Let the discussion begin!

Was anyone else freaked out by this book?

Good heavens, yes. I had to look up ‘vivisection’ on Wiki to know what exactly I should be picturing in my bad dreams.

I think, for me, the most horrible thing is when he goes back to London and can’t stop looking at people as Beast People

I also looked up vivisection. For me it was a word that I had a vague notion of what it suggested, but not a real good concept of the definition. I think to our twenty-first century mind, with gene-splicing and cloning and reattachment of limbs, etc., it conotes more than what it really meant in Wells’ day.

Ella, what bothered you about that? Was he not right to see the Beast people in everyone around him, given what we know now was to come? Does it make us look at ourselves and others around us now and wonder how far from beasts we are removed? I think there is a deep religious aspect here that may be getting avoided, a fundamental question about what humans are and our place in the world.

At first I thought what fun, another island adventure story. Silly me.  When Moreau started explaining himself I thought I might be a little sick.  I had to look up vivisection, too, Ella.  I had an idea of what it was, but now I have a lovely vivid picture in my mind.

I think it’s that classic “he escapes - but he can’t ever really escape” ending. I found it horrible, after what Prendick had been through, that he rejoins civilization only to discover that the Beast People are everywhere. That bit about city commuters really got me: “they seem no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies” - yikes. Humans are pretty horrible creatures sometimes, but the Beast People - I found them to be something else, more awful.

I knew what vivisection was, I’ve seen photos. When I lived in Los Angeles there was, and probably still is, an animal rights group that would set up shop on street corners and display these huge posters of vivisected animals. Enough to make a person lose their lunch. So those pictures keep popping up into my mind and it all just makes me feel ill.

I think it interesting Ella that you are most bothered about when Prendick returns to London and can’t stop seeing Beast People. I think it continues the emphasis on the question of what is human. It also speaks to the guilt and trauma of Prendick’s experience.

What bothered me most about the vivisection is that it was done without anesthesia. Does Moreau ever say why he works on animals that are not only alive but awake? I can’t stop thinking about that poor puma, screaming for days and days.

Maybe Prendick mentions this, I don’t recall: can the screaming of the puma not be likened to the cries of an infant as it is being born, and any pain suffered as the pain in bringing a new life into the world? Moreau’s work is just a complete perversion of humankind, from our point of view, but what about from God’s?

Moreau didn’t use anesthesia. He tells Prendick he wants the animals to feel pain because he believes the pain will burn through the beast so that there is nothing left but a rational mind. The pain is part of the process and he also uses it as punishment--his enclosure is called The House of Pain by the Beast People and they are threatened with being taken there when they break the Law. it could be likened to the pain of birth on some respects, but the pain of thier “birth” is perverted and unnatural.

I’m almost certain it hurts more to give birth than be born. Maybe Moreau should have vivisected himself.

This book really had me on edge. Every time I turned the page I kept thinking, oh God what’s going to happen now. I was really haunted by the House of Pain. How could Moreau keep going on with the experiments? Where was his humanity when he is inflicting so much pain on others?

You hit on it, Iliana: how easy it is to stray over the line that separates human from animal.

We’re horrified by the vivisection in the book, but Well’s reviewers were horrified by Wells’ “refusal to honor conventional distinctions between human beings and beasts,” as the introduction to my copy puts it. [I read that after posting, BTW] The fact that we are more bothered by the animal experiments perhaps shows how much we accept our animal nature and how much we value animals now.

Incidentally, I looked into anaesthesia and at the time the main anaesthetic was ether. With ether, the effective dose is very close to the lethal dose, and so it would have been very hazardous to use on animals as the proper dose would vary greatly by species and size. That might partly explain why there was no mention of it. When you consider what humans undergoing surgery went though before anaesthetic, vivisection would not have seemed so incredibly cruel then as it does to us who have so many options for pain relief.

One thing that struck me about Prendick’s narration is his confusion. After the “Lady Vain” sinks and he’s set adrift, it’s almost as though he falls into a kind of trance. There is no sense or reason on the island; he explains things in a kind of jumble of details. Even in the main plot points of the story, like Moreau’s death and the arrival of the dead captain, there is very little explanation why or how they happen. Montgomery never even explains why they chose to take Prendick to the island at all, instead of letting him drift away in the launch - it’s not like Prendick would have been a big help to their work, and there’s no hint that Moreau wanted to work on him. The whole book seemed like a kind of nightmare. I kept thinking that it would end by revealing Prendick still drifting around in the “Lady Vain” dinghy, gone completely mad.

Did anyone else get that confused feeling? (It’s entirely possible I am just not processing this correctly - late night again yesterday.)

Ella that’s an interesting thought. I got the sense of confusion from Pendrick at the beginning more so than at the end of the book. But, I think the idea of being in a trance is carried throughout the entire story. For example, when the Beasts are reciting the Law. And, it’s when they fall out of the trance (tasting blood) that they begin to revert back to being animals.

I like the whole trance idea. Could we say that from the time of Prendick’s shipwreck he was in an animal-like trance? Or in process of touching more of his animal nature? They did after all draw straws on the dinghy to see who was going to be eaten. He was given some drink that tasted like blood by Montgomery on the ship after he was rescued. It was all a downhill sort of slide. And then as a flip side of that can we say the animals were in a human-like trance? Who on the island was more human? the humans or the Beast People? I felt quite a lot of empathy for the plight of M’ling. He seemed very much like a nice guy caught up in a bad situation only he wasn’t human.