Victorians and Vivisection Fi

Victorians and Vivisection:
Fictions of Pain from the fin de siecle
by
Lynne Crockett
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for' the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
New York University
January, 2004
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
UMI Number: 3114187
Copyright 2004 by
Crockett, Lynne
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my advisor, Jeffrey L. Spear,
for his guidance and patience during the writing of this
dissertation. Each of his comments contributed to a
richer and more interesting perspective of vivisection
and the complex Victorian environment. I am deeply
indebted to my friends and colleagues, Jan Zlotnik
Schmidt and Robert H. Waugh, for their confidence in my
abilities and, most importantly, their humor. When I
most needed perspective, it was they who provided it.
I am especially grateful to my husband, Donald
Gardeski, for his endless interest in my project, his
scientific advice, and his proofreading skills. Without
the love and support of Donald and my parents, Peter and
Margaret Crockett, this endeavor would never have been
possible. Finally, I would like to thank m y dear friends
Michelle Diana and Kyung-Sook Boo who were always
willing to listen as I talked through the problems
encountered during the writing process.
iv
Abstract
Victorians and Vivisection: Fictions of Pain from
the fin de siecle explores the role of the vivisection
controversy in late-Victorian literature. Vivisection,
the method of experimentation that propelled medicine
from an art to a science, becomes complicated by its
connection to eugenics, gender and procreative issues,
and for its role in revisiting Darwinian debates about
the relationship between human and non-human animals.
These concepts are woven into works of fiction and n o n
fiction, particularly those that concern themselves with
a moral vision for the future of humanity.
The first chapter, "The Laboratory," examines the
laboratory as the site of the vivisector's gruesome
work. Dr. Benjulia, the archvivisector in Wilkie
Collins's novel, Heart and Science (1882/83), is an
emotionally stunted man who shuns social intercourse,
preferring to remain cloistered within his mysterious
laboratory. Charles Darwin's theory that humans derive
pleasure from companionship is belied by Benjulia whose
unnatural occupation invites solitude.
The second chapter, "The Hom e," looks at the role
V
of women in the antivivisection movement. Sarah Grand's
The Beth Book (1898) illustrates the moral dangers a
woman faces when living with a degenerate vivisector.
Darwin's examination of the moral laws that serve the
interests of the community lies behind Grand's message
of sacrifice for the common good and eugenics as the
means of creating a race of healthy, virtuous humans.
The third chapter, "The W i l d , " explores the results
of unrestricted vivisection in H.G. Wells's The Island
of Doctor Moreau (1896). In spite of his freedom to
pursue experimental science in exile, Moreau fails to
create a viable creature. Moreau, by an effort of sheer
will, overcomes the sympathetic instinct that Darwin
claims is innate to all social animals, placing him,
like Benjulia, in the category of unnatural vivisector.
The fourth chapter, "The Future," uses Octavia E.
Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (1987/88/89) as a means of
examining the issues raised by Victorians in a
futuristic context. Butler's future humans can survive
only if they interbreed with aliens. This trilogy is
strongly influenced by a Darwinian understanding of the
necessity of evolution and mutation to ensure survival.
v i
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract iv
Introduction: The Past 1
Chapter 1: The Laboratory 38
Chapter 2: The Home 92
Chapter 3: The Wild 153
Chapter 4: The Future 210
Conclusion 259
Works Cited 266
Reproduced with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
1
Introduction: The Past

