“You cannot imagine the strange colourless delight of these intellectual desires. The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow creature, but a problem” (56).
Dr. Moreau’s use of the phrase “strange colourless delight” to describe the “intellectual desires” that compel him to conduct his vivisection experiments reveals the underlying unease that he feels about his experiments in vivisection. By his own description, Moreau himself does not fully understand the nature of his own desires, and his ambivalence towards them creates a cycle in which he conducts his experiments in order to get at the “problem” not only of the animal on his vivisection table, but also within himself.
Moreau suggests that he finds his own delight in his experiments both alien and ambiguous with his use of the phrase “strange colourless delight.” Color typically functions as an identifying characteristic, whether it connotes pigmentation or emotion, and its absence makes both objects and concepts difficult to define. So, while Moreau’s delight is colourless, and therefore ambiguous, the word strange implies that his delight is also alien, or other. The simultaneously strange and ambiguous nature of the delight that Moreau derives from his intellectual desires reveals that Moreau himself has difficulty locating or naming what it is within himself that spurs him to conduct his experiments.
The unknowable nature of Moreau’s “strange colourless delight” echoes the “restless curiosity in research” that Arthur Symons notes as being a defining characteristic of decadence (105). Moreau’s frustration about the ambiguity of his delight could be read as its own sort of “restless curiosity.” In the context of this interpretation, Moreau’s “intellectual desires” are focused both on the “problem” of his animal experiments as well as on the “problem” of the unknowability of his delight.
The phrase “intellectual desires” also suggests Moreau’s cloaked anxiety, created in this case by the contradictory nature of the combination of intellect with desire. Desire pairs oddly with the adjective intellectual, as desire and intellect are not words typically associated with one another. The word intellectual is affiliated with reason, while the word desire correlates with lack of control, or perhaps instinct. The phrase as a whole suggests that Moreau’s “intellectual desires,” which push him to ever greater extremes of experimentation, meld reason with bestial instinct, an anomalous mixture that causes anxiety for Dr. Moreau.
If Moreau’s statement does in fact reveal that he, perhaps unconsciously, feels anxiety about how his “intellectual desires” affect him, then his later, more explicit statement about the purpose of his experiments is in fact an articulation of the cycle of anxiety, experimentation, and further anxiety that characterized Moreau’s work on the island. Moreau states, “Each time I dip a living creature in the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own” (59). In light of the underlying anxiety evident in Moreau’s description of his “strange colourless delight,” I believe that his desire to “burn out all the animal” and “make a rational creature of my own” is in fact an attempt to reconcile the contradictory nature of his own “intellectual desires,” the combination of desire for reason and animal instinct that drive him to conduct his experiments in the first place.
Moreau’s own anxiety about the delight that his partially bestial “intellectual desires” inspire in him connects to the larger anxieties and ambivalences that characterized the late 19th century. If Moreau’s experiments are in fact part of a cycle in which he tries to locate the “problem” within himself in the bodies of his “fellow creature[s],” then it is possible that Arthur Symons’s definition of decadence as “an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity” is a list of the symptoms inspired by the simultaneous anxiety and ambivalence experienced at the close of the 19th century (105). Decadence, then, and the delight suggested by its name, is its own cycle of anxiety, experimentation through “self-consciousness, restless curiosity… over-subtilizing refinement,” and a resulting “a spiritual and moral perversity,” which creates further anxiety necessitating investigation.
This comment brings up very good points and insights into the motivations of Doctor Moreau. In my post, I did something sort of similar, except I mostly wrote him off as being narcissistic, evil, and with a hunger to control and possess other living creatures. This post explores and questions that thought more carefully, by examining a specific quotation that I think is particularly well-chosen. He both acknowledges that his desires are strange, and reveals that he gets some sort of twisted delight from causing animals pain. Moreau both intrigues and repulses me. He cannot name exactly what it is that drives his curiosity to morph creatures into other creatures, but claims that it is rooted in some sort of intellectual need, instead of my inclination which is to say he is a sadist. I like how the author of this post explored the meanings of the words “desire” and “intellectual”, which don’t raise any alarms when put together smoothly in a sentence by Moreau, but when examined separately, seem to contrast. Overall, Moreau’s motivations for his experiments are cloudy, and frankly, horrifying.
I hadn’t thought of how the experiments reflect Moreau’s anxiety of being connected to the beast-men he is creating. Because of his clinical language, he seemed removed and objective about the whole process – I had basically thought he was just a sociopath. But this is a far more compelling argument for why he does his vivisections. He is trying to create a completely rational creature because that is what he wants to identify with, but he can only ever create things that still retain their bestial mark because you can never truly get rid of the animal, and this terrifies the doctor for his own sake.
This is a very interesting commentary because throughout the book Moreau is not the character I would have associated with anxiety – for noticeable reasons, Prendick is. Associating Moreau with anxiety therefore makes his explanation of the island’s inhabitants to Prendick read in a very different manner. The idea that he desires knowledge that makes him anxious makes that speech as a whole sound a bit more mad. He’s aware of his own sanity and morals, yet he’s developed such an extensive, decisive way to stop people from questioning them.