Caleb thanks for getting this discussion started.
I had seen a couple of film versions before reading this book (for the first time) for this monthly discussion. I did not recall a great deal of detail but enough to totally alter my experience from what H.G. Wells intended for readers. Readers were supposed to slowly come to the realization of who/what these strange man like creatures were, and what the experiments of Dr. Moreau were about, but having seen the films any such shock or surprise was gone for me.
I have a slightly different take on the moral lesson that Wells intended. That it was immoral for Moreau to conduct those cruel experiments out of shear curiosity and to discard the creatures produced to fend [poorly] for themselves when results did not meet his expectations. That Moreau though mentally superior, and because of this able to exert dominion over animals, was in no way morally elevated over the animals he experimented on.
Some one mentioned in a different thread before this book was opened for discussion that this was more a SF tale than anything else. I would agree completely. Even at the time the Wells wrote this book I am sure people understood enough to know that it was fiction to think that the mental capacity and instincts of various animal species could be altered by surgery, no matter how skillful.
I highlighted and made a note (love reading ebooks) this passage:
Quote:
“But,” said I, “these things—these animals talk!”
He said that was so, and proceeded to point out that the possibility of vivisection does not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily. In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of superseding old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed of what we call moral education, he said, is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion. And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he continued,—in the incapacity to frame delicately different sound-symbols by which thought could be sustained. In this I failed to agree with him, but with a certain incivility he declined to notice my objection. He repeated that the thing was so, and continued his account of his work.
I asked him why he had taken the human form as a model. There seemed to me then, and there still seems to me now, a strange wickedness for that choice.
|
This immediately reminded me of this, and I made a note to look it up later:
Quote:
Saint Teresa of Avila:
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.
|
Ecstasy of St. Theresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Whew! Steamy stuff.