The love of a dog for his master is notorious;
in the agony of death he has been known to
caress his master, and every one has heard of
the dog suffering under vivisection, who
licked the hand of the operator; this man,
unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt
remorse to the last hour of his life.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
I. The Past: the vivisection controversy
The end of the nineteenth century was a time of
crossing over, of moving from one century to the next,
of change and the anxiety associated with change. The
vivisection controversy in the late nineteenth century
captures the spirit of the fin de siecle• Vivisection,
the practice of conducting experiments on living
creatures, introduced the scientific method to the field
of medicine. Robert A. Nye explains that "two binary
oppositions dominated sociological discourse in the
nineteenth century: progress/decline and
social/individual" (49). These oppositions are clearly
present in the scientific discourse of the vivisection
controversy. The advancement of medical science offered
2
the possibility of a future free from disease, a
progression forward. Yet it simultaneously threatened
the dissolution of previously held beliefs in miasmas,
the nature of sanitation, and the relationship between
physical and moral health, considered by man y a decline.
The Victorian writer Ouida (Marie Louise de la R a m e e ) ,
in a comparison of vivisectors to the torturers of the
Spanish Inquisition, claims that the "motives" of the
inquisitor were more "lofty" than those of the
vivisector because the inquisitor "sincerely believed
that he saved souls and benefited his victims" whereas
the physiologist "only expects to save bodies" (152).
The progress of medicine, then, was imagined to include
a decline in virtue. Medical experimentation was
considered an individual endeavor that satisfied the
v i v i s e c t o r 1s lust for research but did little to benefit
the public. The amoral scientist, motivated purely by
curiosity and the joy of experimentation, is pictured
regularly in fiction, from Victor Frankenstein in the
early nineteenth century to Dr. Moreau at the end of the
century. Nye's binary oppositions of progress/decline
and social/individual are consistently present in the
vivisection discourse.
3
Before the nineteenth century experimental medicine
was still a relatively new concept and practice. As
Michel Foucault points out in The Birth of the Clinic,
doctors in the eighteenth century relied on observation,
or what Foucault calls "the gaze," as a method of
diagnosis and treatment. Experimental medicine, however,
moved beyond external observation to a closer, internal
examination; as Foucault says, "at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, doctors described what for centuries
had remained below the threshold of the visible and the
expressible" (xii). This search "below . . . the
visible" began with dissection, then later in the
century vivisection became the preferred method of
experimentation. George F. Yeo, a Professor of
Physiology at King's College, wrote in an article in
Popular Science Monthly (1882): "physiology can not
advance without vivisection; experiment on living
animals is . . . essential to its progress" (615). A
deceased body does not respond to drugs or other
stimulus, so it is impossible to measure the effects of
new cures on it. The progress of medicine was thus
directly linked to vivisection, and as a result, the
antivivisection movement is complicated by an inclusion
4
of those opposed to the scientization of medicine with
those opposed to the mistreatment of animals.
Although vivisection was routinely conducted in
France, Italy, and Germany in the mid-nineteenth
century, until the latter half of the century it was not
commonly practiced in England (French 37). This lag was
due to a split within the medical profession between
those who desired to keep stride with their continental
contemporaries and those who felt that medicine should
remain an art of individual observation, not a science
(French 39). The discovery of ether in 1847 advanced the
frequency of experiments using vivisection. With
anesthesia, animals could be observed more accurately
because they were not reacting to pain, and those
scientists who were opposed to hurting animals could now
experiment without qualm (French 40). The use of
vivisection in Britain increased dramatically in the
1870s, leading to the formation of several
antivivisection organizations and the investigation of
vivisecting scientists by the Royal Commission in the
1870s (French 44). This investigation led to the Cruelty
to Animals Act of 1876, which regulated vivisection by
requiring a license to perform it, by ensuring that it
5
only be practiced for new discoveries with clear
beneficial results ("'the advancement by new discovery
of physiological knowledge or of knowledge which will be
useful for saving or prolonging life or alleviating
suffering'"), and by requiring that anesthesia be used
(French 143). Experiments in which animals were
vivisected to illustrate lectures, in which anesthesia
was not used, in which the animal was allowed to recover
from anesthesia, or in which former discoveries were
retested required special permits (French 143).1
The Act did not entirely please vivisectors or
antivivisectionists. Many scientists wanted no
regulation of their professional activities; they had
experimented freely in the past and saw no reason why
they shouldn't continue to do so (French 155). The
antivivisectionists were "bitterly disappointed" that
vivisection wasn't outlawed altogether and continued to
fight for complete abolition (French 160, 162). In fact,
most antivivisection novels were written after 1876.
Fictional vivisectors like Wilkie Collins's Dr. Benjulia
in Heart and Science (1882), the research-obsessed
scientist who works alone in his laboratory vivisecting
animals to discover a cure for brain disease, is
portrayed as an anti-social, self-involved man who
refuses to share his discoveries. As I describe in
Chapter 1, the Act of 1876 was created to intrude into
the solitude of the laboratory. The laboratory was
surrounded by an aura of secrecy and horror, both in
antivivisection novels and articles in the public press.
M any antivivisectionists felt that the research
conducted in isolation needed to be publicly exposed and
regulated to prevent atrocities against animals and even
humans.
Aside from antivivisection novels, in the late
nineteenth century newspaper and journal articles about
vivisection were widely printed. George Hoggan, in an
1875 letter to the Morning Post, describes a physiology
lecture of Claude Bernard in which dogs were led to the
operating table for vivisection:
Even when roughly grasped and thrown on the
torture-trough, a low, complaining whine at
such treatment would be all the protest made,
and they would continue to lick the hand which
bound them till their mouths were fixed in the
gag, and they could only flap their tail in
the trough as their last means of exciting
7
compassion. (340)
Letters and articles like Hoggan's added fuel to an
already hot debate— French says that Hoggan's letter
"had the greatest impact" out of the antivivisection
arguments printed at the time (68)— and from December of
1881 to March of 1882, six articles about vivisection
appeared in The Nineteenth Century alone. The articles
in the March, 1882 edition of The Nineteenth Century
referred to Claude Bernard's "'baking dogs alive'" and
to bleeding dogs to illustrate reviving them through the
giving of one dog's blood to another ("The Ethics of
Vivisection"); injecting animals with germs so as to
test possible inoculations ("Vivisection and the
Diseases of Animals"); and to the various new, effective
drugs then used on humans that were first tried on
animals ("Vivisection and the Use of Remedies").
Examples like these, all fairly explicit, brought the
vivisection controversy into the homes of literate
Victorians, and opinions for and against the practice
were widely espoused.
The pain experienced by animals was the primary
reason antivivisectionists desired to regulate
vivisection. Two of the most prolific writers and
speakers against animal "torture" were the popular
novelist Ouida and the activist and essayist Frances
Power Cobbe.2 Ouida, an animal lover, wrote a powerful
article entitled "The New Priesthood" published in the
N e w R e vie w (1893) in which she likens the fanaticism of
science to that of religion: "Each has the same
blindness, the same egotism, the same pitilessness, the
same arrogance, the same hypocrisy. Each would
cheerfully wade through a sea of blood to obtain the
ratification and gratification of its own theories and
lusts" (151).3 Cobbe founded the "Victoria Street"
society (the Society for the Protection of Animals
Liable to Vivisection) in 1876, and her article "The
Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes," originally
printed in Fraser's Magazine in November of 1863, is
still reprinted in anthologies of Victorian prose. In
this article, Cobbe argues against the use of
vivisection in France (in 1863, as Cobbe notes,
vivisection was not widely practiced in Britain and the
United S t a t e s ) . Cobbe argues that if a beast is sentient
it is immoral to knowingly cause it pain. She asks for
two conditions from science: "firstly, that the life we
are going to take is really demanded by science;
9
secondly, that the pain of the experiment shall be
removed by anaesthetics" (277). These two conditions
were met in the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876 that
Cobbe and others fought to pass. Though Cobbe admits in
her article that some experimentation is necessary, she
and Ouida agree that vivisection without anesthesia was
performed more often than was necessary.
The vivisection controversy in fin-de-siecle
Britain, however, was not solely about pain. The topic
is greatly complicated by its entanglement with other
social and political issues. As I show in Chapter 2,
"The H o m e , " the movement against vivisection was
primarily supported by women, and issues of concern to
women such as opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts
and compulsory vaccination were linked to a general
protest against medical science and vivisection (Elston
267). Mary Ann Elston writes that these "were campaigns
against the increasing claims of science and medicine to
the right to dictate morality and personal b e h a v i o r , " a
theme strongly present in Sarah Grand's 1896 novel The
Beth Book {21 A) . The passage of the Contagious Diseases
Acts in 1864 was an attempt to control the spread of
syphilis by enforcing the random arrests of lower-class
10
women suspected of having the disease. These women were
placed into "Lock Hospitals" for observation and
treatment. Women, like animals, were thus at the mercy
of doctors experimenting with new medical techniques.
Women felt that they were victimized by the legal and
medical authorities and consequently fought these
establishments. Upper and middle class women formed the
majority of antivivisectionists, not only because of
outrage at the CD Acts, but also, according to Coral
Lansbury, because they identified with the powerless
animals who were the vivisectors' victims (84). Women
also opposed vivisection because, as the caretakers of
the sick, they were responsible for the family's
physical and moral health; they did not want to
relinquish this responsibility to physicians. Nicholaas
Rupke explains that those "who opposed vivisection were
people who saw their cultural influence waning as that
of science gr ew, " and although he focuses on opposition
from the aristocracy, the clergy, and the judiciary,
women's moral influence was also challenged by the
advancement of medicine (8). As Ouida notes, the
progress of medical science created a cultural shift in
which "the body has assumed the all-important prominence
11
which in the Middle Ages was given through religious
mania to the soul and its salvation" (154). The
importance of virtue, the pursuit of which is noted by
Cobbe as life's "highest pleasure," was being surpassed
by a preoccupation with physical health (270-271). The
medical discourse tainted the moral sanctity of the
home, and antivivisection novels routinely portray the
vivisector as a man unfit for decent female
comp an ion shi p.
Although anti-vivisectionists tried to prove that
vivisectors were purely selfish and cruel, and
vivisectors claimed that those who opposed vivisection
were ignorant and sentimental, members of both sides
appeared to be struggling with deeper conflicts. Samuel
Wilks, in "The Ethics of Vivisection" (1882), writes:
The difference between a dozen anti
vivisectionists and a dozen scientific men
cannot possibly turn upon a moral question
such as dislike of cruelty; and therefore, if
the one can look upon an animal injured and
bleeding with serenity, and the other not, it
would be owing, as the former party assert, to
usage or habit . . . and it may be safely
12
conjectured that much of the opposition to
experimentation is due to the unpleasant
picture which the subject presents to the
imagination. (812)
Wilks's "unpleasant picture" presented by vivisection is
called by Stewart Richards the "aesthetic revulsion"
that prevented scientists like Darwin and T.H. Huxley
from practicing it: "It is important to emphasise that
these were cases in which the end was recognised to be a
sufficient ethical justification for the means, yet
where the means could not be implemented because they
engendered a paralysing sense of aesthetic revulsion"
(Richards 167). This revulsion was captured by H.G.
Wells in The Island of Doctor M o r e a u . In his makeshift
laboratory, Moreau painfully reshapes animals into a
semblance of humanity, emphasizing the indefinite nature
of the hybrids' bodies. In Chapter 3, "The Wild," I
examine the ambiguity between man and beast that
reflects Wells's ideas about the body's "plasticity" and
the close evolutionary relationship between humans and
other animals ("The Limits of Individual Plasticity"
36). Darwin and Huxley, both well aware of humanity's
animal biology, chose not to vivisect creatures because
13
of the suffering endured by the beast. Moreau, who
denied his own animal instincts or impulses, was
completely indifferent to pain. The strength of
imagination that Wilks mentions as leading to the
unpleasantness associated with vivisection is, according
to Wells, exacerbated by an awareness of one's own
kinship to animals.
Vivisection was practiced to learn about the body.
Yet the discoveries of scientists and the methods used
to probe within for secrets seemed a violation of the
self, and by extension, of an innocent creature.
Vivisectors were not surprisingly considered immoral,
overly sexual, and actually subhuman. In 1888 when Jack
the Ripper was terrorizing London, there were those who
believed that he was a vivisecting scientist; his
knowledge of anatomy, the speed with which he
dismembered bodies, and his ability to gain the trust of
his victims and avoid capture indicated that he was an
educated m an . 4 The case attracted great attention and
the inquests were mobbed with people fascinated by the
killings. The ability of educated people to behave
brutally has troubled not only Victorians but people of
every age. How can a rational creature, as humans have
14
historically been portrayed, cruelly murder prostitutes
or torture animals? In Chapter 4, "The Future," I
discuss this question as posed by Octavia E. Butler in
her twentieth-century Xenogenesis trilogy. The concerns
raised about science and scientists in Victorian
antivivisection novels still exist in the late twentieth
century. In fact, Butler's conclusions are remarkably
similar to those of Wells one-hundred years before her:
humans are animals, are motivated by biological
impulses, and are not as rational as they would like to
believe.
The chapters are organized by time and space to
illustrate the complexity and breadth of the vivisection
controversy. Each site of focus— the laboratory, the
home, and the wild— appears in many diverse vivisection
novels with similar consequences to the characters. The
laboratory is a confining location of torture or
madness, the home is the place where the vivisector is
the least likely to exert his influence, and the wild
offers potential for new professional and medical
developments impossible to attain in Britain. The final
chapter, "The Future," shows the continuing significance
of medical science in fiction and Western culture.
15
Rather than having become interesting historical relics,
the issues raised in Victorian vivisection novels
continue to haunt twentieth and twenty-first century
readers in the guise of cloning, artificial
insemination, and, in Butler's novels, genetic
engineering. As the body's plasticity has become a
medical and biological reality, fiction continues to
probe into possible future consequences of its potential
shape.
II. Darwin and the mutability of man
When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species
in 1859 his theory of evolution was not entirely
unexpected; Lamarck, Lyell, Whewell, and Chambers had
all published works debating the possibility of
evolution, and Wallace printed similar findings at the
same time as Darwin's O r i gin .5 Educated people were
aware of fossil records that captured the impression of
ancient animals, and predictions that presently living
animals had progressed from these ancient forbearers had
been generally accepted. It was the inclusion of
humanity in Darwin's theory, and his careful scientific
documentation, that led to the Darwinian revolution, one
16
that has yet to subside.
Simply put, evolution is the continuous adaptation
of animals or plants to survive under changing
conditions. The concept of evolution is radical to
humans accustomed to religious explanations of life.
According to Darwin, animals and humans are created
through the process of sexual selection and adaptation
to an ever-changing environment; humans are not
privileged over other creatures and change, or
instability, is valued over stability. In opposition to
the Biblical creation story of Genesis, animal species
are not created individually by God but through
evolution from less complex organisms. Animals that seem
distinctly different are actually related to one
another, having come from common a n c est ors . Humans are
not made by God in his image for the purpose of ruling
over other animals but have evolved from other animals;
humans are animals. Within the Bible, God arranges the
species hierarchically; man subdues the earth and rules
the animals, and the animals are given the green plants
for sustenance. In The Origin of Species Darwin notes
that animals rely on each other, plants, and insects in
a complex, interrelated web of dependency and survival.
17
The Biblical model is linear, whereas Darwin's is
weblike and cyclical.
With evolution, stability can be reached only
through instability or adaptation. Once stability is
achieved, change again occurs to maintain stability,
thus stability is unstable. Constant change is the core
of evolution; as a cycle, a definitive end is never
achieved. Progress means an alteration of what already
exists, thus a decline in established systems. The
uncertainty derived from constant change and the
destruction of clearly delineated boundaries between
species led to heated philosophical and theological
disputes (Ruse 237). Cobbe, for example, refers to
evolution as a "dreadful hypothesis" about a "Godless
world" in which creatures "came into existence by some
concourse of unconscious forces" in a "sunless,
hopeless, fatherless world" (270). More than one-hundred
years later, many people still agree with C o b b e 's
assessment and refuse to accept evolution as the origin
of humanity. In spite of the controversy over Darwin's
theories, during his lifetime evolutionary thought
became a cultural phenomenon, and his influence has
clearly shaped twentieth-century scientific and social
18
inquiry.
Vivisection, like the theory of evolution,
destabilizes the perception of the human body. Drugs and
various cures that are effective on animals are often
effective on humans, proving the similarities between
humans and other animals. Vivisection helped to
reinforce and expand Darwin's theory, leading to
multiple possibilities for humanity. For instance, if
evolution alters a body so it can better adapt to its
environment, why can't science do the same, but more
quickly? The concept of eugenics was created out of this
question, as was the premise behind The Island of Doctor
Moreau and later Butler's Xenogenesis books. Wells's use
of the word "plasticity" to describe the human body
indicates the body's potential to be other than what it
is. The body is no longer shaped in the image of a
Christian God but is malleable and unstable like the
bodies of pre-Christian, shape-shifting gods.
In Origin and Descent, Darwin attempts to explain
not only the evolution of physical structures but also
that of animal behavior. He finds "that there is no
fundamental difference between man and the higher
mammals in their mental faculties" (Descent 1:35).
19
Social animals, like dogs and primates, develop
behaviors to benefit the group, and nurturing instincts,
feelings of sympathy, and the habit of protecting one's
family all derive from evolutionary adaptations that aid
in group survival (Descent 1:12). Darwin links morality,
a behavior that humans consider unique to themselves, to
all social animals: " . . . any animal whatever, endowed
with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably
acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its
intellectual powers had become as well developed, or
nearly as well developed, as in man" (Descent 1:71-72).
He disagrees that moral behavior cannot be innate, or
instinctual; morality is not limited to "actions done
deliberately, after a victory over opposing desires, or
to actions prompted by some lofty motive" (Descent
1:88). The attributes that humans have associated with
religion (morality) and that have set humans aside from
other beasts are considered by Darwin to be simply a
more fully evolved form of behavior already practiced by
other beasts. The instability created by Darwin's theory
infected human culture as well as the body; the
perception of the physical and moral self was radically
altered.
20
Darwin notes that the sense of morality differs
depending upon conditions of life and survival; hive
bees, for instance, would by necessity develop a
different system of morality because their lives and
needs are different from those of apes or humans
(Descent 1:73). Similarly, social animals warn each
other of danger, attempt to make their fellows
comfortable by removing fleas and lice or burrs, hunt in
packs and share the food, and often risk their own lives
to save one another from danger, an action that Darwin
links to a sympathetic response (Descent 1:74-77). These
behaviors begin by instinct (pleasure gained from social
interactions), are heightened by sympathy, and
eventually become habit. Morality is no longer a clear-
cut system decreed by God but a logically evolved
behavioral pattern that varies from group to group
depending upon the dangers and influences from the
environment. In "Morals and Civilisation," Wells applies
Darwin's ideas of morality in nature to human societies:
"There is no morality in the absolute. It is relative to
the state, the civilisation, the corporate existence to
which the man beast has become adapted on the one hand,
and to the inherent possibilities of the man on the
21
other" (221). It is inevitable that Darwin's discoveries
would be construed to mean that the systems established
in Britain were not fixed laws but individual patterns
of behavior evolved for a particular place and time.
Science was subverting the established stability of
European culture.
Although Darwin's theories did shift previously
held beliefs in Europe and the United States, they were
still influenced by European culture. Darwin's
definition of morality ("As ye would that men should 'do
to you, do ye to them likewise'") and belief that men
are inherently more intelligent than women reflect his
own historical and cultural milieu (Descent 1:106,
2:327). Yet Darwin's explanation for the evolutionary
existence of morality, and his belief that if educated
like men women would be more like men, illustrate his
ability to place old concepts in new contexts (Descent
2:329). In his writing, he considers problems carefully
rather than citing solutions, a style that leads to a
sometimes-ambiguous reading of his ideas and the
adaptation of his theories to non-scientific ideologies.
For example, Herbert Spencer created Social Darwinism--a
cultural survival of the fittest--from the theory of
22
natural selection, giving scientific authority to a
social, not biological, pattern of behavior. Francis
Galton, Darwin's nephew, used Darwin's theories as the
foundation for eugenics. Because certain traits are
inherited, Galton thought it logical that the "fit"
should breed selectively with one another and the
"unfit" be discouraged from breeding at all.6 Neither of
these offshoots is accurately Darwinian or scientific,
yet each is considered Darwinian because of its roots in
evolutionary thought.
The vivisection debate became popularly associated
with other evolution-based social issues. Eugenics was
thought to be a cure for the degeneration of the British
population, and several fictional vivisectors are
portrayed as degenerates. In Sarah Grand's The Beth
B o o k , the vivisector Dan Maclure is a degenerate,
whereas Maclure's wife Beth, who is virtuous, believes
in eugenics and opposes vivisection. Degeneration was a
cultural phenomenon presented as an organic one in Max
Nordau's book Degeneration (1893).7 Nordau approaches
the problem of a degenerating Europe as that of a
diseased organism, structuring the book accordingly into
symptoms, diagnosis, etiology, prognosis, and
23
therapeutics. Degenerate individuals carry physical
symptoms of the disease, like the syphilitic aristocrat
Mosley Menteith in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins
(1893) whose low forehead and small head are signs that
he is among Galton's "unfit." Nordau notes that
degeneration is apparent in other physical problems,
like neurasthenia and sterility. Although degeneration
is a social malady, it participates in the medical
discourse of the time, an indication of the influence of
biological science on European thought.
Degeneration had its biological companion in
reversion. The opposite of evolution, reversion is the
devolution of a creature into a more primitive state,
and as noted in the case of Sir Mosley Menteith, a
symptom of degeneration was the reversion of skull
structure. Reversion would accelerate if the more
primitive specimens of society (the "unfit" whose facial
qualities indicated to phrenologists their closer
genetic proximity to the apes) were allowed to breed
freely and mingle with the "fit" members of society. In
H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, the creatures
Moreau creates through vivisection revert, as do the
humans around them. The fear of degeneration and
24
reversion highlights anxiety about the dissolution of
the physical absolute. The possibility existed that the
human, already destined to physical alteration, m ay not
automatically evolve into a superior creature but may
revert into a lower one, further destabilizing the
species. This fear was further supported by a
recognition that in the womb human fetuses vary little
from those of other mammals, proving true Ernst
Haeckel's phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"
coined in 1866.
Like Wells, in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson raises the fear
of a Darwinian reversion. Although in Jekyll and Hyde
there are no scalpels cutting apart living creatures, it
is, nonetheless, a vivisection novel. In an 1882 article
in The Nineteenth Century, George Fleming defined
vivisection as not just "'cutting up animals alive,'"
(which he claims "is not a scientific procedure") but
also, he explains, "opening a vein, or injecting a few
drops of liquid under the skin, is etymologically
'vivisection'" (469). Vivisection includes any
experimentation on living creatures, and Dr. Jekyll's
drinking of a chemical solution is, in effect, a form of
25
self-vivisection. Jekyll's testing of an unknown drug by
ingesting it himself has many real-life precedents. The
chemist Humphrey Davy discovered the results of
"laughing gas," or nitrous oxide, in the early
nineteenth century by performing experiments on himself
(Rey 144) . Experimentation is, however, a risky
business. Davy is believed to have shortened his life
from years of testing chemicals. Jekyll, who at first
initiates and controls the appearance of Hyde,
eventually can do so no longer. As a consequence, Jekyll
reverts to Hyde without prompting. Jekyll's panic at his
lack of control mirrors the Victorian fear of the
consequences of science depicted in other vivisection
novels. The novel also questions the motivation of
scientists. Like D r s . Benjulia and Moreau, Jekyll is
experimenting to achieve his own personal goals: he
wants to sin without consequence. Stevenson presents the
reader with the problem of the social versus individual
desires: Does one give in to the luxuries of vice, or
does one abstain and continue his virtuous work for
mankind? Does work to progress, as Jekyll, or give way
to decline, like Hyde?
26
III. The vivisector in literature
Coral Lansbury claims that the "figure of the
archvivisector" in literature was born in 1875 when
Emmanuel Klein testified before the Royal Commission
prior to the passage of the Cruelty to Animals Act
(130). Klein stated that he used anesthesia only to
avoid being hurt by the animal during experimentation,
and that just as no one questioned the animal's feelings
prior to its being cooked, "'just as little can the
physiologist or the investigator be expected to devote
time and thought to inquiring what the animal will feel
while he is doing the experiment'" (qtd. in Lansbury
130). Huxley wrote to Darwin about Klein's testimony, "I
declare to you I did not believe the man lived who was
such an unmitigated cynical brute as to profess and act
upon such principle, and I would agree to any law which
would send him to the treadmill" (qtd. in Lansbury 131).
This criticism comes from a man who supported
vivisection, and those already opposed were even more
outraged. Klein, however, was not alone in his
indifference to pain. Ten years later Charles Richet
defended vivisection by claiming that animals do not
feel pain; their "nerves are less excitable [than
27
man's], and their brain is less susceptible of that
clear perception of self without which pain can hardly
be" ("Man's Right" 765) .8 Unlike Klein who does not deny
that animals feel pain, Richet appears to be justifying
the pain he inflicts on the animals by refusing to
acknowledge it. He combines personal observation with
arrogance to reach a perspective that is not
substantiated by scientific method and that counters
findings of people like Charles Darwin who insisted upon
the similarities between humans and animals. Darwin
wrote that pleasure and pain were two impulses that led
animals to learn and evolve certain behaviors. Animals
naturally avoid pain and pursue pleasure, so the
repeated stimulus of these sensations leads animals to
repeat some behaviors while avoiding others
(Autobiography 64). If pain were "hardly" felt by
animals who lack self-consciousness, they would be less
likely to avoid painful, and potentially dangerous,
situations. Klein, Richet, and other vivisectors who
casually inflicted pain on animals disturbed Victorians
because they were educated men who were expected to be
thoughtful and moral role models. The external m a n — the
wealthy, polished doctor--did not mesh with the
28
internal— the indifferent torturer of innocent animals.
Vivisectors in fiction during this time share
Klein's and Richet's insensitivity to the pain of
others. In Heart and Science (1882), Collins's Dr.
Benjulia chooses to observe the progression of his
colleague's fiance's brain disease rather than cure her
because he is curious about the course the disease will
run. Grand's Dr. Maclure in The Beth Book (1896) leaves
a living, vivisected dog on the laboratory table when he
goes out one evening. Maclure is as indifferent to the
needs of his wife as he is the dog's pain, but Beth,
rather than dying like wives in other vivisection
novels, leaves him to pursue a better life. In The
Island of Doctor Moreau Wells's Moreau does not believe
that pain matters; he is indifferent to pain because it
is "needless" (72). Moreau is killed by one of his
victims— a female p uma— who apparently does not agree
with his assessment of pain. These fictional doctors are
driven by a passion for knowledge that supersedes all
other feelings they might have once had for human
company, love, or life. None has the requisite social
behaviors that Darwin finds crucial to the survival of
the higher animals.
29
Nathan Benjulia, Dan Maclure, and Doctor Moreau are
horrific not only because they are indifferent to those
who suffer under their knives but also because they
violate standard social behavioral patterns and do not
consider the consequences of their actions. To Moreau,
the suffering hybrids that populate the island are
reminders of his failure, not creatures who live
miserable lives. Jekyll and Hyde also portrays a doctor
who rejects all responsibility for his actions. Darwin
explains that one's conscience teaches him to subdue the
selfish impulses and encourage the social (Descent
1:191).9 If, according to Darwin, a man continues to
behave in an anti-social behavior (acting in a manner
"opposed to the good of others") "then he is essentially
a bad man" (Descent 1.92). Dr. Jekyll, through the use
of science, changes himself so the primitive, selfish
aspects of his personality are predominant. He reverts
evolutionarily, and in doing so alters physically and
psychologically to the extent that he is unrecognizable
to his friends. Hyde is a monster, a medically-induced
reversion from the social to the individual, the
advanced to the primitive.10 Yet Hyde is and always has
been a part of Jekyll; he is not a scientific invention
30
but a physical manifestation of what has always existed
within. It is clear in the novel that Hyde is what
Darwin calls a bad man. But is Jekyll? Who is
responsible for the appearance and actions of Hyde? Who
is responsible for the consequences of science?
Stevenson clearly illustrates Hyde's reversion to a
lower form. He is "ape-like" (47, 96) and "like a
monkey" (68), with hands that are "lean, corded,
knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a
swart growth of hair" (88). He walks "lightly and oddly,
with a certain swing" (69) and possesses "great muscular
activity" (77). Hyde's "faculties seemed sharpened to a
point and [his] spirits more tensely elastic" than those
of Jekyll (93). When cornered, Hyde cries out in "a
dismal screech, of mere animal terror" (69). Jekyll
claims that Hyde "had nothing human" within him; he is a
"brute" (94). Jekyll's research began with his interest
in the "primitive duality" of man, and Hyde represents
that which is primitive (82). Hyde is the animal from
which mankind evolved. Hyde, who begins young and small,
grows larger and finally overcomes Jekyll (88). As Wells
notes in Moreau, the animal lurks within each human, and
Jekyll's drug provides the open door from which the
31
animal, Hyde, springs to his freedom.
Stevenson illustrates the tenuous nature of the
physical appearance, of what is seen and judged versus
that which lies within. Like Doctors Klein and Richet,
Jekyll appears to be a respectable, trustworthy
individual, yet his experimentation reveals the brutal,
indifferent nature of the man that lies hidden from
public eyes.11 Vivisection involves the quest for truth,
and Jekyll has exposed the truth that lies within. As
Hyde, Jekyll can behave in ways that his conscience
would not normally condone: "It was Hyde, after all, and
Hyde alone, that was guilty" (87). Yet is not Jekyll
guilty of releasing Hyde?
Stevenson illustrates the thin line between human
and animal, rich and poor, good and evil, self and
other. Jekyll writes in his notes of "the trembling
immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this
seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired" (82) .
The body of Jekyll that becomes Hyde— the Hyde that
lives within Jekyll— captures the mutable nature of
evolution and the uncertainty of the human beast. The
external man Jekyll is so shockingly unlike his double
Hyde that Dr. Lanyon, after witnessing the
32
transformation, dies of shock. L a n y o n 1s notes describe
Jekyll's experiments as leading "to no end of practical
usefulness" (76). What is the purpose of such work? Who
benefits from vivisection? These questions are
repeatedly raised in novels, and Collins, Grand, and
Wells agree with Stevenson: there is no "practical
usefulness" to be had in such meddling with nature. Yet
as Jekyll explains, it is not science that is to blame:
"The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither
diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the
prison-house of my disposition" (85). Science in itself
is not evil; it is Jekyll's disposition that is to
blame. A literary theme continued throughout the
twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries is the
danger of science in the hands of humans who have not
evolved to adequately control it. Just as Jekyll cannot
control Hyde, we modern humans, according to Octavia E.
Butler, cannot control atomic weapons. Whether written
in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, writers agree
that science in the hands of humans has the potential to
destroy the species and the planet.
33
Notes
1. The 1876 Cruelty to Animals Acts in Britain were
"tightened" in 1986 by setting standards for animal care
and housing and by requiring "the investigator to
consider whether the information to be gained from the
experiment exceeds its cost in animal life and
suffering" (Rudacille 284). Investigators are also
encouraged to examine alternatives to vivisection when
feasible (Rudacille 284).
2. Other famous antivivisectionists included George
Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Robert Browning, Tennyson,
Carlyle, and Ruskin. Queen Victoria was also opposed to
vivisection. People in favor of vivisection included
H.G. Wells, Charles Darwin, Arthur Conan Doyle, and T.H.
Huxley.
3. Animals play important roles in many of Ouida's
fictional works. In Under Two Flags (1869), the novel's
handsome hero longs for the horse he left at home, and
his life is saved by a poodle who discovers his still-
living body on a battlefield. Ouida's animal characters
have interesting personalities and are often as noble as
the h u m a n s .
4. Ma r y Ann Elston writes that Cobbe suggested
34
bloodhounds be used to track Jack the Ripper: "'Should
it so fall out that the demon of Whitechapel prove
really to be . . .a physiologist delirious with
cruelty, and should the hounds be the means of his
capture, poetic justice will be complete'" (281).
5. The influential, pre-Darwinian works published by
these men are: J.B. de Lamarck, Philosophie Zoologique
(1809); Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830-33);
William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences
(1837); Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural Hist or y
of Creation (1853); and Alfred Russell Wallace, "On the
Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the
Original Type" (1858). Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus
Darwin, also speculated about evolution in his Zoonomia
(1794-96). Darwin himself admitted that his own
scientific views may have been influenced early in life
by his grandfather (Ruse 161) .
6. According to Stephen Jay Gould, the year 1900 was an
important one for evolutionary biologists because in
that year "the barrier that all evolutionists recognized
as the chief impediment to further insight--ignorance
about the causal basis of heredity— began to crumble
with the rediscovery of Mendel's principles" (409). The
35
word "genetics" was coined by Bateson in 1905. Prior to
this time, the concept of heredity did not have
biological proof to support it.
7. Decadence, another nineteenth-century blight, is
considered by Nordau to be a symptom of degeneration.
8. Peter Singer points out that researchers know that
animals react similarly to humans and thus cannot claim
that they do not feel pain or stress: "the researcher
who forces rats to choose between starvation and
electric shock to see if they develop ulcers (they do)
does so because he knows that the rat has a nervous
system very similar to man's, and presumably feels an
electric shock in a similar way" (Singer 33).
9. Darwin describes conscience as follows:
At the moment of action, man will no doubt be
apt to follow the stronger impulse; and though
this may occasionally prompt him to the
noblest deeds, it will far more commonly lead
him to gratify his own desires at the expense
of other men. But after their gratification,
when past and weaker impressions are
contrasted with the ever-enduring social
instincts, retribution will surely come. Man
36
will then feel dissatisfied with himself, and
will resolve with more or less force to act
differently for the future. This is
conscience; for conscience looks backwards and
judges past actions, inducing that kind of
dissatisfaction, which if weak we call regret,
and if severe remorse. (Descent 1:91)
10. There are several excellent interpretations of
Jekyll's transformation to Hyde: Mary Rosner writes of
Hyde as an example of the morally insane, Christine
Persak describes Hyde's atavism as having derived from
Spencer's theories of moral evolution, and Guy Davidson
proves Hyde's degeneration. Other critics examine the
blurring of gender boundaries and the manifestation of
addiction within the novel. Each of these
interpretations is relevant within the historical
context of Victorian Britain and reflects the complex
interplay of scientific and social discourse. Drug
addiction and homosexuality were behavioral symptoms of
degeneration, whereas atavism was a physical
manifestation of degeneration. I am focusing on a
Darwinian reading to highlight the relationship between
vivisection (medical scientists) and reversion.
37
11. According to Raymond T. McNally and Radu R. Florescu
in their book In Search of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. H y d e ,
Stevenson used as a model for Jekyll Deacon Brodie, an
Edinburgh businessman who was an upstanding citizen by
day and prowled the darker alleys at night. Brodie was
eventually charged with theft and hanged in October of
1788 .
Chapter 1: The Laboratory
Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science (1882/83)
. . . the true sanctuary of medical science is
a laboratory; only there can [the physician]
seek explanations of life in the normal and
pathological states by means of experimental
analysis . . . There, in a word, he will
achieve true medical science.
Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study
of Experimental Medicine
The torture room is not just the setting in
which the torture occurs; it is not just the
space that happens to house the various
instruments used for beating and burning and
producing electric shock. It is itself
literally converted into another weapon, into
an agent of pain.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
I. The Laboratory
During the vivisection debate in late nineteenth-
century Britain, vivisectors insisted upon the necessity
39
for private laboratories to conduct experiments, whereas
antivivisectionists demanded that laboratories be open
for public inspection. The Victorian laboratory became,
as Stewart Richards states, the "site of the struggle"
between the "pro-physiologist and anti-vivisectionist
positions" (143). Why was the laboratory such a
contentious location? The answer to this question is
found inside, where the scientific method of
experimentation, a method that was slowly being adopted
by British physicians and physiologists in the middle to
late nineteenth century, was being practiced in the form
of vivisection.1 To learn more about the functions of
the mammalian body and the effect of drugs and toxins on
it, medical scientists conducted experiments on living
animals. Antivivisectionists imagined that the
laboratory animals were being cruelly tortured by
insensitive physiologists interested only in the
acquisition of knowledge. Pamphlets distributed by
antivivisectionists depict sad-looking, emaciated,
deformed animals, but details of what actually occurred
within the laboratory were scarce. Because the
experiments were unsupervised, the laboratory was
considered by many antivivisectionists as the site that
40
required regulation to restrict or prohibit
experimentation on animals. The laboratory, according to
the scientists, was simply the location where the
development of new drugs, vaccines, and basic
physiological studies was conducted. The utilitarian
physiologists viewed the laboratory as their office,
whereas compassionate antivivisectionists perceived it
as a torture chamber.
The laboratory, as "a place peculiarly devoted . .
. to premeditated destruction and death," became
"indelibly associated" by antivivisectionists "with
ideas of ruthless interrogation, offensive air and,
above all, with blood" (Richards 165). Words like
"interrogation" are more commonly used to describe
torture than scientific experimentation, yet in
Victorian literature the word "torture" is commonly
linked to the vivisector and his laboratory. The writer
Ouida describes the physiologist as an "animal
torturer," who works, according to Dr. George Hoggan, at
a "torture-trough" (152, 177). In The Body in P a i n ,
Elaine Scarry explains that the "torture room" becomes
itself "an agent of pa i n , " a powerful symbol that
recalls and thus recreates the sensations experienced in
41
that space (40). This symbol of pain is clearly
reflected in H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau
(1896), in which Moreau's laboratory is called the
"House of Pain," and the vivisected creatures who emerge
from it are cowed into obedience by the threat of
return.
The public mistrust of unsupervised vivisectors in
their laboratories led to the passage of the Cruelty to
Animals Act of 187 6. The purpose of the Act was to
eliminate the pain that animals experienced during
vivisection, and, as James Turner writes, "nowhere did
[animal suffering] stand out more starkly and dreadfully
than in the laboratory" (86). Because the laboratory was
the location of pain, and because the Act hoped to
eliminate pain, it required, among other things, that
laboratories be "registered with the Home Secretary and
subject to inspection at any time" (French 143) ,2 Thus
vivisection could be conducted, with the use of
anesthesia, only in registered locations, and these
laboratories, the physicians' "san c t u a r [i e s ]," could be
entered and monitored by outsiders with an interest in
the legality and morality, not the scientific
attainment, of the physician or physiologist.
42
Additionally, under the Act, physicians were not granted
a license to vivisect unless they could prove the
medical and/or scientific merit of the experiments being
conducted. Though the historical impact of the Act on
medical researchers was significant, it does not make
its appearance in the antivivisection novels published
after 1876. In Collins's Heart and Science (1882/83),
the vivisector, Dr. Benjulia, still works alone,
unsupervised, and without the use of anesthesia, as does
Dr. Dan Maclure in Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1895).
The plot of The Octave of Claudius (1897) revolves
around Dr. Gabriel Lamb's plans to vivisect a young,
healthy, human male. It seems obvious that Dr. Lamb did
not have an official license to conduct his research.
These novels reflect fears that vivisectors would
disregard moral and legal laws and continue their
research in secret.3
Richards speculates that "opposition to
physiological research was based primarily (if
unconsciously) on a revulsion generated by the supposed
aura of the laboratory as a hybrid product, as it were,
of the operating room and the slaughterhouse" (165). It
is this "hybrid pr oduct," along with the secrecy and
43
suspicion of pain surrounding the laboratory, that made
its way into the novels of the time, creating an
atmosphere of Gothic horror in the laboratory of the
evil vivisector. Like Gothic novels, antivivisection
stories maintain suspense by employing the presence of a
sinister villain torturing an innocent creature in an
isolated place. However, unlike Gothic novels in which
the use of details— dark dungeons or ruins or castles,
ghosts or dead bodies— create a physical presence of
place that dredges up one's romantic, childhood dreams
of fear, the laboratory works on a lack of presence; it
is a locked room without access from which the cries of
tortured animals can be heard. So while Ambrosio in The
Monk rapes and kills Antonia in a dark dungeon filled
with corpses, in The Island of Doctor Moreau the female
puma is sliced apart and restructured in a room that is
unseen aside from the locked door without. Moreau's
dark, leafy island, with its terrifying population of
mangled, hybrid creatures, possesses Gothic
characteristics, but the site of the torture, the
laboratory, is unseen and unknown. Gordon Hirsch writes
that horror "resides in a kind of absence or gap";
anxiety is created and exacerbated by what is not known,
44
and the real-life physicians working in laboratories did
little to alleviate the public's fears (226).
The image of the laboratory as an isolated,
secretive area was encouraged rather than dispelled by
physiologists. Claude Bernard hints at the intellectual
and physical secrecy of the laboratory when he calls it
a "sanctuary," the place to which "the man of science
withdraws" (147, 140). Although Bernard speaks of
withdrawing from public areas into the private space of
the laboratory, it is often portrayed in fiction as
already alienated from normal society. In Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll's
lab is "a dingy, windowless structure" located in a
separate part of the house with access through a set of
back stairs that exit onto the street from "a certain
sinister block of building" (51). In H.G. Wells's The
Island of Dr. Moreau, Moreau, exiled from England, lives
isolated from society on an island. Even so, his
laboratory is kept carefully locked. The precursor to
these novels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818),
depicts Frankenstein's laboratory as "a solitary
chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and
separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and
45
staircase" (39).4 The vivisector, by retreating to his
isolated sanctuary, is thus twice removed from social
interaction. The laboratory itself is horrifying by its
lack of definition, and the doctors within, who are not
driven by the familiar passions of rage, religion, or
sex that rule villains in Gothic novels but by a need to
uncover nature's laws with precision and a cold,
calculating disregard of life's higher mysteries and
powers, add to the eerie, inhuman quality of the lab.
The laboratory appeared to be a space of secrecy
because no one explained what occurred within. According
to Ouida, the physiologists "labour behind closed doors,
and they like to tell the world in general as much or as
little of what goes on there as they choose" (156) .
Ouida voices a concern that occurs in many articles at
the time: the public was locked out of the private space
of the physiology laboratory, both physically and
intellectually, and consequently the misunderstanding of
vivisection was exacerbated by a mistrust of the
unknown. Ian Burney writes that "the defining other to
science was p u b l i c , " thus giving emphasis to the extreme
privacy that surrounded medical research, a privacy that
only increased the public's pressure on doctors and
46
physiologists to openly justify their work on moral, as
well as scientific, grounds (156). George Hoggan
explains that in order to "put down the monstrous abuses
which have sprung up . . . in the practice of
V i v i se cti on, " it is necessary to eliminate "the secrecy
with which such experiments are conducted" (178). In
spite of the daily attacks by antivivisectionists on
vivisectors in the public forum of pamphlets,
newspapers, and periodicals, Nicholaas Rupke notes that
until the investigation by the Royal Commission in 1875,
there was little effort by supporters of vivisection to
respond and explain the doctors' work (189). An article
