The Island of Dr. Moreau deals with intensely gruesome subjects – not only in the physical monstrosity of the Beast People, with their “strangely distorted talons” which evoke a “quivering disgust” (44), but in Moreau’s morally repulsive experiments full of sadism and wanton cruelty. Yet as the full depth of the island’s gruesomeness becomes clear, I began to find the language surrounding it increasingly strange. The language the characters use is often far less graphic than one might expect, as we begin to understand what exactly they’re referring to; the terms used to explain the actual horrors occurring on the island are often vague. Even after Prendick has come to a full understanding of the island’s horrors, the euphemisms persist. This seems counterproductive; in a book so full of shock and revulsion, why bother trying to maintain language that downplays them?
Early on in the novel, Moreau tells Prendick, “‘This is a biological station – of a sort’” (Wells 19). There is a good deal more going on in Moreau’s island than merely biology, but Prendick doesn’t know this yet; it’s a handy lie for Moreau, easily palatable for a fellow scientist. Shortly after, Moreau changes his tone: “‘Our little establishment here contains a secret or so, is a kind of Bluebeard’s Chamber, in fact. Nothing very dreadful really – to a sane man’” (21). While “biological station” sounds relatively simple, even tame, “Bluebeard’s Chamber” is far more objectionable. Moreau could have called his island a biological station if he was experimenting on different types of grass. His allusion to “Bluebeard’s Chamber,” on the other hand, holds a deadly and deceptive conflict. Bluebeard is a character in a fairy tale – removed from reality, ostensibly harmless, figuring only in a child’s imagination. This fairy tale quality makes the allusion itself seem harmless, placing Moreau’s island in an innocuous context. But Bluebeard was a renowned wife-murderer, and his chamber was kept a secret because it was full of dead bodies. The apparent safety of Moreau’s answer is undermined by the nature of his euphemism. Although this tendency seems natural now, when Prendick is new to the island, Prendick himself maintains the euphemisms surrounding the worst of the island’s horrors, as if he can’t bear to name them.
Prendick and Moreau both use the term “vivisection” most often when referring to Moreau’s work, and although the clinical ring of the word seems to excuse it from being a euphemism, I think it’s another link in a chain of sustained euphemisms for something so horrible neither character nor writer can address it openly. “Vivisection” means “living dissection” – yet it sounds much cleaner cloaked in Latin. Prendick never asks himself, “Can Moreau really be cutting apart live animals in order to make them more like humans? Can he dissect live humans?” Instead, he says, “Could the vivisection of men be possible?” (37). While vivisection is ostensibly the most applicable scientific term, it is also used exclusively; there are no other more graphic (and realistic) terms applied to Moreau’s research. I think that this repetition, to the exclusion of any other term, reflects a fear of the actual process, even after we understand it.
Chapter 19 is titled “Montgomery’s ‘Bank Holiday.’” This holiday consists of Montgomery losing his hold on his sanity and eventually being killed by the Beast People. The “bank holiday” is a new euphemism, used perhaps for dramatic purpose (to withhold the details of the next chapter) but I think more importantly for the way it reveals Prendick’s discomfort with the events around him. To Prendick, and perhaps to Moreau also, the horror of the “science” happening on the island is so strong that they can’t bring themselves to name it.
It makes some sense that Wells would try to conceal some atrocities; published under Victoria in an era of strict social decorum, the novel could have been shunned had it been judged too appalling. Yet we see atrocities aplenty. Instead, the euphemisms reveal such a depth of disgust and fear for the island’s events that Prendick (and Wells) could not bear to name them. Instead of calling horror by its own name, Wells constantly conceals and obscures it; the euphemisms he uses for the island’s horrors indicate a discomfort deeper than simple revulsion. I think that these euphemisms reflect a social and moral disgust with Moreau’s science, and perhaps science as a whole, that neither Prendick nor Wells can fully articulate.
This is a really interesting idea & one I had not noticed. I wonder if it can be applied to our discussion about the limitations of language – that the characters’ use of euphemisms is another facet of Prendick’s inability to describe exactly what is repellant about the beast-men. But I also wonder if refusing to name some of these horrors makes them even more terrifying to the reader, who is free to imagine the worst possible.
I think you bring up a very interesting point that I hadn’t recognized before. Maybe, rather than indicating a sort of disgust for the subject of the novel, Wells uses the euphemisms consciously to present an unemotional, disaffected take on science that he himself is trying to warn people against. The term “vivisection” has much less emotional impact than “living dissection,” and in effect it seems to lessen the immoral quality of the act. Wells seems to be offering a view of the world in which science is completely disconnected from humanity, which is why so many of the scenes that could be explained in much more grotesque detail are instead short and restrained.