{"id":97,"date":"2016-02-10T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-10T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/?p=97"},"modified":"2018-09-02T22:06:08","modified_gmt":"2018-09-02T22:06:08","slug":"cycles-of-anxiety-and-experimentation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/2016\/02\/10\/cycles-of-anxiety-and-experimentation\/","title":{"rendered":"Cycles of Anxiety and Experimentation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou 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\u201d (56).<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Moreau\u2019s use of the phrase \u201cstrange colourless delight\u201d to describe the \u201cintellectual desires\u201d that compel him to conduct \u00a0his 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 \u201cproblem\u201d not only of the animal on his vivisection table, but also within himself. <\/span><\/p>\n

Moreau suggests that he finds his own delight in his experiments both alien and ambiguous with his use of the phrase \u201cstrange colourless delight.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

The unknowable nature of Moreau\u2019s \u201cstrange colourless delight\u201d echoes the \u201crestless curiosity in research\u201d that Arthur Symons notes as being a defining characteristic of decadence (105). Moreau\u2019s frustration about the ambiguity of his delight could be read as its own sort of \u201crestless curiosity.\u201d In the context of this interpretation, Moreau\u2019s \u201cintellectual desires\u201d are focused both on the \u201cproblem\u201d of his animal experiments as well as on the \u201cproblem\u201d of the unknowability of his delight.<\/span><\/p>\n

The phrase \u201cintellectual desires\u201d also suggests Moreau\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cintellectual desires,\u201d which push him to ever greater extremes of experimentation, meld reason with bestial instinct, an anomalous mixture that causes anxiety for Dr. Moreau.<\/span><\/p>\n

If Moreau\u2019s statement does in fact reveal that he, perhaps unconsciously, feels anxiety about how his \u201cintellectual desires\u201d 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\u2019s work on the island. Moreau states, \u201cEach 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\u201d (59). In light of the underlying anxiety evident in Moreau\u2019s description of his \u201cstrange colourless delight,\u201d I believe that his desire to \u201cburn out all the animal\u201d and \u201cmake a rational creature of my own\u201d is in fact an attempt to reconcile the contradictory nature of his own \u201cintellectual desires,\u201d the combination of desire for reason and animal instinct that drive him to conduct his experiments in the first place. <\/span><\/p>\n

Moreau\u2019s own anxiety about the delight that his partially bestial \u201cintellectual desires\u201d inspire in him connects to the larger anxieties and ambivalences that characterized the late 19th century. If Moreau\u2019s experiments are in fact part of a cycle in which he tries to locate the \u201cproblem\u201d within himself in the bodies of his \u201cfellow creature[s],\u201d then it is possible that Arthur Symons\u2019s definition of decadence as \u201can intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity\u201d 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 \u201cself-consciousness, restless curiosity\u2026 over-subtilizing refinement,\u201d and a resulting \u201ca spiritual and moral perversity,\u201d which creates further anxiety necessitating investigation. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou 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\u201d (56). Dr. Moreau\u2019s use of the phrase \u201cstrange colourless delight\u201d to describe the \u201cintellectual desires\u201d that compel him to conduct \u00a0his vivisection experiments reveals the underlying unease that he … Continue reading Cycles of Anxiety and Experimentation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3012,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","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\/97","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\/3012"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}