in the journal Science (1883) states that "the
physiologists kept silent, and left the field to their
enemies, with disastrous result; no one, not a brute,
who believed half the stories circulated, could fail to
hate physiology and physiologists" ("The Vivisection
Question" 551).
The significance of this silence was felt by both
sides of the controversy. An article sympathetic to
vivisection published in the journal Science (1883)
warns American physiologists not to make the same
mistakes as the British: "The only danger [to the
47
success of experimental physiology] lies in the
ignorance of the great majority of ordinarily well-
informed people regarding such subjects. Secrecy, not
publicity, is what American physiology has to fear"
("The Vivisection Question" 552). The silence from the
doctors primarily occurred before 187 6, but the
perception of silence continued long afterwards. Though
Hoggan's words appear in 1875, Ouida is still arguing
the same position in 1893. People formed opinions about
vivisection early in the controversy, and these feelings
lingered in spite of later attempts to illustrate the
importance of vivisection to the advancement of
medicine.
During the height of the outrage over vivisection,
Wilkie Collins published the antivivisection novel Heart
and S c i e n c e . In his preface to "Readers in General"
Collins writes:
I have not forgotten my responsibility towards
you, and towards my Art, in pleading the cause
of the harmless and affectionate beings of
God's creation. From first to last, you are
purposely left in ignorance of the hideous
secrets of Vivisection. The outside of the
48
laboratory is a necessary object in my
landscape— but I never once open the door and
invite you to look in. (38)
Throughout the novel, Collins reflects the strategies of
the antivivisection discourse raging outside in the
public periodicals. Benjulia's laboratory door is always
locked, and his house and laboratory are isolated,
located outside of London in the rural town of Hendon,
an area of "farms and cornfields" (129). The lovely
description of the town contrasts with that of
Benjulia's house, which is both ugly— "a hideous square
building of yellow brick, with a slate roof"— and
pri va te— located as it is "in the middle of a barren
little field" (129). Benjulia's laboratory is not within
his home but lies "at a distance of some two hundred
yards" away, and beyond the laboratory is "the hedge
which part[s] Benjulia's morsel of land from the land of
his neighbour" (129). Doctor Benjulia himself is gruff
and solitary by nature, living within his locked mind
and laboratory rather than sharing a full life with
other humans; his thoughts are separated from others by
a hedge of indifference. Ovid Vere, a surgeon and one of
Collins's characters of "heart," feels an instinctive
49
dislike of Benjulia's home, thinking that "there was
something unnatural in the solitude of the place" (129) .
Benjulia himself is unnatural, with his social isolation
and mysterious occupation. Though the nature of
Benjulia's work and the "moaning cry" emitting from the
laboratory are still unknown to Ovid, "the laboratory
had, by this time, become an object of horror" to him
(130). The "horror" is created by the extreme isolation
and absence of normal human comforts that surround
Benjulia and his laboratory. Like the vivisectors
involved in the public debates, Benjulia hides his work
from sight, thus leaving those around him to imagine he
has something particularly gruesome to hide.
The stark images are present throughout Benjulia's
land and home; the landscape is bare, with "not even an
attempt at flower-garden or kitchen garden" (129). The
inside of Benjulia's home is equally barren, with "no
curtains on the windows, and no pictures or prints on
the drab-colored walls. The empty grate show[s] its
bleak black cavity undisguised; and the mantlepiece
ha[s] nothing on it but the doctor's dirty and strong
smelling pipe" (131). The abode of Doctor Benjulia, like
the doctor himself, is purely functional. It reflects
50
the stereotypical view of vivisectors as utilitarian and
blind to beauty; Benjulia is insensitive to nature and
its wonders, to life itself.5 In this Benjulia differs
considerably from the villainous Count Fosco featured in
Collins's The Woman In White who is extremely sensitive
to the beauty and pleasures offered by life and nature;
the corpulent Count is pictured as a sensualist, whereas
the emaciated Benjulia is a pragmatist. The barren
landscape in which Benjulia resides is cheerless and
death-like; it mirrors his empty life and heart. One
imagines the laboratory, too, to be cold and sterile. In
fact, because the reader cannot visualize the inside of
the laboratory, it becomes, by necessity, empty, a blank
space. Benjulia, a single, childless man, attempts to
achieve personal fulfillment in his work, but as the
barren images suggest, his work is no substitute for the
warmth of human contact.
II. Darwin and social behavior
Vivisectors, with their excessive desire for
solitude and their seemingly self-centered absorption
with research, are frequently depicted in literature as
anti-social people. In Collins's Heart and Science, the
51
characters with "heart" are active members of society
who care for the well-being of others, whereas the
characters of "science" are interested only in
themselves and their intellectual pursuits. The
scientist is cloistered within his mind and his
laboratory. Charles Darwin categorized the human as a
social animal, and the vivisectors defy Darwin's
characterization.
According to Darwin, social animals enjoy the
company of others, share similar feelings and
experiences, and assist each other with the task of
staying alive and healthy (Descent 1.72). In Dawn, the
first novel of Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy,
the humans kept in isolation go mad, often injuring
themselves in an attempt to escape their enclosures and
seek the company of other humans. The humans' powerful
desire to be with one another startles their alien
Oankali captors who know that, when together, humans
tend to fight. Darwin recognizes the complexity of
social behavior, something the Oankali, too, soon
discover. Social behavior is, as Darwin notes, an
instinct, a biologically evolved reaction to the
environment. Although Darwin admits that the more
52
intelligent the animal, the fewer the instincts, the
need for survival and the operation of natural selection
have led to the acquisition of several important human
instincts (Descent 1.37). Darwin describes the evolution
of the social instinct as follows. Because humans are
among the "most helpless and defenceless creatures in
the w o r l d , " lacking tough hides, claws, and teeth, the
ability to live and fight in large groups protected the
species from predators (Descent 1.155). Had humans been
constructed differently, "possessing great size,
strength, and ferocity," the species may not have
evolved into social animals, "and this would most
effectively have checked the acquirement by man of his
higher mental qualities, such as sympathy and the love
of his fellow creatures" (Descent 1.156). Darwin
believes that the pleasurable sensations that humans
derive from the company of others were evolved responses
to the necessity of living in groups: "For with those
animals which benefited by living in close association,
the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in
society would best escape various dangers; whilst those
who cared least for their comrades and lived solitary
would perish in greater numbers" (Descent 1.80). Social
53
behavior evolved primarily to assist the species'
survival, but once established it contributed to the
development of its "higher mental qualities."
Social animals learn by "imitation, together with
reason and experience" (Descent 1.161). Human
intelligence, and that of the animals classified as
"higher," progressed more rapidly because, as Darwin
notes, one particularly "sagacious" member of the
community would pass on his knowledge to the others,
who, left alone, might never acquire the same skills
(Descent 1.161). Social instincts have also led to the
development of morals and conscience (Descent 1.71).
Actions that hurt the community were immediately
classified as bad, and those that aided the community
were good: "the so-called moral sense is aboriginally
derived from the social instincts, for both relate at
first exclusively to the community" (97). In fact,
Darwin claims, "the moral sense is fundamentally
identical with the social instincts" (Descent 1.98). The
traits that humans most value in themselves,
collaborative behavior, intelligence, and morality, have
evolved from the social instincts.
Although Darwin says that "the social instincts"
54
lead animals to "act for the good of the community"
(Descent 1.12), with the exception of Dan Maclure,
rarely do the vivisector characters in antivivisection
novels enjoy the presence of other humans. More au and
Benjulia actively remove themselves from social
situations, and Moreau, who fills his lonely exile with
work, is annoyed when Prendick appears on the scene;
Prendick is not company but an interruption. Similarly,
fictional vivisectors are not portrayed as desiring to
aid the community, although non-vivisecting doctors,
like Collins's Ovid Vere and Grand's Sir George
Galbraith, are involved in promoting the general w e l l
being of their communities. All animals have certain
behavioral characteristics that are natural to their
species, and those that do not possess these behaviors
are unnatural. Darwin lists the social instincts as
being among the strongest, "for they are performed too
instantaneously for reflection, or for the sensation of
pleasure or pain" (Descent 1.87). Collins depicts
Benjulia's home and appearance as physical signs of his
unnatural life, but even without these details his
behavior would condemn him as an anti-social, and thus
unusual, human. Fictional vivisectors are portrayed as
55
unnatural creatures who not only shun social interaction
but desire to harm rather than help the members of their
community.
In Collins's novel, those with "heart" possess
instinct as well as a passion for life, whereas those of
"science" consider reason, not instinct, to be their
guide. The significance of instinct runs throughout
Collins's novel, and is most directly introduced when
Mr. Gallilee tells Ovid that he "hate[s]" Doctor
Benjulia, a statement that Ovid attributes to "instinct"
(99). Ovid trusts instincts and agrees with his step
father about Benjulia. He is, in fact, so troubled by
Doctor Benjulia that he asks his mother not to let
Carmina see him while he travels to Canada (136). As
Carmina's life is later in danger because of Benjulia's
neglect of her disease, Ovid's instinct is proven to be
correct. Throughout the novel Collins builds an argument
for the accuracy of senses aside from logic and reason.
The characters with heart have an innate understanding
of moral behavior and are suspicious of those who lack
it.
Darwin notes that the most valued action performed
by higher animals for each other "is the warning each
56
other of danger" (Descent 1.74). In Heart and Science,
rather than warning Carmina and her doctor of the
seriousness of her condition, Benjulia chooses to
observe her illness so he can learn from its
progression. His intellect leads him to further his own
interests rather than assist a member of his community.
Ovid's ten-year-old, half-sister Zoe, on the other hand,
writes to Ovid begging him to return to help Carmina.
Mr. Gallilee and his lawyer Mr. Mool, also characters of
heart, write soon after Zoe. The characters of heart act
naturally and immediately, without thought. The
characters of science, Benjulia and Mrs. Gallilee,
scheme and carefully consider the results of their
actions, which are usually designed to promote self-
interest. Collins insists on the importance of the
Darwinian behavioral patterns common to social animals
as necessary for humans to prosper, regardless of the
strength of their intellect.
The connection that Collins makes between animals
and several of the characters associated with "heart"
helps to solidify the importance of instinct as well as
to highlight Benjulia's unnatural cruelty to animals.
Dr. Benjulia amuses himself and Zoe by pressing a spot
57
on her spine and "tickling" her, which makes her
"wriggle" against her will: "'That's how you make our
dog kick with his leg,'" she observes (96). Collins is
illustrating the biological similarities between Zoe
(and all humans) and the vivisector's victim. Zoe is the
only person Benjulia likes, and she is frequently placed
in parallel situations with dogs, an animal Benjulia
hates. Though Benjulia is motivated by self-interest, he
does not deny the relationship between humans and
animals. He tells his brother that as he vivisected a
monkey he was reminded of Zoe, and the realization makes
him uncomfortable: "My last experiments on a monkey
horrified me. His cries of suffering, his gestures of
entreaty, were like the cries and gestures of a child"
(191). Benjulia's instincts warn him that his actions
are horrible, and he recognizes the monkey's pain and
"gestures of entreaty" as signals to cease the
experiment, unlike some vivisectors who refused to
acknowledge that non-human creatures feel p a i n . 6 Again,
by showing the likeness between a monkey and a child,
Collins is reinforcing his message that there is
similarity between humans and other social mammals. He
also illustrates Benjulia's unnatural passion for
58
science; to continue an experiment knowing that the
monkey is like "a child I sometimes play with" is
greatly disturbing and indicates the depth of his
degradation (191).
Darwin states that "there is no fundamental
difference between man and the higher mammals in their
mental faculties," thus the experiments conducted by
vivisectors on dogs or monkeys are closely associated
with vivisection of people (Descent 1.35). Dogs are used
throughout the novel to assist Collins in illustrating
the moral qualities that are of social importance.
Darwin notes that dogs "possess something very like a
conscience," and return the "strong love" that humans
have toward them, and Collins's dogs are loving, joyful,
and loyal, even when they have been misused (Descent
1.74). A stray dog follows Carmina because his
"mysterious insight" helps him identify someone who
might feed him, just as Mr. G a l l i l e e 's insight leads him
to hate Benjulia (57). A physician friend tells Ovid to
learn from his dog how to rest and be healthy: "Look at
my wise dog here, on the front seat, and learn from him
to be idle and happy" (47). The dog travels with the
physician on the seat, in an equal position. The
59
animals' instincts tell them what is healthy, whereas
people's big brains can mislead them into working long
hours, chasing after ideas and ignoring life, thus
becoming ill and out of balance. Like dogs, Zoe and her
father are easily made happy with good food, walks in
the park, and the company of those they love, and their
good health is frequently lauded by Collins. The more
intelligent characters, Benjulia and Ovid, are not as
healthy. Benjulia's moral and emotional deterioration
leads to his death, and Ovid's refusal to refrain from
overwork has created a problem with his heart. Ovid's
body tells him to rest, but his intellect insists that
he continue to help others.
Though Dr. Benjulia is an antisocial character, he
does follow one of Darwin's rules of social behavior.
Benjulia values the most "powerful stimulus to the
development of the social virtue, namely, the praise and
blame of our fellow-men" (Descent 1.164). Though
Benjulia does not care whether people like him as a
person, his life is devoted to becoming the first to
cure brain disease, and his life ends because Ovid
discovers a cure before him. Benjulia's quest for a cure
is not to help others— he does not assist Carmina--but
60
to receive the praise of his fellow physicians. In an
argument with his brother, Benjulia tells him: "I am
working for my own satisfaction— for my own pride--for
my own unutterable pleasure in beating other men--for
the fame that will keep my name living hundreds of years
hence" (190). Benjulia's desire for fame illustrates the
thread of social commitment that still lives within.
Unlike Dr. Moreau who has cut himself off from his
English counterparts, Benjulia keeps his iron in the
scientific fire hoping to one day prove his superiority.
Collins creates with Benjulia a character who, though
wedded to science, still retains a fraction of "heart."
As a consequence, Benjulia appears to be a man whose
life might have been different, making his downfall more
tragic than that of a completely heartless character.
Benjulia's refusal to help Carmina recover from her
illness does illustrate his self-interest, but he is a
complex character and as such is portrayed as a
misguided rather than an evil man. For example, when
Carmina becomes ill, it is because Mrs. Gallilee, who
has been scheming to break off Carmina and Ovid's
engagement, has heard a rumor of Carmina's illegitimacy.
She confronts Carmina, calling her an "impudent bastard"
61
(249). Benjulia, defending Carmina, demands that Mrs.
Gallilee "hold [her] damned tongue!" (249). Immediately
after, as Carmina becomes seriously ill, Benjulia agrees
to move her away from the home of Mrs. Gallilee and
advises that Mrs. Gallilee not be told where Carmina is
recuperating as another encounter may prove fatal. So
far, Benjulia has taken a difficult situation into his
control and is acting in a seemingly compassionate
manner toward poor Carmina. So when he says "that his
dread of the loss of Carmina's reason really meant his
dread of a commonplace termination to an exceptionally
interesting case," and continues to explain that
Carmina's doctor was sure to misinterpret the symptoms
and make her worse, giving Benjulia a chance to pursue
his interests in "Medical Research," one is left with
conflicting emotions (255). What Benjulia does is
different from what he thinks, and if one judges him by
his visible actions alone, he appears to be odd but
decent. Mrs. Gallilee comes across as the real villain,
whereas Benjulia appears to be a gruff and lonely man
who is misguided by his one passion. Similarly, the work
Benjulia conducts in the laboratory is out of sight and
thus not judged. During the process of composing Heart
62
and Science, Collins wrote to Frances Power C o b b e : "If I
can succeed in making him, in some degree, an object of
compassion as well as of horror, my experience of
readers of fiction tells me that the right effect will
be produced by the right means" (Heart and Science,
Appendix D, 370). Although Benjulia does injure Carmina
in addition to a variety of animals, Collins shows that
Benjulia also sins against himself. His monomaniacal
pursuit of scientific achievement leaves him with an
empty life and lonely death. Though presumably meant for
an audience of antivivisectionists, Collins's novel is a
warning to vivisectors, to those whose intellectual
passions deprive them of the social intercourse that is
necessary for human satisfaction.
III. Heart and Scie nce : the dichotomies
As the title of Collins's novel suggests, the
action is divided between those characters who possess
"heart" and those who tend toward "science." In order to
build the division between heart and science, Collins
creates contrasts; the characters with heart are
impulsive, expansive, and interested in others, and the
characters of science are calculating, narrow, and
63
selfish. The bareness of Benjulia's emotions as
reflected in his stark house, the locked laboratory, and
his personal reserve all come forth as images of an
unnatural withdrawal from life. In contrast, the
garrulous Mr. Gallilee with his love of good food and
wine, and his equally vocal daughter Zoe with her messy
schoolroom, are full of passion, warmth, and the natural
vibrancy of life. Mr. Gallilee and Zoe's goodheartedness
is wholesome just as Benjulia's sterile isolation is
unhealthy. Social behavior is not only normal, it is a
biological necessity.
The characters' contrasts are illustrated by
appearance as well as by action. The two doctors, Ovid
and Benjulia, are described quite differently. Ovid is
about six feet tall, dark, and Carmina finds him
"handsome" (137). He is pale from overwork, but is not
unusual in any other respect. Benjulia, however, is
described as being somewhat grotesque; he is "almost
tall enough to be shown as a giant," and "so hideously .
. . thin that his enemies spoke of him as 'the living
skeleton'" (94-95). His face is marked by a "massive
forehead, . . . great gloomy gray eyes, . . . [and]
protuberant cheek-bones," with a "true gipsy-brown"
64
complexion that is "darker in tone than his eyes, 11 and
"add[s] remarkably to the weird look, the dismal
thoughtful scrutiny, which it was his habit to fix on
persons talking with him, no matter whether they were
worthy of attention or not" (95). This manner of
detached observation is significant later in the novel
when it becomes apparent that Benjulia observes people
purely as potential sources of medical information.
Benjulia's "straight black hair" hangs "gracelessly on
either side of his hollow face as the hair of an
American Indian." His hands are "great" and "dusky"
(95). Benjulia's mental deformity is illustrated through
his physical appearance, and his "gipsy" coloring adds
to the alarming nature of his difference from other
Englishmen. He is not smoothly constructed, but made up
of odd parts, a Frankenstein's monster of a man. This
"otherness" contributes to the mysterious, Gothic
quality of Benjulia's secretive life and horrible
laboratory. Whereas Benjulia is "the sort of man whom no
stranger is careless enough to pass without turning
round for a second look," Ovid "produce[s] no impression
of any sort" (95, 59).
Henry Salt, the president of the Victorian RSPCA
65
(Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to
Animals), refers to a quotation of Michelet that he
believes reflects the role of science in Victorian
society. Children, Michelet explains, discover
"happiness in undoing," and science, like children, also
"undoes": "It cannot study unless it kills" (qtd. in
Salt 74). Mrs. Gallilee is intent upon "undoing"
throughout the novel. Her attempt at undoing the
engagement of her son and Carmina leads to the undoing
of her family when Mr. Gallilee, horrified at her
controlling and cruel treatment of Carmina, leaves with
the children.7 Mrs. Gallilee is undone herself when she
suffers a mental breakdown. Benjulia, although failing
to "undo" Carmina, ultimately undoes himself. The divide
between heart and science is created by the silent
sterility of science that, in attempting to understand
life's mysteries, destroys them, and the bubbling
vocality of heart that fully accepts and appreciates
life as it is, without changing or delving more deeply
into its source. Science dismantles while heart creates.
Collins illustrates that the scientific attitude is
fostered by inheritance and training. Although Zoe's
character resembles that of her father, her sister Maria
66
is like her mother, the scientific Mrs. Gallilee (64) .8
While at the zoo, Maria inadvertently offends Carmina's
old nurse, Teresa, who does not like to see animals
behind bars, by lecturing to her: "'You will allow me to
remind you,' she said, 'that intelligent curiosity leads
us to study the habits of animals that are new to us. We
place them in a cage--'" (105). Maria here sounds like
her mother, who, upon seeing the lovely pansies in her
lawyer's office, wants to dissect them (192). She is
interested in the caged monkeys as objects of
intellectual curiosity, but does not understand them as
living creatures confined in the London zoo. Teresa,
however, is not sympathetic to the intellectually
curious: "'You're an animal that's new to me . . . put
this girl into a cage. M y intelligent curiosity wants to
study a monkey that's new to me'" (105). This
interchange not only illustrates the link between humans
and other primates— Maria, like the monkey, can be put
into a cage to be observed— , but it is again a reminder
of vivisection. Maria, too, can be confined and
vivisected, and, in fact, it is during this trip to the
zoo that Dr. Benjulia receives the monkey he later
vivisects. The division between heart and science is
67
formed by the kinship that exists between humans and
animals (heart) and the inability or refusal to
appreciate this link (science).
Ovid's instinctual sensitivity to all living
creatures: is unusually strong. He unsuccessfully
attempts to prevent Benjulia from stepping on a beetle
("'The common beetle,'" Benjulia observes; "'I haven't
damaged a Specimen'") (103). Similarly, on her first day
in London, Carmina is shocked by the death of a stray
dog (57). Collins is illustrating the sympathy toward
other creatures that Darwin claims originates with the
highest of social and moral behavior. Ovid's reaction to
the beetle causes Benjulia some "astonishment," just as
Carmina's "childish fright" about the dog's death amazes
her aunt (103, 67). The divide between heart and science
is seemingly impassable. Those with heart are shown by
Collins to follow their instincts and to be sympathetic
to both human and non-human creatures, thus following
the Darwinian behaviors most valued in social animals.
Benjulia and Mrs. Gallilee, however, quash their
instinctual natures with their overly intellectual
attitudes, thus furthering the antivivisectionists'
argument about the demoralizing effects of
68
experimentation on living creatures.
Carmina is left alone with Mrs. Gallilee because
Ovid, who has "cruelly wearied" his brain, must go to
Canada to rest (45). The nervous problem from which Ovid
suffers is neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. "In the
1880s," Elaine Showalter writes, "neurasthenia became
the diagnosis of choice for depression and anxiety among
urban male intellectuals, ambitious professionals, and
overworked executives," many of whom were doctors (65) .
Collins reinforces Ovid's and Carmina's extreme
sensitivity--their hearts— through the nervous maladies
each suffers. Other characters of heart, like Mr.
Gallilee and Zoe, are ruddy with health but less
intelligent than Ovid or Carmina (Zoe is called
"illiterate" and Mr. Gallilee "an affectionate old
imbecile" by reviewers of the novel [Academy 290, The
Pall Mall Budget 15]). Although Ovid, possessing heart,
intellect, and instinct, appears to be more balanced
than the other characters, his body breaks down under
the stress of continual work. Collins points to the
intellect as the source of illness, whereas the animal
instincts, if followed, guide one to live properly.
Carmina's health problems are directly related to
69
the cruel treatment of Mrs. Gallilee. Carmina's
instinctual reaction upon first meeting with Mrs.
Gallilee is to fall into a dead faint: "Her eyes and my
eyes flashed into each other. In that one moment, I lost
all sense of myself as if I was dead . . . It was a
dreadful surprise to me to remember it— and a dreadful
pa i n — when they brought me to myself again" (119).
Carmina is vivisected by Mrs. Gallilee's gaze, and she
never fully recovers from the experience. Mrs.
Gallilee's observation does not rest upon but pierces
through her victims; Mr. Mool, too, claims to "have felt
her eyes go through [him] like a knife" (75). Lillian
Nayder feels that in Heart and Science Collins
highlights similarities between the oppression of women
and that of helpless, vivisected animals (137-139).
Several female characters--Zoe, Maria, and Carmi na — are
likened to animals later vivisected by Benjulia. Zoe and
Carmina, both oppressed by Mrs. Gallilee, rely on their
instincts to lead them, and like a dog, Carmina's
instinct is accurate; she immediately senses that Mrs.
Gallilee is dangerous.
Collins demonstrates that when one begins to view
nature scientifically— as nothing but a source of
70
personal knowledge--and loses a sense of kinship with
animals, one's perception of life will alter, resulting
in no connection with any living creature, including, in
Mrs. Gallilee's case, one's own family. An over
developed intellect, according to Collins, destroys
one's pleasure in all but the serving of that intellect.
Science becomes an addiction. The science-loving Mrs.
Gallilee says that one "must" enjoy music, just as one
"must" like pictures; for her, these forms of art are
duties, not pleasures (112) . Mrs. Gallilee enjoys
scientific lectures and soirees, just as Benjulia's
pleasures are derived from his research. Life within the
laboratory is centered around the attempt to dissect and
analyze nature outside of a larger context, whereas life
outside of the laboratory is complex and vibrant, filled
with social, sensual, and aesthetic pleasures. Collins's
view narrows considerably when showing Benjulia's house
and laboratory; it expands with the warm life of Zoe and
her father. Rather than living passionately, the
scientist in the laboratory thinks passionately; he is
drawn to undo the natural— Benjulia's monkey or Mrs.
Gallilee's pans y— in order to comprehend its mysteries.
This loss of emotion or aesthetic feeling is criticized
71
by Collins as dangerous to one's society and family;
both Mrs. Gallilee and Dr. Benjulia are eventually
destroyed because they lack the ability to appreciate
life's variety. Instead, they perceive it as a series of
uncontextualized pieces.
Victorian physicians argued against the claim by
antivivisectionists that they lacked heart. T. Lauder
Brunton, in his article "Vivisection and the Use of
Remedies" in the March 1882 issue of The Nineteenth
Century, explains that having too much heart may, in
fact, be a liability; "the practical surgeon or the
experienced nurse . . . have simply learned to
disregard their own feelings, and to concentrate their
attention on the interests of the patient. They are
guided no longer by emotion, but by judgment" (480). The
balance between heart and science is frequently
described as one between emotion and judgment. Ovid and
Mr. Mool, the lawyer, do maintain this balance, although
most of Collins's characters do not. Too much heart,
Collins argues, can be nearly as dangerous as none at
all. Mr. Gallilee, for example, is afraid of his wife,
and is motivated to action only after she has seriously
injured Carmina. His emotion paralyzes his judgment
72
until damage has already occurred. Teresa, on the other
hand, attempts to strangle Mrs. Gallilee; her emotion
leads to an overly impulsive act with no judgment
whatsoever. Collins illustrates the necessity for both
emotion and judgment, a recognition of instinct and
heart balanced by the intellect and reason.
According to Ouida, the physiologists' "lives are
passed entirely in the laboratories; their object is not
any good, any use, any service; it is solely and
entirely to obtain what they call 'knowledge,1 and to
make a name and a career for themselves" (155). Each
item of Ouida's statement is expressed by the character
of Dr. Benjulia. Benjulia's servants are accustomed to
his habit of spending days in the locked laboratory and
not allowing anyone to have a key, even to clean the
space (97). The fact that the laboratory is always
locked is repeated by Collins: Ovid unsuccessfully tries
the door when he visits, and Benjulia leaves his
laboratory "very unwillingly . . . locking the door
behind him" when his brother visits (130, 184). A
servant of Benjulia does attempt to peer in through the
skylight (there are no windows) and sees nothing: "'A
large white blind, drawn under the skylight, and hiding
73
the whole room from view'" (98). The "white blind" and
locked doors are barriers to sight and insight, to the
activities that actually occur within the laboratory.
The one person who knows of Benjulia's experiments is
his dog-loving, antivivisectionist brother Lemuel who
did enter the laboratory one day when it was left
unlocked. When Lemuel later asks Benjulia why he
vivisects, Benjulia gives him a complicated reply,
filled with the arguments commonly echoed in the public
press:
"--Knowledge for its own sake, is the one god
I worship. Knowledge is its own justification
and its own reward. The roaring mob follows us
with its cry of Cruelty. We pity their
ignorance. Knowledge sanctifies cruelty. The
old anatomist stole dead bodies for Knowledge.
In that sacred cause, if I could steal a
living man without being found out, I would
tie him on my table, and grasp my grand
discovery in days, instead of months." (190)
The search for knowledge above all else, the contempt
with which doctors held the laypeople, and the fear
that, if it were legal or possible, doctors would
74
vivisect humans can be found in antivivisection fiction
and non-fiction. Benjulia's obsession with locking his
research away from prying eyes is a result of his quest
for knowledge, his professional jealousy, and from a
recognition that a discovery would bring with it
unpleasant publicity. The highly reserved Benjulia
avoids people and would find the exposure of his work to
be an uncomfortable as well as a counterproductive
situation. Benjulia does not share professional
discoveries in discussions with his colleagues. He
peruses the professional journals only to see if a paper
or book has been published in his field, not to learn
from the work, but to reassure himself that he will be
the first to make a breakthrough in brain disease.
Benjulia is a tightly locked person, private in home and
mi n d . 9
The world of the vivisector is thus pictured as an
isolated, narrow one, centered around one place: the
laboratory. The world of those who do not engage in
scientific pursuits is shown to be a broad, expansive
arena, filled with music, laughter, and love. The
vivisector enjoys the pursuit of knowledge: he is a
private man. The layperson enjoys the pursuit of social
75
intercourse: he is a public person. The
antivivisectionists accused the vivisectors of cruelty,
and the vivisectors accused their opponents of
sentimentality; the gap between science and heart seemed
unbridgeable. The vivisectors working in their confined
spaces perceived their discoveries as having far-
reaching, beneficial consequences to all living
creatures, and the antivivisectionists, lacking the
knowledge necessary to understand the scientists' work,
viewed their experiments on their most literal level:
that of torturing animals so as to see how the organs
function.
IV. The laboratory unlocked
In many antivivisection novels, when the door to
the laboratory is unlocked, the consequences are deadly.
In Heart and Science, The Octave of Claudius (1897), and
The Island of Doctor Moreau, the open door leads to the
destruction of the vivisectors and of their credibility,
their public facade. The laboratory is an extension of
the doctor himself, the womb in which his creative acts
occur, and the opening of the laboratory exposes the
absence of progeny; the doctor consists of secrets
76
rather than substance. The suspicion of vacancy, of a
void within the laboratory, becomes symbolically enacted
by the vivisector himself. Antivivisectionists believed
that once the doctors were publicly exposed through
numerous articles, novels, billboards, pamphlets, and
public lectures, their work would be found to be cruel
and meaningless. The laboratory door, open, would reveal
none of life's truths but only its sorrows.
Dr. Benjulia's destruction and subsequent exposure
follows the abrupt end to his quest for knowledge and
fame by the publication of Ovid's book on brain disease.
The book that Ovid publishes is based on a manuscript
given to him by a dying surgeon in Canada, a mulatto
from the southern United States whom Ovid nurses during
his last days (159). Ovid says that had he lived, he
would have been "ranked . . . among the greatest
physicians of our time" (160). Ovid's success is not a
product of solitary work in the laboratory but derives
from his compassionate attempt to ease the pain of a
terminally ill man during the last days of his life.The
collaboration between the dying man and Ovid leads to a
breakthrough in the cure of brain disease. Not only are
compassion and collaboration the keys to success, the
77
dying man is himself of diverse origin. Collins
celebrates life's social interactions and its products;
success is measured by reaching out to others, whether
they be dogs, beetles, children, or people of other
nations and races, not by working alone, cloistered
within a sterile room. In fact, Ovid's book begins with
a statement against vivisection, reinforcing the
uselessness of Benjulia's years of toil: "Whatever
faults and failings I may have been guilty of as a man,
I am innocent, in my professional capacity, of ever
having perpetrated the useless and detestable cruelties
which go by the name of Vivisection" (307). Collins
proves that Ovid, by working at the bedside and not the
laboratory, is a moral man, and the discoveries that aid
humanity are to be found outside of the laboratory, in
the diverse world of humans and animals.
In his description of social behavior and morality,
Darwin explains that intelligence leads to reflection,
which in turn leads to "images of all past actions and
m o t i v e s , " which themselves create "that feeling of
dissatisfaction which invariably results . . . from any
unsatisfied instinct ... as often as it was perceived
that the enduring and always present social instinct had
78
yielded to some other instinct" (Descent 1.72). The
vivisectors portrayed in novels do not always experience
this logical association of thought and feeling. Moreau
dies knowing that what he does is right. Before Doctor
Benjulia dies, however, he is dissatisfied with his
life; his social instinct has yielded to his passion for
research and desire for fame, but he seems to finally
understand that life might have been very different had
he chosen a less narrow path. The publication of Ovid's
book leaves Benjulia with nothing because his interests
in life were not diverse; all were focused on the one
goal. He seeks the one person who can console him for
his loss, Zoe, but the Gallilee's have moved, another
indication of Benjulia's inability to achieve the human
companionship he now needs. He contents himself with the
cover of a notebook inscribed with her name: "my cop
book zo" (321). Earlier in the novel, Zoe asks Benjulia
to look up the word "love" in the dictionary. He
discovers there are "seven meanings to love" and wonders
"which of them might have made the pleasure of [my
life]?" (247). He broods. "Who is the better for love?"
(247). Now he asks the Gallilee's housekeeper if she
believes in God (321). Benjulia ponders love and the
79
existence of God. His reflection is methodical and
scientific; he doesn't feel love nor does he have faith.
He turns to books and logical explanations of these
phenomena, and cannot find proof of their use. At the
same time he realizes that for others love and God do
exist and that he is lacking important experiences. Zoe
alone has the ability to touch "the one tender place,
hidden so deep from the man himself, that even his far-
reaching intellect groped in vain to find it o u t , " yet
when asked if he is fond of her, Benjulia is puzzled: "I
don't know" (246, 244). The qualities that Darwin
describes as the highest attainment of social evolution,
love and sympathy, smolder within Benjulia but are never
fanned into flames. Before dying, Benjulia writes a
will, leaving his entire estate to Zoe (322).
Just when Dr. Benjulia appears to be realizing
life's possibilities, he further limits them by ending
it. In his preface to Heart and Science, Collins
explains that Benjulia suffered from "the result of the
habitual practice of cruelty," and although he
recognizes his error, he cannot now change himself and
begin a new life (38). He opens the laboratory to free
the animals within that are still mobile, and he kills
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those that are not. One, a dog with a lame foot, finds
shelter with a servant in the kitchen. The suspicion
that Benjulia has been experimenting with living
creatures is confirmed not by a glimpse into the
laboratory but by the animals' liberation from that
awful space. Those within die. The laboratory remains a
symbol of pain and destruction until it is itself
destroyed. The servant that helps the dog, realizing
"his master's secret," "hate[s] himself for eating that
master's bread, and earning that master's money" (323).
He dislikes knowing that he has profited from his
master's monstrous deeds.
Benjulia's death is beautifully written. The night
is clear and silent, and the absence of warmth, of the
sound of birds or a fragrant breeze in the trees,
creates a scene that is as pure, cold, and lonely as
Benjulia himself. Benjulia meditates for a short time
outside of the laboratory, then leaves the vision of
stars and infinite space to return to his sanctuary, the
laboratory. The last sound heard is "the locking and
bolting of the door" (323). Soon after, the servant
discovers that the laboratory has been set ablaze: "The
starlit sky over the laboratory was veiled in murky red.
81
Roaring flame, and spouting showers of sparks, poured
through the broken skylight" (324). What was one moment
a cold and silent night is now truly Gothic in its
passion and color, with the torture chamber's final
destruction shooting violent red flames into the cold
darkness. An unsigned reviewer in the April 28, 1883
issue of The Academy, wrote of this chapter that "Mr.
Wilkie Collins can deal strongly with a strong
situation, but he has done nothing so powerful than his
sketch of Benjulia's last hours" (Heart and Science,
Appendix A, 329). Benjulia has chosen the confined space
over the larger world; the laboratory becomes not only a
symbol and agent of pain, but a symbol of the man who
works within. When the laboratory is destroyed, so is
Dr. Benjulia.
Collins's preface to Heart and Science concludes
with the following statement: "I trace, in one of my
characters, the result of the habitual practice of
cruelty (no matter under what pretense) in fatally
deteriorating the nature of man--and I leave the picture
to speak for itself" (38). This line refers to the
concern that vivisection, when practiced regularly, will
dull the sympathetic response to pain, a belief rooted
82
in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Though Kant did not
believe in animal rights or, in those pre-Darwinian
days, that humans were kin to animals, he did think that
compassion toward humans would be lessened if one were
violent or cruel to non-human creatures: violent
behavior reaps more violence (Maehle and Trohler 14) .
Kant felt that killing animals for food was acceptable,
if the death occurred quickly and as painlessly as
possible, but that "'the painful physical experiments
for the mere sake of speculation are to be abhorred, if
the end may be achieved without them'" (qtd. in Maehle
and Trohler 14). Victorians opposed to vivisection
referred to Kant when voicing their concern about
scientific experimentation. Lewis Carroll writes that
"the evil charged against vivisection consists" not in
the pain suffered by the animal but "in the effect
produced on the operator" (Fallacy 7). Carroll held the
Kantian belief that the routine practice of inflicting
pain "deadened" one's "sympathies" to all living
creatures. To support his point, he quotes from a March,
1875 article in the Spectator describing a physiology
lecture during which "demonstrations were made on living
dogs. When the unfortunate creatures cried and moaned
83
under the operations, many of the students actually
mimicked their cries in derision'." (Fallacy 8). The
continued practice of vivisection was considered to be a
symbol of the decline of civilization, leading to a new
breed of insensitive men. Vivisectors were not like
other humans, but were mechanical monsters. Ovid worries
about Benjulia's influence on Carmina because he is "not
fit" to be with young women, an indirect reference to
the amoral Benjulia's corruption from years of
inflicting pain on innocent creatures (136).10
Claude Bernard, though eloquent in his defense of
vivisection, confirms the gradual insensitivity to pain
that people feared: "A physiologist no longer hears the
cry of animals, he no longer sees the blood that flows,
he sees only his idea and perceives only organisms,
concealing problems which he intends to solve" (103) .
The focus of scientists on an abstract concept--an idea-
-at the expense of a living, breathing creature was
repulsive to many, and the thought of one's doctor as
lacking in sensitivity was disturbing during the time
that medicine was depending upon vivisection to
legitimize it as a scientific discipline. In fact,
according to Richard French, many scientific physicians
84
did not consider themselves to be healers but
scientists, an attitude that is present in the character
of Tom May in Charlotte Yonge's The Trial (18 64) who
prefers medical theory and research to sick people
(French 151, Yonge 296). In Heart and Sci en ce,
Benjulia's insensitivity and quest for knowledge is
supposed to be a result of his hours spent in the
laboratory vivisecting animals. When Ovid returns to
help the ailing Carmina and confronts Benjulia with
allowing her condition to "go on from bad to w o r s e — for
some vile end of [his] own," Benjulia replies, "No, no.
For an excellent end— for knowledge" (306-307). Benjulia
is not interested in his patients except as hosts for an
interesting disease; he sees "only the id e a , " not the
suffering individual. Yet Collins illustrates that
Benjulia, the agent of suffering, himself suffers for
his life of misplaced priorities. The continued practice
of cruelty does indeed damage the practitioner, and the
demise of the unloved Benjulia tragically illustrates
the necessity for heart as well as science.
Henry Salt, concerned about the rights of animals
and insensitivity of vivisectors, attempts to respond to
those who, like Bernard, consider non-human animals to
85
be less important than humans because differently
constructed. Salt explains that although science has
created the recognition of the "close relationship
between mankind and the animals," the scientific method
leads the practitioner to ignore "the essential
distinctive quality, the individuality, of the subject
of his investigations, and becomes nothing more than a
contented accumulator of facts, an industrious dissector
of carcasses" (72-73). Like Benjulia, the scientist is
nothing more than an automaton, carving through bodies
to discover one more "truth." Salt feels that truth
includes more than a minute look at organs and microbes;
he is interested in the individuality of each living
organism, its position and role within a whole community
or system as opposed to it as a symbol or representation
of a disease within a laboratory. Because of his large
view, he perceives the solitary man in the laboratory,
with his organs and microbes, to be nothing but "a
contented accumulator of facts"; not a man who is
knowledgeable about life, but a man who knows one,
minute part. It is outside of the closed laboratory that
life occurs in its natural element; life within is
contrived, unnatural. Darwin, for example, reached his
86
theories in the wild, not in the laboratory.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin observes that many of
the "lower animals" share characteristics that we humans
think of as exclusive to us: "We have seen that the
senses and intuitions, the various emotions and
faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity,
imitation, reason, &c, of which man boasts, may be found
in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed
condition, in the lower animals" (1.105). Darwin's
theory of evolution, of course, rests on the assumption
that all planetary life is interconnected, that we have
evolved together as a system, or "tangled b a n k , " of
existence (Origin 429). It is this tangle of life that
Collins and Salt believe will lead to the discovery of a
greater truth than those sought in the confines of the
laboratory.
87
Notes
1. I refer in this chapter to physicians, surgeons,
scientists, and physiologists. In the nineteenth
century, a physician, usually called "doctor," required
a license from the Royal College of Physicians to
practice medicine and generally dealt with diseases, or
internal complaints. A physician was allowed to
prescribe medicine. A surgeon, on the other hand, was
called "mister" and bandaged cuts and bruises, delivered
babies, set broken bones, and handled other external
complaints. Surgeons did not need a license to practice.
(Heart and Science, Note 2, 45). In Heart and Science,
Ovid Vere and Mr. Null are surgeons, while Nathan
Benjulia is a physician. Some physicians were exposed to
vivisection during their schooling and continued to
practice it once they were licensed. Physiologists are
scientists who study the body; they may or may not also
be physicians.
2. See the introduction for a more complete description
of the Cruelty Against Animals Act of 1876.
3. Although antivivisectionists were concerned about the
plight of animals, they also worried that vivisectors
would turn to humans as their next victim of choice.
Lewis Carroll felt that the boundaries delineating who
or what would be acceptable for experimentation would be
slowly enlarged to include humans. He believed, and
wrote in his thirteenth fallacy, that vivisection would
eventually "include human subjects." In "The New
Priesthood," Ouida writes that if the physiologists have
their way, "tens of thousands of men should be stretched
on the torture-table beside the dog and the horse, and
should be sacrificed without hesitation in the pursuit
of knowledge" (158).
4. Frankenstein, published in 1818, did predate the
vivisection controversy, but Shelley's depiction of the
doctor, and her exploration of the consequences of the
scientist's tampering with nature to further his
knowledge, are themes that are present in most, if not
all, antivivisection works. Lewis Carroll, in fact,
refers to the vivisector as "a new and more hideous
Frankenstein— a soulless being to whom science shall be
all in all" (Fallacy 13). Carroll's description of a man
who lives purely for scientific knowledge— a common
literary stereotype of scientific doctors--is an
appropriate description of Dr. Moreau and Wilkie
Collins's Dr. Benjulia, not to mention Victor
89
Frankenstein himself.
5. In Collins's The Woman in White, Walter Hartwright
says "Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the
earth we live on, is, in truth, one of the civilised
accomplishments which we all learn . . . " (43).
Benjulia's blindness to life's beauty illustrates his
antisocial, uncivilized personality as well as indicates
the emptiness within the man.
6. Charles Richet, a nineteenth-century vivisector,
writes: "No being suffers unless he is able to think
that he suffers, and meditate on his suffering. To
suffer means to have consciousness ..." (Scientific
Cruelty 2 6-27).
7. Mrs. Gallilee hopes to break off the engagement
because if Carmina dies, unmarried, she, Mrs. Gallilee,
will inherit the girl's fortune.
8. After Mr. Gallilee removes his daughters from his
wife's care, Maria improves, becoming less stiff and
bookish. Collins shows that with proper attention a
child's character can be formed. Maria was rewarded by
her mother for her facility in the classroom, but once
taken from that environment her social skills develop as
they become the object of praise.
90
9. Since Collins's book was written in 1882-83, and
since the first line of the story, "The weary old
nineteenth century had advanced into the last twenty
years of its life" (45), places the time of the novel in
the 1880s, Benjulia by law could not have kept his work
a secret. He would have had to register his laboratory
with the Commission, and he would have had observers
visit him, unannounced, to check that he was using
anesthetics and operating as he claimed. Though there
were violations of the Act (French 175), the omission of
any reference to it or to Benjulia's unlicensed
laboratory indicates the concern that vivisectors would
lie about their work (Benjulia claims to be a chemist)
and continue to secretly practice vivisection.
10. The theme of vivisectors as not being "fit person[s]
to be in the company of . . . young girl[s]" runs
through many novels that deal with the theme of
vivisection. Women who are unfortunate enough to marry
vivisectors generally die, as in The Octave of Claudius
and The P r o f e s s o r ’s Wife, and those who are strong
enough not to be mortally affected, like Beth in The
Beth Book, are encouraged by others to end relations
with the morally repellent doctor. Coral Lansbury finds
91
a strong theme of perverse sexuality running through
antivivisection novels that would support the concept of
danger to young women in the company of vivisectors.
92
Chapter 2: The Home

Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (1898)
"You are sick, that's sure"— they say:

"Sick of what?"— they disagree.
"'Tis the brain"— thinks Doctor A.,
"'Tis the heart,"— holds Doctor B.,
"The liver— my life I'd lay!"
"The lungs!" "The lights!"
Ah, m e !
So ignorant of man's whole
Of bodily organs plain to see—
So sage and certain, frank and free,
About what's under lock and key--
Man's soul!
Robert Browning, "Doctor" from Dramatic Idylls
I . The home
Sarah Grand's 1898 novel The Beth Book illustrates
the difficulties faced by women who refuse to abide by
the social codes that govern their lives. Beth Caldwell
Maclure continually questions the status quo and is
misunderstood by both her mother and her husband who
attempt to subdue her into obedience. As a consequence,
she does not have a true home--one in which she feels
safe and at peace--until she leaves her husband, Dan
Maclure, and settles by herself first in a little attic
apartment and finally in a rose-covered cottage by the
sea. In The Beth Book, the home is less a place of
safety and refuge than a confining site of conflict.
93
Beth's personal evolution is reflected in the houses she
inhabits, and her solitary homes are those in which she
is able to live a "pure" and moral life, in full control
of her own destiny. When she moves away from Maclure,
she realizes that finally "she [can] live serenely, and
purify her mind by degrees of the garbage with which
Dan's habitual conversation had polluted it" (489). The
middle section of the novel, Beth's residence and
relationship with her husband Dan Maclure, reflects
Beth's growing sense of principle learned from self-
education and her refusal to submit to her decadent,
vivisecting husband. The success of Beth's evolution is
made evident by her survival in a world not conducive to
intelligent women who disobey authority.
The significance of Beth's several homes is not
surprising within the context of a Victorian novel. The
domestic space of the home is commonly considered the
woman's sphere, and within the home it has been the
woman's duty to ensure the moral and physical well-being
of the family. The man's workplace has conventionally
been outside of the house, and his job is to assure the
family's financial health. The woman's world is
insulated, protected from the variety of temptations
94
that men daily encounter. This division has allowed men
more freedom from moral duties than women; in fact,
novelists like Sarah Grand suggest that men are
expected, and often encouraged, to behave immorally
while away from home.
The relationship between moral behavior and women
originated with the desire of men to control w o m e n ’s
sexual activities. Charles Darwin, writing from a
biological and behavioral perspective, claims that
women's chastity is necessary because of male, not
female, attitudes:
As soon . . . as marriage, whether polygamous
or monogamous, becomes common, jealousy will
lead to the inculcation of female virtue; and
this being honored will tend to spread to the
unmarried females. How slowly it spreads to
the male sex we see at the present day.
(Descent 1.96)
Darwin here notes the tendency for monogamy to be
practiced less by men than by women, a focus of Grand's
message of moral reform within The Beth Book. Women, not
men, must learn to control their sexual behavior and
avoid conflict with their mates. In her essay "Literary
95
Paternity," Sandra M. Gilbert quotes Honore de Balzac:
"'woman's virtue is man's greatest invention'" (492).
The creation of the virtuous female by men is often
recognized by women even while they uphold this
construction. George Egerton's protagonist in "A Cross
Line" (1893) is amazed by man's "denseness" in blindly
following "the female idea he has created" (59). She
determines that men prefer lies to truth (64). Conduct
books written by men for women universalized the "female
idea." Nancy Armstrong explains that with the writing of
conduct books, men "transformed the female into the
bearer of moral norms" turning feminine "qualities" into
"techniques for regulating desire" (89). This desire to
control women, Gilbert claims, has led to the
development of the female character, not only within the
written pages of novels and conduct books, but also with
the writing of social laws that regulate women's literal
selves (492). It is this patriarchal control of women
that Grand attempts to alter within The Beth B o o k . In a
retort to her husband, Beth scorns male writers who
determine what good women "should" or "should not" know:
"You are still in the days of old Chavasse, who
expatiates in his 'Advice to a Wife' on the dangers of
96
men marrying unhealthy women, but says not a word of
warning to women on the risk of marrying unhealthy men"
(443). According to Gilbert, it is important that women
like Sarah Grand take up the pen to rewrite the female
character from a woman's perspective (494). It is
through this rewriting that women will finally be
educated, not regulated.1
Though a woman's responsibility is first to her
family and home, it became common among the more
affluent classes of Victorian women to spread their
ideals of moral purity to the less fortunate (Elston
272). Women helped with the poor; with children; with
animal-rights causes; or like Dickens' character Mrs.
Jellyby in Bleak House, with Christian charities for
Africans and other colonized people. Mary Ann Elston
recognizes that for some (she mentions Josephine Butler
and Francis Power Cobbe) the volunteer work was a means
of "extending women's influence to the public sphere,"
which the women claimed insured the safety of the
domestic sphere (272). Angelique Richardson calls "the
middle-class home" a "site of a profound contradiction"
because once a "private h aven," its "management was now
extending into a wider social context" (231). The moral
97
work of women is complicated by its natural connection
to the world outside of the home; the public service of
women overlaps with and brings the world of men into the
home while attempting to keep the home free from worldly
taint.
The spread of syphilis during the late nineteenth
century reinforced the importance of women's outside
involvement. Elaine Showalter writes that in previous
times— the Renaissance and the Restoration--syphilis was
considered, respectively, a disease of the spirit and of
the state, but in "fin-de-siecle English culture" it
became "a symbol of the disease in the family" (89) .
Military men, infected with syphilis, returned home to
pass on the disease to their wives and unborn children.
Sarah Grand's widely popular novel, The H ea ven ly Twins
(1893), illustrates the danger of women's sexual
ignorance, one that she considers a consequence of
growing up within the insulated confines of the home. In
The He avenly Twins, Edith Frayling marries an
aristocratic military man, Sir Mosley Menteith, whose
sexually promiscuous past is overlooked by her well-
meaning parents. Soon after the marriage, Edith becomes
ill with syphilis and gives birth to a sick child, who
98
is "old already, and exhausted with suffering" (289).
Edith dies from fulfilling the expectations set forth
for women in conduct books, from being an obedient woman
who follows her parents' and husband's commands. Grand
feels that women's "innocence" is a crime, and the
parents who allow their chaste daughters to marry men
who are not equally chaste are criminals. Her next
novel, The Beth Book, continues with the concept of
degeneration as related to the sexual double standard,
syphilis, and the Contagious Diseases A c t s . 2
The Contagious Diseases Acts, passed in 1864, 1866,
and 1869, were created to limit the spread of syphilis,
but also, as Elston writes, to control women's sexuality
by regulating prostitution (274).3 Women suspected of
being prostitutes were arrested and conducted to state-
controlled Lock Hospitals where they were examined for
venereal disease. If they were found to be sick, they
could be held as long as nine months in quarantine and
after release had to remain registered with medical
authorities and return for routine checkups (Mangum
165). Men suspected of having syphilis were left alone.
Teresa Mangum writes that an attempt was made in the
1860s to examine soldiers, "but the men became so angry
99
and resisted so violently that military leaders feared
desertion" (166). The focus on women as guilty and men
as less so came from the perception of men's sexual
desires as natural and uncontrollable, much like eating
and breathing. The prostitute's sexuality was not a
necessary biological urge but one calculated for
monetary gain. As a consequence, men were not held
accountable for their actions but women were (Mangum
166). The concern about syphilis at this time was
legitimate. Sally Ledger writes that in 1859 out of
every one-thousand men in the army, four hundred and
twenty two had syphilis. Not surprisingly, notes Ledger,
the Acts did not succeed in stopping the spread of
syphilis because the untreated men were still freely
infecting people (111).
Sexual promiscuity in women was not only considered
biologically unnatural but the source of venereal
disease. Mary Spongberg explains that the prostitute's
body was "defined in terms reserved for other health
problems, such as drains and sewers," so the connection
made between "the bodily discharges of the prostitute"
and miasma, the popularly held theory of disease as
emanating from drains, sewers, and other sites of foul
100
water, contributed to the belief that prostitutes were
guilty of spreading the disease while their male clients
were not (54) .4 Sexually promiscuous women infected men,
not the reverse (Spongberg 143). As a consequence of
these gender myths and the Contagious Diseases Acts
(hereafter abbreviated as CD A c t s ) , women merely
suspected of being prostitutes were charged with a crime
and forced to endure humiliating physical examinations.
Rumors of women being subjected to unnecessary medical
procedures--vivisection--while in the Lock Hospitals
also led to consternation among an ti vivisectionists.
The outrage about the humiliation endured by lower-
class women arrested for prostitution during enforcement
of the CD Acts spilled over into other medical
controversies of the time. People upset about the
vaccination laws were easily annoyed by the Acts, and
the antivivisectionists became inflamed about both the
CD Acts and compulsory vaccination. According to Richard
D. French, these groups banded together with a common
distrust of medical science:
All three saw themselves as arousing the basic
moral instincts of laymen against an arrogant
coalition of scientists, medical men, and
101
legislators, who were blindly following the
dictates of technique into an ethical cul de
sac, where beneficent ends failed to justify
horrid and repugnant means. (230)
The suspicion of the authoritative body that condoned
the moral double standard led to a movement against it,
and to many, the clearest violator of these particular
moral laws was the doctor who was held responsible for
the general breakdown in Victorian ideologies that
upheld middle-class values. Elston notes that
vivisection was destroying the certainty that "physical
health and moral order" were natural outcomes of
sanitarian practices (275). Vivisection symbolized the
new materialistic school of medicine that revealed
micro-organisms as the source of disease, not filth
(miasmas) or immoral behavior (promiscuous s e x ) . The
discoveries made by medical science slowly took control
out of the hands of the people: if sanitation and high
moral principles— the controllable aspects of life—
cannot keep one from becoming sick, then one must rely
on the doctor for one's health. As with the AIDS
epidemic today, people wanted to view syphilis as a
disease of immorality rather than one of disinterested
102
germs; one's behavior is one's own fault, and the
elimination of disease can thus be accomplished without
a disturbance of the status quo. In The Beth Book, Sarah
Grand, like other writers of the time, attempts to teach
the public about the immorality of the medical
profession in what French nicely summarizes as a
"struggle against professional solidarity, political
expediency, and bourgeois morality to bring issues of
health and medical practice out of the hospital, the
clinic--and dark corners of the Victorian psyche" (230) .
By doing so, she restructures social rules, making it
women's duty to purify the world outside of the home,
ensuring the safety of the domestic environment.5
Women working with the poor to teach them the
benefits of moral living were involved in a multitude of
social and medical issues. Nancy Armstrong explains that
the poverty and filthy, crowded conditions of the poor
in nineteenth-century Britain were perceived to be a
result of immorality rather than exhaustion and a lack
of money and time (171). Middle-class women thus
believed that their assistance could dramatically alter
people's lives. People like James Kay Shuttleworth (The
Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes
103
Employed In the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, 1832)
attempted to understand and control the chaos of poverty
by numbering and listing external details of p o v e r t y —
the unpaved streets, the garbage, the numbers of people
and rats--and as Armstrong notes, the act of listing
both creates and dissolves boundaries of control (171).
As with the writing of conduct books, complex social
conditions were given the illusion of control by
counting, itemizing, and listing, by organizing words on
a page. Prostitution also represented confusion,
disorder, and disease. The CD Acts targeted prostitutes
in an attempt to "control female sexuality" and thus
clean up the syphilis problem that was rapidly spreading
through the military (Rudacille 52). The relationship
between control and morality is a close one; moral
behavior is controlled behavior, and the ideal result of
control is mental and physical health. The perception of
oneself as morally superior to another reinforces the
illusion of control and distances one from the fear of
chaos, contamination, and disease.
Just as the crusade against the CD Acts was a moral
extension of women's work in the home, so was the
struggle against vivisection. In the antivivisection
104
movement, women formed more than half of the membership
of the Victoria Street Society and the RSPCA (Royal
Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals),
though men still held the positions of responsibility
(Elston 267). The actions of male doctors against women
during enforcement of the CD Acts and against animals
during vivisection created "the metaphor of medical
science, and medical practice on women, as rape" in
antivivisection literature: "Women were explicitly
invited to identify themselves with animals, as
potential victims of sexual assault by materialist
medical men" (Elston 279). Women were pictured, like the
vivisected animal, as helplessly strapped into the rack
on her/its back, legs splayed, at the mercy of the
doctor. The positional identification between female
patient and vivisected animal is reinforced by the
doctor's authority over the helpless female/animal.
Legally, horses, dogs, wives, children, servants, and
the like were the property of men, and a Victorian man
could abuse his "property" without outside
interference.6 This concept of having possession, or
control, over another encourages cruel behavior in cases
where it might not otherwise occur; the possessed is
105
somehow less deserving of respect because it isowned.
Gilbert notes that the man who writes the character of
woman (through rules, both moral and legal) is the
"owner/possessor of the subjects of his text" (489). As
such he controls these subjects.
In The Beth Book, Grand's protagonist Beth Caldwell
Maclure fights vivisection, the CD Acts, and the sexual
double standard within the space of marriage and the
home. Beth's struggle to maintain a virtuous life within
and outside of her domestic sphere places her in direct
conflict with her philandering, vivisecting, self-
absorbed husband Dan Maclure, a doctor in charge of a
local Lock Hospital. Beth attempts to live "properly"
with her immoral husband, but her behavior eventually
shifts from a desire to please him to a quest for moral
purpose outside of the home. Richardson notes that New
Woman Writers were interested in "grounding both the
body and sex roles in the flesh and blood of
evolutionary narrative," and Grand arms Beth with the
traditionally masculine weapons of logic and Darwinian
language in her combat of Dan (228).
106
II. Darwinian morality
Early in her marriage Beth's life is centered
around her home, yet the house she inhabits with Dan is
considered his space. The nature of marriage, as
portrayed by Grand, is that of the violation of a
woman's privacy, mind, and body. Space--architectural
and biological--becomes the domain of the male, and as
legal owner, he controls these areas. The woman's
ownership of the domestic sphere is not a legal but a
managerial one. Beth notes that although Dan "ha[s] his
consulting-room, a room called his laboratory, a
surgery, and a dressing-room, . . . she ha[s] literally
not a corner" (345-346). Out of psychological necessity,
Beth discovers a hidden attic room that she keeps secret
from Dan. Beth's room is furnished with her Aunt
Victoria's belongings, a symbol of her desire to do well
in the world, not financially but morally. In this room
Beth sews to repay the money borrowed by Dan from her
impoverished mother, reads to improve her mind, and
writes to help educate herself and others. It is from
this room that Beth observes Dan's infidelity, and it is
here that Beth escapes his constant prying and wearing
down of her principles. Dan's room— the laboratory— is
107
seen only once, and then when it holds the evidence of
his cruelty toward a helpless animal. Beth penetrates
Dan's space to deliver the animal from its pain, whereas
Dan invades Beth's space to satisfy his possessive
curiosity by reading her mail, stealing her money, and
rifling through her belongings. The room in which Beth
spends her time is an extension of Beth's moral center,
just as Dan's locked laboratory reflects his excessive
need for control.
In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin writes: "To
do good unto others— to do unto others as ye would they
should do unto you,— is the foundation-stone of
morality" (1.165). As with Beth, Darwin's perception of
morality is a combination of Christian doctrine and
Victorian science. Darwin defines "a moral being" as
"one who is capable of comparing his past and future
actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of
them" (Descent 1.88). The evolutionary purpose of
reflecting upon past actions is to ensure the continued
prosperity of the species. If a person behaves selfishly
one time, eating all of the food and not saving any for
his child, reflection on his child's hunger and
potential starvation is supposed to ensure a change in
108
behavior the next time food is available.
Beth, like Darwin, says that one's life must serve
the purpose of helping others, and as a child her
actions toward her mother and Aunt Victoria indicate her
selflessness. Beth fishes and hunts rabbits to feed her
hungry family and allows her inheritance to be used to
educate and keep her brother James at school. The fact
that Beth's hunting of rabbits is illegal— she poaches
on her Uncle James's land--indicates her priority of
moral over legal laws that protect wealthy landowners
but do not help people in need. The nurturing side of
Beth is also prominent when she later nurses Arthur
Brock through his sickness, spending all of her money on
his food and almost killing herself in the process. "For
G r a n d , " Richardson notes, "the higher the phase of human
development, the more self-sacrificing the l o v e , " a
Darwinian ideal that explains Beth's devotion to her
mother and Aunt and her self-denial during the time of
Arthur's illness (230). Beth's views of good literature
as morally instructive and her final career choice as
public speaker also illustrate the strong influence of a
social conscience at work.
Darwin states that "[a]s no man can practise the
1 09
virtues necessary for the welfare of his tribe without
self-sacrifice, self-command, and the power of
endurance, these qualities have been at all times highly
and most justly valued" (95). Though Darwin uses the
generic "man" in this sentence, Beth certainly exhibits
the "virtues" mentioned above, and, in fact, has been
criticized by recent feminists for giving too much of
herself.7 These qualities, "self-sacrifice, self-
command, and the power of endurance," are shown in The
Beth Book as womanly traits; the characteristics of
selfishness, indulgence, and impatience are displayed by
the male characters, like Beth's father, Uncle James,
brother Jim, husband Dan, and the dandy Al fred Cayley
Pounce. Most of the male characters, in fact, exhibit
moral behavior that falls under Darwin's category of
"lower rules" that "relate chiefly to the self ," or they
lack moral instincts altogether.8
Darwin divides moral laws into the "higher" and the
"lower": "The higher are founded on the social
instincts, and relate to the welfare of others . . . The
lower rules, . . . relate chiefly to self, and owe their
origin to public opinion" (Descent 100). Since morality
ensures the continued prosperity of a social group,
110
moral people are less inclined to be selfish. Having
been raised with a flirtatious father who expects his
comforts to be met while ignoring his wife's needs; a
wealthy uncle who pompously pretends to be superior as
he allows his near relations to starve; and a brother
who drinks, smokes, and is continually in debt while his
uneducated sisters are ragged and hungry; Beth does not
understand why men should be respected more than women.
Beth's social conscience is thus formed by her strong
moral views in a society that places men above women,
and her later life is devoted to exposing the immorality
of these illogical rules and helping women to be
emotionally and physically healthy.
Grand may have been responding directly to
prejudice against women's moral judgment when she wrote
The Beth Book. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso
(1895) wrote that the average woman was "'deficient in
moral sense, and possessed of slight criminal
tendencies, such as vindictiveness, jealousy, envy,
malignity, which are usually neutralized by less
sensibilities and less intensity of passion'" (qtd. in
Spongberg 167). Darwin, however, describes feminine
characteristics as closely mirroring the moral. With
I l l
their children, women show the capacity for "greater
tenderness and less selfishness" than men, and
"therefore," claims Darwin, "it is likely that she
should often extend [these attitudes] towards her
fellow-creatures" (Descent 326). Because, as Grand
points out, women's upbringing did not include a
practical education as did men's, women were doomed to
behave as though they had no sense, opening the door for
men like Lombroso to think them mentally inferior. These
beliefs, however, are both created by men and further
allow them to control the community's moral rules,
resulting in the obvious patriarchal bias in laws like
the CD Acts.
The authorities who opened Lock Hospitals under the
auspices of the CD Acts in an attempt to control
syphilis were considered immoral by many Victorians,
chiefly women. From a Darwinian perspective, the good of
the community was not served by persecuting lower-class
women and leaving infected men to spread disease. In
fact, the protagonist in Egerton's New Woman story "A
Cross Line" notes that women "care nothing for laws,
nothing for systems" but are primarily concerned with
"instinct" (63). Instincts have evolved to serve the
112
greater good, whereas the CD Acts support the welfare of
a chosen class and gender of a community, not the whole
population. Public outcry from social crusaders like
Josephine Butler and writers like Sarah Grand led to the
abolition of the Acts in 1886.9 Beth's husband Dan
Maclure, as the doctor in charge of the Lock Hospital,
is himself one of those medical men who support the
humiliation of powerless women. Grand places the immoral
behavior of Dan beside the very moral intentions of Beth
to illustrate that women not only possess moral sense,
in many cases theirs surpasses men's.
Darwin considers morality to be a trait exhibited
only in social animals: "the moral sense is
fundamentally identical with the social instincts"
(Descent 1.98). Social animals are strongly influenced
by the will of the group and protect and assist each
other to insure the survival of the entire community.
Social animals are also affected by the praise and
condemnation of the group. This psychological influence
is the force behind the success of conduct books and
laws that regulate human behavior; social animals desire
praise and acceptance from their community, and
according to Darwin, this praise motivates people to
113
moral action (Descent 1.82). If, as Darwin claims, all
social animals exhibit some form of moral behavior, then
morality is a natural pattern that exists for the
purpose of the common good. Immoral behavior— behavior
that harms the well-being of the group or species— would
thus be unnatural. Yet the clarity of concepts like
moral and immoral, natural and unnatural, is muddied by
social expectations. Though moral conduct includes an
obvious impulse toward survival in the procuring and
sharing of food and shelter or caring for the young,
within certain social structures rules that regulate
some patterns of behavior are less comprehensible.
Obviously, the spread of venereal disease is
biologically harmful in any society, but sexual
promiscuity may not be. The regulation of women's sexual
behavior is a socially constructed moral law, not one
created by nature.
Doctors who participated in the practice of
vivisection and supported mandatory vaccinations were
accused of immorality because of their determination to
cure disease, an act that was thought unnatural both in
its offense to a higher power and in its interruption of
the evolutionary chain that allows the race to progress
114
through the death of the weak and survival of the
strong. Medicine thus interferes with the laws of nature
that ensure the health of the species. People feared
possible advances in medicine that would remove the
effects of a person's pre- and extra-marital sexual
activity. Diseases like syphilis that were once fatal
are now easily cured by antibiotics, and, as a
consequence, contracting syphilis through a sexual
relationship no longer bears the moral stigma that an
incurable STD like AIDS does. Similarly, birth control
prevents pregnancy, so women are not socially hindered
by an unwanted pregnancy from having premarital sex.
Scientific medicine was perceived as a force that, if
unstopped, might completely alter the present natural
and moral system. New Woman writers like Sarah Grand who
believed in biological determinism fought the advances
of scientists and spread the evolutionary discourse out
of a concern for the future of the human race.
III. Vivisection: science with purpose
One of the most vivid scenes in The Beth Book is
Beth's discovery of a still-living, vivisected terrier
in her husband's laboratory. Beth is alone in the house
115
when she hears a creature crying in "what seemed to be a
human voice" (436). The sound appears to be coming from
the laboratory, the door of which is usually locked, but
to her surprise the key has (conveniently) been left in
the door, so she enters, candle flickering in her
trembling hand. Beth thinks she hears the crying from
beneath a calico sheet on the examining table, so she
"light[s] the gas, put[s] down her candle," lifts the
sheet,
and s[ees] a sight too sickening for
description. The little black-and-tan terrier,
the bonny wee thing which had been so blithe
and greeted her so confidently only the
evening before, lay there, fastened into a
sort of frame in a position which alone must
have been agonising. But that was not all.
(437)
What "was not all" is never clearly described aside from
"these horror s," but a reader familiar with vivisection
would assume that the terrier had been cut open and was
in the process of being vivisected when Dan Maclure went
out for the night. This scene resembles that of the
vivisection of the puma in H.G. Wells's The Island of
116
Doctor Moreau (1896); the terrier, like the puma, cries
in a human voice, indicating the biological and
emotional link between human and non-human creatures so
recently made public by Charles Darwin. The relationship
between women and animals and the vivisector's perverse
cruelty to each is also evoked in this scene: Moreau's
puma was female, and Beth is the one who, like the
terrier, suffers at Dan's hands. She later tells Dan,
"'I know that every woman who submits in such matters is
not only a party to her own degradation, but connives at
the degradation of her whole sex'" (439). Like the CD
Acts that targeted women, vivisection is a crime against
the "whole [female] sex." As such, it is immoral,
"degradation" not being conducive to a community's we ll
being .
After finding the dog, Beth puts it out of its pain
by killing it with a drug from Dan's supply. Unlike
women in other antivivisection novels who become
hysterical or die of brain disease after witnessing a
vivisection,10 Beth is startled into a clearer sense of
her own moral principles: though "her eyes were haggard
and her teeth were clenched, . . . she felt stronger for
a brave determination, and more herself than she had
117
done for many months" (437) . She tells Dan that "[she]
will not allow" him to experiment on animals within her
house again, and "if [he] dare[s] to attempt it . . .,
[she] will call in the townsfolk to see [him] at [his]
brutal work" (440) . Grand is rewriting the formulaic
antivivisection novel to show the vivisector as an
unnatural man while still allowing the female character
a display of strength, dignity, and the will to survive.
The vivisector— Dan Maclure— is not the strong,
destructive figure commonly portrayed in antivivisection
novels but is a weak and unmanly character.
Beth and Dan have fundamental philosophical and
moral differences that lead to the dissolution of their
marriage soon after the death of the terrier. However,
throughout The Beth Book Grand is attempting to show the
larger social issues that affect not only Beth but all
women. Her choice of a vivisecting physician in charge
of a Lock Hospital for Beth's husband presents her with
the opportunity to illustrate the effect of degrading
medical practices like vivisection that occur within the
confines of a woman's marriage and home.11 The language
that Beth uses illustrates her concern with the
philosophical and social consequences of vivisection
118
that are more important than the personal ones. For
instance, when arguing with Dan after the vivisection,
she refers to "a woman" or "women" rather than "me" or
"I" as victimized by vivisection: "every woman who
submits in such matters. . ." (439), "a woman does not
marry to have her heart wrung, her health destroyed, her
life made wretched by anything that is preventable"
(439-440), and "I cannot understand any but unsexed
women associating with vivisectors" (441). Beth's
language universalizes her experience, removing it from
a purely personal viewpoint within a marital dispute and
giving it a calm, logical tone of authority. It is not
only Beth's distaste for Dan's work that makes him a
monster; none but "unsexed," and thus unnatural, women
make suitable wives for vivisectors, and by association
one m ay conclude that vivisectors themselves are
unnatural.
The home, as the site of femininity and morality,
is not the proper space for a vivisector to reside; the
vivisector does not make a fit husband. Beth declares to
Dan soon after her discovery of the terrier, "'Had I
known you were a vivisector, I should not only have
refused to marry you, I should have declined to
119
associate with you'" (441). Richardson explains that
Grand was interested in teaching women their
responsibility in choosing biologically fit husbands to
father their children and that a woman's personal
happiness was insignificant when compared with her role
as wife and mother. Beth's habit of speaking of her
experience as universal, one affecting all women,
illustrates her awareness that she, as an individual, is
not important. Her husband represents the patriarchal
authority that attempts to control and define women, and
thus her marriage to him is a threat to all women. It is
this immoral male control that Beth devotes her life to
fighting, and the weapons she uses are the patriarchy's
own: logic, dissection, and vivisection.
After she discovers that Dan is a vivisector, Beth
no longer views him through a haze of optimism but
critically, as if under a microscope. She notices that
"everything he d[oes] [i]s an offense, ... a source of
irritation" (444). She wonders how "he c[an] eat with
hands so pollu ted ," and when he gives her an orange
segment at dessert, she leaves it untouched on her plate
(445). Coral Lansbury accuses Beth of "ha[ving] become
the vivisector" of Dan; she notices a "cool detachment"
120
in Beth's examination of her husband: "'Beth found
herself studying him continually with a curious sort of
impersonal interest; he was a subject that repelled her,
but from which, nevertheless, she could not tear herself
away'" (Lansbury 148, Grand 445). Beth herself practices
the method of scientific experimentation to cut through
Dan's "cant" and "bluster" and understand what lies
within.
Once she has begun vivisecting Dan, Beth continues
to apply her method of critical observation to others.
During a visit with the Kilroys, Mr. Kilroy sympathizes
with her for having to tolerate Alfred Cayley Pounce's
"platitudes." Angelica disagrees with his sympathy,
stating:
"He is merely an intellectual exercise for
Beth. She watches the workings of his mind
quite dispassionately, draws him out with
little airs and graces, and then adjusts him
under the microscope. It interests her to
dissect the creature. When she has studied him
thoroughly, she will cast him out, as a
worthless specimen." (461-462)
At Beth's "twinge of conscience,"— for what Angelica
121
says is true--Angelica proclaims: '"It is vivisection.'"
She continues, "'the scientific mind is a mystery to me,
and I shall never understand how you have the patience
to do it"' (462) .
Beth herself is aware of her scientific me thod of
deduction. After having not seen Pounce since her youth,
Beth is curious to discover what a weak individual he
has grown to be. During a discussion, he condescendingly
points out that her "point of view" regarding politics
is "feminine." She replies, "'Yes . . . and a scientific
method. We go from the particular to the general, and
only draw broad conclusions when we have collected our
facts in detail'" (451). Beth is twisting the stereotype
of female thought as based on emotion to that of reason;
only male prejudice imagines otherwise. Pounce, trained
to embrace stereotypes, prefers to imagine himself as
logical and Beth as emotional. Grand, of course, is
illustrating the use of the scientific method in a moral
context (Beth) as opposed to an immoral one (Dan). Beth
gains knowledge without hurting her "victim," whereas
Dan destroys the dog during his experiment. Beth's
experiments enable her to live with a better
understanding of human nature, whereas Dan's, according
122
to Beth and other antivivisectionists, are useless
(440) .
Beth also employs the scientific method on herself,
dissecting her feelings so as to understand them. After
discovering that she was ignored by Angelica and Mrs.
Orton Beg because of Dan's position at the Lock
Hospital, she "picked to pieces the griefs they brought
upon her, dissected them, and moralised upon them; and,
in so doing, forgot the personal application" (410) .
Grand uses, in the above quote, the words "dissected"
and "moralised" in the same sentence, and Beth's linking
of the scientific method with moral purpose is repeated
in The Beth Book. The scientific method allows Beth to
analyze people in such a way as to broaden her
perspective rather than becoming stuck in a certain
pattern of thought and behavior: she learns from her
dissections. According to Beth, "'all things are always
in a state of growth or decay; and conservatism is a
state of decay'" (413). Evolution is the state of
growth, and the scientific method is clearly shown as a
catalyst for Beth's personal evolution. Like Darwin,
Grand is assured that evolution is heading in a
positive--thus moral--direction (Descent 1.104).
123
Unlike characters in most antivivisection
literature, Beth is not portrayed as distrusting
science: besides being friends with a moral doctor, Sir
George Galbraith, and telling Dan that "doctors" are
different from "vivisectors" (441), she cites scientific
evidence when it suits her purpose (477) . Beth relies on
science and scientific authority as the source of her
argument's evidence, but her argument is always rooted
in an anti-materialist concept of morality.12 In
discussing her philosophy of medicine with Dan, Beth
accuses him of lacking "honest intention" and of
"be[ing] content merely to treat effects" as opposed to
"causes" of disease; she wants to "hear more of
prevention and less of wonderful cures" (441-442) .
Beth's desire for Dan to "strike at causes" echoes the
wish of the public for doctors to preach and practice
morality and sanitation. If doctors taught people to
live clean lives with good, moderate diets, exercise,
and self control, then perhaps their "showy
operation[s]" would not be necessary (442). However,
just because a doctor preaches doesn't mean the patient
will alter his behavior. Military men knew that sexual
relations with prostitutes could very well result in
124
disease, but they continued to visit them anyway.
When arguing that doctors should advise men to be
chaste so as to avoid syphilis, Beth says to Dan, "you
are at variance with Nature. Your whole endeavor is to
thwart h e r , " because Dan feels that curing disease is as
important as preventing it (442). Beth's statement to
Dan is shared by many who felt that science is
unnatural— is "thwart[ing]" the laws of nature and the
good of mankind— and because unnatural, frightening. The
vivisector's indifference to suffering and his passion
to control biology were considered arrogant, an attempt
to play God. To Beth, the practice of teaching people
how to be chaste and clean— "pure" and "purity" are
words often repeated by Grand--will ensure the health of
the strong, and those who are unable to survive are best
dead: "'By the reproduction of the unfit, the strength,
the beauty, the morality of the race is undermined, and
with them its best chances of happiness'" (442) . To
Beth, the science taught by Darwin and his cousin
Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, is the best way
to ensure a healthy future.13
125
IV. Eugenics, a "moral duty"
Francis Galton, the man who coined the term
"eugenics" in the nineteenth century, was, according to
Stephen Jay Gould, "fascinat[ed] with numbers"; he
"believed that, with sufficient labor and ingenuity,
anything might be measured, and that measurement is the
primary criterion of a scientific study" (107) . In a
manner reminiscent of Shuttleworth, Galton set out to
measure humans and their behavior, including subjective
qualities such as beauty and the "efficacy of prayer"
(Inquiries 107). In his zeal for classifying and
controlling the evolution of the human race, Galton
established the terms "fit" and "unfit" as a standard
for eugenics; the "fit" should survive and prosper, and
the "unfit" should be discouraged from perpetuating the
s pe c i e s .
According to Richardson, many New Woman writers put
biological determinism at the center of their "social
and political agenda[s]," and this is certainly true of
The Beth Book (228) . Beth decries the medical
profession's attempt to cure diseases like measles,
smallpox, and scarlet fever when syphilis, "the worst
disease to which we are liable," is not being prevented
126
by doctors preaching celibacy (442). Beth's obsession
with syphilis is due to its (preventable) sexual
transmission and insidious onset; one may have syphilis
yet be asymptomatic for years. Although her dismissal of
smallpox and scarlet fever seems harsh,14 her reasoning
is located in the eugenic notion of biological
determinism:
"Nature decrees the survival of the fittest;
you exercise your skill to preserve the
unfittest, and stop there--at the beginning of
your responsibilities, as it seems to me. Let
the unift who are with us live, and save them
from suffering when you can, by all means; but
take pains to prevent the appearance of any
more of them. By the reproduction of the
unfit, the strength, the beauty, the morality
of the race is undermined, and with them its
best chances of happiness." (442)
As already noted, Beth's use of the words "fit" and
"unfit" comes directly from Francis Galton, and her
evolutionary perspective of disease echoes that of
Darwin in The Descent of Man:
There is reason to believe that vaccination
127
has preserved thousands, who from a weak
constitution would formerly have succumbed to
small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised
societies propagate their kind. No one who has
attended to the breeding of domestic animals
will doubt that this must be highly injurious
to the race of man. It is surprising how soon
a want of care, or care wrongly directed,
leads to the degeneration of a domestic race;
but excepting in the case of man himself,
hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his
worst animals to breed. (1.168)
Darwin's reference to one's "worst animals" is much the
same as Galton and Beth's use of the word "unfit." The
recognition of evolutionarily established hereditary
characteristics brought forth a new set of moral
obligations and anxieties, especially in relation to
medicine. Is one obliged to help eliminate disease and
thus risk overpopulation and the perpetuation of the
weak? Or is one morally responsible for ensuring the
natural process of evolution, allowing the weak to die
so the strong can perpetuate the race? 15
Galton's idea of eugenics is rooted in Darwin's
128
theory of natural selection. It is, simply put,
selective breeding, like that used with domestic
animals. Galton uses the words "fit" and "unfit" to
classify those who should be allowed to breed. He
defines the "fit" as those who "[bear] the signs of
membership of a superior race," such as "longevity" and
the families' ability to thrive (as "defined or inferred
by the successive occupations of its several male
members in the previous generation, and of the two
grandfathers") (Inquiries 212). Deborah Rudacille
concisely clarifies Galton's definition of "fit" as "the
wealthy, the successful, the beautiful, and the
intelligent," and the "unfit" as "the destitute, the
physically weak, [and] the mentally ill" (82).
Richardson writes that Galton introduced a
"biologization of . . . class" and that the goal of
"Galtonian eugenics . . . was to regulate population by
altering the balance of class in society" (235) . Class
clearly plays an important role in determining who is
suitable for reproduction, and Galton ignores economic
factors that affect longevity and success, like the poor
nutrition that results from poverty and the good
education and work habits that privileged children
1 29
acquire from their parents. As Rudacille notes, Galton's
beliefs "appealed to the upper classes of [his] day,"
who "equated success with virtue" and both to biology
(82). Like Galton, Beth herself believes that the race's
future health and happiness lies in the application of
"scientific principles" to the human population
(Rudacille 82). Galton claims that the "religious
significance" of evolutionary theory "imposes a new
moral duty" on those who "endeavour to further
evolution" (Inquiries 220), and Beth's debates with
Maclure and Pounce fulfill the rhetorical expression of
this duty.
In his book, The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay
Gould claims that Darwin "approached hereditary
arguments with strong suspicion," and when comparing
Darwin's careful language with Galton's direct rhetoric,
one can sense his caution (109). For instance, Darwin
believes "virtuous tendencies" to be "more or less
strongly inherited" (102); "more or less" is a phrase
that indicates flexibility, not certainty. Compare this
language with the confident opening line of Galton's
Natural H e r e d i t y : "I have no patience with the
hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, .
130
. . that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the
sole agencies in creating differences between boy and
boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral
effort" (36). Darwin's differences with Galton become
even more clear in the following passage regarding the
possible path of evolution:
Admitting for the moment that virtuous
tendencies are inherited, it appears probable,
at least in such cases as chastity,
temperance, humanity to animals, &c., that
they become first impressed on the mental
organisation through habit, instruction, and
example, continued during several generations
in the same family, and in a quite subordinate
degree, or not at all, by the individuals
possessing such virtues, having succeeded best
in the struggle for life. (Descent 1.102-103)
Darwin theorizes that moral behavior is established and
continued because of its effect on survival and
prosperity, so it becomes an inherited rather than a
learned behavior when those who practice it are more
successful than others. He does harbor some doubts about
his theory because of customs observed in other cultures
131
(Descent 1.103). He also notes that with proper
education and discipline, even the less privileged will
evolve into the more successful. Darwin acknowledges the
differences between people that Galton notes but isn't
as sure as Galton that these are all the result of
biological heredity. Gould quotes Darwin as responding
to Galton's book, Hereditary Genius, as follows: "'You
have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I
have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did
not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard
work'" (qtd. in Gould 109). There certainly are points
on which the two men agree--Grand quotes Darwin in an
epigraph at the beginning of Book I of The Hea ven ly
Twins, "I am inclined to agree with Francis Galton in
believing that education and environment produce only a
small effect on the mind of anyone, and that most of our
qualities are innate"— but this quote is taken out of
context, missing Darwin's explanation and
qualifications. Though their ideas overlap, Darwin and
Galton differ in approach and conclusions.
The purpose of eugenics, to improve the race by
culling out the weak and inferior members, makes it
vulnerable to the same immoral behavior it attempts to
132
eliminate from the race. The middle-class
characteristics that Grand and Galton valued may not be
those that will ensure the species' continued success.
In The Origin of Species, Darwin notes that by breeding
animals for particular purposes that suit man, the
evolution of the animal is disrupted (65). Darwin
worries about the consequence of any evolutionary
alteration, whether it be achieved through vaccination
or planned breeding, that disrupts the laws of nature.
New Woman writers who favored eugenics were often
opposed to scientific developments like vaccination, yet
the two techniques are equally natural and equally
"thwart" evolution. Vaccination makes use of the body's
defense system that evolved to create antibodies to kill
germs. The injection of a virus into the body is the
only unnatural aspect of a vaccination. Vaccination and
eugenics are both natural methods made unnatural by
human interference. If interfering with nature is
immoral and unnatural when practicing vaccination, then
eugenics is guilty of the same charge.
Moral laws are rules that, ideally, are continually
being adjusted to protect the largest number of people,
including the powerless, like dogs, the poor, children,
1 33
and women. Without this scrutiny, it is possible for
powerful individuals to twist scientific theories to
justify personal ideologies. Gould speaks of "evolution
and quantification" as forming an "unholy alliance" and
leading to "'scientific racism" in the late nineteenth
century (106). Not long after Darwin's death, Adolf
Hitler perverted Darwin's theories of natural selection
and Galton's eugenics in an attempt to create a "pure"
breed of Germans— the Aryan race. Under Nazi law,
Germans with disabilities were euthanized (about sixty
thousand were killed), German women of mixed heritage
(not Aryan) were sterilized, and millions of non-Aryan
people, primarily of Jewish descent, were exterminated
(Rudacille 84-85). Rudacille cites the work of several
scholars whose research has shown the eugenics policies
enforced during the Nazi occupation were "a natural
outgrowth of the science of the day , " the scientific
racism mentioned by Gould (86).16 During the Nazi
regime, Hitler outlawed animal vivisection because he
felt it was "an example of Jewish cruelty to animals"
(Rudacille 81). He considered vivisection a product of
the "mechanized Jewish mind" (81). The irony is obvious;
Hitler himself created an immense mechanistic industry
134
to torture, vivisect, and slaughter Jews. Because of
this irony, Rudacille questions the Victorian belief
that cruelty to animals degrades people; what if "an
elevation in the moral status of animals inevitably
result[s] in a degradation in the moral status of human
beings?" (89-90). If one accepts that humans are
animals, then the possibility exists to breed humans
like animals and to rid society of weak or violent or
unwanted humans by euthanizing them (90). Although later
in the twentieth century eugenics became associated with
racist and. classist ideologies and fell out of favor,
eugenics in the nineteenth century was considered an
ideal solution to social problems, many of which were
believed to be biological in origin. Galton envisioned
eugenics as occurring naturally over several
generations; the accelerated method of population
control enforced by Hitler was not Galton's vision of
the future.17
The obvious difficulty with eugenics is that a fair
definition of "fit" or "unfit" will never be possible to
reach and will always be tainted by political,
religious, ethnic, or other cultural biases. In her
novel M i n d of M y Mi n d (1977), Octavia E. Butler explores
135
eugenics within a futuristic, supernatural context. The
hero of the novel, a man named Doro, has supernatural
powers resulting from a mutation that occurred when he
was born four-thousand years ago. Doro can shape-change
by "eating" or entering another person's body, and he is
telepathic; he knows where "his" people are and what
they are thinking. Doro has spent his long life
collecting other mutants like himself and conducting a
breeding program, "and behind him he had an untold
number of failures, dangerous or only pathetic, which he
had destroyed as casually as other people slaughtered
cattle" (9). Most of Doro's offspring suffer from their
hybrid physiology; they have some perceptory abilities,
but cannot control them. Many are mentally ill and abuse
alcohol and drugs. None is a good parent. Doro's
experiments finally result in a girl, Mary Larkin, who
is truly exceptional. She weaves the mindwaves of Doro's
children together into a strong, telepathic web and,
with the help of the others, destroys Doro, ending his
cruel eugenics program.
D o r o 1s goal is to create more people who are like
him; he views himself as the ideal in human evolution.
Yet when his new breed comes together an evolutionary
137
vulnerability.
V. Degeneration
Although Dan Maclure is portrayed as an immoral
vivisector, Grand's portrait of his character differs
from that of other fictional vivisectors. Dan is not
antisocial or asexual like D r s . Moreau or Benjulia. In
fact, he enjoys both society and women to a fault: he
overindulges. He (ioes not spend all of his time in the
laboratory fulfilling his passion for science, nor is he
particularly interested in the pursuit of knowledge. Dan
is motivated to work because he likes money; he runs the
Lock Hospital because it provides him with a lucrative
position (326). Nor does Dan look like a stereotypical
vivisector. In Heart and Science, Dr. Benjulia's
physically grotesque body marks his moral deficiencies.
In The Beth Book, however, Dan Maclure is described
quite differently. From the first time Beth meets him
she notices his "glossy black hair" and "bright
complexion": "'A woman with as much color would have
been accused of painting'" (257). Dan also pays
particular attention to his clothes and "'looks neat to
the point of nattiness, which is finical in a man'"
136
and cultural shift occurs; those with telepathic powers,
now united, control those without, the "mutes." The
mutes serve the telepaths, and the telepaths completely
control society, thinking that the mutes are happier
within the new structure because all difficult choices
are made for them. Butler's novel highlights her
philosophy of "hierarchical thinking": humans are flawed
because of the combination of intelligence and an
obsession with categorizing others hierarchically, quite
similar to Galton with his passion for quantification.
According to Butler, a black woman, it is the human
propensity to think hierarchically that has led to the
great damage inflicted on all living creatures and on
the planet. Hierarchical thinking led to Hitler and the
Holocaust; hierarchical thinking justified the
vivisection of animals and certain humans; hierarchical
thinking has led intelligent people to think that
disease sprang from women and the poor; and hierarchical
thinking has led vivisectors to label antivivisectors as
"hysterical" and antivivisectors to call vivisectors
unnatural and immoral monsters. Imagining that one is
different or somehow better than others allows one to
distance oneself from the recognition of one's human
138
(323). Dan is vain about his looks, with a habit of
gazing into the mirror over the mantlepiece and
smoothing his mustache as he and Beth are talking,
creating an impression that his mind is elsewhere (341,
395). Dan's clear complexion and red cheeks do not
suggest the indifferent, gloomy character of Benjulia,
so it might seem as though Grand is attempting to
portray Maclure as less monstrous than the usual
vivisector. However, when Dan's appearance is considered
within the social context of Victorian anxiety about
sexual degeneration introduced by Grand through
references to the CD Acts and the syphilis epidemic, his
pretty coloring and curly hair indicate that he is
morally imperfect: he is effeminate.
Sarah Grand, according to Richardson, felt that
"effeminate men" were dangerous, "threaten[ing] the
fabric of nation and family alike" (243) . The
"effeminate" male was considered among the "unfit"
believed to be degenerating the English race. In The
Beth Book, Beth's definition of "unfit" is never clearly
delineated, yet her preferences are clear. Beth deplores
vain and selfish people like Dan, and since Grand shows
a close link between the morally and physically weak,
139
Beth's personal distaste becomes objective fact: the
weak are also the "unfit." Beth's instinctive ability to
distinguish between the "fit" and "unfit" indicates her
own fitness. Richardson writes that eugenists considered
women as "biologically designed to be morally superior"
whereas "men were biologically designed for immorality"
(240). Consequently, Beth's instincts about Dan
originate with her hereditary ability to distinguish the
moral from the immoral.
Since morality was believed to be hereditary,
certain types of people were more likely to suffer from
degeneration than others. Hamilton notes that in The
H e avenly Twins, Grand stigmatizes Major Colquohoun, an
Irishman, and Sir Mosley Menteith, an aristocrat, not
only for their sexually active pasts and for Menteith's
syphilis but also for their membership in "problematic
racial and class groups" (73). However, Dan is not
situated within the typically problematic groups. Unlike
Menteith, Dan does not carry the physical traits of
syphilis and is, as Uncle James smugly points out, not
an aristocrat but a member of the British middle class
(338). Grand portrays Dan's degeneration as a result of
his unprincipled and thoughtless behavior. Like Beth's
140
father and brother, Dan relies on alcohol and tobacco,
stimulants listed by Max Nordau in his 1892 book
Degeneration as symptoms of degeneration (34). Dan often
loses his cool when he and Beth talk, and he reverts to
tears when he thinks that doing so will manipulate Beth
and grant him his wishes (407). Dan's unprincipled and
emotional behavior contrasts with Beth's control and
logic; he displays' the "confusingly gendered bod y of the
decadent male" that Hamilton describes as "signal[ing] a
fear about the decline and extinction of the race
through syphilis, hereditary illnesses, and sterility"
(Hamilton 67). Though Dan and Beth both appear to be
healthy, they remain childless after several years of
marriage, an indication of the "sterility" or confusion
of effeminate men noted by Hamilton, and thus another
indication of Dan's "unfit" status. Dan is described
well by Nordau as a man who does not "comprehend his
relation to other men and the universe, and to
appreciate properly the part he has to play in the
aggregate of social institutions" (257). Dan is like a
child who desires constant attention and gratification,
yet as an adult this irresponsible behavior is
counterproductive to the well-being of the society.
141
Beth and Dan's disagreement about literature
further adds to his moral portrait. Beth and Sir George
Galbraith agree that writing should be instructive and
leave the reader with a moral lesson. They like the
English writers who are "rich in thought" (367). Dan, on
the other hand, detests English authors who are "long-
winded"; he prefers the French, who write about "real
life" ("sexuality, you mean," answers Galbraith) (366).
Showalter notes that in the late nineteenth century, "in
France . . . male writers had become obsessed with the
idea of syphilis and madness as the symptoms and the
stigmata of creative genius" (91). To the moral English
writers like Grand, the French writers' open treatment
of sexuality, their interest in style over content, and
the twisted attitude of imagining "syphilitic insanity"
as "creative genius" rather than "a virtually complete
perversion of moral sense," indicate their decadence
(Showalter 91). Richardson writes that, according to
Grand, there was "no better example of degenerate
literature, and its corrupting influence, than the
French novel" (243). Dan, then, is immoral not only
because of his association with the Lock Hospital, his
practice of vivisection, and his brutal treatment of
142
Beth, but also because he is effeminate and decadent.
Degeneration was considered a biological problem,
one inherited from the family. As mentioned earlier,
certain types of people--aristocrats, the Irish,
geniuses, and alcoholics— were more likely than others
to suffer from degeneracy. Eugenics was one solution to
decadence, and women were expected to choose husbands
not because they were romantically or passionately
attracted to them but out of a social obligation to the
future of the species. Because women were morally
superior to men, they were expected to know "good" men
from the others. In The Heavenly Twins, Evadne can tell
at a glance that Menteith is "a dreadful man" (232), and
Beth, too, learns to instinctively distinguish between
moral men like Sir George Galbraith and degenerates like
Dan Maclure or Alfred Cayley Pounce. New Woman stories
like Menie Muriel Dowie's Gallia (1895) portray the
selfless woman who sets aside her own desires for the
good of the species. In this book, Gallia refuses to
marry the man she loves and instead chooses for her
husband a more common figure of a man: he is the rather
dull, middle-class, British male touted by New Woman
writers as the ideal father of the future English race.
143
Similarly, in Egerton's "A Cross Line," the protagonist
meets a man who is "like" her while married to a kind
but dull man who understands his "idea" of her (62, 59) .
Thinking only of her unborn child, she hangs a white
cloth— future baby clothes— on a bush to signal her
rejection of the man she has befriended (62). Richardson
notes that eugenists believed "the flesh should submit
to the spirit in order to contribute to racial progress;
pleasure is overshadowed and undercut by the imperative
of (re)production" (230). In both Dowie's novel and
Egerton's story, the thought of future children gives
the female characters the strength and purpose to
continue their intellectually incompatible marriages.
Although in The Beth Book there are no children
born to Dan and Beth, Grand believed that women should
determine the future of the population: "'Men have not
managed to regulate either the population or the social
question at all satisfactorily, and it would be well to
give us a chance at trying what we can do'" (qtd. in
Richardson 237). The novel does focus on Beth's
successful effort to free herself from a morally
degrading marriage and ends with the man of her choice
riding toward her on a white horse. Eugenic novels,
according to Richardson, "borrowed and transformed the
language of Darwinian sexual selection," and as she
evolves Beth selects a more desirable mate, Arthur Bock,
than the one who was chosen for her when she was
sixteen, Dan Maclure (239). Darwin notes that in most
animal species females choose their mates, but he
believed humans to be an exception to this pattern
(Descent 2.371). New Woman writers like Grand chose to
rewrite Darwin's interpretation of sexual selection, one
that was created by the social laws of men, not nature.
In fact, as Richardson notes, eugenists perceived men's
control "over sexual selection . . . as the major cause
of race pollution." (240). Sexual selection by the
female was clearly the solution to degeneration; women
who chose husbands with the eugenic model in mind were
shaping the future of humanity.
In the antivivisection novel, vivisectors are
portrayed as men who cannot be proper husbands to moral
women, and in most novels the wives are destroyed by
their association with vivisectors. Doctors are
portrayed by antivivisection writers as arrogant
creatures, taking the laws of nature into their own
hands and attempting to alter or even create life
145
themselves. Yet writers who create fictional characters
like the vivisector also possess authority. Grand alters
the structure of power so that Beth becomes stronger
with time, even within the confines of marriage, and
Dan, ostracized by the community because of his work at
the Lock Hospital, suffers from his position of power.
The characters' fates are just, according to Grand's
philosophy: Beth succeeds as the "fit" naturally do, and
Dan's "unfitness" leads to loss of wife and job. Beth
refuses to be confined within the home, which Grand
argues is not a safe environment for women married to
vivisectors, and instead becomes successfully involved
in the public sphere. Beth's decision to leave Dan to

