but what he finds there is anything but.
Dr. Moreau is what Wells refers to as a “mad vivisectionist”. Vivisection is a barbaric form of surgery which is conducted on live subjects, and was and forever will be a black stain on humanity’s scientific progress. However, later adaptations like that universally beloved critical hit with Marlon Brando that was hailed as the greatest film ever to be made and has no faults whatsoever, use “gene research” as a stand in for vivisection, as a way to hand wave the concept. Because although interesting, it isn’t really important HOW Dr. Moreau accomplishes his task – this is a man who cares more about results, after all.
When Wells used vivisection as the mechanism by which Dr. Moreau creates these monstrosities, he was using a medical practice which was common to Victorian England, and topical to public sensibilities. There was a nascent Anti-Vivisection movement growing in popularity around the time of the books release, and it was a common topic of parlor discussions, along with seances and mummy dust. This period of time was also an agricultural boom for England, and proud farmers and ranchers were developing methods of breeding the squarest cattle. The public was seeing in real time the utter transformation of the biology of the cattle industry, and many were wondering if the same concepts could be applied to humans. This is eugenics. That’s eugenics, that’s a eugenics thing. It’s eugenics.
It’s common in nerd circles to hear that Charles Darwin was a religious man. He may have made groundbreaking discoveries public with his book On the Origin of Species, but he also wrote another paper, called On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties. It is this paper that inspired a generation of ranchers to attempt to wrest control from nature, to create the biggest fattest cows they possibly could.
Here’s a quote from that paper, don’t worry trans women there’s trains:
“The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow.”
I wonder if Moreau ever read that quote, and ever considered the ramifications of his creations becoming “unbalanced deficiencies” in the animal kingdom. Wells himself almost certainly did.
And while the public was captivated by the idea that animals could be transformed in such a way, and perhaps people too (eugenics), some even wondered if animals could be so transformed that they may one day resemble people. This is the society that read The Island of Dr. Moreau. And they hated it. The press despised Wells for this work, London Times calling it “loathsome and repulsive,” contemporary scientists calling Wells a scientific “heretic,” and various high-profile parodies of the work. All the attention turned The Island of Dr. Moreau into something of an instant cult classic.
And undoubtedly it isn’t Wells’ most popular or beloved books, never quite reaching the fame of War of the Worlds or Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books (the precursor to warhammer and DnD). People decried the book for conveying an anti-scientific tone, where the scientist doesn’t seek to help but to harm and control. How does he control the experiments?
The Law.
When Prendick runs off into the woods, he finds an eviscerated rabbit, and a humanoid creature drinking from a stream which notices him and scampers off into the woods.
Then suddenly upon the bank of the stream appeared something—at first I could not distinguish what it was. It bowed its round head to the water, and began to drink. Then I saw it was a man, going on all-fours like a beast… I could hear the suck of the water at his lips as he drank.
After a while he discovers a small settlement of creatures, humanoid in appearance but animalistic and deformed. A creature that Prendick can’t identify speaks like a pastor to a crowd of enraptured congregants, and tells them the orders from on high.
“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law…
“Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law…
“Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law…
“Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law…
“Not to chase other Men; that is the Law… Are we not Men?”
It is to Prendick and the reader a religious experience, one totally foreign yet utterly comprehensible, designed perfectly to cater to a worship of the human form, and meant to instill in followers the desire to not only deify humanity but seek to emulate it. Like if Christianity told you to act like an angel, and you could score an invite to the club one day. Oh.
And then Moreau shows up, along with Montgomery and friends. Moreau gives Prendick a gun for his own “comfort” but ostensibly dares him kill god. What could Prendick do? Could he really kill god, knowing that these creatures worship the father, surrounded by their claws and teeth, at the mercy of their thin veneer of performative humanity? Would you? Prendick goes right back to the compound, where he petulantly demands answers, and it is this part of the novel where we finally hear the truth. Moreau isn’t in the business of turning humans into animals. From animals, Moreau seeks to create humans.
