Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal

The displacement of animality onto marginalized others operates as an attempted repression of the animality that stalks Western subjectivity in the modernist age. Indeed, the development of Freudian psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century should be recognized as a logical response to the threats of evolutionary theory. The concept of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis operates as a modernist codification of the problem of animality in the human person. Freud himself hazards an explanation of humanity’s rise from its animal heritage and theorizes that our repression of organicism simultaneously deanimalizes us and makes us human. Animality is consequently equated with neurosis in psychoanalytic terms since one must repress it in order to become, and remain, human. Historically, then, we might say that Darwinism releases the specter of animality for British modernists, while psychoanalysis attempts to capture and tame it. Freud offers a “cure” for animality’s presence in the human psyche. In fact, modernist literature often enacts this dialectic between Darwinism and psychoanalysis, which helps to explain the centrality of the human / animal dichotomy in literature of the period.

We have seen in the previous chapter that some modernist texts project animality away from the Western subject. In contrast, other texts insist upon the inevitable return of animality for the European. Rather than deny animality by displacing it, these texts either recognize that humans and animals are ontologically similar or acknowledge the confrontation with animals as one of radical alterity that fundamentally unsettles the “human” itself. In other words, these works resist the desire to repress the Darwinian story of origins, which includes the European in its narrative.

H. G. Wells is among the first modernist writers to thematize clearly the post-Darwinian uncertainty the human subject’s stability in relation to its species status.¹ While Wells’s account of this confrontation is partly racialized in The Island of Dr. Moreau, it is most directly a study of humanity’s animal nature rather than its racial nature. Though anxious, his account asserts the coincidence of human and animal and suggests that the denial of one’s animal nature cannot be sustained. Through Moreau’s character, Wells exposes the repression inherent in an Enlightenment project of transcendence that attempted to deanimalize the human subject. That is, the text suggests that humanity’s repression of animality is a violent impossibility.

Wells specifically narrativizes the dialectic between evolution and psychoanalysis in his novel The Croquet Player, which depicts British socialites’ inability to exorcise the organic persistence of our animal past in their psyches. This text details an inescapable contagion of the mind that issues from the ubiquitous, vestigial presence of man’s evolutionary ancestors. Characterized as a haunting and as a contagion, animality in The Croquet Player defies the powers of repression—in a specifically psychoanalytic register—and remains as an increasingly infectious spook.

For D. H. Lawrence, the confrontation with nonhuman animals in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers reveals another revision of traditional definitions of the human. Lawrence exposes the “voices” of Western humanism that encourage the violent sacrifice of animality, and he catalogues the human struggle to overcome those powerful ideological forces. At times, Lawrence’s poetry acknowledges the radical alterity of the animal other and deconstructs the typical humanist subject-who-knows by framing the limits of human epistemology. While the poems sometimes restabilize the traditional humanist subject position through violence against animals, Lawrence’s musings are valuable because they record the tension experienced by the modernist subject about the animal’s alterity and its consequent troubling of the “human.”

This repression of the Thing, which for our purposes is homologous to animality, constitutes the reason-driven subject of the Enlightenment, and, as Žižek explains, parallels the splitting of the Lacanian subject that renders it a barred and crossed-out subject. The “official” Enlightenment subject is one that represses its own animality or Thingness, and, because of this repression, circulates around a void. This purified notion of the human subject is profoundly threatened by Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which emerges in the late nineteenth century, as we have already seen. Darwin’s insistence that differences between humans and other animals are differences of degree rather than kind radically problematized the traditional humanist abjection of animality, particularly in its purified Enlightenment form.

As evidenced in the previous chapter, animality is recurrently coded in figures of ingestion and cannibalism throughout modernist literary texts. The Island of Dr. Moreau further corroborates this insight. The reader meets Edward Prendick, the novel’s protagonist, and two other sailors shipwrecked from the Lady Vain as they float helplessly without provisions and without promise of rescue. Prendick describes this initial crisis in terms of hunger and thirst: “We drifted famishing, and, after our water had come to an end, tormented by an intolerable thirst, for eight days altogether.”³ Prendick and his companions find themselves bereft of the basic comforts of human society and physical sustenance: they are confronted with mere physical survival, the need to eat and drink. Their predicament immediately compromises humanity’s claim to the transcendence of animal instincts as the three men agree to draw lots and determine who will be the cannibals among them and who will be the victim. Though Prendick’s companions struggle with one another and roll overboard before anyone is eaten, human nature is already marked in the novel as fundamentally physical, instinctual, and even aggressive.

Cyndy Hendershot points out that Prendick, as the novel’s “representative of masculine British civilization,” is set apart from the other men in the raft because he resists the initial proposal of cannibalism,⁴ but the text immediately undercuts Prendick’s status as nonprimitive when he is picked up by Moreau and company. Moreau’s assistant Montgomery gives Prendick some “scarlet stuff, iced,” and Prendick notes, “It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger” (5–6). Here Prendick’s basic physical need to eat and drink is realigned with cannibalism and therefore animalized. A few lines later, Montgomery assures the weakened protagonist that some mutton is boiling and will soon be ready to eat. When the mutton is brought in, Prendick is “so excited by the appetising smell of it” that he is no longer disquieted by the puma’s incessant growls from the deck (7). Wells’s emphasis on the olfactory further underscores Prendick’s animal needs. Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer have noted that Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, associates the acquisition of humanity with a decreased reliance on smell and an increased sense of sight: “Freud’s fantasy of origins tells us, then, that the human animal becomes the one who essentially sees rather than smells.”⁵

Of course, as Derrida has theorized, eating animal flesh is structured as a highly civilized activity in the West, as enacting the very autonomy and civilize-ation of the European subject. But Wells’s text troubles the distinction between eating the flesh of sheep and eating the flesh of people through its alignment of the carnivorous and the cannibalistic. Thus Prendick’s consumption of flesh and blood indicates the coincidence of human civilization and instinctual animality. In this way, the text highlights the Law’s justificatory reification of what Derrida calls in his essay “Eating Well” a “non-criminal putting to death” that is served up for dinner, a Western cultural practice that symbolically maintains the human through the destruction of animals for food (112). Wells’s text takes pains to emphasize the bloody realities of British cuisine. By foregrounding Prendick’s animal response to animal flesh, the text reveals the inherent contradiction of “carnivorous civilization.” Within the first few pages of the novel, then, Wells codes the eating of flesh as an animal practice. Prendick’s “civilized” status is undercut by his desire to feed on other animals, a desire that becomes one among several primary markers of animality in the novel.