,1
find a real home o-f her own further subverts the
traditional ending to a domestic, albeit vivisection,
novel. Beth's ability to survive in a time of novels
that portray wives of vivisectors perishing and wives
who leave husbands as suffering creates a new model for
the fictional heroine. The Beth Book's ending-as-a-
beginning (sunrise, glowing reviews of Beth's first
public speaking engagement, and Arthur's silhouette
appearing on the horizon [527]) is appropriate for the
ongoing debate that occurs within its pages, one that
146
considers the sexual selection of mates as the
responsibility of women, not men. The Beth Book ends
with promise for the future, one that includes the
possibility of a healthy marriage and children.
147
Notes
1. In Grand's The Heavenly Twins, Angelica tells her
twin Diavolo, "'there is no law . . . either to protect
us or avenge us. That is because men made the law for
themselves, and that is why women are fighting for the
right to make laws too'" (307).
2. Although written a decade after the CD Acts were
repealed, Teresa Mangum notes that The Beth Book was
published during the same year that there was talk of
reinstating the Contagious Diseases Acts in England and
India (167).
3. Later, in 1888, Jack the Ripper prowled the poverty-
stricken East End of London in what might have been a
one-man attempt to regulate prostitution, murdering
women with a sharp knife in ways that strangely
resembled vivisection.
4. The degenerate male was also accused of being the
source of syphilis. Elaine Showalter notes that "the
prolonged feminist campaign against the Contagious
Diseases Acts educated women to understand that
prostitutes were hapless victims of male lust . . .
Perverted men, feminists argued, spread syphilis through
homosexual acts and then infected the prostitute"
148
(Showalter 94). This belief was probably calculated to
counter that of prostitutes spreading the disease to
innocent men. Of course, neither is accurate as both
were spreading the disease. Showalter writes that the
"mystery" surrounding syphilis was dispelled "by 1913
with the discovery of the spirochete, Alvarsan, and the
Wassermann blood test" (111).
5. Beth declares that she is "'going to write for women,
not for men'": "'I don't care about amusing men'" (37 6).
Like Beth, Grand appears to have directed her message
toward a female audience, though the popularity of her
novels indicates a mixed readership.
6. In fact, laws to protect animals were on the books in
the United States before laws that protected children.
In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer relates the example
of Henry Bergh, the founder of animal welfare societies
in the United States, who in 1847 was asked to prosecute
the owners of "a little animal" for having beaten it.
The little animal was, in fact, a human child. From this
and other cases, the New York Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Children was formed (Singer 247).
7. Terri Doughty, in "Sarah Grand's The Beth B o o k : The
New Woman and the Ideology of the Romance E n d i n g , "
149
claims that during her nurturing relationship with
Arthur, not only did Beth starve herself but she
abandoned her work as well. She notes, too, Arthur's
comment about Beth as joining "the unsexed crew that
shriek upon the platforms" when she cuts her hair to buy
him food and medicine, a comment that seems strange
coming from a sympathetic character. Doughty continues,
"This incident [with Arthur] completes her subjection in
the role of nurturer; the female artist is lost" (191).
Doughty feels that in order for Beth to move on as an
independent artist, Arthur must be removed from the
plot.
8. The exceptions are Sir George Galbraith, Count Gustav
Bartahlinksy, Mr. Kilroy, and Arthur Brock.
9. The 1886 repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts takes
place during the action of The Beth Book (518).
10. The idea of wives being destroyed by their "unfit,"
vivisecting husbands is perpetuated in most anti
vivisection literature: Mrs. Lamb first loses her mind
when she discovers her husband's desire to vivisect
humans, and later she dies in the fire that consumes her
husband's laboratory (since she sets the fire to kill
him, one could argue that she destroys h e r s e l f ) .
150
Beatrice Grant loses her mind and then dies from brain
disease after discovering that her husband Eric is a
vivisector. Carmina, in Wilkie Collins's Heart and
Science, though not married to a vivisector, almost dies
while under the care of one. These novels perpetuate the
myth of women as emotionally unstable and sensitive
people who need to be confined to the safety of the
domestic environment.
11. Grand was familiar with the life of a doctor's wife,
having herself been married to an army doctor. There is
speculation that The Beth Book is semi-autobiographical,
and Teresa Mangum cites Grand as having almost admitted
to the closeness between her own life and Beth's (144).
12. While I agree with Lisa K. Hamilton that "New Woman
authors sought to shore up their culturally marginal
position and attain legitimacy through the
straightforward use of scientific discourse" (64), I
think that in The Beth Book Grand is also presenting an
alternative to the patriarchal practice of medicine and
demonstrating that female characters like Beth are
capable of themselves participating in that discourse.
13. Although the inclusion of the evolutionary discourse
was common in New Women novels, it is unusual for an
151
antivivisection novel. French claims that
antivivisectionists were often anti-evolutionists as
well, and almost all were anti-science (229, 364-365).
Even though Darwin's theories could have been used to
support the antivivisection platform, they were not
because many felt that they perverted Christian beliefs.
14. The virulence of smallpox and scarlet fever is
presented in other novels from the nineteenth century:
in Dickens's Bleak House (1853), Jo dies and Esther is
permanently disfigured from smallpox; and in Charlotte
Yonge's The Trial (1864), the Ward family loses two
m e m b er s— Dr. Ward and his wife--to scarlet fever,
leaving the children orphans. However, if considered in
relation to Galton's theories, Jo died because he was
not among the "fit" members of society, and the
extravagant Wards are not as morally sound as the
neighborly medical family, the Mays.
15. After stating his opposition to vaccination because
it ensures the survival of the weak, Darwin realizes
that if the doctor "were intentionally to neglect the
weak and helpless," it would contribute to "a certain
and great present evil. Hence we must bear without
complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak
152
surviving and propagating their kind" (Descent 1.169).
Although Darwin considers the long-term interference
with evolution as detrimental to the species, he is also
aware that doctors are morally obliged to take care of
their patients.
16. The scholars Rudacille mentions are Hartmut M.
Hanauske-Able, Robert J. Lifton, Anne Harrington, and
Robert J. Proctor (86) .
17. The practice of eugenics was not restricted to Nazi
Germany. Deborah Rudacille notes that "in the United
States before World War II, twenty-five states passed
laws permitting the involuntary sterilization of the
mentally ill, criminally insane, and retarded" (83). At
the same time, it was illegal for white and black people
to marry, much as Jewish/German unions were forbidden in
Nazi Germany.
153
Chapter 3: The wilderness

