(I know this is the example quote from the prompt outline but I swear I coincidentally picked the same passage during the exercise in class before I ever saw the prompt sheet)<\/p>\n
\u201cEach of these creatures, despite its human form, its rag of clothing, and the rough humanity of its bodily form, had woven into it, into its movements into the expression of its countenance, into its whole presence, some now irresistible suggestion of a hog, a swinish taint, the unmistakable mark of the beast.\u201d (29)<\/p>\n
In this passage, Prendick has left his room and wandered into the forest, where he comes across a trio of \u201cgrotesque human figures\u201d and stops to observe them. Although there are many different species of man-animal hybrids on the island, these are among the first he has seen.<\/p>\n
The most frequently used word in the passage is \u201cit,\u201d which is used to describe the pig-men hybrids. His use of the term \u201cit\u201d shows Prendick\u2019s distaste for what he sees and his refusal to acknowledge them in the same terms as he would a full human. The passage could have easily been \u201cEach of these creatures, despite their human forms, their rags of clothing, and the rough humanity of their bodily forms\u2026\u201d but Prendick makes the choice to identify each creature as an \u201cit,\u201d as a thing instead of an actual living gendered being.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, Prendick never specifically describes exactly which features resemble those of a pig, nor how strongly. The words \u201csuggestion,\u201d \u201ctaint,\u201d and \u201cmark\u201d all lack a sense of the concrete, despite being paired with words like \u201cirresistible\u201d and \u201cunmistakable.\u201d This almost oxymoronic assertion of the pig-ness of these humanoids leaves their actual physical appearance up to the reader\u2019s imagination. This means that these creatures could have any degree of animalistic features, depending on the reader.<\/p>\n
Prendick is both horrified and fascinated by the intertwining of man and beast in these creatures\u2019 appearances. Wells\u2019 places emphasis on the visual unmistakability of these combinations, and yet as these animals\/men are unavoidable throughout the island, Prendick also can\u2019t help but notice distinctly human qualities about them. It is ironic that among the first humanoid creatures he sees on the island are part pig, as \u201cpig\u201d is a common insult among \u201creal\u201d men. A pig is stereotypically slow, fat, dumb, dirty, and lazy. These human focal points and the constant reoccurrence of man-beasts throughout the island begs the question, \u201cwhat makes a human a human?\u201d and plants a seed in the reader\u2019s mind that perhaps men aren’t all that different from animals after all.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(I know this is the example quote from the prompt outline but I swear I coincidentally picked the same passage during the exercise in class before I ever saw the prompt sheet) \u201cEach of these creatures, despite its human form, its rag of clothing, and the rough humanity of its bodily form, had woven into … Continue reading “Men Are Pigs”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3604,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3604"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}