This early troubling of Prendick’s status as human is promptly mirrored in the appearance of M’Ling, Moreau’s most beloved Beast Person who Prendick perceives as a misshapen black man moving with “animal swiftness” (9). As Hendershot points out, M’Ling serves as an obvious point of conflation between imperialist racism and Darwinian theories of evolutionary superiority. Not yet realizing that M’Ling is one of Moreau’s animals-made-human, Prendick experiences this creature within a psycho-mythological register:

Prendick seems to recollect M’Ling’s disquieting face through an unconscious source that is chronologically anterior. In Jungian terms, M’Ling triggers Prendick’s collective unconscious. Jung maintains that archetypes or primordial images recur in dream symbolism because the mind, like the physical body, represents a museum with “a long evolutionary history behind it…. I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal.”⁶ Prendick’s vague recognition of M’Ling, like most recognitions in the novel, says more about him than about the Beast Man because it indicates his own evolutionary kinship with animality. This recognition is mythologized in a subtle yet instructive reference to biblical tradition when Prendick turns to view the schooner’s deck. He is astonished to see, in addition to staghounds and a huge puma “cramped” in a small cage, “some big hutches containing a number of rabbits, and a solitary llama… squeezed in a mere box of a cage…. The dogs were muzzled by leather straps. The only human being on deck was a gaunt and silent sailor at the wheel” (11). In the parable of Noah’s Ark, humans and animals are equalized by the wrath of God infused into nature and find themselves literally in the same boat. The parable implicitly deconstructs the superiority of man over animal by insisting upon their mutual corporeal needs. The Ark is an apt allusion for the beginning of Wells’s tale, which, according to Anne Simpson, calls for humankind’s “deep investigations of the nature of self-awareness.”⁷

M’Ling functions as the ironic precursor to Prendick’s lesson on Noble’s Island, which undoes humanism’s fundamental species tenet, that humans are ontologically distinct from nonhuman animals. Prendick’s confusion over the status of M’Ling’s humanity sets the stage for his immanent tutelage. Looking toward M’Ling through the darkness, Prendick is astonished when “it” looks back with shining green eyes. “The thing came to me,” notes Prendick, “as a stark inhumanity. That black figure, with its eyes of fire, struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind” (18). For Jung, the childhood mind is more connected to the “deeper instinctive strata of the human psyche,” which adults have learned to control and repress (36). This narrative moment of terror also recalls Freudian theory, which implicitly claims that the repression of one’s animality must be learned because, as children, we are not repulsed by our own physicality.⁸ Ultimately, then, Prendick is poised to unlearn one of the basic lessons of human subjectivization: to be a person one must not be an animal.

Moreau’s apology for his experimental vivisections comes late in the novel, after Prendick has misunderstood the Beast People as humans who have been scientifically devolved into protoanimals. Of course, this misrecognition underscores the text’s deep implications for human identity: Moreau’s vivisections, which humanize animals, vividly register the inverse fear that humans already have animal qualities. This textual dialectic mirrors the double-edged nature of evolutionary theory as it was received in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That is, while much emphasis was placed on the progressive capacities of evolution for human cultures at that time, our shared heritage with other animals resulted in anxieties about regression and atavistic “leftovers” in the human person. Moreau’s response to such threats is a grandiose humanizing project that aims ultimately to eradicate animality from the sentient world. And while Moreau remains captivated by his own romance, Prendick learns by the novel’s end that this kind of purification is an impossible fantasy.

The deeply disturbing nature of this eventual collapse of human subjectivity is narrativized in the ninth chapter, subtitled “The Thing in the Forest.” In order to escape from the shrieks of the puma being vivisected in Moreau’s enclosure, Prendick ventures out to explore his island home. He is surprised to discover what, at first, is an indistinguishable figure that “bowed its head to the water and began to drink. Then [Prendick] saw it was a man, going on all-fours like a beast!” (42). This “animal-man” (50), this “grotesque half-bestial creature” (42), will be identified later in the text as the Leopard Man, but in this scene, Prendick cannot decipher its nature and struggles to comprehend the creature’s trans-species appearance. His anxieties are heightened when he stumbles upon a dead rabbit with its head torn off, the most recent victim of the “man” who goes on all fours. The rabbit is covered with flies, its blood scattered about, and therefore serves as an excessive depiction of predation, consumption, and what Žižek would term the “life substance” (22). In light of Žižek’s work, Wells’s terminology is perhaps most notable in this section. Prendick narrates the terrifying and various ways in which “the Thing” (46) pursued him. The creature easily coincides with the Kantian Thing, which Žižek reads as that which must be primordially repressed in order to produce the split subject of Lacanian discourse (Žižek, 181). Prendick’s flight from the Thing metaphorizes the Subject’s haunt by das Ding, by repressed and abjected animality. This reading is especially compelling because Prendick vacillates between the certain knowledge that the “other” is following him and the suspicion that his fears issue from within, from his own anxious imagination: “I was tormented by a faint rustling upon my right hand. I thought at first it was fancy, for whenever I stopped there was a silence save for the evening breeze in the tree-tops. Then when I went on again there was an echo to my footsteps” (47–48). This Thing in Wells’s ninth chapter serves as the animal without who ignites anxiety about the animal within, and though this chapter ends with Prendick’s narrow escape from the creature, the novel will demonstrate that such an escape is ultimately impossible because the animal cannot be extracted from the human subject. As Žižek maintains in reference to the subject’s attempt to escape the Thing, “The problem, of course, is that this endeavor [to master the Thing] is ultimately doomed to fail since the imbalance is constitutive” (183).