H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).
You ask about my opinion on vivisection. I
quite agree that it is justifiable for real
investigations on physiology; but not for mere
damnable and detestable curiosity. It is a
subject which makes me sick with horror, so I
will not say another word about it, else I
shall not sleep tonight.
Charles Darwin, Autobiography
"The study of Nature makes a man at last as
remorseless as Nature."
H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
H.G. Wells' 1896 novel, The Island of Doctor
M o r e a u , portrays the battle between animal impulses and
the laws that are designed to control them. Instincts,
passions, and desires influence the behavior of each
character--human and hybrid--in the novel, and the
"laws"--either those of England or of Moreau--are
designed to quell these irrational elements. Moreau
himself complains to Prendick about his inability to
154
"touch . . . the seat of the emotions" when molding his
creatures: "Cravings, instincts, desires . . . burst
suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature
with anger, hate, or fear" (76). The three humans on the
island are themselves subject to the same animalistic
"cravings" as the hybrids whose instinctual natures
eventually overcome Moreau's rules. Moreau, though
seemingly cool and passionless, focuses all of his
energy into a lust for research. Moreau uses science in
an attempt to control, or transcend, the animal within,
to create new, solid boundaries that separate irrational
emotion from reasonable intellect. The result of his
experiment is a further breakdown of barriers, greater
disorder, and the creation of monsters.
I. The wild
The Island of Doctor Moreau begins with the
shipwreck and rescue of Edward Prendick, as recorded in
his diary and narrated by his nephew. The removal of the
narrator from the recorded events creates distance
between the experience and the telling of the story,
blurring boundaries between fact and fiction.1 Wells
thus upsets the reader's interpretative faculties from
155
the beginning, and the question of perception, of fact
and fiction, continues to be unsettled throughout the
novel.
Twice set adrift in a small dingy and twice rescued
by Montgomery, Prendick finally lands on a desolate
island. This wild place is occupied by Montgomery; his
superior, Moreau; and a handful of "curiosities" created
in a laboratory that Moreau calls "a biological station-
-of a sort" (27). The "curiosities" refer to the
"biological station" as "The House of Pain." Because the
island is completely isolated from civilization— a ship
is sighted once a year (27)--the scientists are free to
operate without the restrictions limiting researchers in
England, the country from which Moreau and Montgomery
are exiled. These men, and now Prendick, are without
family or friend, living for their labor and its curious
fruits.
The wilderness setting of the deserted island is
significant for the plot and purpose of Moreau. The
removal of social barriers and the opportunities
afforded by the isolated location leave Moreau free to
shape a land governed by rules of his own making. Yet
this lack of restraint leads to the blurring of other
156
boundaries, most obviously between the human and the
animal. While living with Moreau's hybrid creatures,
Prendick confesses to "a strange persuasion . . . that,
save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of
the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of
human life in miniature, the whole interplay of
instinct, reason, and fate, in its simplest form" (93).
Montgomery declares himself to be "an outcast from
civilisation" because he is no longer in London (17),
but Prendick considers the Londoners he encounters upon
his return to be much like the beasts on Moreau's
island, uncivilized, living more by instinct or impulse
than intellect (128). The laws guiding the Londoners
appear to keep them under control, yet Prendick feels
comfortable only when gazing at the cool, distant stars
in the sky (129). In an attempt to move beyond the human
animal to create a more rational being, Moreau has
disrupted the illusion of natural order.
Just as boundaries are shifted between human and
animal, the delineation between animal and environment
becomes indistinct. The land is portrayed as a living
force, an organic, sustaining creature that is dangerous
because wild. The language used by Wells strengthens
157
this impression: the "underbrush . . . clothed" the body
of the land (37), the forest is "mysterious" (41, 45),
and the trees are "uncertain" (43). Prendick notes that
"the green bush . . . swallowed up Moreau and
Montgomery" (97) and blames his fears not exclusively on
the island's inhabitants but on the place itself; he
worries that "the terror of the island" will never leave
him (128). The land offers the possibility for new life,
but "new," while exciting and liberating, is also
unknown and potentially dangerous.
When recalling his arrival on the island eleven
years ago, Moreau reflects on its "green stillness" and
isolation. His poignant m e m o r ie s- -"'I remember . . . as
though it was yesterday'"— and his feeling that, like a
person, "'the place seemed waiting for me,'" are both
egoistic (the land was not indifferent but was "waiting
for" Moreau) and nostalgic. For the rational,
unemotional Moreau, this statement is irrational and
almost loving (73). The island provides Moreau with a
refuge from the constraining laws of Britain and a site
for his laboratory; it becomes a womb in which he can
both hide and create new life. Moreau, an asexual man,
attempts to give birth to new beings within the
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seclusion of Mother Earth, yet his offspring refuse to
thrive and he is destroyed by a female puma who resists
his mastery. The feminine is traditionally considered
mysterious and disorderly, arousing irrational feelings
within rational men, and Moreau's desire to harness
nature, to "burn out all the animal," is his response to
these unsettling emotions (76). The Island of Doctor
Moreau can be read as the failed colonization of nature,
a tale of the human animal's inability to reach beyond
his own biological limitations.
Wells's use of a wild geographical setting to
establish new and unusual opportunities is not unique to
Moreau. Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" (1912) and
H. Rider Haggard's She (1887) portray fantastic
creatures, human and non-human, that are situated in
South America and Africa, not within the boundaries of
European civilization. Moreau's freedom to conduct
research on the island is reflected in novels about
other doctor characters whose professional breakthroughs
occur in the wilderness.2 Ovid Vere, in Wilkie Collins'
Heart and Science (1883), travels to the "wilds" of
Canada for his health, and while there comes upon the
cure for brain disease that will later make him famous
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and save the life of his fiance. In Charlotte Y o n g e 1s
The Trial (1864), Henry Ward and his sisters move to the
"wilds" of America where Ward makes himself valuable as
a doctor during the Civil War. In both cases, the open
territories seemingly lacking in social and physical
boundaries create new beginnings for young men whose
struggle for success is restricted in an England already
parceled out to community doctors and researchers with
specialties. Moreau, thrown out of England by the
antivivisectionists, finds in the island's seclusion the
freedom to continue and even surpass his work begun in
London. However, Moreau differs from Vere and Ward in
his goals: while those men find success in saving
already existing lives, Moreau destroys lives in an
attempt to create something new.
In his book Degeneration, Max Nordau claims that
the frantic pace of the civilized world exhausts its
inhabitants, creating in them hysteria and neurasthenia,
symptoms of degeneration (42). The exhaustion stems from
"the vertigo and whirl of our frenzied life, the vastly
increased number of sense impressions and organic
reactions, and therefore of perceptions, judgments, and
motor impulses, which at present are forced into a given
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unity of time" (42). The excessive stimuli of the modern
world overly stress the sensitive individual, resulting
in mental and physical illness. Anticipating Nordau,
Collins's hero, Ovid Vere, suffers from heart disease
brought on by nerves and travels to Canada to
recuperate. The wilderness, or the primitive, untamed
place, is thus a rejuvenating environment in which one's
success is better assured than in the highly civilized
city. Cesare Lombroso claims that
the life of large towns is not favourable to
intellectual work, that men who have had a
great influence on their age have been brought
up in solitude, and that all the great men of
England, and even of London, were born in the
country, though this fact is often ignored on
account of their having fixed their residence
in the capital. (153)
The cities are not only portrayed as unhealthy but as
not conducive to intellectual development. Wilder lands
like England's colonies and Moreau's island are thus
commonly pictured as settings for characters who set out
to make a name for themselves, whereas London and highly
populated locales tend to be the site of decadence and
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degeneration. The irony is that the colonists
immediately begin to reshape the wilderness into a
semblance of the degenerate civilization from which they
came.
Wells approaches the corruption of civilization
differently from Nordau and Lombroso. Though Moreau
himself does not suffer from the common, nervous
influences of civilization's corruption— he appears, in
fact, to be quite healthy and calm— the island does
offer him and Montgomery a fresh start after having been
expelled from England for offending those residing on
that island. Montgomery is nervous and drinks too much,
although Wells implies these changes occurred after he
was ensconced on the island, not while he was in London.
Moreau and Montgomery are, however, depicted as
degenerate individuals. Moreau's genius, according to
Lombroso and Nordau, is in itself proof of his
degeneracy, and his emotionless, amoral behavior and
monomaniacal passion for work are further evidence.
Montgomery's alcoholism labels him as degenerate (Nordau
41), and he left London with Moreau because he "lost
[his] head for ten minutes on a foggy night" (17). Kelly
Hurley (and others) point to the possibility of
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Montgomery's youthful indiscretion as having been
homosexual in nature, another indication of degeneration
and rejection of the animal feminine represented by the
land (108). Of the two, Montgomery, with all his
weaknesses, is preferable to Moreau; as Prendick says,
"Montgomery was a man I felt I understood" (66).
Moreau's lack of sympathy or responsibility for living
creatures places him at a distance from other social
animals; as Cyndy Hendershot states, "Moreau expresses a
'science-for-science's sake' philosophy which eschews
utilitarian applications of knowledge" (10). This
philosophy of Moreau both reflects the fears held by
many Victorians about the moral purpose of science while
providing a link to the "art-for-art's-sake" movement
associated with Oscar Wilde and decadence.3
Wells borrows much from Charles Darwin in his
depiction of Moreau's island and his creatures.
"Darwin's theories," writes Gillian Beer, "with their
emphasis on superabundance and extreme fecundity,
reached out towards the grotesque" (Darwin's Plots 123).
Beer continues, "[Darwin's] writing . . . relies on a
nature which surges onward in hectic fecundity, a system
both estranged and voluptuous in its relations to
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humanity. The organism--or the body--becomes the mediu m
of transformation; engendering becomes the means of
creating change" (D a r w i n ’s Plots 125). The setting of
the lush island creates the vegetative "hectic
fecundity" that becomes the site for "creating change."
Moreau, however, is attempting creation not through the
normal means of "engendering," but scientifically, using
the island as his refuge and the site of a new beginning
for his creatures. Wells's island, then, illustrates the
scientific fertility of nature and the Biblical garden
of life's beginning. Moreau intends to twist Darwin's
theories of natural selection by taking them into his
own hands, but Mother Nature has the ultimate control.
II. The sympathetic instinct
Moreau, like Wilkie Collins's Dr. Benjulia,
discounts all emotions as irrational and focuses instead
on pure intellect. However, instincts and feelings have
evolved for a reason. A feeling of sympathy for others
exists among the higher animals to promote the care of
all by all, leading to healthy social groups. Darwin
writes that sympathy operates as an instinct "especially
directed towards beloved objects" and that with time,
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"the mutual love of the members of the same community
will extend its limits" (Descent 1.82). According to
Darwin, sympathy is a feeling shared by all humans: "We
are indeed all conscious that we do possess such
instinctive feelings" (Descent 1.85). The character of
Doctor Moreau, however, does not follow the natural laws
that govern social animals: he lacks sympathetic
feelings, he does not care for the company or approval
of others, and his life is devoted to fulfilling his
consuming passion for science. Moreau encourages his
hybrids to follow behavioral laws so as to curb their
natural impulses, yet ironically he himself was exiled
from England for not curbing his impulses— for violating
the laws regulating vivisection— and his own life is
devoted to fulfilling, not transcending, his desires.
(John R. Reed claims that Moreau's island is "populated
by outlaws," since Montgomery also left England due to a
problem with the law [135]). What motivates Moreau? What
manner of creature is he?
Charles Darwin classified humans as social animals,
and as such, there are certain behaviors that are
followed to ensure the well-being of the species.
According to Darwin, the more civilized a person, the
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more his sympathies will go beyond the members of his
own group to those of the nation, and beyond his nation
to those of other nationalities (Descent 1.100). Darwin
explains that the more "noble" the person, the more
"widely diffused" will be her feelings for others
(1.101). This refined sense of morality not only
includes sympathy toward humans from various nations,
cultures, or races, but also for non-human animals:
This virtue, one of the noblest with which man
is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from
our sympathies becoming more tender and more
widely diffused, until they are extended to
all sentient beings. (Descent 1.101)
This "diffused" sense of sympathy might function as a
means of preserving other creatures and plants--our
environment--which, in turn, would ensure the continued
success of the human population. Darwin notes that not
all people share this highly developed sense (and he
might have characterized it as "the noblest" because he
himself was possessed of it), but he claims that social
animals experience sympathy at least for their families
and others of their community: "A man who possessed no
trace of such feelings would be an unnatural monster"
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(Descent 1.89-1.90).
Is Moreau, then, "an unnatural monster"? He does
not show sympathy for people, even Englishmen like
himself, much less non-human animals. When Prendick is
set adrift by the captain of the Ipecacuanha, M oreau is
content to let him die rather than interrupt his work by
inviting him to the island (21). And Moreau's
indifference toward the animals he vivisects in The
House of Pain is strong evidence that he lacks sympathy
for non-human creatures. Moreau argues that physical
pain is not important, but his lack of interest in the
creatures' fearful, confused lives after alteration
indicates that he regards them only as failed
experiments. Darwin writes that "sympathy beyond the
confines of man, that is humanity to the lower animals,
seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions"
(Descent 1.101). Moreau, then, is not advanced morally;
in fact, he seems to be amoral. He is as indifferent to
morality as he is to pain.
Moreau's lack of sympathy is illustrated throughout
the novel, but two scenes in particular are especially
significant. The first example occurs immediately after
Prendick's arrival on the island as Moreau begins to
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vivisect the puma. The continual cries of pain send the
experienced Montgomery, with "his dull grey e y e s , " to
take "some more whiskey" (35). Prendick, a novice to
vivisection, leaves the enclosure to escape the noise:
The emotional appeal of those yells grew upon
me steadily, grew at last to such an exquisite
expression of suffering that I could stand it
in that confined room no longer . . . The
crying sounded even louder out of doors. It
was as if all the pain in the world had found
a voice ... It is when suffering finds a
voice and sets our nerves quivering that this
pity comes troubling us. (36)
Prendick notes that it is the auditory expression of
pain that triggers his pity. The puma's outcry creates a
discomfort in both himself and Montgomery that derives
from sympathy, from an instinctive desire to relieve,
not cause, pain to others (Descent 1.82). Later when
Prendick accidentally opens the laboratory's locked door
and sees the mutilated, bandaged puma, he convinces
himself it is a human, not an animal, that Moreau is
vivisecting. Moreau shows Prendick the puma to prove he
has not been hearing a human voice, but Prendick is
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still horrified:
"It is the puma," [he] said, "still alive, but
so cut and mutilated as I pray I may never see
living flesh again. Of all vile--"
"Never mind that," said Moreau. "At least
spare me those youthful horrors. Montgomery
used to be just the same." (68)
Moreau considers Prendick's response that of someone not
accustomed to vivisection, a "youthful" reaction to
pain. Wells captures the fear expressed by many
Victorians that the continued exposure to vivisection
leads eventually to the doctor's hardened sensibility.
Yet Wells contrasts Moreau with Montgomery, who is so
disturbed by the suffering that he becomes an alcoholic.
Wells is criticizing a particular type of scientist, one
who is arrogantly indifferent to all but himself and his
intellectual goals.
Prendick's sympathy for the animals is also aroused
by their fear. When the Leopard Man is chased and
finally cornered, Prendick realizes its fear--"its
imperfectly human face [was] distorted with terror"--
leading to his recognition of "its humanity" (92). The
Leopard Man knows that if he is caught, he will be
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returned to The House of Pain. Prendick, an animal
himself, identifies with the Leopard Man's terror and
kills him out of mercy and against Moreau's wishes. The
Leopard Man's fear is triggered by a memory of pain, and
Moreau's control over the creatures arises from their
terror at the possibility of returning to The House of
Pain. Because pain is a physical and emotional— not an
intellectual--response, Moreau discounts it as
"needless" (72), yet he is aware of its power to exact
obedience from the wild creatures around him.
When asked by Prendick how he justifies his
infliction of pain, Moreau accuses him of being "a
materialist":
"For it is just this question of pain that
parts us. So long as visible or audible pain
turns you sick, so long as your own pains
drive you, so long as pain underlies your
propositions about sin, so long, I tell you,
you are an animal, thinking a little less
obscurely what an animal feels." (71)
Of course, we humans are animals, but Moreau is intent
on changing this law, of transcending nature through
means of the intellect. Moreau proves to Prendick that
170
pain does not matter by unflinchingly jabbing a knife
into his own thigh.4 In "The Province of Pain," Wells
notes that the purpose of pain "is protection. There
seems to be little or no absolutely needless or
unreasonable pain in the world" (195). Wells's character
Moreau, however, tells Prendick that pain "'gets
needless'" and will be "'ground out of existence by
evolution sooner or later'" (72). Wells's use of the
word "needless" in the two examples indicates his
philosophical distance from the character; he is
portraying Moreau as a man who allows his own
intellectual goals to interfere with his comprehension
of reality.
Moreau's explanation of why pain does not matter is
intellectually fascinating but certainly not convincing.
None of his justifications--and these are
justifications, just as Charles Richet's claim that
animals feel no pain was a justification for his
experiments— indicates that he has a sympathetic
connection with other living creatures.5 James Turner
writes that to the Victorians, "training of the
intellect alone was not sufficient. It could not teach
the thing most needful, the 'instinct of pity,' the
171
'only safe judge of right and wrong'" (75). Moreau, who
is uninterested in "right and w r o n g , " is not drawn as a
character to inspire confidence in science.
It is the intellect alone— "'the strange colourless
delight of these intellectual desires'" (73)— that
pleases the asexual, amoral Moreau. Like Claude Bernard,
he finds that the mental absorption of his endeavors
changes the living animal before him from "'a fellow-
creature'" to "'a problem'" (73).6 He is aware--again,
as a scientific fact— of sympathetic pain, but he does
not experience it: "'Sympathetic pain--all I know of it
I remember as a thing I used to suffer from years ago'"
(73) . The lives of others never enter into his
consideration; he himself says, "'To this day I have
never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study
of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature'"
(73) .
Darwin, another man who devoted his life to the
study of nature, disagrees with Moreau's last statement;
though he acknowledges that vivisection is necessary for
the advancement of medicine, he himself was unable to
practice it: "It is a subject which makes me sick with
horror, so I will not say another word about it, else I
172
shall not sleep tonight" (Autobiography 304). Though
Reed claims that Moreau's "resistance to . . . outmoded
constraints [from conservative scientific colleagues]
appears heroic" (140), it serves no purpose other than
that of pleasing himself, and as such is self-serving,
anti-heroic. Wells is expressing his impression that
the general mass of the medical profession,
[who] equipped with a little experience and a
muddled training, and preposterously impeded
by the private adventure conditions under
which it lives, goes about pretending to the
possession of precise knowledge which simply
does not exist in the world. (Social Forces
400)
Moreau's arrogant assurance that he does have "precise
knowledge" and that his animal instincts and emotions
are under control is dangerous. Human comprehension of
life is not clearly delineated but complex, with gray
areas and blurred boundaries. Moreau, and other
scientists like him, wrestle with uncertainty in an
effort to bring it under control, to destroy it. Moreau
is not a disinterested scientist as he claims to be, and
his cold, frenzied attempt to control nature is,
173
according to Wells, a result of the very same animal
impulses he rejects; his intellectual passion is itself
an emotional human instinct.
Moreau's life's effort to "burn out all the animal"
is a direct outcome of his intense aversion to his
biological status as an animal (76). His passion for
research, his desire to create creatures that transcend
those of nature, and his willingness to use his
intellect to subdue his instincts and impulses--the
pleasures and pains associated with animal life--are
human characteristics stemming from the biological gifts
and limitations granted the human animal. His ambition
to go beyond human nature is itself a product of human
nature--the self-conscious intellect evolved by the
human animal. His failure to do so is a result of his
human limitations: nature's laws are more powerful than
the human animal's intellect. Moreau, in his attempt to
destroy the animal emotions that guide and protect
humans as social animals, exposes a problem deeply
rooted within himself.
Cesare Lombroso, in his book, A Man of Genius,
describes the ways in which men of genius are often
insane and degenerate.7 Genius is a material problem, a
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peculiar physiological ailment. Several of Lombroso's
claims relate directly to Moreau; for instance, the
tendency of brilliant men to remain unwed and produce no
offspring is both a sign of degeneracy and, according to
Lombroso, a fact among men of genius (13). He speculates
that a lack of sexual drive and sterility explain why
few children are born to geniuses, both of which are
physical problems specific to the degenerate. Other
characteristics include: "loss of moral sense, . . .
morbid vanity, excessive originality, [and] excessive
preoccupation with the self" (5-6). Moreau is amora l— "a
bad m a n " — because he is not sympathetic to others
(Darwin Descent 92). He is also intellectually vain, his
experiments with "plasticity" are gruesomely original,
and his inability to take seriously the needs of those
around him could be considered an excessive
preoccupation with the self; after all, he believes his
own views and needs are facts and those of others are
simply emotional quirks. Lombroso, in his chapter
entitled "Characteristics of Insane Men of Genius,"
lists under characteristic eight:
These energetic and terrible intellects are
the true pioneers of science; they rush
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forward regardless of danger, facing with
eagerness the greatest difficulties— perhaps
because it is these which best satisfy their
morbid energy. They seize the strangest
connections, the newest and most salient
points; and here I may mention that
originality, carried to the point of
absurdity, is the principal characteristic of
insane poets and artists. (317)
This description perfectly suits Moreau and other
fictional "mad doctor" characters like Victor
Frankenstein and Nathan Benjulia, whose "rush forward"
into rash scientific endeavors often occurs without
consultation with others. Their desire for p rivacy comes
partly from a refusal to share ideas, but the
unwillingness to collaborate leads to an extremism—
"carried to the point of absurdity"— that renders the
final experiment ineffective.
Besides showing signs of degeneracy and possible
madness, Moreau appears to be regressing as a human. His
inability to feel sympathy, for example, when he once
had as a young man, indicates a reversion from a more
civilized or "noble" state of existence to a more
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primitive one. His refusal to acknowledge respect for
other life forms, or to notice the beauty inherent
within them, are also traits of an uncivilized man and
can be found in portraits of fictional vivisectors like
Dr. Benjulia. To be civilized, one must cohabitate with
others successfully. Moreau, like Benjulia, believes
that his perception of reality is the only correct one;
he rules over, but does not live with, other humans and
animals. He appears to be reverting to a more primitive
state of existence in which social behavior for the
benefit of a large group is rejected in favor of
personal satisfaction for the individual.
W e l l s ’s portrait of Moreau parallels that of the
vivisector reviled by antivisectionists in the Victorian
press. His blind passion, refusal to justify his work,
and unbalanced reliance on intellect and rejection of
emotion all reflect common descriptions of vivisectors.
One example from Moreau relates directly to the
portrayal of vivisectors in an article written by Ouida
entitled "The New Priesthood." In it, Ouida likens
vivisectors to inquisitors:
The pleas and demands of the animal torturer
in the nineteenth century are precisely the
177
same as were those of the torturer of men,
women, and children in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. The alleged motives and
objects of the latter were declared to be as
pure, as lofty, and as impersonal as those of
the former now claim to be. (152)
Not only is Ouida's description of the inquisitors'
"pure . . . lofty, and . . . impersonal" motives a
perfect description of Moreau's estimation of himself
and his work, but in the novel Doctor Moreau wonders
about vivisectors of the past:
"Yet one would imagine it must have been
practised in secret before ... in the vaults
of the Inquisition. No doubt their chief aim
was artistic torture, but some, at least, of
the inquisitors must have had a touch of
scientific curiosity . . . " (70)
Moreau's wonder about inquisitors has within it a touch
of reverence, providing a perspective quite different
from Ouida's scathing commentary. Ouida's article was
published in The New Review in 1893, and The Island of
Doctor Moreau was published in 1896. Wells's reference
to the inquisitors and portrayal of Moreau were likely
178
influenced by articles written in newspapers and
periodicals during the 1890s. R.D. Haynes finds within
Moreau "a comprehensive analysis of the prevailing
assumptions of science and the presumption of
scientists" (13), and he concludes that Wells's
portrayal of scientists is "far from flattering" (24) .
Though Wells's novel is unique within the genre of
vivisection fiction, his portrayal of Moreau is quite
similar to those generally found in novels and the press
at that time.
"The New Priesthood," the title of Ouida's article,
is a reference to medical science. Moreau, however,
attempts to go beyond priesthood and achieve the status
of God himself. As in Ouida's description of the
inquisitors, Moreau is arrogant, egotistical, godlike:
"'But I will conquer yet. Each time I dip a living
creature into 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. After all, what is ten
years? Man y has been a hundred thousand in the making .
. .'" (76). Moreau ranks his efforts at asexual creation
with those of God and nature, but this arrogance is not
rewarded. Haynes writes that traditionally the "attempt
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to create life, and especially human life, has been seen
as a usurpation of divine power" (15). When read within
this tradition (Haynes mentions Prometheus), Moreau is
doomed to failure. Wells points to other aspects of
Moreau's godlike image: he "take[s] the human form as a
model," which seems "strange[ly] wicked" (71) to
Prendick, but like the God of the Old Testament, Moreau
creates creatures in his own image: Moreau wants to
create more Moreaus. Moreau himself looks like the image
of the Western Christian God, "a white-faced white-
haired man, with calm eyes" who is "seren[e]" and
"almost . . . beaut[iful]" (77). The laws recited by the
hybrids parody Western religion, and again indicate
Moreau's attempt to play god:
"His is the House of Pain.
His is the Hand that makes.
His is the Hand that wounds.
His is the Hand that heals.
His is the lightning-flash.
His is the deep salt sea.
His are the stars in the sky." (57)
It isn't clear whether Moreau or the Kanaka initially
taught the hybrids the laws (76), but Moreau and
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Montgomery encourage their recitation and punish their
violation. Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes write
that Wells "called Moreau a ’theological grotesque,' by
which he meant (at least in part) that Darwin's theory
enormously aggravates the problem of theodicy: a god who
would allow the cosmic pain and suffering evolution
necessarily entails would have to be like Doctor Moreau"
("Introduction" 17). Moreau's indifference to others may
equal that of nature itself, yet Moreau is not
indifferent to his own interests and in this is quite
human, not like nature at all.
One might be able to ignore Moreau's cruelty to
animals and disregard of human emotions if the results
of his research proved to be helpful. The utilitarian
argument, of course, was frequently used by vivisectors
in response to complaints about the cruelty of
experimental medicine. Yet Wells is careful to show the
complete ineffectiveness of Moreau's efforts, described
as follows by Prendick:
Had Moreau any intelligible object I could
have sympathised at least a little with him. I
am not so squeamish about pain as that . . .
But he was so irresponsible, so utterly
181
careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless
investigations, drove him on, and the things
were thrown out to live a year or so, to
struggle, and blunder, and suffer; at last to
die painfully. (93)
Just as Wells creates the parallel between Moreau and
God, he destroys it. Moreau's work is futile; he is
driven by a mania for scientific creation and is
motivated by a selfish desire to transcend instinct and
impulse. God and nature may be indifferent to individual
suffering, but many species have evolved successfully;
Moreau's creatures fail to live and reproduce. Though
Moreau claims to be emotionless, he is strongly
motivated by passion and a desire to control, and his
intelligence allows him to justify instincts and other
impulses by pretending that his motives are pure and
intellectual, not base and physical. Because his drive
to create is intellectual, Moreau considers it to be
superior to Montgomery's drinking or the Leopard Man's
hunger for flesh and blood. Yet Moreau's intellectual
passions are themselves an expression of the animal
within.
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III. Shifting boundaries: human/imals
Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man clearly shows
that humans are not created in God's image, but are,
like other life forms on Earth, creatures who have
evolved from a simpler into a more complex organism.
Darwin claims that our relationship to animals had never
before been considered because "our natural prejudice,
and . . . arrogance . . . made our forefathers declare
that they were descended from demi-gods" (Descent 1.32) .
Though humans still can and often do claim superiority
to the "lesser" animals, the traditional boundaries
between human and other creatures were dramatically
altered by Darwin's theories. In The Island of Doctor
Moreau, Wells further undermines these boundaries.
Throughout the novel, Prendick's illusion of human
superiority is stripped away, leaving him with a strong
awareness of the animal within. Prendick is afraid of
this inner beast, and turns from biology to astronomy
for the peace and order that he finds in the distant
heavens but not on Earth. Unlike Prendick, Mo ntgomery
"acknowledges his kinship with the beast within" (Haynes
19), leading Prendick to dismiss him as "half akin to
these Beast Folk, unfitted for human kindred" (107).
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Moreau completely denies his animal nature by giving
undue importance to the intellect while neglecting the
physical and emotional--the animal--aspects of himself.
Haynes notes the irony of Moreau's denial: "the more
Moreau attempts to overcome the limitations of the human
condition, the more he uncovers those limitations: the
more he determines to humanise his beasts, the more he
demonstrates the bestiality of man and his own
inhumanity" (18).
The Origin of Species and The Descent of M an set
forth the theory of evolution and the relationship
between humans and animals by comparing specific
developmental stages, body parts, and behavioral
patterns; in other words, Darwin breaks the wholes into
parts and analyzes the function of the parts. Similarly
Wells shows kinship between the human and hybrid
characters by breaking whole creatures into parts: eyes,
hands, ears, voices. Early in the novel, Prendick
awakens on board the Ipecacuanha with the m emory of
M'Ling's "dark face with extraordinary eyes" (7), then
soon after he beholds Montgomery's "watery grey eyes,
oddly void of expression" (8). Montgomery's eyes are
"dull" (35) whereas Prendick is accused in England of
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having eyes of a "strange brightness" (122). Moreau
possesses "calm eyes" (77). Bright eyes are generally
associated with a certain alertness in animals,
indicating Prendick's relationship to animals (or his
reversion toward the animal after having been on the
island), and Montgomery's eyes are dull from excessive
drinking and his desire to hide from the agony that
surrounds him. Moreau's are calm because he is sure of
himself, his work, and his control over the environment;
he is not struggling to survive like other animals, but
is transcending survival by living in his mind. The
creatures' eyes, which "shone with a pale green light"
(18), and M'ling's "pointed ears, covered with a fine
brown fur" (31), provide the clues to Prendick that they
are not as human as they initially appear. As is common
in novels, Wells portrays eyes as an indication of the
inner self— bright or dull, dark or light, calm or
terrorized--; each character's emotional and physical
state can be determined by its eyes. What is unusual in
Wells is that many of the eyes belong to non-humans.
Wells also notes voices: the puma's "low angry
growling" is overlaid by Montgomery's human voice (8) :
"a snarling growl and the voice of a human being
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together" (9). Again, Wells's attention to detail and
lack of differentiation between human voice and growl
(Prendick can understand neither) eliminates the usual
hierarchy of human over animal. Prendick notes that
M'ling has a "queer, hoarse quality in his voice" (11)
whereas Montgomery speaks "with a slobbering
articulation, with the ghost of a lisp" (8), again
indicating his degeneracy. Darwin notes that social
animals use their voices more frequently than solitary
ones, and all tend to vocalize to express intense
emotions, like pain, rage, and pleasure (Expression of
Emotions 84). Thus the social Ape Man's continual
chatter is as natural for him as is the Leopard Man's
silent stalking of Prendick. Though Prendick initially
claims that the hybrids cannot laugh, he later
contradicts himself (80). As he and Montgomery tour the
island, Prendick hears "the Satyr laughing" (84); and,
as the creatures run after the Leopard Man, the Hyaena-
Swine looks furtively at Prendick with a "snarling
laugh" (90). Their laughter is the result of strong
emotion, but it derives from the anticipation of
overcoming or outdoing another, one of the baser
pleasures to which all humans can relate. Wells
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describes eyes and voices to illustrate the similarity
between the characters, just as Darwin proves the fetus
of the human to be nearly identical to that of the dog
by setting them side by side, equally, and comparing
them (Descent 1.14-1.15). The act of identifying a
character normally relegated to the background forces
one to recognize him, and the recognition of an "other"
is the first step toward a recognition of kinship.
Wells also describes the characters' faces equally,
giving attention to detail in human and animal. In
fiction, one's looks often provide clues for the reader
to determine one's character.8 Montgomery is "a youngish
man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured mustache,
and a dropping nether lip" (8), whereas M'ling has a
black face,
singularly deformed . . . the facial part
projected, forming something dimly suggestive
of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth
showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen
in a human mouth. His eyes were bloodshot at
the edges, with scarcely a rim of white round
the hazel pupils. (11)
Though the "men" look differently, the attention to
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detail and writer's attitude are similar with each.
Neither character is particularly handsome or admirable.
Montgomery's decadence is suggested by his "dropping
nether lip," and M'Ling's skin color and unusual animal
characteristics (muzzle and large teeth) suggest the
Victorian perception of a savage. Hurley notices in
Wells's novel "a certain physical likeness between the
not-quite-evolved beast people and the atavistic
'criminal types' elaborated by Lombroso" (103),
suggesting that M'Ling is degenerate, placing him and
Montgomery in a similar evolutionary position. Wells's
attitude toward M'Ling deceives the reader, like
Prendick, into thinking that M'Ling is human, while
suggesting the thin divide between human and beast.
As the novel progresses, the hybrids' personalities
are individualized and more easily humanized. Prendick
is especially close to the Saint Bernard Dog M a n (82), a
social creature whose personality is doglike, and he is
repulsed by "a particularly hateful (and evil-smelling)
old woman made of Vixen and Bear, whom [he] hated from
the beginning. She was said to be a passionate votary of
the Law" (81). The Sayer of the Law and the "hateful"
woman mentioned by Prendick are portrayed by Wells as
being narrowly pious, not questioning the laws but
strongly urging their enforcement. The Ape Man also
annoys Prendick with his blind admiration of humans and
certainty of his own superiority (due to his five
fingers; many of the hybrids had claws [53]). Upon his
return to London, Prendick finds religious service
intolerable, as "it seemed that the preacher gibbered
Big Thinks even as the Ape Man had done" (129). Like
Montgomery, Prendick feels strong attraction or
repulsion toward the creatures, just as one would toward
fellow humans. Moreau, to whom partiality would be too
closely associated with irrational feelings, does not
distinguish between the creatures.
Moreau considers the hybrids as works in progress,
successes or failures, not as individuals: "'They only
sicken me with a sense of failure. I take no interest in
them'" (76). Wells wrote that "what is called the
scientific method is the method of ignoring
individualities; and, like many mathematical
conventions, its great practical convenience is no proof
whatever of its final truth" (Social Forces 230). Moreau
shares with Claude Bernard and Descartes the idea of the
body as a "machine" (Bernard 159). Machines are not
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unique individuals but material objects, made of parts
that can be replaced, that work or fail, that can be
arranged into different structures for different
purposes, and that are clearly controllable. Organic
bodies, however, are more complex than machines, and
although Moreau considers every living creature a
possible or completed experiment, he is unable to
restructure an animal to his liking. By ignoring a
creature's individuality and attempting to simplify the
complex interrelationship of physical and mental health-
-including instincts and emotions— he is evading a
larger meaning or truth about organic life.
When examining a biological creature as a whole,
the intricacy of the body's interactions becomes clear.
Instincts and emotions, like pain, have evolved for a
purpose and closely operate within the entire organism.
In a letter to G.J. Romanes Darwin wrote: "I have been
accustomed to looking at the coming of the sense of
pleasure and pain as one of the most important steps in
the development of mind" (qtd. in Young 59).9 M o re au is
unable to successfully create a purely intellectual
creature because he chooses to ignore the sensations of
pain and pleasure that are necessary to mental
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development. His refusal to recognize the importance of
the interdependent nature of the biological organism,
especially of the role played by emotions and instincts,
leads to his failure as a scientist and as a human
being.
Kelly Hurley surmises that "human identity in The
Island of Dr. Moreau is so unremarkable a thing that it
can be duplicated by a few weeks of close labor, wherein
Moreau accomplishes what Nature, working through natural
selection, accomplished in millennia" (106). Though
Hurley is correct in noticing the denigration of human
identity within the novel, it is achieved more through
the writer's attitude than Moreau's success as a
vivisector. Moreau completely fails to accomplish
anything nearly as successful as nature's animals; his
creatures do not successfully reproduce, so they die out
after one generation. Prendick expresses Wells's
sentiments about Moreau's indifference toward the living
results of his labor: "'Before they had been beasts,
their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and
happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the
shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died,
fretted by a law they could not understand'" (93). The
191
creatures were not fully animal or human and suffered
for their intermediary status. In Origin, Darwin
considers some of the limitations man faces when
attempting to do the work of nature: "How fleeting are
the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and
consequently how poor will his products be, compared
with those accumulated by Nature during whole geologic
periods!" (65). When put into a broader perspective,
human identity is insignificant and Moreau's burning
passion to destroy the beast within is useless.
There are obvious racial overtones in Wells's
description of Moreau's creatures. Prendick's
identification of M'Ling as the "black-faced man" (11,
13), "the deformed man with the black face" (13), and
"the black" (13) all occur before he--or the reader—
knows that M'Ling isn't human. Though Hendershot says
that Moreau "does not create Caucasian-type Beast
people; he does create Negroid-type Beast People" (7),
Tim Youngs notes that those animals described as being a
"dull pinkish drab colour" are "of course, 'white,' as
is the case with the sloth-like creature Prendick . . .
described as 'a dim pinkish thing'" (98). Yet Prendick's
attitude of horror does not abate with the "white"
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creatures; in fact, he finds the sloth to be
particularly upsetting (60). Hurley claims that "the
beast people are uncanny because they remind Prendick
not only of 'some familiar animal' but also of himself"
(105). Wells is attempting to cut through the
"otherness" that is implied by the dark skin of M'Ling;
Prendick is disturbed by these monsters not because they
are different from him but because they are like him.
Their unnatural status appalls him, just as the dogs are
instinctively upset by M'Ling (11, 13, 24, 26), but
Moreau's alterations have made the creatures, who can
talk, even more closely allied to Prendick than they
would be in their natural forms. They are still beasts,
but because they walk upright and express their
opinions, they serve as the missing links, reminding
Prendick of himself and other humans.10
Sandra Siegel, in writing about the emerging
science of anthropology, notes that the presence of
savages implied one's own savage roots (214). This
recognition, in turn, led to an awareness of one's
relationship to animal ancestors. Beer recognizes
anxieties about the "other" captured in "the phrase 'the
missing link,'" which expresses fears "not only about
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our relationships to other life-forms, but about a
variety of social relations within and beyond European
culture" (Open Fields 122). The different social
behaviors of people from non-European cultures,
especially concerning nudity and sexuality, disturbed
Europeans. Turner notes the danger of sexuality that
lurked within the savage; the social mores that trained
Europeans to suppress sexual desire were not necessarily
practiced by other cultures. "Sexual impulses reminded
one of the beast inside," Turner notes, and this inner
beast was in need of control, of being put down (68).
Not surprisingly, colonialism began with missionaries
attempting to Christianize and control the heathen
savages. Moreau, in attempting to eliminate sexuality by
scientifically creating his own savages, is defining an
ideal, masculine world that is wholly rational and
controlled. The laws followed by his hybrids, as a
reflection of the Christian laws introduced to English
colonies, illustrate an attempt to regulate the
creatures' animal impulses. Siegel writes that
"children, the mad, and women were constant reminders of
the condition from which civilization had evolved and to
which civilization could revert" (214) . By
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scientifically creating an emotionless, biological
machine, Moreau hopes to eliminate sexuality, women, and
children altogether, thus achieving orderly,
controllable progress as opposed to uncontrolled
reversion and disorder.
J.R. Hammond notes that "In The Time M a c h i n e , The
Invisible M a n , and The Island of Doctor Moreau, [Wells]
questioned the complacent assumption that human
evolution would inevitably lead to progress" (75). In
fact, unlike contemporaries who optimistically embraced
a future of progress, Wells rather strongly indicates
that devolution is likely. Moreau laments that although
the "'creatures, . . . just after I make them, . . .
seem to be indisputable human b e i n g s [,] . . . afterwards
as I observe them . . . the persuasion fades. First one
animal trait, then another, creeps to the surface and
stares out at me'" (76). A parallel is drawn throughout
between the hybrids and humans, and the suggestion that
the human creatures are also reverting to an a nimal
like, or prehuman, state is quite clear. When Prendick
finally returns to London, he "'look[s] about ... at
[his] fellow-men" and feels "fear":
I see faces keen and bright, others dull or
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dangerous, others unsteady, insecure; none
that have the calm authority of a reasonable
soul. I feel as though the animal was surging
up through them; that presently the
degradation of the Islanders will be played
over again on a larger scale. (128)
Like Moreau, Prendick is watching the animal traits
creep to the surface and peer out at him. The
possibility of reversion— or devolution— becomes as
tangible as that of progress— or evolution.
IV. The Unnatural: Mad scientists and monsters
Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, like The Island
of Doctor Moreau, examines the boundaries that exist
between human and non-human, and Shelley, like Wells,
situates much of the action in the wilderness. Like
Moreau, Frankenstein visits the wilderness— in his case,
the icy wasteland of the new world— not to pursue a
successful career but to commence the final chase after
his monster, a suitable metaphor for Moreau's own
endless task of perfecting the monstrous creatures he
creates. In these novels, boundaries are crossed and
questions raised about the essential nature of animal,
196
man, and monster and the role of science in determining
each. Both novels examine the efficacy of asexual
reproduction and of the scientists' responsibility as
they create, and destroy, living creatures. The
questions raised by Shelley and Wells are not to be
dismissed as mere tokens of nineteenth-century thought.
Contemporary works like the popular film Blade Runner
(adapted from the 1968 book, Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick) and Octavia E.
Butler's Xenogenesis series (1987-89) are also concerned
with the moral consequences of creating new beings. The
ethical issues raised by Shelley and Wells have actually
become more pressing as biological science continues to
advance and what was once fiction becomes reality.
In Frankenstein Mary Shelley emphasizes the
similarities between Victor Frankenstein and his
monster, and within The Island of Doctor Moreau Wells
proves that Moreau, too, resembles the creations he
rejects as failed experiments: like them, he is subject
to blind passion and impulses; like them, he is an
animal who has been twisted into something un nat ur al. 11
In Origin, Darwin defines a "monstrosity" as "some
considerable deviation of structure, generally
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injurious, or not useful to the species" (Origin 33).
According to this definition, Moreau's hybrids certainly
qualify as monsters; the creatures' mixed genetic
composition is a "deviation in structure" and causes
them to suffer and die without producing viable
offspring. Moreau's own "deviation" may well be his
intellect; it, too, proves "not useful to the species."
Darwin uses the word "monster" more loosely when he
claims that any man who lacks sympathy for his fellow
creatures is "an unnatural monster"; again, Moreau's
intellect leads him to dismiss sympathy as an emotion
once felt but since rejected (Descent 1.89-1.90; Moreau
73). Darwin implies that the absence of feeling can
itself be considered a "deviation" from normal human
structure. Is Moreau a monster, like the hybrids he has
created (in his own image)? Are the humans that horrify
Prendick in London also monsters? How does one
distinguish between a man, an animal, and a monster?
Within the novel Prendick struggles with these very
questions. At first he thinks the island's "natives" are
human, but soon Moreau convinces him otherwise: "The
creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men.
They were animals— humanised animals— triumphs of
198
vivisection" (68). The sarcasm in the line "triumphs of
vivisection" is clear since Prendick is first horrified
by and later sympathetic to the animals, but he never
considers them biologically admirable or successful. He
does, in fact, call them monsters (69), but his
awareness of their monstrosity only contributes to his
dejection once he suspects his kinship to them. Yet
Prendick does not qualify as a monster under Darwin's
definition, unless one considers his weak emotional
state as a "deviation." Prendick is an animal, but not a
monster. Montgomery, too, is a mere animal; his
weaknesses may make him decadent and degenerate, but not
monstrous.
Like Shelley's picture of Victor Frankenstein,
Wells carefully depicts Moreau as an unnatural creature.
He uses Montgomery as an assistant, but doesn't need or
seek his company, nor does he have sexual desires. He
isn't troubled by the pain he causes his vivisected
animals. He doesn't even seem disturbed by the
uselessness of his work or the despair of his creatures'
confused lives, though he is "dissatisfied" by his
inability to create a successful hybrid (75). Moreau
does not act as a normal social animal, who "dislike[s]
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. . . solitude, and . . . wish[es] for society beyond
that of his own family" (Darwin Descent 1.84).
Montgomery, however, needs company, and so befriends the
hybrids. He enjoys sex, thus the predicament that forces
him to leave England. He drinks to drown the sympathetic
pain to which he is exposed daily. Prendick says that he
understands Montgomery, but instinctively "distrust[s]
and dread[s]" Moreau (66), just like the dogs who are
instinctively disturbed by M'Ling (11, 13, 24, 26). R.D.
Haynes describes the novel as "a trenchant satire on the
cult of research for its own sake, on the exclusiveness
and isolationism of science with its contempt for the
layman and ultimately for humanity" (24) . The Moreaus
and Frankensteins who choose research, or the life of
the mind, over life itself are as severely afflicted as
the "poor brutes" that emerge from their laboratories
(93) .
Gillian Beer defines Darwin's use of the word
"natural" in Origin as the absence of man's meddling
"(that is, non-human and unwilled)" (Darwin's Plots 8).
In other words, natural is that which is organic without
human interference. The puma is natural until Mo reau
gets involved. Aside from the House of Pain, the island
200
is always natural. According to Wells, man's
interference may take the form of vivisection, as in
Moreau's creation of the hybrids, or it may consist of
laws designed to suppress important instincts, as in
Moreau's injunction to the hybrid creatures to act
contrarily to their animal natures. Moreau's own
rejection of sexuality and sympathy also derives from
Western religious and social conventions that deny the
physical feminine and extol the intellectual masculine.
Moreau is physiologically natural, but intellectually
unbalanced, deviant, monstrous. Wells's references to
Moreau's degeneration and possible madness support the
perspective of his mental deviance. His blind,
irresponsible quest to destroy the natural emotions and
instincts in others— to "burn out all the animal" (76)—
is an example of the danger that lies in the unnatural.
Wells is cautioning scientists about the consequences of
attempting to control a natural world they don't fully
understand. An example of the dangers pictured by Wells
exists in our present society. A serious concern with
the genetic engineering of crops is that an unnatural
strain of corn, for example, may spread, eliminating or
changing creatures who are accustomed to feeding on the
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natural varieties and eventually evolving into an
uncontrolled species with an unknown influence on the
environment. The corn could become a monster. Like
Moreau's hybrids, the engineered species may create more
disorder than the natural ones, leading scientists to
further efforts to control nature.
Darwin writes that social animals instinctively
work for the better of the community, but on Moreau's
island what does the community consist of? They
originated from different species with different social
rules, thus solitary creatures like the Leopard Ma n are
initially living in the huts with social creatures like
the Saint Bernard Dog Man that befriends Prendick, all
following laws devised for the benefit of Moreau, not
the creatures. Once Moreau brings rabbits to the island,
the hybrids begin to eat their flesh, in direct
violation of the laws (39). Prendick sees a creature
slurping water from a stream, another violation (37).
After Moreau is killed by the puma, the monsters shun
the laws and revert back to their natural states. Yet
what are their natural states? Some creatures, like
M'Ling, are constructed of different animals (bear, dog,
and ox [81]), which results in even more confusion; to
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which natural state does M'Ling revert? Bears tend to be
solitary omnivores, dogs are social and predatory, and
oxen are vegetarians. The potential for confusion beyond
that found in a natural environment is clearly p r e s ent —
Prendick talks of the "aimlessness" (92) and "disorder"
(93) of life on the "green confusion" of the island (41,
96)--so Prendick is in more danger from the unnatural
hybrids than he would be on an island with natural wild
animals.
Like Moreau's monsters, Prendick arrives at the
island feeling confident about his own natural state—
humanity— but becomes more confused as he remains. He
does not blame the disorder on Moreau, but sees it as a
larger state of reality:
A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism,
seemed to cut and shape the fabric of
existence, and I, Moreau (by his passion for
research), Montgomery (by his passion for
drink) , the Beast People, with their instincts
and mental restrictions, were torn and
crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the
infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.
(94)
203
Prendick views "blind fate" as a machine, like the human
body, an indifferent material object simply fulfilling
its function. An d as with the body, scientists attempt
to tinker with the machine, to tamper with Fate, to
ignore evolution by shaping all life on earth for the
benefit of humans. Scientists use medical technology to
insure that the weak will survive and breed animals
whose only function is to produce excessive amounts of
milk, meat, or eggs. Will this interference by science
create a better world for the human species? Or will it,
as it does in Wells's book, lead to a reversion rather
than a progression of species?
Gillian Beer notes that "evolutionary theory "does
not privilege the present, which sees it as a moving
instant in an endless process of change" (D a r w i n ’s Plots
10). This "moving instant" is captured within The Island
of Doctor Moreau, increasing the dread Prendick feels
toward organic life as he notices it devolving, not
evolving. Prendick, at the end of the novel, is exiled
in England much in the way he was once exiled from
England. Prendick feels alone among humans, afraid of
the brutes by whom he is surrounded. The certainty that
he once felt about his place in the world is gone.
204
Turner writes that "the close identification of science
with progress meant that the Victorian faith in progress
implied equal confidence in science" (100). Wells's
vision of science, and thus progress, is bleak. The
scientists like Moreau, who desire control and
definitive boundaries between feminine and masculine,
nature and intellect, are depicted as monstrous failures
who aid not evolution but devolution. If the island
indeed serves as an analogy to England, the reversion
experienced by the monsters may be followed by
extinction, as four years later Prendick's nephew
discovers no trace of hybrids or humans on the island.
205
Notes
1. Mary Shelley, attempting to blur boundaries herself,
used the same narrative technique in Frankenstein.
2. Ma n y nineteenth-century Englishmen did make great
discoveries while outside of England. Charles Darwin
reached his theories of evolution from his travels in
the wild; the observation of nature outside of human
control and influence allowed Darwin to transcend more
commonly held theories to reach fresh conclusions. Henry
Morton Stanley and other explorers also kept notebooks
of unusual natural life outside of England, and their
work was widely read and celebrated upon their return to
civilization.
3. In the Preface to The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells
wrote that the novel was inspired by
a scandalous trial about that time, the
graceless and pitiful downfall of a man of
genius, and this story was the response of an
imaginative mind to the reminder that humanity
is but animal rough-hewn to a reasonable shape
and in perpetual internal conflict between
instinct and injunction. This story embodies
this ideal, but apart from this embodiment it
206
has no allegorical quality. It is written just
to give the utmost possible vividness to that
conception of men as hewn and confused and
tormented beasts.
The trial of which Wells writes is that of Oscar Wilde,
and Hurley suggests that Wells's reference to Wilde's
trial further supports Montgomery's possible
homosexuality (109).
4.In "The Province of Pain," Wells writes that it is "a
common trick among medical students to thrust a pin into
the thigh. There the nerve-ends are thinly scattered
over the skin, and these once passed the muscle is
penetrated with scarcely a pang" (195-196). Though
Moreau admits to Prendick that the thigh has few spots
"capable of feeling p a i n , " he is careful not to make his
point by jabbing himself in a more sensitive part of the
anatomy (71).
5. Charles Richet, a vivisector writing in the late
nineteenth century, said of animals and pain:
No being suffers unless he is able to think
that he suffers, and meditate on his
suffering. To suffer means to have
consciousness; and as far as it is permissible
207
for a man to picture to himself the sensations
of a frog, I should say that the frog has no
consciousness of suffering. (26-27)
6. Claude Bernard wrote that "A physiologist no longer
hears the cry of animals, he no longer sees the blood
that flows, he sees only his idea and perceives only
organisms, concealing problems which he intends to
solve" (103) .
7.Darwin was called a genius by Lombroso. In his last
chapter, "Sane Men of Genius," Lombroso writes of "those
few men of genius who have completed their intellectual
orbit without aberration, neither depressed by
misfortune nor thrown out of their course by madness"
(353). He devotes several pages to a history of Darwin's
and his ancestors' physical infirmities and neuroses.
The point is that Darwin and his ancestors were men of
genius, as can be told by their work and their speech
impediments, tempers, etc. However, unlike other men of
genius, Darwin was "sane" because he was able to live
with mild forms of degeneration, never succumbing to
extremes in mood or habit.
8. Some novelists played with expectations; Wilkie
Collins often creates villains whose appearances reflect
208
those of traditional heros, like Godfrey Ablewhite (The
Mo o n s t o n e ) and Lydia Gwilt (Armada le ).
9. Darwin's reasoning is as follows:
The sort of progress which I have imagined is
that a stimulus produced some effect at the
point affected, and that the effect radiated
at first in all directions, and then that
certain definite advantageous lines of
transmission were acquired, inducing definite
reaction in certain lines. Such transmissions
afterwards become associated in some unknown
way with pleasure or pain. These sensations
led at first to all sorts of violent actions,
such as the wriggling of a worm, which was of
some use. All the organs of sense would be at
the same time excited. Afterwards definite
lines of action would be found to be the most
useful, and so would be practiced." (qtd. in
Young 59)
10. In Descent, Darwin refers regularly to the
Quadrumana, primates that are the "nearest allies" to
humans (1.139) . This creature serves as a missing link
within Descent, used by Darwin as an example of the
209
developmental stages between animals and humans.
Moreau's hybrids play a similar role; as close relatives
who are, however, not human, they provide the
imaginative link to allow Prendick a realization of his
animal ancestry.
11. Similarly, there is an ongoing debate about the film
Blade Runner (1982), in which Deckard, hired to track
down and kill replicants, is himself suspected of being
a replicant.
210
Chapter 4: The Future

