"As remorseless as Nature": victorian sublime in Dr Moreau's fin de siècle-manifestation of the mad scientist

Abstract

This dissertation discusses H. G. Wells’ Island of Doctor Moreau from a Romantic perspective, arguing that the novel’s antagonist Doctor Moreau fails in transforming animals into human beings through the practice of vivisection due to the impossibility of overpowering the sublime nature. Following Burke’s notion of ‘the sublime’ as a terrifying, omnipotent entity which instils fear and awe in equal measure, the sublime power of nature is represented in this novel by the force of evolution, which changed the Victorian society’s anthropocentric understanding of the world in the aftermath of Darwin’s theory of evolution. By analysing Moreau’s character in juxtaposition to Victor Frankenstein’s and Dr Jekyll’s incarnations of the ‘mad scientist’ trope, this work supports the view that Moreau’s adherence to the aforementioned stereotype has evolved from previous Romantic manifestations to one that depicts the fin de siècle pessimism in which the novel was written, and that reflects Victorian anxieties towards disquieting theories of degeneration, the regressive process whereby complex organisms revert to humbler beings. This analysis shows that Moreau’s version of the ‘mad scientist’, rather than solely pursuing scientific knowledge beyond the laws of nature as attempted by his literary predecessors, also involves a desire for imitating the sublime power of nature by becoming evolution, thus, resulting in a deification of the scientist himself. The impossibility of overpowering nature, however, is portrayed by Wells as inevitable and illustrated not only through Moreau’s atrophy of morality, since the scientist’s empathetic connections towards his experiments are dissolved and transformed into cruel indifference, but also through the Beast Folk’s atrophy of the body, that is, through their impending degeneration to their original animal state. In this, The Island of Doctor Moreau seems to follow a rather Romantic conception of the sublime nature, whose power proves impossible to undermine even for the ruthless fin de siècle version of the ‘mad scientist’ found in Moreau.