Moreau’s project, while ostensibly aimed at the transformation of animals, is in fact directed squarely at this constitutive imbalance in the human subject. His strident and repeated attempts to make animals reasonable represent an extreme legacy of the Enlightenment project of rationalization in its drive to purify the human subject—and even the animal subject—of all connections to the irrational, the bodily, the supernatural. In other words, Moreau’s science is desperate to exterminate animality by creating and policing the boundaries of rationalist humanism. Moreau reveals this fundamental motivation to Prendick when he admits, “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” (89; emphasis added). Wells’s portrait of Moreau insists upon the constructedness of the rational Enlightenment subject by suggesting that the transcendence of the rational human requires a certain intense and artificial technology, a burning out of the animal portion of human nature. The process, of course, is displaced here onto Moreau’s unsuspecting subjects, who are animals.

This fictional program of purification depends upon the newly articulated theories of mutation and natural selection that were made available to Wells in the late nineteenth century by theories of evolution. That is, once the idea of species mutability emerges, Wells can fashion a character obsessed with the final humanization of all biological creatures. Moreau informs Prendick, “These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that—to the study of the plasticity of living forms—my life has been devoted” (81). The mutability of species was precisely what compromised humanity’s claim to sovereignty over other animals once evolution was considered scientifically sound. And Moreau implicitly confirms this dethroning of the human when he tells Prendick, “A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily…. Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion” (82). Wells appears to draw directly from Nietzschian philosophy in this passage that explains morality as a repression of instinct. Nietzsche outlines a similar theory in On the Genealogy of Morals, where he discusses the process of internalization, that “all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself.”⁹

The notion that a pig may be educated reveals the ideological kernel of Moreau’s “benevolent” humanizing fantasy—a fantasy that combines pre-Darwinian Enlightenment doctrines of perfectibility with post-Darwinian theories of mutability—that all creatures can be elevated beyond their animality, that all creatures can be finally humanized. Horkheimer and Adorno critique this sort of deeply totalizing gesture when they elaborate the repressive forces of Enlightenment reason and its connection to fascism: “Enlightenment is totalitarian,” they explain.¹⁰ The “official” narrative of the Enlightenment proposes that matter will be mastered by scientism, systematism, and rationalist empiricism. The animal represents the human subject’s internal resistance to rationality and symbolic law, so Moreau, as a perverse Enlightenment “father,” wants to make all creatures reasonable.

Despite Moreau’s impassioned lecture on species transformation and the plasticity of forms, Prendick objects to the suffering Moreau inflicts upon his victims. At this objection, Moreau launches into a long discussion of physical pain and the need for rational man to transcend it. “So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick,” he maintains, “so long as your own pains drive you… I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels” (83; emphasis added). Here the scientist emphasizes the corporeal bottom line, the moment of pain in which materiality triumphs and the mind is conquered by the flesh. This is the moment in which humanity’s embodiment cannot be denied, yet denial is precisely what Moreau recommends. Moreau refuses to see that his own violent experimentation is akin to the very “animal” drives he works against. As Horkheimer and Adorno say of the animal experimenter: “It shows that because he does injury to animals, he and he alone in all creation voluntarily functions as mechanically, as blindly and automatically as the twitching limbs of the victim which the specialist knows how to turn to account” (245). Moreau continues his argument by drawing a knife and carefully inserting it into his own leg. His indifference to the blade is meant to demonstrate his transcendence of animal sensitivity to pain, which he argues can be “ground out of existence” by evolution (84). Again, Moreau aspires to epitomize the rationalist subject in his utter indifference to matters of the flesh: “This store men and women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure—they are for us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust” (84–85).

At the end of Moreau’s explanation, Prendick remains, to a certain degree, horrified by the humanizing experiments. He shivers at his newfound understanding of Moreau and finds himself in a “stagnant” mood. Prendick’s ambivalence reflects his persistent inability to rationalize the cruel means and questionable ends of the vivisections. Throughout the text, Wells emphasizes the extreme violence Moreau resorts to and therein provides a rare fictional representation of animal suffering in medical experimentation. Moreau’s rationale reinforces the text’s suggestion that actual violence against animals is a displaced violence that vainly attempts to exorcise animality from the human psyche. What’s more, the text also intimates, through its portrait of animal suffering, that attempts to deanimalize humanity are fundamentally violent. Before Prendick knows of Moreau’s procedures, he is driven from the compound by the puma’s “exquisite expression of suffering,” which sounds “as if all the pain in the world had found a voice” (40). Obliquely, then, the text bears witness to the inherent violence of the humanizing process which creates Lacan’s split subject, a process which forces the individual to renounce its animal nature, its connection to the natural world, and its instinctual desires and to reinforce this disavowal through violence against nonhumans. As I have already noted, Žižek explains in Enjoy Your Symptom that Lacan’s subject is predicated upon the primordial repression of the Kantian Thing, which “introduces a fundamental imbalance in the universe: the symbolically structured universe we live in is organized around a void, an impossibility (the inaccessibility of the Thing in itself)… the subject can never fully ‘become himself,’ he can never fully realize himself, he only ex-sists as the void of a distance from the Thing” (181). The violence of this “compromise formation” (Žižek, 22), in which the subject becoming human must disavow its animality, is literalized in the text by the scream of the puma as Moreau forces its renunciation of animal being in order to shape its “humanity.”

