Animal

The distinction between human and animal is particularly difficult to define, and incidentally has been a matter of my own personal curiosity since childhood. In kindergarten, I would ask my Catholic school teachers whether human beings' nature was animal or otherwise. I had suspected that there was no tangible evidence that humans were somehow super-animal, and I believed that humans, my teacher included, were reluctant to accept this. Curiously I recall taking comfort in the belief that humans and animals are closely related. In any case, the questions would always be cleverly avoided and are thus left for me to address here.

The Oxford English Dictionary's first two definitions would offer different answers to an inquisitive 7-year-old: "1.a. A living being... endowed with life, sensation and voluntary motion," clearly including human beings, and "2. In common usage: one of the lower animals... as distinguished from man," explicitly excluding human beings.

I have compiled a list of criteria which are used in The Island of Dr. Moreau to distinguish between humans and (other ?) animals. It is as symmetrical a list as I could make it, although most of the book describes the hybrids, assuming familiarity with humans.

The list is largely what might be expected, however a few items seem to warrant some discussion. The clothing distinction is particularly interesting. As the human-animal distinction is fuzzier than we might be comfortable with, we use clothing as a symbolic measure to separate the two, much like we might use uniforms to distinguish members of teams in sport and war who are otherwise very similar.

Wells' interpretation of gender in relation to the animal-human border is also worth discussing. "Female" makes the Animal list for the same reason "night" does. The animal part of the hybrid creatures is strongest at night when they start to "revert" to their animal ways. Similarly, the animal part seems to be strongest in the "pioneers" of this movement, which, to Mr. Prendrick's "surprise" were all female. There's a similar (i.e. I would propose that it is similar in motivation) reference to a animal-human hybrid as being of the "negroid type." This may refer only to the creature's hue, bit it seems that a racial categorization is being made. While our analysis will be largely speculative, we can see a potential motivation for this. Throughout Wells' narrative, the human-animal distinction is challenged, perhaps even discarded . In response to this, Wells defensively throws up two other distinctions between himself and an the disfavored assessment as "animal."

At least one Lacanian school of object relations described by Mark Bracher asserts that a subject constructs its identity by adopting and rejecting identity elements which might engender love of the subject in another, or in a generalized "Other" object. This process occurs symmetrically in individual and group levels. The subject thus identifies with various meaning-bearing signifiers which constitute the individual's ego-ideal identity. These identity elements are a strategy to engender love in a love-object, and they symbolically represent one's fitness to be loved. When viewed through this lens, human interaction both microscopically and macroscopically is the result of the "wars" which people and whole societies "wage on other [competing] signifiers." One such signifier would be "human," and Bracher specifically asserts gender and race as perennial examples of such "master signifiers." This school of analysis would suggest that Wells, feeling one of his identity-bearing signifiers threatened, asserts two new ones to take its place. Thus, while the meaning of human, and the border between human and animal is challenged, there are at least two human groups who are closer to the animal than Wells himself is.

Animal

naked
gibberish
parrot like

fear-hunted pain-driven things
instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings
cannibalism*
"revert" from civilized ways

night
female
going on all-fours
hands hanging down
jaw thrust forward
hunchbacked
squatting
abnormally short legs
ugly faces
fur
pointed ears
sharp teeth
black

Human

clothed
language
think
memory

reasonable
an abstract law*
religion
civilized*

day
"Are we not Men"
standing erect
build houses
cook

human figure

I have marked with an asterisk* those words and phrases which I have interpreted which may not have appeared in the book. While "cannibalism" is alluded to by taboos in the Law, and by the act of cannibalism occurring in the book, the word "cannibalism" may have been used to describe it.

1. "They were... reverting very rapidly. / Some of them - the pioneers, I noticed with some surprise, were all females - began to disregard the injunction of decency."(p. 145) The women thus are the first to "revert" to their animal ways, and thus are included here. It is a stretch, and perhaps more a criticism of the English language than a commentary on Wells' narrative that "Men" was used to describe the Human side.
2. Dr. Moreau creates a "fair specimen of the negroid type."(p. 86), and Montgomery's assistant is often described as a having a black face, or even as "The black face"(p. 9). It seems that Wells is referring primarily to the hue of his creation, it's hard to tell if a racial categorization is also intended. It could possibly be significant that Wells' character classifies an intermediate animal-human as "negroid."

glossary