{"id":91,"date":"2016-02-10T06:28:23","date_gmt":"2016-02-10T06:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/?p=91"},"modified":"2018-09-02T22:06:28","modified_gmt":"2018-09-02T22:06:28","slug":"colonization-through-the-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/2016\/02\/10\/colonization-through-the-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Colonization through “The Law”"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most obvious overarching themes of The Island of Dr. Moreau<\/em> is the colonialism story, reflecting the relationship that England had with one fourth of the world\u2019s population by the 1890s. Colonizing nations took over \u201cless civilized\u201d territories to take advantage of the resources of the land, but under the guise of bettering the lives of the colonized peoples. The Victorians applied Darwin\u2019s ideas about evolution to society to place their culture above those of the peoples they were invading, validating their right to attempt to civilize the people brought into Victoria\u2019s empire by educating them in English language, culture and history. They would \u201cuplift\u201d these peoples\u2019 lives while simultaneously destroying that which connected them to their heritage. This uplift and destruction took place around the world, and Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, sums up the sentiment best when speaking about the point of educating Native Americans in 1892: \u201cKill the Indian in him, and save the man\u201d (http:\/\/historymatters.gmu.edu\/d\/4929\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Schools meant to stamp out non-western European cultures were set up in all colonized lands, and we see a mirror of this school in the Law that the beast-men live by after Moreau turns them out because he \u201c[began] to feel the beast in them\u201d instead of them retaining a human mentality (Wells 59). The beast-men repeat their law when a new creature arrives, and mistaking the protagonist Prendick for another of Moreau\u2019s vivisected animals, \u201cthe Sayer of the Law\u201d begins the process of teaching him (Wells 44). The Law serves two main purposes \u2013 to define the place of the beast-men in the island\u2019s society and to prescribe their actions so that they stay \u2018men.\u2019<\/p>\n

The Law begins by prohibiting certain beast-like behaviors \u2013 \u201cnot to go on all-Fours…. not to suck up Drink…. not to eat Flesh or Fish…. not to claw Bark of Trees…. not to chase other Men\u201d (Wells 43). By avoiding these actions, the beast-men act more like men, as they desire to do. And if they do any of these things, \u201cevil are the punishments of those who break the Law;\u201d fear tactics and negative-reinforcement training is in place in their society to keep them in order (Wells 44).<\/p>\n

The other part of the Law is ascribing characteristics of power and ownership to some male figure \u2013 \u201cHis<\/em> is the House of Pain. His<\/em> is the hand that Makes…. His<\/em> is the lightning-flash…. His<\/em> are the starts in the sky,\u201d (Wells 43). The beast-men are worshipping this figure, assigning to him the powers of creation and healing, as well as pain and destruction, basically saying that he is the master of all things, but the figure is never specified. It is likely Dr. Moreau because he is the one that causes these being unimaginable pain, but he is also the one that enables them to have this ability to think and understand, even if in a limited capacity, but it is still never explicitly stated who is being worshipped, or where this Law originated.<\/p>\n

Someone had to give the Sayer of the Law these rules and instill this hero-worship, but it is presented to new creatures by one of their own as if this Law is, was, and always will be the natural order of things, even though that is not remotely true. Moreau has only been doing this kind of vivisection for a little over a decade, and there was no way for this Law of the beast-men to be in place before this. But this presentation of a set of constructed societal principles as the natural order of things is exactly how colonized peoples were educated. They were forced into a new way of life, told how to act and punished severely if they showed disobedient behavior, and this forced assimilation was often done at the hands of previous generations of their own people. An example of this is Wallace Denny, who went through the Carlisle Indian School system, a system intent on killing his heritage, and then returned to work for that system as a disciplinarian for other native children. This is how the cycle of colonization is able to continue for generations, often with little input from the colonizer once the system is in place. The only flaw in this scheme, however, is what happens when the colonized begin to take their new knowledge and use it for their own aims, a terrifying possibility which was just beginning to fully set in for the Victorians.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most obvious overarching themes of The Island of Dr. Moreau is the colonialism story, reflecting the relationship that England had with one fourth of the world\u2019s population by the 1890s. Colonizing nations took over \u201cless civilized\u201d territories to take advantage of the resources of the land, but under the guise of bettering … Continue reading Colonization through “The Law”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2516,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","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\/91","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\/2516"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}