If Moreau’s experiments characterize the attempted renunciation and purification of animality, his creations also catalogue the inevitable failure of these processes. Moreau is motivated to eliminate the perpetual regression of his Beast People to an animal state. He admits to Prendick that his creatures are unable to maintain their humanlike repression of animal instincts, so he works harder to perfect his craft; “I have been doing better; but somehow the things drift back again, the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again” (87). Hendershot reads the “beast flesh” as Wells’s codification of sexual perversion, which was often attributed to non-European natives in imperialist narratives (5). But a close reading of Moreau’s continued description suggests that the beast flesh cannot be reduced to sexuality alone. Rather, it stands for a multifaceted human participation in animality. At this point, Moreau’s description is a thinly veiled denunciation of human behavior:

Moreau, who coincides with and embodies the Freudian father, or as Lacan rewrites it, the retroactively projected Name-of-the-Father, creates the Law for his Beast Folk. His prohibitive symbolic economy reads like a mock-up of the Ten Commandments as it identifies specific bestial acts that the humanized creatures must forego. The Beast Folk chant their moral code, “Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to eat Flesh of Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?” In addition, they are not to claw trees or chase other men, and Prendick notes how they swear the prohibition of “the maddest, most impossible and most indecent things one could well imagine” (65). These unmentionables register humanism’s projected self-loathing or shame at organicism while simultaneously acknowledging the profound unknowability of animal consciousness. The Beast Folk’s interrogative coda “Are we not Men?” insists upon the instability of human subjectivity and the concomitant need to establish and reestablish the boundaries of the human. Indeed, the Beast Folk provide a conspicuous instance of the “productive reiteration” of hegemonic norms that Judith Butler theorizes.¹¹ The creatures habitually gather to repeat the Law in their desperate attempt to remain human. They must constantly remind themselves of their putative humanity. Butler’s work on the iterability and cultural resignification of sexed identity can be applied to the discourse of species as it operates in Wells’s text. In Butler’s terms, the Beast Folk speak the necessary recitation, the repeated assumption, of their identity position, “whereby ‘assumption’ is not a singular act or event, but, rather, an iterable practice” (108). They speak and respeak their identity; they literally rearticulate their humanity in order to maintain its integrity.

Wells continues to lay bare the precarious nature of human identity vis-à-vis the animal through Prendick’s gradual demystification of the humanist version of the subject. After several months on the island, he reports becoming “habituated” to the Beast People (96). This habituation results from an uncanny resemblance between the behavior of the Beast People and Prendick’s memories of human behavior. He can no longer distinguish the carriage of Moreau’s bovine creature who works the launch from “some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours,” or the Fox-Bear Woman’s “shifty face” from the faces of prostitutes he once saw in “some city by-way.” Wells’s mutual deployment of gender and species discourses clearly emerges here as he adds that the female creatures had an “instinctive sense of their own repulsive clumsiness” and therefore readily adopted a human regard for decorum (96).

Victorian critics have analyzed “the animal within” as a figure that is aligned with sexuality, especially feminine sexuality, in nineteenth-century literature.¹² But those analyses tend to read out animality as such when they treat it as primarily symbolic of human behaviors and anxieties. While animality is occasionally gendered as feminine in the text, and while masculine imperialism is clearly at issue in Moreau’s attempts to create and control the “other,” the novel remains irreducibly interested in the ontological boundary between human and animal. Therefore, the text’s commentary on “primitive” female sexuality cannot contain its broader concern with human animality. Prendick’s habituation to the Beast People signals an erosion of the symbolic abjection of animality that constitutes human identity. If humans are socialized to see animals as fundamentally other, then Prendick’s socialization is wearing thin as the Beasts appear uncannily human. There appears to be a two-way trafficking of identity-deconstruction here, as Moreau’s animals become partially human while Moreau and the other men seem increasingly animal. This double destabilization unmasks the unmaintainability of the species boundary. The cultural edicts of speciesism dissolve on Dr. Moreau’s self-contained island, which functions as an alternative space to the finde-siècle British socius.

Prendick’s habituation to Moreau’s creatures serves as a precursor to his more radical moment of deconstructive clarity involving the Leopard Man. Formerly known as the Thing in the forest, the amorphous Leopard Man hunted Prendick earlier in the novel. He proves to be Moreau’s most wayward creature when he is exposed as a killer and consumer of flesh. The Leopard Man has disregarded Moreau’s Law and resumed his instinctual modes of behavior; he serves as a testimonial to the impossibility of Moreau’s Enlightenment fantasy of producing a purely rational human specimen. When Prendick and Montgomery discover a second slain rabbit in the woods, they suspect that the Beast People are on the verge of regression and revolt. Moreau calls the Folk together and confronts the carnivorous transgression, at which time the guilty Leopard Man leaps at Moreau. A frantic chase ensues, and the Beast People readily join the hunt for one of their own, a betrayer of the Law. In fact, the hunt allows them to indulge their “killer” instincts; the Swine-Folk squeal with excitement and the Wolf-Folk, seeing the Leopard Man run on all fours, howl with delight (106). The frenzied pursuit further unravels Moreau’s humanizing project because it disregards the fifth Law: Not to chase other Men. In Freudian terms, the chase corresponds to a return of the repressed animality in the Beast People and ultimately to a similar return in the human psyche. The narrative insists upon the Leopard Man’s interspecies identity at this point: “The thing was still clothed, and, at a distance, its face still seemed human, but the carriage of its four limbs was feline, and the furtive droop of its shoulder was distinctly that of a hunted animal” (106). Of course, the psychoanalytic “hunting” of animality is narrativized by Wells in The Croquet Player, which I will discuss subsequently in this chapter. For Prendick, the pursuit of the fugitive Leopard Man frames the novel’s most pivotal recognition. Coming upon the crouched figure who stares over its shoulder at Prendick, the latter admits: “It may seem a strange contradiction in me—I cannot explain the fact—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes, and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity” (107–108; emphasis added).

