April 21, 2011
The Island of Dr. Moreau and “Who Goes There?”



In both H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and John W. Campell’s “Who Goes There?”, the grotesque character of evolutionary embodiment occasions a crisis of abjection.  Discuss Well’s and/ or Campbell’s respective treatments of this cultural and psychic trauma.  What do Wells’ and/ or Campbell’s principal characters find most frightening and repulsive about evolutionary process?

We are witnessing the dissolution of the divine.  In an epoch where the totality of the human form is being reduced to a mere causality of biological persistence; a happen-stance of rudimentary cellular advancement; an unfolding of molecular sovereignty; Wells and Campbell expose the socially constructed nature of the morality and civility that we hold most dear.  Both authors have the same target in their cross-hairs: the imperative belief that the human race is removed far from their bestial ancestors.  That some mysterious and intangible entity, call it the soul, can form a bastion fortifying us from the horrifying insinuation that we operate upon the exact base desires and instincts in the animals we observe.  While Wells and Campbell share similar targets, they differ in their choice of fear-inciting objects to dissolve the dignity of the human race.  The object Wells’ utilizes to elicit fright is the potential sentience of the animal kingdom in The Island of Doctor Moreau.  Campbell’s approach differs in that his object or ‘embodiment of evolution’ is one that exists hierarchically above the human race.  With the questionable morality and motivations of the Thing in “Who Goes There?”, the human race is dethroned from our previously unquestioned mastery of the universe.  Both approaches resolve to force realization of one tenet: the human race exists on a developing and therefore incomplete, linear spectrum.  Objection to this realization arises in that spectrum and binary exist in stark conflict with each other.  This tenet provokes the ‘cultural and psychic trauma’ in Wells’ and Campbells’ principal characters.


Prendick embodies the hesitance and anxiety of general society to come to terms with the linear spectrum of evolution.   This is not to say that he cannot fathom the possibility but rather is unable to cope with the reality.  We see awareness forming when he states that a “strange persuasion came upon [him], that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, [he] had here before [him] the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form” (Wells 145).  This observation by Prendick lends itself well in demonstrating the multi-tiered dimensions of acceptance and understanding.  On the cerebral level, Prendick can acknowledge the microcosmic qualities of the island he inhabits yet he is also aware of his conditioned reflex of repulsion towards the beasts.  Drawing upon Kelly Hurley’s conjecture of liminality in the “Abject and Grotesque” seems appropriate when attempting to comprehend Prendick’s aversion to the beast people.  The puma vivisected to resemble man occupies multiple positions and stands in the threshold between many different categories.  This liminal quality “undermines crucial binarisms as nature and culture, human and animal” (Hurley 139).  The mechanics of the binary are of absolute necessity to understand before deconstructing The Island of Doctor Moreau for the novel heavily critiques human beings dependence upon the binary for affirmation of identity.  By relying on ‘othering’ through subtle distinctions and negative attribution to the foreign we build a fragile pedestal on which humanity stands upon.  This leads to an identity which can be easily undone when objects are introduced which “collapse the distinction between human and animal” (139).  With this collapse and the acceptance that “mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily [structure]” (Wells 125) morality and civility come under scrutiny as an objective or valid belief system.  When postulating that this belief system is nothing more than “an artificial modification and perversion of instinct” (125), we have masses of the population in upheaval and unrest as religion and morality play a vital role in maintaining order within society.  
Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” dabbles in the ambiguity of a foreign, alien creature and focuses almost entirely upon our reaction to the encounter.  Because the object of fright has the characteristic of being able to assume any shape, the alien creature itself only takes physical and discreet form within the beginning of the narrative.  This ability to evade form is innately terrifying to the human identity and ego according to Kelly Hurley’s conception of self-differentiation.  The thing closely resembles our infantile traumatic experience of creating an ego as the monster lacks “bodily integrity” (Hurley143) and thus “knows no boundaries” (144).  This resemblance occurs because we have to undergo a process of distinguishing what is ‘I’ and ‘not I’ and in doing so the process can be described as a “sickening experience of entrapment at the border between identity and non-identity” (144).  When the monster appears to be functioning upon a nondiscriminatory boundary of form the principal characters elicit feelings of terror associated with the psychic trauma experienced as a newborn.  Also, the shape-shifting talent of the Thing can be utilized as a rhetorical mechanism on the part of Campbell to focus attention primarily towards the human characters in the piece and the defining aspects of the human condition.   By turning inquisition against one another on suspicions of being inhuman Campbell delves into the qualities that only a human could possess.  

By the end of the piece, it is established that the “minds that race must have” (Campbell 297) are vastly more intelligent than the human race.  The effortless ability to develop anti-gravity with tin cans removes the human race as the most intelligent known race.  With this assertion, the human race must then fall into a spectrum of linear ordering.  The destruction of the binary once again occurs as the implicit ordering becomes arranged as such: animals species below, humans in the middle, and the thing race on top.