I find the character of Doctor Moreau extremely interesting, because he has an entire island, medical background, and plenty of resources at his disposal, and he chooses to create a society completely borne from pain, proclaiming it as means to the ends of science and knowledge. Studying Moreau\u2019s language when he explains his experiments to Prendick is very revealing. At first read, we can somewhat understand Moreau\u2019s motivations and potentially view him as a scientific man who is simply above menial human emotions such as compassion for animals. But if we look more closely at his speech, he reveals himself to be extremely narcissistic, and quite frankly, evil.<\/p>\n
Moreau claims that he just wishes to advance the practice of vivisection for its usefulness to the scientific community. But looking at his word choice, we can see that he wants to make vivisection his, <\/i>he wants it to be his legacy. \u201cAnd yet this extraordinary branch of knowledge has never been sought as an end, and systematically, by modern investigators, until I took it up!\u2026I was the first man to take up this question armed with antiseptic surgery, and with a really scientific knowledge of the laws of growth.\u201d (53). Moreau is stressing to Prendick how he <\/i>was the first one to really investigate into vivisection, and all the scientific knowledge that he has to do it with. Moreau wants the credit for all the pain and suffering he has caused on his island. This is reminiscent of the Ledger and Luckhurst introduction to the Fin de Si\u00e8cle, <\/i>when they discuss the anxiety of the century\u2019s moving on, and where that leaves the people of the 1890\u2019s. People wanted to be remembered, to leave a legacy. For Moreau, creating human beings to worship him as God was the way to do it.<\/p>\n
Moreau claims to have chosen the human form as a model \u201cby chance\u201d (54) but this is clearly insincere. Moreau was making creatures in his own image, playing God. He instilled a religious law in the Beast People in order to control them, to make them more human-like, and also so that they would continue to worship him like humans do to God. Animals don\u2019t do that. Moreau\u2019s language when talking to Prendick indicates that he believes that his way is the only way of intelligent people, and any other mode of thinking he dismisses immediately. After he says that the main difference between a man and a monkey is the larynx, Prendick narrates \u201cIn this I failed to agree with him, but with a certain incivility he declined to notice my objection. He repeated that the thing was so, and continued his account of his work.\u201d (54) Only a page later, he uses the same dismissive tone with regards to religion: \u201cThen I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be. It may be I fancy I have seen more of the ways of this world\u2019s Maker than you- for I have sought his laws, in my <\/i>way, all my life, while you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies.\u201d (55) This reminded me of the \u201cLongman\u2019s Anthology\u201d section on the \u201cAge of Empire\u201d. Britain, specifically Queen Victoria, at this time felt it was its duty as \u201cmore advanced, superior\u201d people to essentially force the British way of life on people around the world. Their duty was to spread their culture on more \u201csavage\u201d people, the same way Moreau forced the Beast People to be like him. Moreau is at once both removed from society, and the complete embodiment of British society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I find the character of Doctor Moreau extremely interesting, because he has an entire island, medical background, and plenty of resources at his disposal, and he chooses to create a society completely borne from pain, proclaiming it as means to the ends of science and knowledge. Studying Moreau\u2019s language when he explains his experiments to … Continue reading Moreau as a Narcissistic God-Like Figure<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3036,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-blog-post","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","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\/3036"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}