This epiphanic moment produces a surprising inversion of the traditional humanist subject position, which abjects and represses animality. In profound contrast to that abjection, Prendick’s vision privileges animality as an a priori, necessary, and constitutive element of the human. Prendick’s vision insists that the Leopard Man’s animality is actually his most human quality.

Indeed, it is the Leopard Man’s terror and capacity for suffering that reveal his humanity for Prendick in this scene. Moreau’s Law punishes transgressors by returning them to his “House of Pain” for further rationalization. When Prendick realizes that within seconds the animal-man will be “overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures of the enclosure,” he abruptly opts for a mercy killing and shoots the creature “between his terror-struck eyes” (108). This act of mercy grows out of Prendick’s awareness of the creature’s terror at its imminent suffering. His identification with the Leopard Man also suggests that experiencing fear of bodily harm and of one’s mortality are supremely human characteristics. In other words, being embodied, experiencing pain, having instincts and fears, these qualities mark one’s humanity as profoundly as any other qualities. We are reminded of Derrida’s discussion of vulnerability and inability at the heart of the living: “Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life.”¹³

The broader implications of Prendick’s privileged epiphany about the Leopard Man are almost immediately addressed in the text. The Beast People gather together after the fugitive’s body is dragged away, and Prendick continues to analyze the products of Moreau’s bizarre undertaking: “A strange persuasion came upon me 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” (109). Philosophical pronouncements like this one, that trouble the sanctity of humanism, characterize the remainder of the novel.

Jill Milling’s analysis of science-fiction narratives involving beast-men confirms that the scientist / protagonist “who makes discoveries about the relations between humans and other animals… records a sense of wonder, displacement, and ambivalence resulting from these revelations.”¹⁴ Prendick’s vision of humanity is permanently altered by his experience on the island. When he laments the Beast People’s lost innocence at Moreau’s hands, he implicitly laments humanity’s denaturalization as evolved, subjectivated, rational beings. Moreau’s beasts had been “adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand” (109). Humanity is metaphorized as the antithesis of freedom, as a blind adherence to authority, to the Law, to the symbolic order. The human creature has lost its immanence. In these rare moments, one detects in Wells traces of a nostalgic longing to return to some originary, animal moment in history before the human emerged as fully other from its fellow creatures, before man became the “thinking animal.” But for most of the novel, humanity’s residual animality stalks the human and threatens its locatability.

Moreau’s death at the claws of his Leopard Man confirms the futility of his project and sounds a warning to rationalist humanism that attempts to purify humanity of its animal tendencies are doomed to fail. Prendick’s unsuccessful return to “civilization” echoes this defeat. Rather than feeling restored by English society, Prendick reports a “strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread” he confronted on Moreau’s island. His detailed explanation of this “delusion” warrants a sizable quotation:

At the novel’s end, then, Prendick cannot reengage the basic humanist disavowal of animality. He recognizes the undecidability of the species boundary, and there is a certain horror in that recognition. Ultimately, Prendick places himself in a liminal species category that seems more animal than human: “And it even seemed that I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain, that sent it to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with the gid” (156). Perhaps Prendick obliquely acknowledges the unreasonableness of Enlightenment reason here, a strange disorder in the human brain. The novel’s final chapter informs us that Prendick must live as a recluse in order to maintain his sanity. He finds “hope” in an abstract sense of protection that he gains from his astronomical studies, in the “eternal laws of matter” (156). Clearly, Prendick’s gesture toward stability fails to recontain the anxiety released by the novel.

While The Island of Dr. Moreau maps a blurring of species boundaries on the physical body, The Croquet Player privileges the psyche as its evolutionary battlefield. The novel’s narrator-protagonist, Georgie Frobisher, underscores the psychological nature of Wells’s narrative in his opening line, “I have been talking to two very queer individuals and they have produced a peculiar disturbance of my mind” (emphasis added).¹⁵ The mental disturbance of which Frobisher speaks is immediately figured as a contagion that has “infected” the croquet player despite its “fantastic and unreasonable” nature (9). Indeed, Frobisher is poised to detail the manner in which he acquired an acute disease of the mind through the recounted experiences of Dr. Finchatton. Frobisher’s own confusion subtly emerges alongside these introductions when he notes that his immanent tale is “much more realistic and haunting and disturbing than any ordinary ghost story” (10). Frobisher seems to contradict himself; his story is unreasonable but realistic, fantastic but particularly disturbing. As the novel will reveal, this vacillation reflects modernism’s struggle to acknowledge and control the story of human origins that Darwinism outlines.

Frobisher introduces himself in the first chapter as an expert sportsman, an archer, croquet player, and tennis devotee. Disciplined and controlled, he can “keep [his] head and temper at croquet and make a wooden ball perform like a trained animal” (11). Likening Frobisher’s athletic expertise to animal training seems merely rhetorical at this juncture, indicating metaphorically his ability to subdue and control the erratic tendencies of the croquet ball. In fact, the image foreshadows the central anxiety of the novel: the inability to control one’s animality. Wells’s text will finally suggest that humans are simply trained animals, and that their training is insufficient to eradicate their deeply animal nature.