In the novel, Moreau uses elaborate and cutting edge – no pun intended – vivisection techniques to gradually warp the animal form into that of a human, and hypnosis to gradually subscribe to the channel. I mean subscribe to the channel. Sub… Scribe… To the channel. Huh. Knowing what we know now about science, it seems very silly, quaint even. Everyone knows that’s not how tf-sequences work. But back then vivisection and hypnotism were captivating and subscribe and let your thoughts fall out of your empty little head into the comments section. I mean, plausible ways to alter biology and minds. And the Marlon Brando version hand waves it away with gene science, and we’re all pretty sure CRISPr is the only way to tf-sequence into catgirls, right? Maybe it works the other way around, thought Wells in his programmer socks and cat ears. Maybe we can commission a tf-UNsequence…
“Timothy looked into the eyes of the bears and saw a friend. I saw the cold, brutal reality of nature.” – Werner Herzog
Moreau does a better job with his super villain monologue in the Marlon Brando movie, which I promise you is if not the best then the most coherent part of the film. He showcases his knowledge of the christian bible by slamming out some bible quotes, and then proceeds to explain his vision – a society free of human avarice and greed, one more connected to nature and at peace with the world. And at last we see Moreau’s plan for what it really is – an attempt to create life in his own image. An attempt to play god.
The methods of his control are already in place, and they are absolute. He controls his creations spiritually, through a constructed religion which places him at the center of their small animalistic world, and in the Marlon Brando movie he also controls their bodies through a shock device embedded in their skin, if they don’t eat their fruit loops and red bull from their bowl on the ground like a good girl.
Just as an aside, you know who else has a private island and their own religion, and spiritual captives? Jared Leto. Just throwing that out there.
The most chilling part of the story, which only appears in the book as far as I can tell, is the brief mention of one of Moreau’s “failures,” a creature he refers to simply as “The Footless Thing.”
“The fact is, after I had made a number of human creatures I made a Thing—” He hesitated… “It killed several other things that it caught. We chased it for a couple of days. It only got loose by accident—I never meant it to get away. It wasn’t finished. It was purely an experiment. It was a limbless thing, with a horrible face, that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion. It was immensely strong, and in infuriating pain. It lurked in the woods for some days, until we hunted it; and then it wriggled into the northern part of the island, and we divided the party to close in upon it. Montgomery insisted upon coming with me. The man had a rifle; and when his body was found, one of the barrels was curved into the shape of an S and very nearly bitten through. Montgomery shot the thing. After that I stuck to the ideal of humanity—except for little things.”
What follows is a mostly incoherent mess of narrative devices to get to the eventual resolution – that Dr. Moreau (predictably) dies at the hands of his creations, and his abhorrent religion fades away like the minds and human tendencies of his “children.” Moreau may have been god to his creations, but who could really weather the death of god. Is there still law? There is still law. But no longer anyone to enforce it, through coercion, pain, or affection. The manipulation of the animal mind is almost secondary to the ultimate effect – that Moreau sought to create an island of slaves, and when the revolt finally came and his sins had boiled over and his “love” ceased to be enough, it wasn’t an organized rebellion but an animal expression of the chaos inherent to savage survival. Moreau wasn’t defeated by his creations, he defied nature and he was obliterated by nature. A modern day Timothy Treadwell. And like the Grizzly Man, Moreau lives on only in the memory of passive observers, like Prendick, who eventually returns to society.
And it’s this return to civilization that features the story’s only real recognition of the place that humans (non-human apes) have in the animal kingdom. A shocking addition to a book written for a society who was convinced of human superiority, of boundless human power in the face of nature itself. Prendick makes it back to civilization, but he remains haunted by the experience, unable to connect with other humans, preferring the study of the cold, the lifeless, to engaging with the biology around him, inherent to his own existence.
“Then I look about me at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright; others dull or dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere… I feel as though the animal was surging up through them… I know this is an illusion; that these seeming men and women about me are… perfectly reasonable creatures, full of human desires and tender solicitude, emancipated from instinct… Yet I shrink from them, from their curious glances, their inquiries and assistance, and long to be away from them and alone.”
I’m Veronica Ripley, and I want to hear your thoughts on the Island of Dr. Moreau. What story should I cover next? Tell me in the comments. For the full text of this video, and for a whole lot more, visit nikatine.com/blog, link down below. There are thousands of people out there looking for a friend just like you, all you have to do is find them.