The Island of Doctor Moreau: H. G.Wells Seen from the Byronic Perspective

Abstract

Biographers are quite reticent about the fact that H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1897) recaptures many elements of Lord Byron's Don Juan, Canto II (1819). Both writers not only revert to the iconographical element of the shipwreck, they also show man at the precarious point when he is about to degenerate into a beast and cannibal. Seen in terms of allegory, both works address the question of what happens when God (personified by the tyrannical Doctor Moreau) or the concept of the trinity (symbolised by the ship called Trinidada) ceases to exist. While philosophers like Nietzsche see in God's death the advent of the superman, both Byron and Wells share the same anthropological doubt when they regard religion as an ambivalent means to preserve the brittle façade of civilisation. As relentless critics of religion, they also indulge in the deconstruction of their literary and cultural inheritance: while Byron turns the tradition of Don Juan upside down and transforms the erotic rebel into a sea-sick anti-hero, Wells inverts features of medieval culture when he has a parley turn into an abortive attempt at communication and Dante's guide through hell replaced by a chattering ape.