At the novel’s outset, Frobisher is associated with control and a specifically class-based transcendence. The sportsman’s own admission that he and his aunt “are the floating cream of humanity” (14) reinforces their distance from all things gritty, from the material detritus that gathers at the bottom of the proverbial cup. His aunt is “naturally hostile to sexual facts,” and Frobisher seems unaffected by such bodily vulgarities (12–13). Moreover, Frobisher is a wealthy socialite, a man whose routine engagements consist of high culture diversions like daily tea and his aunt’s social appointments. In partial contrast to Frobisher’s “nerve and self-possession” (12), however, he admits to being effeminate and to having “soft hands and an ineffective will” (13). He argues, moreover, that most sporting people, who pretend to “hairiness and virility,” are actually “soft” like he is (11). Gaming is not reality, Frobisher insists, and players create an imaginary realm within their “pleasant round of harmless and fruitless activities” (12).

Georgie Frobisher comes to swallow a profound dose of Darwinian reality in The Croquet Player, a reality that his cultivated, recreational prowess will not sufficiently tame. His original description of this psychic force, initially characterized as an evil presence or ghost, underscores his own powerlessness to subdue it: “The ghost they told me about was something… that began as an uneasiness and grew into a fear and became by slow degrees a spreading presence. And still it grew—in size, in power and intensity. Until it became a continual overshadowing dread. I do not like this ghost that grows and spreads, even though it does so only in the mind” (10). This “spreading presence” remains opaque in Frobisher’s opening description, though its psychological quality and its contagious nature are evident.

When, in the second chapter, Frobisher recalls his encounter with Dr. Finchatton, this presence, later dubbed “the Evil” (38), is characterized as an unavoidable and ubiquitous reality that stalks its human prey. The doctor initially challenges Frobisher: “But suppose you found there were ghosts all about you…. ‘There,’ he said and waved a hand at the tranquil sea and the innocent sky” (21). Dr. Finchatton wishes to know whether Frobisher engages himself in “real thinking. About things that pursue and worry you and cannot be explained” (21; emphasis added). Wells’s metaphor of prey and quarry aptly characterizes the precarious state of modernist subjectivity, which is stalked by the question of its own animal ontogenesis. Moreover, the ubiquitous nature of this stalker underscores its inescapable presence for Wells’s characters, suggesting that the Evil issues from within rather than without. Of course, the reader soon learns that this evil force is coterminous with humanity’s animal ancestry.

When Frobisher observes that Dr. Finchatton appears quite normal at first glance, he indicates a matter-of-factness about the presence of the Evil in the human person. He says of the doctor, “there was nothing about him to warn me off him. There was nothing eccentric in his manner or indeed in his general appearance” (23). Finchatton’s averageness, indeed his modest good looks and his typical Englishman’s dress, suggest that ordinary folk are susceptible to the Evil, though Frobisher will eventually question the doctor’s mental health. In contrast to his ordinary appearance, Dr. Finchatton’s tale of the “haunting” in Cainsmarsh strikes Frobisher as extraordinary. But before he recounts the remarkable tale, Dr. Finchatton describes his own difficulties within the medical profession. As a medical student he had been repulsed by dissection; he “felt too much” and “didn’t like the damaged human stuff in the wards… it horrified me” (26). Finchatton reveals his inability to confront the non-transcendent, corporeal aspects of the human: the body, blood, death, disfiguration, and the natural decay of the human corpus. His decision to buy a small medical practice in Cainsmarsh is motivated by the desire to escape these “harsh red realities” (26). Once established in the region, he avoids newspapers because they contain war photographs, and he refuses to read books “later than Dickens” (27). This literary reference acknowledges the way in which modernist literature and Wells’s own work openly thematize the “harsh red realities” inscribed in the post-Darwinian story of human identity. Wells seems to recognize that writers in the modernist era confront the species problem more squarely than earlier writers, and that their grapplings therewith unsettle the conventional tenets of humanism.

Of course, Dr. Finchatton’s desperate attempt to escape these realities is met with an excess of them, which suggests in psychoanalytic terms that the more desperately one represses a “neurosis,” the more violently it returns. Cainsmarsh, which is eventually revealed as the doctor’s fictitious construction rather than a geographical region, functions in the text as a placeholder for the unconscious. Finchatton remarks that this region, with its lack of cultural lore, is ostensibly an improbable place for “anything you could call psychic.” And yet, he muses, “It is in just such a flat, still atmosphere perhaps—translucent, gentle-coloured—that things lying below the surface, things altogether hidden in more eventful and colourful surroundings, creep on our perceptions” (29). And “creep” is the operative word in the phrase, for the text reveals that the malevolent presence in Cainsmarsh is indeed a return of repressed animality, an unleashing of what Jung has called the collective unconscious, in a specifically animal register.

But this recognition comes gradually to Finchatton, to Frobisher, and to the reader. At first, the doctor notices an unusually high suicide rate in Cainsmarsh and an abnormal incidence of “inexplicable crimes” that have no obvious motives (30). The Cainsmarsh population is especially dependent upon “opiates” and other mind-altering drugs, a dependence indicative of their attempt to control and redirect the psychological imbalances they experience. Finchatton notices his own infection by the “brooding strangeness” (30) of the place when his sleep becomes disrupted:

As a medical doctor, Finchatton attests to the lack of a “physiological cause” for these terrifying dreams. Consequently, his troubles are catapulted into the realm of the psyche. Freud explains such psychic disruptions by suggesting that dreams function as a retrogressive link to the unconscious. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud characterizes dreaming as “an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.”¹⁶ He goes on to suggest that dreams reveal humanity’s ancestral past:

The hunting imagery in Finchatton’s dream further foreshadows the imminent revelation that Cainsmarsh is an atavistic repository of the savage, animal past. Therefore, as Finchatton remains in Cainsmarsh, his unconscious mind is overstimulated, and it stalks his very subjectivity. Finchatton’s “furious struggle” to defend himself in his dreams is precisely that, a desperate attempt to protect the humanized self—the transcendent, autonomous “I”—from its inevitable participation in the animal.