Octavia E. Butler, Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn (1987),
Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)
Judging from the past, we may safely infer
that not one living species will transmit its
unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.
Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species
No doubt man is lord of the whole earth of to
day, but the lordship of the future is another
matter. To give him that argues a confidence
in the permanence of terrestrial conditions
which has no justification either in
geological or astronomical science.
H.G. Wells, "The Rate of Change in Species"
In the Xenogenesis series, Octavia E. Butler
evinces a preoccupation with the human as a biologically
determined creature controlled by genetics more than by
reason. The trilogy portrays humans as violent,
territorial, prejudiced against those of other races and
species, sexually aggressive, homophobic, suspicious,
and certainly not as intelligent as they would like to
believe. Her purpose is to destroy an idealized image of
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the rational human so as to construct a new future for
humanity, one found in physical and psychological
change. Lilith Iyapo is the focus of the first novel of
the trilogy, Dawn, and the only fully human protagonist
in the series. As her name implies, her role is that of
mother to the new human species. Butler is offering an
alternative origin myth for the future, that of Lilith,
not A d a m and Eve. In the story of Lilith, Lilith is made
not from the rib of a man but from the same dust that
gave rise to Adam: she is equal to man. By altering the
primary Judeo-Christian origin story and its related
hierarchies, Butler is restructuring the way humans are
conceived and thus conceive of themselves.
Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy has as its antecedent
science fiction dating back to Mary Shelley's 1818 novel
Frankenstein. As in Butler's novels, the humans in
Frankenstein judge others by appearance, and like Butler
Shelley points to the problems that arise from such
superficial determinations. Frankenstein's monster is
rejected first by Victor Frankenstein and then by all
the humans he meets; he is imagined to be dangerous
because he looks dangerous. The monster finally becomes
dangerous because no one will take responsibility for
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his well-being. Science, the monster in Shelley's story,
has the potential to cause harm if it is not recognized
and treated appropriately. Scientists are primarily at
fault for their shortsightedness, but everyone shares
the burden of maintaining the balance between scientific
progress and social health. Nearly two-hundred years
later, Butler's Xenogenesis series--Dawn (1987),
Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)— portrays the
aftermath of a nuclear holocaust on Earth. The deadly
atomic weapons created by scientists in the 1940s are
deployed in the late twentieth-century by power-hungry
national leaders; the combination of science and
hierarchical behavior nearly eliminates the human
species. The surviving humans and the planet are saved
by the alien Oankali who are monstrous in appearance,
with gray skin, featureless faces, and writhing
tentacles. Although the Oankali have prevented the
extinction of the human race, humans reject the aliens
because they look unhuman; they are ugly. The tentacled
aliens, however, are socially and scientifically
superior to the humans. Butler's "monster," unlike
Shelley's, represents scientific progress; the Oankali
take responsibility for their actions and attempt to
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improve the quality of life for all creatures. Butler,
like Shelley before her, is concerned with the social
well-being of the human race, and the species' long-term
health requires not xenophobia or scientific
individualism but the responsible, collaborative effort
of the entire community.
I. The alien scientist
The alien Oankali are scientists by nature,
especially the ooloi, a genderless Oankali that forms an
integral part of the family unit.1 Because they are
extremely logical, the Oankali cannot understand the
depth of contradictory human emotion that would lead a
species to attempt "mass suicide" (Dawn 14). The Oankali
perception of the world is different from that of the
human, and because the Oankali know that their
understanding of life is factual, based as it is on
actual cellular information, they mistrust the humans
whose perception of life they consider to be greatly
handicapped. The ooloi Kahguyaht is especially likened
to an arrogant scientist; it patronizes Lilith because
it knows that it is right and she is wrong. Nikanj,
Lilith's ooloi and Kahguyaht's child, notes that
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Kahguyaht "always said there was no point in paying
attention to what Humans said" (AR 50). Though the
Oankali are almost always correct, they do misunderstand
humans who are more intellectually complex than they
initially imagine. Humans both attract and puzzle the
Oankali.
Just as the Oankali need time to understand humans,
even the most accepting humans misunderstand the
Oankali. Upon being awakened from suspended animation
alone in a small room, Lilith feels like an animal in a
cage that has been vivisected and awaits further
experimentation. She considers herself as an experiment
(Dawn 9), an "experimental animal" (Dawn 58), "a zoo
animal" (Dawn 56), and a "nearly extinct animal, part of
a captive breeding program" (Dawn 58). She worries that
the scar from her cancer surgery indicates dissection
(Dawn 20) and decides that the curious Oankali she meets
in the community "would have enjoyed dissecting her"
(Dawn 55). She wonders how ooloi study humans: "She
imagined dying humans caged and every groan and
contortion closely observed. She imagined dissections of
living subjects as well as dead ones. She imagined
treatable diseases being allowed to run their grisly
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courses in order for ooloi to learn" (Dawn 20). What she
imagines, of course, is that the Oankali are treating
her as humans would treat an alien species. Human
aversion to the ooloi is so powerful that in Adulthood
Rites a man dies of an ulcer, vomiting blood, all the
while knowing that he can receive help from any ooloi
(77). The Oankali understanding of humans is limited by
their reliance on biological facts, and human
understanding of the Oankali is hindered by xenophobia
and anthropocentrism.
The humans feel justified in their suspicion of the
Oankali. After the war and prior to being placed in
suspended animation, the humans rescued by the Oankali
were examined for trauma and healed of injury and
disease. They were also sterilized, a procedure that can
be reversed only by the Oankali. The Oankali feel
strongly that the humans should not be allowed to
regenerate a race of self-destructive individuals, and
they are certain that if left to themselves the humans
will eventually commit "humanicide" (Dawn 14). Humans
equally strongly desire a chance to prove themselves
capable of survival, and without the ability to
reproduce feel that their lives lack meaning. The
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Oankali intend to breed with the humans to eliminate
genetic flaws and do not understand the human need for
purely human offspring. Because the Oankali think the
humans are unstable, they decide to engineer the
species' future.
The Oankali assessment of human potential is made
possible through the use of their tentacles, sensory
organs that allow them to see, smell, and vivisect, or
probe beneath an object's surface to perceive its
cellular and chemical makeup. At the end of each
tentacle is a tiny, hair-like needle that penetrates the
flesh to "read" cellular information (Dawn 12). Lilith
describes the penetration as a "touch, a harder
pressure, then the puncture. It hurt[s] more than . . .
expected, but the pain end[s] quickly (Dawn 78). Unlike
human vivisectors, the Oankali feel the pain they give;
as Akin determines, "best, then, to be careful and not
cause pain (AR 7). Though the Oankali procedure differs
from that of the human, Lilith reacts just as she would
with a human vivisector; she resents being observed and
manipulated. Her interactions with the Oankali lead her
to fear the loss of her autonomy and even of her human
identity. She wonders whether identity is physically or
217
culturally constructed: what exactly makes her human?
Nikanj and Kahguyaht are frustrated by Lilith's
inability to retain new information, so Nikanj alters
Lilith's memory to be more efficient like that of the
Oankali, a procedure that bothers Lilith because she
thinks of her mind, her memory, as her self (Dawn 78).
The Oankali have a biologic memory that allows them
physically to retain knowledge; they do not forget
anything. They read the cellular composition of various
objects and store this information in their own cells
for future use. As Nikanj becomes acquainted with
Lilith, it "reads" her to learn who she is from her
cells. Even her son, Akin, "tastes" her to learn about
her biological self and ancestry (before metamorphosis,
his one tentacle is in his tong ue ). Lilith finds that
her enhanced memory allows her to access the information
that already exists in her mi n d — she can now remember
the Oankali language that before eluded her--but she
still relies on her human sense of vision to interpret
the world around her. Lilith is, however, more
perceptive than most humans. She recognizes the
delusional arrogance that leads the resisters to think
they can overcome the Oankali as well as the Oankali
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biological blindness that creates serious psychological
blunders in their interactions with the humans. Lilith
is trapped between the Oankali and the human, and
throughout the three novels struggles with her role as a
human who has chosen the Oankali way of life.
Besides reading cellular information, manipulating
the body's chemistry, healing wounds, and eliminating
pain, with their tentacles the Oankali also control sex
and reproduction. During sex, the ooloi lies between the
male and female humans with the only contact that of the
ooloi's tentacles penetrating each. The three are joined
through neuro-chemical connections generated by the
tentacles; sex is all in the mind, the result of "neural
stimulation" (Dawn 169). Reproduction is a scientific
practice, separate from that of sex; the child is
carefully considered and constructed. As Nicholas Birns
notes, the Oankali/human children are called
"constructs" because they are created "according to
plan, not out of spontaneous biological interaction"
(11). Procreation does not occur during sex, but when
the ooloi chooses to mix the egg and sperm in an organ
located between its two hearts, called a yashi, a type
of organic laboratory. The genetic engineering and
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impregnation of the female can occur at any time; Akin
is conceived years after his father, Joseph, has died
(AR 46). The Oankali genetic engineering is, in effect,
the practice of controlled reproduction, eugenics. The
ooloi eliminate dangerous illnesses and insure a
healthy, intelligent fetus. Because the Oankali believe
the humans to be genetically "unfit," the ooloi itself
chooses the characteristics that will be reproduced, and
the privileged species, the Oankali, has control over
the reproductive outcome. Lilith's concern about a loss
of self, of her humanity, originates with the loss of
control over her future and that of her children.
As aliens, the Oankali perceive human physiology
differently from humans. For example, they consider
cancer as "beautiful" and learn to control the rapid
cell growth to regenerate new limbs and later, to alter
physical forms (Dawn 21). When Nikanj is seriously
injured, nearly losing its arm and its life, it uses
Lilith's body to heal its own; it penetrates her body
with its tentacles, borrowing cellular information from
her cancer cells to regrow its own severed flesh (Dawn
232). It later tells her that her cancer "has given [it
its] life back" (Dawn 236). Lilith's child Jodahs, the
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first construct ooloi, discovers that it has the ability
to shape-shift, to change its form to please its
companions. This enhancement, one that the Oankali ooloi
do not share with the constructs, is directly related to
knowledge gained from the study of cancer cells (Dawn
40). The Oankali's ability to understand and control the
body on a cellular level eliminates the fear and
suspicion that characterize human interactions with the
environment. The Oankali approach life with curiosity
and excitement, whereas humans are afraid that new
creatures and experiences will harm them. Cancer, a
disease that terrifies humans, is fascinating to
Oankali. Nikanj is attracted to Lilith and later Tino
because they have cancer in their families; the unusual,
deadly disease makes the human chemistry somehow
different from other humans and thus seductive.
With her portrayal of the logical Oankali Butler
complicates the conception of humans and human
scientists. The Oankali characters--the books' genetic
engineers--perceive life differently from humans and
consequently use their scientific knowledge for
different purposes. Because they are not hierarchical,
their control of the human species is intended for its
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own good; they do think the Oankali way is superior to
that of the human but only because the humans have
proven themselves to be violent and self-destructive.
Butler blames the human propensity for domination on
male biology, and unlike human male scientists whose
emotionless logic is depicted as anti-feminine, Butler's
aliens are superior to the humans because they are
objectively logical and feminine. The Oankali are not
hierarchical; they consult and collaborate with each
other before acting on any important plans. They are
nurturing healers who value the solid family unit. They
love children. Most importantly, they feel others' pain
and are biologically determined to eliminate it; they
become physically uncomfortable if they are near someone
whose suffering they are unable to assist. Jodahs
notices that his human father is the only family member
who, when in pain, attempts to hurt others (Imago 20) .
The purpose of Oankali science is to improve life, not
to achieve a personal goal.
II. Change: evolution, adaptation, extinction
Through their "reading" of human cellular biology,
the Oankali discover that humans are "fatally flawed":
2 22
"You have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics.
Either alone would have been useful, would have aided
the survival of your species. But the two together are
lethal. It was only a matter of time before they
destroyed you" (Dawn 36). The Oankali determination to
"trade" genetic material with humans is, in part, to
eliminate the fatal flaw and thus save the species from
extinction. Lilith, however, worries that
"crossbreeding" with the Oankali "will finish what the
war began" and ensure the extinction of the human
species (Dawn 40-41).
But will it? What does it mean to be extinct?
Charles Darwin claims that all complex creatures now
living on the planet can trace their ancestry to ancient
species whose genetic material still exists in their
differently evolved relatives (Origin 314). Because the
genetic heritage is not completely eliminated, these
ancestors are "partial[ly]" as opposed to "complete[ly]"
extinct (Descent 1.236). Darwin did not have a modern
biological understanding of genetics and chromosomes but
based his understanding on the concept of heredity.
However, his statement about partial extinction is
remarkably accurate. We now know that the genetic
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material in a mouse is ninety-eight percent the same as
that in a human, proving true Darwin's claim that humans
are descended from animals and that the ancestors of
mice and humans live on, genetically speaking, in our
physiological makeup. The ancestor of the human and
mouse is partially, but not completely, extinct, even
though it no longer exists in its original form.
The humans in Xenogenesis believe in the pre-modern
understanding of heredity rather than the current one of
genetics, and in the trilogy this emotional attachment
to the idea of a pure human race is a sign of the
genetically encoded hierarchical thinking characteristic
of human behavior. According to Lilith and the other
humans, if the human body in its present form no longer
populates the Earth, it is extinct. Lilith's continued
use of the term "crossbreeding" emphasizes the breeding,
or physical shape of the species, rather than its
genetic makeup. The Oankali believe that the blending of
the human and Oankali through genetic engineering will
guarantee that neither becomes extinct, just different.
Evolved. This biological change is not a loss to them
but a natural process of life, an exchange of genetic
material. In Darwin's statement, "judging from the past,
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we m a y safely infer that not one living species will
transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity,"
the key word is "unaltered" (Origin 428). Evolutionary
history has shown that even if human offspring are not
genetically engineered, the species will eventually
evolve into something new. The difference between
genetic engineering and evolution is that of time and
control; in Xenogenesis, Butler insists that the slow
process of natural evolution would not have prevented
the species from self-destruction and that immediate
intervention by the Oankali was necessary to save them
from complete extinction.
Unlike humans, the Oankali trace their heritage not
through their present physical selves but from the
beginning of evolutionary time. Nikanj tells Lilith
family stories, but its stories include the ancestors
whose features were not at all like itsown:
Six divisions ago, on a white-sun water world,
we lived in great shallow oceans . . . We were
many-bodied and spoke with body lights and
color patterns among ourself and among
ourselves . . . (Dawn 61)
Nikanj is taking Lilith back to the days the Oankali
225
were one-celled animals, "many-bodied.11 The Oankali are
now symbionts, or a conglomeration of one-celled
creatures living in harmony as one organic unit (thus
the phrase "we . . . spoke . . . among o u r s e l f " ) . In
Imago, for instance, Aaor begins to dissolve (or
"devolve" as Eric White claims [406] ) into its different
parts. In Adulthood Rites, Nikanj teaches its and
Lilith's son about the Akjai, Oankali living on the
spaceship who, to Akin, resemble "ugly" caterpillars
(13-14). Nikanj tells him that its own grandparents,
Akin's great-grandparents, were Akjai (AR 13-14). The
Oankali presently do not resemble caterpillars, although
the ooloi do have six limbs. For the Oankali,
evolutionary change is necessary, controlled, and in the
immediate past; Akin can identify the presence of his
own ancestors in his cells, even his dead human father
Joseph. Because physical evolution is so integral and
immediate to Oankali history it is difficult for them to
comprehend the fearful human perception of change as
extinction. To the Oankali, change is life, and
biological assimilation does not indicate the end of one
species so much as the beginning of another.
Although Lilith claims that genetic trading with
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the Oankali will lead to the extinction of the human
race, the Oankali know that without the trade they will
become extinct: "We do what you would call genetic
engineering. We do it naturally. We must do it. It
renews us, enables us to survive as a species instead of
specializing ourselves into extinction or stagnation"
(Dawn 39). Humans, according to the Oankali, "had come
to their own end" because "they were flawed and
overspecialized" (AR 133). Genetic diversity enables a
species like the Oankali to continually develop and
evolve while maintaining a productive relationship with
their trading partners. Human genetic overspecialization
is the result of an attitude contrary to the Oankali's,
that of fear of difference. The Oankali explain, for
instance, that racial differences are "the result of
isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to
different environments" (AR 13). Humans have
historically isolated themselves from other groups of
humans because they are afraid of those who look
differently from themselves. In Shelley's novel, people
are terrified of Frankenstein's monster because of his
hideous appearance, and in Butler's even Lilith
struggles to overcome her initial revulsion to the
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Oankali. This fear has evolved for a purpose; as Nikanj
explains: "Different is dangerous. It might kill you.
That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest
animal relatives. And it's true for you" (Dawn 18 6).
In Xenogenesis, race becomes a biological rather
than a cultural characteristic; it is not a proud sign
of one's heritage but an indication of the human desire
to isolate itself from unlike groups. Racial purity is
maintained through inbreeding and as such is a rejection
of diversity. Butler, herself a black woman, condemns
this priority as superficial: it contributes to genetic
overspecialization and reinforces hierarchical thinking.
Benn Michaels claims that "in Xenogenesis it is not
difference itself but one's attitude toward difference
that is the source of conflict" (657). The humans resist
difference even when doing so means possible extinction.
The Oankali perceive diversity as both healthy and
exciting, and as a result they thrive.
Butler's introduction of aliens, as Benn Michaels
notes, forces the humans to disregard their racial
differences— which are, after all, only skin deep— to
overcome a threat to the survival of their species
(650). The humans do channel their fears of
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miscegenation toward a hatred of aliens, but even so
their xenophobic behavior remains unchanged. The
resisters attack other resister communities, stealing
women and killing men. Although some of the communities
are inter-racial, human behavior is still tribal; Butler
repeatedly illustrates human resistance to change. In
Imago, Jodahs meets a group of humans who are fertile
but diseased from inbreeding in an attempt to remain
pure, to remain human. The result of this attempt is
forced breeding (the women and men are mated like
animals), disfigured bodies (the disease creates huge,
unsightly tumors), and early deaths (many of the babies
die at birth or soon after, and adults die of their
tumors at a relatively young a g e ) . They kill all who
come near their town to maintain their isolation and
prevent the discovery of their fertility even though
this very fertility is literally killing them. Al though
their exile from the company of other humans is not
motivated by racism, the desire to remain human is just
as biologically destructive as that to remain racially
pure.
In Butler's novels, the human species is portrayed
as not having evolved much beyond its primitive
229
ancestors. Although the species was nearly destroyed by
its own violent, irrational behavior, immediately after
being awakened the humans engage in several fights, one
attempted abduction and rape, and the formation of
groups to revolt against Lilith who has been given the
task of acclimating the humans to their new future.
Lilith, after breaking up the attempted rape, tells
ev e r y o n e :
"There'll be no rape here . .. Nobody here is
property. Nobody here has the right to the use
of anybody else's body. There'll be no back-
to-the-Stone-Age, caveman bullshit! We stay
human. We treat each other like people, and we
get through this like people." (Dawn 178)
The problem, according to Butler, is precisely this:
they are already treating each other like people.
Butler, like H.G. Wells before her, portrays the human
population as greatly resembling its stone-age
ancestors. What has kept humans civilized are, according
to Wells, "suggestions and ideas, " a form of moral
behavior dictated by society and culture that is not, as
Darwin claims, instinctive, but an abstract human
creation: "[W]hat we call Morality," writes Wells,
230
"becomes the padding of suggested emotional habits
necessary to keep the round Palaeolithic savage in the
square hole of the civilised state" ("Human Evolution"
211, 217). Stephen Jay Gould agrees that "we have no
evidence for biological change in brain size or
structure since Homo sapiens appeared in the fossil
record some fifty thousand years ago" (354). Since the
culture to which Butler's human characters are
accustomed has been destroyed, the men, especially, seem
to have dropped their pretense of moral behavior and
returned to Wells's "Palaeolithic savage"— the "caveman
bullshit" of which Lilith speaks. In Darwinian terms,
the humans have reverted to an earlier social state.
Gould notes that "cultural evolution is . . . readily
reversible because its products are not coded in our
genes" (355). The Oankali know that humans are
genetically programmed to behave like cavemen. The human
cultures on Earth for which so many resisters long
nostalgically were, in actuality, abstract devices for
restraining natural genetic impulses; the animal was
lurking just beneath the surface, as Prendick perceives
in Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau. In Adulthood
Ritesr groups of resister men roam the Earth, stealing
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construct children to exchange for women, or stealing
and raping women without first buying them. As the
doctor, Yori, notes, "that's the way Human beings are
now. Shoot the men. Steal the women. If you have nothing
better to do, go raid your neighbors" (AR 259). Though
the humanicide occurred because of a few powerful people
with scientific weapons, they were no different,
according to Butler, than the dirty, uneducated
resisters with homemade guns who steal Akin after
crushing his human step-father's skull.
Butler clearly recognizes the necessity for
evolution in Xenogenesis to prevent humanity from
becoming extinct from self destruction or over
specialization. Because modern medicine has advanced to
the point where many people in technologically developed
countries live long lives unaffected by serious disease,
the role of evolution in weeding out weak or genetically
damaged individuals has been stymied. People who might
have died as children in the eighteenth century live to
adulthood in the twenty first, raising children of their
own. Darwin was himself disturbed by the possibility
that advances in medical science would interfere with
human evolution:
232
There is reason to believe that vaccination
has preserved thousands, who from a weak
constitution would formerly have succumbed to
small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised
societies propagate their kind. No one who has
attended to the breeding of domestic animals
will doubt that this must be highly injurious
to the race of man. (Descent 1.168)
Darwin and Butler are each concerned that without change
the human species will stagnate and degenerate. It is
impossible to determine how or if humans would have
evolved without the interference of science or if
evolution is presently occurring in an as-yet-unforeseen
way. As Gould states, the human brain has not evolved in
fifty-thousand years, and science has been meddling with
evolution for less than two hundred years. Butler
implies that well before scientific advancements humans
were shaping their own biological future by refusing to
integrate with unlike groups, an isolation that
perpetuated biologically determined behavior (fear of
the other) and genetically inherited diseases. Her
novels portray a human population that has not changed
to keep up with a technologically advanced, highly
233
populated world; rather than sharing and helping one
another, most humans continue to act tribally, hurting
all in the process.
Evolution works because it occurs to aid a species'
successful adaptation and survival. Aside from the self
destructive tendency noted by Butler, humans have not
yet had to be more logical or less hierarchical to
evolve successfully on Earth; the human species is
almost too successful. In his essay, "Planet of Weeds,"
author David Quammen interviews paleontologist David
Jablonski about the possible future extinction of the
human race. Quammen quotes Jablonski as saying: "'we've
got to be one of the most bomb-proof species on the
planet . . . W e ' r e geographically widespread, we have a
pretty remarkable reproductive rate, we're incredibly
good at coopting and monopolizing resources. I think it
would take a really serious, concerted effort to wipe
out the human species'" (231). At the same time,
Jablonski notes, Earth is presently in the midst of a
mass extinction comparable to the great extinctions of
the past,2 and though humans, in his opinion, will
survive, the planet will be "'a crummier place to live'"
(Quammen 231). There will be fewer species and less
234
diversity than we are presently accustomed to. Some
scientists predict that as much as one-third to two-
thirds of all species will be lost, making this
biological calamity as serious as past mass extinctions.
The loss of biodiversity will mean fewer resources in a
time when the world's population continues to grow and
further stress the environment.3 Jablonski hopes that
the "'new difficulties will serve as incentive for major
changes'" (qtd. in Quammen 231), but he adds that
evolutionary "'recovery might not begin until after the
extinction-causing circumstances have d i s a p p e a r e d , '"
meaning after the disappearance of humans (qtd. in
Quammen 233). Quammen calls humans "the consummate weed"
because the species thrives and spreads, choking out
other species in the process (231).
In support of Quammen's weed theory, Gould claims
that "flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution"
(363). The human ability to adapt and overcome
difficulties is proven by population growth and the
species' great geographic dispersal. Yet this success
may itself create the species' decline as overpopulation
leads to fewer resources and greater environmental
degradation. Butler notes that humans are not
235
psychologically adaptable; even now evidence of global
warming is not creating behavioral changes in the
technologically advanced societies that contribute most
to the problem. Butler's novels are set on a futuristic
Earth whose physical realities are not consistent with
our own, but her message for change is urgently
communicated to us now. Our present actions will
determine our future fate.
In Xenogenesis Butler's human characters inhabit a
post-war Earth of the future with an alien environment,
yet the people continue to behave just as they always
have. Within the unfamiliar setting, adaptation requires
both intellectual and physical flexibility; the refusal
to change means extinction because no offspring will be
born, but the ability to accept the Oankali leads to
partial extinction--the birth of monsters— one that many
humans stubbornly refuse to accept at all. Neither
option is easy, but retaining the old way of life is not
an option at all. Though she agrees to work with the
Oankali, Lilith herself has mixed feelings about the
future of humankind. She fears the resisters' violence
while "admir[ing]" their ability "to resist
conditioning": "Were they strong, then? Or simply unable
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to adapt?" (Dawn 201). Although Butler portrays many
adaptable human characters— Lilith, Joseph, Wray Ordway
and his lover Leah, Tate Marah, Tino Leal, Tomas and
Jesusa— the great majority of humans are stubborn and
violent, refusing (or unable) to change or learn from
the near-disaster that occurred on Earth. As White
notes, "the hero of the tale" is not the human but the
alien (402).
III. The human
Throughout the Xenogenesis trilogy Butler questions
what it means to be human. She attempts to determine,
writes Amanda Boulter, whether the human is "a
biological, psychological, cultural or historical
identity" (175). Butler leans heavily toward the
biological identity, the human as a genetically
determined species. Critiques of the human within
Xenogenesis reflect those in Butler's other novels, and
within all there is an acknowledgment of destructive
behavior as intrinsic to the species. As Benn Michaels
states, the trilogy blames the nuclear holocaust "not on
political struggle but on human nature" (655). Butler
agrees with the Oankali perspective that humans suffer
237
from a biological flaw,4 a potentially fatal conflict
between two genetic characteristics, one ancient and one
evolutionarily recent:
"You are intelligent . . . That's the newer of
the two characteristics, and the one you might
have put to work to save yourselves . . . You
are hierarchical. That's your older and more
entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your
closest animal relatives and in your most
different ones. It's a terrestrial
characteristic. When human intelligence served
it instead of guiding it, when human
intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a
problem but took pride in it or did not notice
it at all . . . That was like ignoring cancer"
(Dawn 37).
That the hierarchical principle, one directly related to
humans' animal ancestors, is reinforced by intelligence
is clear throughout the three novels. Hierarchical
thinking leads to illogical behavior that is
rationalized by intelligence: war, racism, and sexism
are all examples of hierarchical behavior that have been
perpetuated by the manipulation of intelligence. If, as
238
scientists now claim, all humans can trace their descent
from a single female in Africa— the "African E ve " — and
if humans possessed the biological memory of the Oankali
and were able to trace the genes in their bodies back to
this ancestor, it would be more difficult to justify
hatred of others. The member of the "different" race,
after all, is genetically part of one's self. The
contrast between Butler's logical aliens and the
emotional humans further emphasizes the hierarchical
nature of human behavior.
The Oankali, though scientific in attitude and
action, differ greatly from human scientists in that
they are not hierarchical and are deeply committed to
the welfare of all in the community (Dawn 39). Whereas
human science has often been motivated by a desire to
justify personal hierarchal theories--women's
inferiority to men, the higher intelligence of white
European males, the genetic unsuitability of the poor
for parenthood, human superiority to the "lesser"
animals, and so on--the Oankali's extreme logic and
probing tentacles make it impossible for them to fool
themselves. The Oankali's biological and cultural
structures are contrary to the tendencies that lead to
239
human hierarchies. Even their three genders, as White
notices, symbolize a break with "the source of all
dualistic thought" (404) . Binarism does not exist in the
Oankali culture; the Oankali operate as a whole, as a
community, never as individuals. All important decisions
are reached by consensus among adult Oankali; one
Oankali never decides for others. Even on the biological
level, their bodies are symbiotic clusters of cells, not
individual organisms. They interact biologically with
their environment; their tools and technology are
organic, resulting from genetic trades. Their homes and
spaceships, too, are organic— not quite animal or plant-
-and exist as extensions of the family. They revere
life, are disgusted by the human habit of eating flesh,
and do not understand the concept of war. Oankali can
communicate using electrical impulses between one
another and the home or ship, thus spreading information
rapidly. They do not hide information from one another
but are factual and open. The Oankali are unable to deny
truths because they perceive them fully; humans, on the
other hand, cannot help but manipulate information. As
Jdahya tells Lilith, "intelligence does enable you to
deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter"
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(Dawn 38). A fact, according to the Oankali, exists
whether it is acknowledged or not, and choosing to
ignore it is irresponsible and even dangerous: a "cancer
growing in someone's body will go on growing in spite of
denial" (Dawn 38).
The choice of Lilith to "parent" the first awakened
humans is logical to the Oankali; they have carefully
tested each human for flexibility, adaptability,
intelligence, and health. The logic of the Oankali,
however, is not that of the human. Lilith is a black
woman, so within the human hierarchy she is not
leadership material. Lilith herself does not want the
responsibility of telling a frustrated group of
imprisoned war survivors that they are under the control
of an alien species and that their children will be half
alien. Most of the human males refuse to accept Lilith;
upon being awakened, Curt immediately asks her who is in
charge, and he, of all the men, most resists Lilith's
position (Dawn 141). Yet Curt, a white man, is exactly
what the Oankali fear in a leader; he is aggressive and
violent. His rigid certainty makes him dangerous and
even stupid, like many of Butler's males. Curt does not
like Joseph Shing because he is Asian (Dawn 141), and he
241
does not accept Lilith's leadership because as a black
female she is at least twice removed from h i m — below
hi m— on the old hierarchical ladder. Yet in the post-war
world hierarchies have shifted, and men like Curt are
punished for their arrogance; after his murder of Joseph
Shing, the Oankali return him to the ship where his body
is used for cancer research (Dawn 231) . Lilith, whose
adaptability, intelligence, and compassion mark her as
Curt's superior, is the mother of the new human/Oankali
race, whereas Curt's genetic material will die with his
body. Human extinction, if it occurs, will be the fault
of human rigidity, not alien manipulation.
Lilith is an alien among the Oankali because she is
human (Osherow 75), yet because of her affiliation with
the Oankali she is believed by the humans to be an
alien. People avoid Lilith because she is "not human, or
not human enough" (Dawn 181). Lilith's body has been
enhanced to help her defend herself against attack, yet
she knows that these alterations will "make her seem
less human" and thus increase the likelihood of attack
(Dawn 120) .5 Lilith, who longed for human company, now
finds "that she must struggle not against nonhuman
aliens, but against her own kind" (Dawn 149-150) . The
242
Lilith myth is continued throughout the novels, with
Lilith portrayed as a strong, independent woman whose
choices alienate her from her own species. Butler
desires to alter the pattern of human life from a
destructive to a productive one, and the use of a black
woman named Lilith as the African Eve of a new race
enforces the realization that humans must reconfigure
their perception of reality to save the planet and
the m s e l v e s .
The human classification of "races" is based purely
on appearance, which for the ever-evolving Oankali is
only a superficial determination of one's identity. For
them, truth lies not in one's skin but beneath the
surface, on the cellular level, whereas the humans
instinctively dislike those who look or act differently
even when there is no logical reason for fear. M any
humans are afraid of--and immediately kill--mice,
insects, or snakes, even though they have the ability to
distinguish between threatening and non-threatening
varieties of these species. The Oankali fear truly
dangerous creatures, and the danger is determined by a
cellular understanding of them. Jdahya tells Lilith that
when his family met its first human, a doctor, they
243
"found her so disturbing that [some] left home for a
while. That's unheard-of behavior among us" (Dawn 24).
It is the genetic construction of humans that shocks the
Oankali, not their appearance: "I think their fear was
stronger than yours is now. They had never seen so much
life and so much death in one being. It hurt some of
them to touch her" (Dawn 25). Even so, it is this
cellular combination of "life" and "death"— one that the
Oankali lack--that they find attractive. Lilith tells
her son Akin,
Human beings fear difference . . . Oankali
crave difference. Humans persecute their
different ones, yet they need them to give
themselves definition and status. Oankali seek
difference and collect it. They need it to
keep themselves from stagnation and
overspecialization . . . When you feel a
conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace
difference. (AR 80)
Lilith suffers not only for her difference from the
other humans but for the realization that she has
betrayed her own species to be with the Oankali.6
However, she teaches her children to avoid strange,
244
potentially dangerous humans and to "go the Oankali
way." Physically Lilith is human, but emotionally and
intellectually she is very Oankali, and her acceptance
of Oankali culture conflicts her identity.
Butler attempts in the Xenogenesis trilogy to
redefine "the relationship between 'self' and 'other'"
by examining relationships between humans and between
humans and aliens (Boulter 172). She does this, as
already stated, by criticizing human behavior, but she
also shows human complexity in the Oankali's inability
to understand them. Lilith's adaptability and assumption
of Oankali culture belies the Oankali analysis of the
human as genetically hierarchical and flawed. In fact,
few of the human females act hierarchically, proving
that it is possible for humans to overcome their genetic
impulses. Although the Oankali do rely on their
biological understanding of a person to "know" her, they
are also aware of the importance of culture in shaping a
person. Nikanj tells Lilith that humans are "more than
only the composition and the workings of [their] bodies.
[They] are [their] personalities, [their] cultures.
We're interested in those too. That's why we saved as
many . . . as we could" (Dawn 154). The Oankali are less
245
adept, however, at understanding human culture and
personality and tend to overlook complexities as a
result. As Boulter notes, although the Oankali's
"biological certainty" makes them think they understand
humans, it "does not 'solve' the mystery of 'human
nature'" (174). The Oankali are repeatedly surprised by
humans— Lilith's refusal to "mate" with Paul Titus (who
was chosen because he is "big and dark" like her [Dawn
164]), the human rejection of the Oankali, Curt's murder
of Joseph ("What happened here was . . . totally
unplanned" [Dawn 224]), and the human determination to
die childless rather than create "monsters"— all
surprise the Oankali because not visible on a cellular
level. One's culture is difficult to measure or to fully
understand; it is not genetic or material.
Although the Oankali claim that the human is a
product of biology and culture, the emphasis on biology
remains strongest. In Adulthood Rites and Imago, most of
the humans encountered are not American, but even so the
men are as violent and primitive as the Americans
encountered in Dawn.1 Several humans try to kill Jdahya
with no provocation (Dawn 15-16), and rather than
pulling together in a cohesive group, the humans bicker
246
among and attempt to kill each other (Dawn 17). Later,
when released on Earth, the humans quickly develop
weapons and do kill each other. Lilith's encounter with
Paul Titus is extremely violent; Lilith notices that he
seems "to be enjoying himself" as he bullies her to have
sex, and when she refuses, he blames her: "'They said I
could do it with you. They said you could stay here if
you wanted to. And you had to go and mess it up!'" (Dawn
94). Butler's male characters are always shown to be
more unstable and violent than women, a trait the
Oankali link to male biology. The women characters
usually defer to the men, and many females who are
attracted to the ooloi, like Tate Marah, live in
resister communities because their human spouses refuse
to join the Oankali. Because human behavior is
biologically determined, Butler implies that humans need
to first evolve physically in order to evolve
culturally. Evolution requires change, and humans resist
change. As Benn Michaels notes, "the human desire to
'stay human' may be more plausibly described as the
object of the novel's critique than of its appreciation"
(657) .
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IV. The future
Xenogenesis ends with the future of humanity in an
uncertain state. The final constructs who represent the
Oankali/human future, Jodahs and Aaor, are shape-
shifters, physically unstable beings. Their plastic
bodies can mold into the shape most desired by their
companions or can lose all individuality and dissipate
into single-celled creatures. The definition of "imago"-
-the title of the last novel— is thus intriguing. The
"final and perfect form after metamorphosis" is not a
definite form at all (Peppers 56). The human visual
hierarchical relationship to others is shattered when
the other is not the same from one day to the next. The
physical characteristics that humans have historically
used to define themselves are entirely eliminated with
the creation of this one perfect monster. These
constructs characterize a future that is unknowable.
Butler's vision is one of evolution, of constant change
and adaptation. Nothing is concrete for long; all is in
a constant state of flux.
Darwin's theories of evolution introduced the
concept of human mutability, the potential for humans to
alter with time and eventually to become extinct. White
248
recognizes that instead of being the "apex of biological
po ss ibility," in Xenogenesis humanity has become "a
historically contingent, transitional phenomenon" (399).
Although White is writing about a twentieth-century
novel, his words perfectly describe the Victorian
anxiety about evolutionary change. Kelly Hurley explains
that the instability introduced by the theory of
evolution and other scientific discoveries greatly
worried late-nineteenth-century Europeans:
As nineteenth-century physics, evolutionism,
and social medicine generated the highly
compatible models of entropy, species
'reversion,' and human pathology, it became
clear that such alterations would be
disastrous ones, transforming the human
species into something unrecognizable, perhaps
even ensuring its extinction. (65)
Science, as a method of delving beneath the surface to
realize the facts that lie beneath, exposed the
transience of the human form. Pre-Darwinian novels like
Frankenstein portray science as creating monsters that
threaten cultural stability, whereas works written after
the 1871 publication of The Descent of Man, such as The
249
Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), prove the power of
nature to be as threatening as that of science. In
Moreau, the humans, scientists and laymen, are nearly as
unstable as the monsters, and society is doomed to
regress with or without science. Moreau, in fact, is
struggling to create a progressive human, one free from
the influence of nature. The humans in Butler's trilogy
compete against the same natural forces as those in
Wells's novel, and in each the humans lose. Change is
inevitable, and human identity is insignificant.
In Xenogenesis, although the humans understand that
their cultures and Earth itself have changed, they
attempt to live as they always had; they cling to a
doomed past and resist the new direction being created
for their species. Butler describes the Oankali interest
in difference as preferable to the human resistance to
it, and Oankali science is portrayed as more advanced
and desirable than human science. So when Akin reveals
the Oankali's plans for Earth it comes as a shock: the
Oankali, after trading with humans, will leave the
planet bare, consumed by their organic communities that
evolve into spaceships:
it was not only the descendants of Human and
250
Oankali who would eventually travel through
space in newly mature ships. It was also much
of the substance of Earth. And what was left
behind would be less than the corpse of a
world. It would be small, cold, and as
lifeless as the moon. . . The salvaged Earth
would finally die. Yet in another way, it
would live on as single-celled animals lived
on after dividing. (AR 119)
Like the humans themselves, the Earth will be changed
but present, partially extinct. Akin's revelation
introduces a new complexity to Butler's novels, leading
to different possible interpretations. One possible
reading is that of endless evolutionary cycles. When
Butler's trilogy begins, Earth is nearly destroyed.
Without the Oankali intervention the only surviving
species on the planet would have been "bacteria, a few
small land plants and animals, and some sea creatures"
(AR 41); Earth would have been returned to pre-human
times. The Oankali, however, regenerate life quickly
from specimens collected and the "altered remnants" of
species that had been salvaged (AR 41). When the
constructs leave, Earth will be left with nothing, then
251
slowly evolution will regenerate it again. An
evolutionary interpretation of the novels is consistent
with the attitudes Butler maintains toward the humans
and aliens, and it reinforces her message of change.8
Eric White offers another reading. He, in fact,
calls the Oankali "imperialistic or piratical
adventurers who roam the galaxy preying upon and
ultimately abolishing the difference they crave in its
specificity" (405). Though the Oankali claim not to be
hierarchical, they do favor their own interpretation of
life— the result of their compilation of facts— over
those of other species, such as humans. In this sense
they are very human. They colonize Earth, impose their
own attitudes, breed with the natives, and leave the
planet bare of all resources. The parallel between the
Oankali and the imperialism practiced by humans is
strikingly eerie. As both White and Benn Michaels
recognize, the Oankali destroy the very difference that
they crave, an act that resembles the fatal
contradiction they deplore in human behavior (White 405,
Benn Michaels 658).
To further complicate one's attitude toward the
Oankali, in Adulthood Rites Lilith's construct son Akin
252
agrees that the Oankali are allowing humans to become
extinct: the humans, he claims, "will only be . . .
something we consumed" {AR 199). Butler throughout the
series uses the Oankali and constructs to speak the
truth, and the truth has always been that the Oankali
have a symbiotic relationship with their human mates (AR
199). Akin, however, argues for an Akjai human; the
Akjai are the unaltered form of Oankali, and Akin
believes the humans should be allowed to exist in an
unaltered form. Yet the Oankali "know to the bone that
it's wrong to help the Human species regenerate
unchanged because it will destroy itself again" (Imago
11) and consider Akin's desire to be "profoundly immoral
[and] antilife" {AR 233). Akin agrees that the humans
could easily destroy themselves. He longs for evolution-
-the pure evolution of which Darwin wrote— in the form
of "mutation [and] . . . unexpected effects of the new
environment" to diffuse the human hierarchical tendency
{AR 2 61). In Xenogenesis humans are not offered the
option of reclaiming the past; survival can be achieved
only through biological alteration in the form of
genetic engineering or evolution.
Butler effectively creates the uncertainty of the
253
future through that of the protean constructs and the
complexity of the alien and human relationships. She
forces the reader to examine the Oankali purpose in
"saving" the Earth and the humans. If one has the human
perception of control, materialism, and endings, then
the Oankali are very like the human; they enslave the
humans while eventually devouring and destroying the
colonized Earth. If, however, one employs a broader,
evolutionary perspective and agrees that the Oankali are
not hierarchical, then the Oankali's genetic engineering
of humans and Earth appears to be beneficial to all
involved. Akin (who argues for the human A k j a i ) , is a
half-human construct, was raised in a human resister
colony, and is strongly influenced by the human way of
thought. Xenogenesis, however, supports not sameness but
difference, continual change. Even the elimination of
life from the planet is not in itself final. The Oankali
are aware of the planet's ability to regenerate itself,
and they actually leave behind a part of themselves— the
yashi with its warehouse of seeds and cellular
materials--to aid in the planet's rebirth.9 To accept
change one must rearrange one's perspective of life and
death, beginnings and endings. The destruction of
254
difference and the demise of the planet are not
necessarily an ending but a beginning, a new slate for
the assimilation of more difference, the evolution of
new life.
Darwin wrote, "When I view all beings not as
special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some
few beings which lived long before the first bed of the
Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become
ennobled" (Origin 428). Like the Oankali, Darwin
appreciates the intricate mechanism of biological change
to "ennoble" common lifeforms and advance them forward
in time, toward further alteration. Both Darwin and
Butler realize the value of change and diversity, which
to each symbolizes life itself. Xenogenesis proves that
evolution is necessary for the advancement of all life;
biological alteration may lead to the partial extinction
of the old species but it will also allow for the
genesis of a new one. As Butler writes in the Parable of
the So wer ,
Forever uniting, growing, dissolving—
forever Changing.
The Universe
is God's self-portrait. (313)
255
Notes
1. The ooloi is a genderless Oankali who is the family
healer, collector of information, and genetic engineer.
Each Oankali family unit consists of a male, a female,
and an ooloi, and each construct family consists of two
males, an Oankali and a human; two females, an Oankali
and a human; and one ooloi. The mated male and female
Oankali are generally brother and sister. The ooloi
stimulates the chemical responses within its partners
during the act of sex although the partners, one on
either side of the ooloi, do not physically touch. The
ooloi gathers the sperm and the egg, combines them
within an organ called a yashi, and later impregnates
the female. The process is very much like artificial
insemination. While combining egg and sperm, the ooloi
can choose certain genetic characteristics over others,
thus creating a genetically engineered child.
2. Among the examples given of past extinctions, Quammen
cites the Ordovician in which 85 percent of marine
animals died (this was prior to the existence of land
animals), the Permian period when 95 percent of animal
species became extinct, and the Cretaceous extinction
during which 7 6 percent of all species--including the
256
dinosaurs— perished (213).
3. Darwin was concerned about the inevitable prob le m of
overpopulation. In Origin, he writes: "Even slow-
breeding man has doubled in the last twenty-five years,
and at this rate, in less than a thousand years, there
would literally not be standing-room for his progeny"
(51). Darwin gave credit to the advancements in medical
science, through vivisection, for the longevity of
humans, but at the same time recognized the potential
planetary disaster that would accompany a great
population growth.
4. In an interview, Butler says that the Oankali belief
that humans have a fatal genetic flaw, that of
hierarchical thinking and intelligence, mirrors her own
assessment of humanity. This biological conflict plagues
the species and carries within it the potential for self
destruction (Beal 14).
5. "The Oankali had given her information, increased
physical strength, enhanced memory, and an ability to
control the walls and the suspended animation plants"
(Dawn 120).
6. The first group of awakened humans spread stories
about Lilith being a traitor to her kind. Tino, upon
257
first meeting Lilith and not yet realizing she is "the"
legendary Lilith, advises her to change her name (AR
36) .
7. As Boulter points out, the war's destruction of the
Northern Hemisphere has eliminated most of the white,
European humans (173). Lilith, a Californian, was on
vacation in South America when the nuclear bombing
occurred. In Dawn, the human population awakened by
Lilith is primarily white and American. In Adulthood
Rites and Imago, those whom Akin and Jodahs meet are
racially and ethnically diverse— many are from South
America, Asia, and Africa--and most do not speak
English.
8. In her novel The Parable of the Sower, Butler's
character Lauren Olamina creates a new religion called
"Earthseed," the central tenet of which is that change
is inevitable, necessary, and desirable: "God is Change"
(25) .
9. Oankali physiology includes an important organelle
that is used "to store and keep viable the cells of
unfamiliar living things" (Imago 23) . This organ is
larger and more complex in the ooloi, and in addition to
storing cells is used to construct new organisms. The
258
Oankali know that this organelle makes them Oankali; it
requires them to trade and collect new life forms. When
the Oankali visit planets that have no trade partners,
they "deliberately le[ave] behind large numbers of the
organelle. Abandoned, it . . . seek[s] a home in the
most unlikely indigenous life-forms and trigger[s]
changes— evolution in spurts" (Imago 23). Although the
Oankali do destroy old life forms, they leave the seeds
for new to develop.
259
Conclusion
[The] wise men . . . took a number of tame and
inoffensive animals--but principally those
noblest and most sensitive animals, horses—
and having bound them carefully for their own
safety, proceeded to cut, hew, saw, gouge,
bore, and lacerate the flesh, bones, marrow,
heart, and brains of the creatures groaning
helpless at their feet. And in so orderly and
perfect a fashion was this accomplished, that
these wise men, and learned men, and
honourable men discovered that a horse could
be made to suffer for ten hours, and to
undergo sixty-four different modes of torture
before he died.
And the people of this city still boasted
and said, "Behold, we are the most wise, and
the most brave, and the most polished people
on the face of the earth, and our city is the
centre of civilization and of humanity."
Frances Power Cobbe, "The Rights of M an and
the Claims of Beasts"
260
Robert A. Nye explains that in the nineteenth
century the "concept of decline was conceptually
inseparable from that of progress," and science has been
a symbol of both progress and decline (49). Science
fiction and antivivisection novels do not depict science
as delivering a utopian future to humanity; all indicate
that in different ways humanity suffers because of
science. Yet not all of the novels end with the decline
of the species. Deborah Rudacille notes that approaching
the vivisection controversy with a desire to perceive it
in absolute terms indicates an unwillingness to grapple
with the difficult questions that emerge from scientific
advancement (13). Though the oppositional rhetoric of
progress and decline is as true now as it was in the
nineteenth century, defining progress and decline is
still a murky business. Unlike the Victorians, we now
have extensive proof that medical science has helped
humanity enormously; in scientifically advanced
countries, we live long, comfortable lives compared with
those of the Victorians, and our health and longevity is
due in great part to vivisection. However, like the
Victorians, we are faced with many perplexing questions
261
about the future of medical science. Rudacille reminds
us that "we may soon have within our grasp the power to
remake ourselves, at the most basic level" (14). Genetic
engineering has made the body's plasticity a scientific
possibility. How will we use this technology? Will we be
in danger of creating a perfectly fit race of happy,
beautiful people? Who will determine the standards for
"fit" or "happy" or "beautiful"? Rudacille continues:
"What might be the outcome of this experiment none can
now foresee. But it is certain that history has
something to teach us about the dangers of both
scientific hubris and public ignorance of science" (14).
Scientific history has much to teach. As
illustrated in the epigraph by Frances Power Cobbe,
people consider themselves to be progressive even as
they commit heinous acts against those who are not
exactly like them; well into the twentieth century,
medical scientists routinely experimented on animals,
women, and the poor, not on their wealthy or influential
peers. Less than one-hundred years after Darwin's theory
of evolution was published, Adolf Hitler perverted
Darwinism and Galton's idea of eugenics to
scientifically alter the human race according to an
262
Aryan ideal. One German researcher, Professor J.
Hallervorden, received for his work the brains of
euthanized people: "'I accepted these brains of course.
Where they came from and how they came to me was really
none of my business'" (Rudacille 85). Hallervorden's
statement hearkens back to the Burke and Hare scandal of
1829 when members of the Edinburgh poor were mu rdered to
provide dissecting material for the medical institute.
Do researchers like Hallervorden or the professors in
Edinburgh have a responsibility outside of the
laboratory? Is it their business to know the source of
their materials or the consequences of their
discoveries? Many Victorians had asked whether there was
a limit to the sacrifices made for knowledge, and World
War II, with Hitler's accelerated eugenics program and
the United States's use of the atomic bomb on Japan, led
to serious reflection about the nature of scientific
responsibility.
Like the debates that continually accompany
scientific discoveries, vivisection itself is not an
issue of the past. Scientists still conduct experiments
on living animals, and antivivisection movements are
still in operation to block cruel behavior toward
263
experimental animals. Peter Singer, writing in the
1970s, claims that "scientists do not look for
alternatives [to vivisection] simply because they do not
care enough about the animals they are using" (83).
Singer charges people who do not treat animals as
respectfully as humans as guilty of "speciesism."
Speciesism, like racism, is grounded in a hierarchical
belief that one group is better than another. According
to Madhusree Mukerjee in Scientific American (1997),
however, scientists are now more sensitive to animal
issues than ever before; he cites farmers, hunters, and
the clergy as the three groups who most consistently
support the vivisection of animals (88). A nd Deborah
Rudacille, writing twenty-five years after Singer,
points out that scientists are now seeking alternative
methods of research that do not include vivisection. A
great impetus for this change has been pressure from
antivivisection groups and the public condemnation of
animal experimentation (Rudacille 169). Singer's book,
in fact, was instrumental in forcing change to occur.
Progress and decline are often difficult to measure
because what may seem at one time to be progress, like
the use of DDT, can later be recognized as creating a
264
decline in overall diversity of species and public
health. Certainly progress has been achieved in terms of
the health and longevity of people living in developed
countries. Coinciding with this progress is
overpopulation and environmental degradation, arguably
conditions of decline. Additionally, there are those who
would agree with Sarah Grand and Ouida that our modern
preoccupation with the body indicates an abdication of
morality, a capitulation to our animal natures.
Rudacille, in making a connection between Darwinism and
the "war between science and animal prote cti on, "
considers the possibility that the antivivisection
movement is "a microcosm of a larger conflict between
the human desire to use nature and its resources to
improve human life and the painful recognition that in
doing so we run the risk of destroying the delicate
symbiosis between ourselves and the natural world"
(273). This relationship between any species and its
environment was recognized by Darwin as integral to the
species' ongoing success, and our success in maintaining
a balance may be one way of measuring the progress or
decline of the species. The effort to protect
environmental integrity without eliminating scientific
265
research is realized by the ongoing debates about
scientific advancement and its consequences. The
vivisection controversy of fin-de-siecle Britain is
simply a forerunner to the controversies of twenty-first
century Europe and the United States.
266
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Victorians and Vivisection:

Fictions of Pain from the fin de siecle

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for' the degree of

New York University

All rights reserved.

ProQuest Information and Learning Company

All Rights Reserved, 2004

I would like to thank my advisor, Jeffrey L. Spear,

for his guidance and patience during the writing of this

dissertation. Each of his comments contributed to a

richer and more interesting perspective of vivisection

and the complex Victorian environment. I am deeply

indebted to my friends and colleagues, Jan Zlotnik

Schmidt and Robert H. Waugh, for their confidence in my

abilities and, most importantly, their humor. When I

most needed perspective, it was they who provided it.

I am especially grateful to my husband, Donald

Gardeski, for his endless interest in my project, his

scientific advice, and his proofreading skills. Without

the love and support of Donald and my parents, Peter and

Margaret Crockett, this endeavor would never have been

possible. Finally, I would like to thank m y dear friends

Michelle Diana and Kyung-Sook Boo who were always

willing to listen as I talked through the problems

encountered during the writing process.

Victorians and Vivisection: Fictions of Pain from

the fin de siecle explores the role of the vivisection

controversy in late-Victorian literature. Vivisection,

the method of experimentation that propelled medicine

from an art to a science, becomes complicated by its

connection to eugenics, gender and procreative issues,

and for its role in revisiting Darwinian debates about

the relationship between human and non-human animals.

These concepts are woven into works of fiction and n o n ­

fiction, particularly those that concern themselves with

a moral vision for the future of humanity.

The first chapter, "The Laboratory," examines the

laboratory as the site of the vivisector's gruesome

work. Dr. Benjulia, the archvivisector in Wilkie

Collins's novel, Heart and Science (1882/83), is an

emotionally stunted man who shuns social intercourse,

preferring to remain cloistered within his mysterious

laboratory. Charles Darwin's theory that humans derive

pleasure from companionship is belied by Benjulia whose

unnatural occupation invites solitude.

The second chapter, "The Hom e," looks at the role

of women in the antivivisection movement. Sarah Grand's

The Beth Book (1898) illustrates the moral dangers a

woman faces when living with a degenerate vivisector.

Darwin's examination of the moral laws that serve the

interests of the community lies behind Grand's message

of sacrifice for the common good and eugenics as the

means of creating a race of healthy, virtuous humans.

The third chapter, "The W i l d , " explores the results

of unrestricted vivisection in H.G. Wells's The Island

of Doctor Moreau (1896). In spite of his freedom to

pursue experimental science in exile, Moreau fails to

create a viable creature. Moreau, by an effort of sheer

will, overcomes the sympathetic instinct that Darwin

claims is innate to all social animals, placing him,

like Benjulia, in the category of unnatural vivisector.

The fourth chapter, "The Future," uses Octavia E.

These concepts are woven into works of fiction and n o n