Finchatton’s daytime hallucinations provide a more specific manifestation of this Darwinian intrusion on his subjectivity. He becomes “nervous and fanciful” as the unidentified stalkers in his dreams begin to take various animal forms: “I would turn convulsively under the impression that a silent hound was creeping up to attack me from behind, or I would imagine a black snake wriggling out from under the valance of an armchair” (32–33). At first, Finchatton insists to himself that these are merely hallucinations, “symptoms of relaxing mental control” (33). He begins to study his “profoundly uneasy” patients and concludes, “There was fear in the Marsh for them as for me. It was an established habitual fear. But it was not a definite fear. They feared something unknown” (34). This something, hidden beneath the surface in “Cainsmarsh,” this unconscious force, is partly revealed when the doctor seeks out the counsel of Old Rawdon, one of the local vicars.

Rawdon himself appears to occupy an ambiguous position on the species grid. Dr. Finchatton is unsettled when the elderly vicar “sat down quite close to me with one long bony hand cupping his hairy ear” (37). Of course, Wells’s cross-species portrait of Rawdon only parallels the explication he is poised to give Finchatton, who asks if there is something extraordinarily wrong in their part of the country. The vicar coins the moniker “The Evil” (38) in his description of Cainsmarsh’s curse, a curse that causes him to fear for his reason. Folks in his district are furtive and suspicious; they are violent toward their children, and especially brutal to animals. “They beat their dogs and horses,” explains the vicar, “Not regularly. By fits” (39). Apparently, the people of Cainsmarsh sense the animal “enemy” that Rawdon unveils, and they consequently displace their anxiety by brutalizing their own animals. This “enemy,” according to the vicar, is no simple beast but is, rather, the collective animal ancestry of the human species, unearthed by archaeologists in Cainsmarsh, “Something colossally evil. Broken up. Scattered all over the Marsh” (40).

Vicar Rawdon voices the developing anxieties of an era in his half-mad speech to Dr. Finchatton. Graves are everywhere, he exclaims, graves of our ancestors that should be left untouched since their disturbance creates “doubts and puzzles—destroying faith” (41). In the first decades after Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) was published, the major debates over evolutionary theory were religious, centering on its implications for Christian theology’s depiction of man as created by God ex nihilo. In keeping with these protestations, the vicar was “At a jump… denouncing Darwinism and evolution” (41). But as Rawdon’s ruminations continue, they reflect the deepening of the humanist crisis in species identity that marks the early twentieth century. He begins to rant about “Giants” in a local museum who wield “murder stones” (42). Finchatton eventually understands that Rawdon refers to model dinosaurs displayed in natural history museums. Yet the vicar clearly imagines these beasts as an immanent threat to his safety. He goes on to discuss the biblical curse of Cain, and Finchatton notes that Rawdon eventually gets “the children of Cain and the cave men and the mammoths and megatheria and dinosaurs all jumbled up in the wildest confusion” (44). Rawdon’s hysterical conflation of dinosaurs and men parallels the confrontation that humanism must make after Darwin, a confrontation with the interontology of the human and animal. Rawdon’s diatribe recasts the most difficult “truth” of evolutionary theory, the overlap of human and animal being. Moreover, the novel’s widespread use of infection tropes reflects modernism’s anxiety about the biological coimplication of human and animal.

Thus Rawdon’s “lunatic” rantings actually function as the Darwinian truth of Wells’s text, a text that will finally insist that the human mind cannot transcend its connection to animality. Rawdon’s most radical characterization of the “remote, archaic, bestial” (45) haunting in Cainsmarsh is the one that forces Dr. Finchatton to break from his narration and stare at Georgie Frobisher. Vicar Rawdon elaborates on the nature of the haunting:

Dr. Finchatton reports to Frobisher that upon hearing this theory he tried to laugh, but could not. Rather, he became “more saturated with terror” (45) than he had been prior to his visit with the vicar. Rawdon’s suggestion is indeed a powerful one that marshals the vast history of species evolution to threaten the sovereignty of humanism. It implies that Cainsmarsh (read the unconscious) is saturated with animality. In fact, the notion that our ancestral amoebae haunt us implies an inevitable, molecular instantiation of the animal within human bodies that clearly evokes terror. Deleuze and Guattari would reference this imagery as a “becominganimal which always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity” (239). The image of an irreducible multiplicity—our ancestral amoebae, for instance—is for Deleuze and Guattari an animal, unconscious, libidinal image that psychoanalysis wants to reduce and control because it threatens the sanctity of the individuated subject. When Dr. Finchatton admits that his medical training predisposes him to diagnose the problem as a “virus in the air or the water or the soil” (53), he reissues the equation of animality with multiplicity and with materiality. He determines not to drink water or food which has not been boiled or well-cooked.

The lesson of Wells’s tale, of course, is that the material invariably infuses the psychological. Vicar Rawdon evokes the biblical metaphor “ashes to ashes” when he explains how the archaeologists’ digs result in infection: “They turn up the soil, they strip things bare, and we breathe the dust of long-dead men” (43). Thus, it is as bodies, as physical animals who require oxygen to function, that the people of Cainsmarsh are infected. They inhale particles of the already-dead, particles that are emblematic of their own mortality. In the vicar’s eyes, these inhalations reactivate the animal being that resides as evolutionary residue in the human psyche. Corporeality is thus understood as a weakness and a curse that activates degraded mental propensities. In keeping with the Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition that values transcendence over the corruptible and animal body, the dust of materiality taints the spirit and animalizes the mind.

Returning home from his terrifying encounter with the vicar, Finchatton experiences his own version of atavism. He sees visions everywhere along the roadside and once at home becomes drunk. Feeling compelled to confront the land itself, he flings open his door: “There crouched the marshes under the moonlight and the long low mists seemed to have stayed their drifting at the slam of the door against the wall. As if they paused to listen. And over it all was something, a malignant presence such as I had never apprehended before” (46–47). Forcing himself to brave this confrontation, the doctor tries to speak out against the Evil of Cainsmarsh, “I forget what I said. Maybe I myself went far enough back to the Stone Age to make mere inarticulate sounds. But the purport was defiance—of every evil legacy the past has left for man” (47). Like Dr. Moreau, Finchatton cannot accept the human connection to animality. In this moment, the doctor’s inability to remain linguistically human is ironically emphasized as he tries to speak out against his animal ancestry. In fact, Finchatton reverts to an imagined prelinguistic past, before the organization of language, when protohumans—as animals or “cave men”—expelled “mere inarticulate sounds.” His defiance against humanity’s animal legacy is profoundly and satirically mitigated by his own barbaric yawp.

The text continues to dwarf the stature of contemporary human civilization in contrast to its evolutionary past. Still determined to comprehend the nature of the Cainsmarsh haunting, Dr. Finchatton visits the local museum that vicar Rawdon mentions and seeks out its archaeologist in residence. This scientist proudly exhibits the skull and remains of a “Neanderthaler,” which he calls the museum’s “special glory.” Finchatton is immediately unsettled by this “louring beetle-browed skull, that still seemed to scowl from its empty sockets” (58). This animal / human gaze problematizes the doctor’s own subjectivity and resonates with Lippit’s claim that the “locus of animality itself functions as a cut that lacerates the discourse of the subject.”¹⁷ After the doctor “marked the snarling grin of its upper jaw and the shadowy vitality that still lurked in the caverns whence its eyes had once glared upon the world,” he turns in astonishment to the archaeologist and exclaims, “That in our blood!” (59). Finchatton confronts what we now call the shared genetic code between humans and their primate ancestors. As Darwin’s findings indicate, the genetic mutations of other animals eventually produced humans, and their biological essence still runs in our veins. More significant to Wells’s novel, Finchatton’s humanist worldview collapses when the scientist describes the prehuman world. Indeed, the historical primacy of creatures like the Neanderthaler reduces human history to a mere insignificance:

Wells again underscores the ubiquitous nature of this ancestral specter. Just as Vicar Rawdon’s amoebae image suggests a teeming multiplicity, so too the archaeologist’s description insists that humanity’s animal ancestors saturate the earth. The scientist continues to trouble the sanctity of the human by suggesting that these creatures left not only bones but spirits as well, which haunt the earth. And while the scientist ostensibly dismisses this possibility with a chuckle, the novel does raise the question of animal consciousness through such suggestions. The scientist’s “teasing” reveals modernism’s anxiety about the deconstruction of the human person traditionally viewed as the only creature with a soul.

The archaeologist’s full explanation of the Cainsmarsh haunting, which explains changes in the perception of time, encapsulates one of the more profound ideological shifts of the modernist age. In The Culture of Time and Space, Stephen Kern outlines the late-nineteenth-century scientific arguments over the age of the earth in his chapter entitled “The Past.” Kern explains that these arguments were eventually settled in 1903 by the discovery that radium salts release heat, but that the subsequent debates only emphasized the fact that on an earth that is hundreds of millions of years old, “the history of man came to appear increasingly as a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.”¹⁸ Prior to these scientific discoveries, the biblical past of a few thousand years had supported an anthropocentric view of the universe in Western metaphysics. In contrast, new scientific calculations of the past forever changed the privileged status of the human. Kern also briefly notes that Darwin and other thinkers of his time like Marx and Hegel “shared the idea that philosophies, nations, social systems, or living forms become what they are as a result of progressive transformations in time, that any present form contains vestiges of all that has gone before” (51). Therefore Western humanism is not only attenuated by its connection to the animal world at this time, it has also lost its claim to temporal privilege in the grandest of metanarratives.

For Wells’s archaeologist, these newfound perceptions of time, both past and future, have caused the Cainsmarsh disease. He explains to Finchatton that a century earlier, men mostly “lived in the present” since they “knew nothing of the remote real past.” In fact, reminders of man’s evolutionary heritage—like the prized skull—were buried and forgotten, so men “lived in a magic sphere and we felt taken care of and safe” (63). Of course, scientific discoveries shattered these illusions of safety by revealing humanity’s ancient lineage in a “savage” and seemingly limitless past. The scientist explains:

The scientist’s impassioned speech implies that a post-Darwinian knowledge of human ancestry causes previously unearthed or repressed instincts to surge up from a collective unconscious. He impresses upon Dr. Finchatton that this savagery is “a mental thing and it had to be fought out in the mind” (64). Of course, as Kern explains, Darwin and Freud share a basic ideological assumption that remnants of the past shape the future, whether individually or as a species (42). As we have already noted, Freud suggests that the unconscious harbors traces of humanity’s ancient past, and he argues that “organic repression” acts as the humanizing force that separates us from our animal instincts. What we find in this novel, then, is a dialectical tension between Darwinism and psychoanalysis that frames the very organic realities of the animal problem as primarily mental concerns. This displacement resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis that, they claim, names and frames neurotic animality within the Oedipal scenario in an attempt to control the uncontrollable.

The museum archaeologist hopes Finchatton will be able to “broaden his mind” to include the vast reaches of the past “where the cave man was as present as the daily paper and a thousand years ahead was on the doorstep” (65). If the doctor cannot adjust mentally to this reorganization of time, though, the scientist recommends a psychotherapist named Dr. Norbert to Finchatton. After returning home and discovering a dog “battered to a pulp,” Finchatton finds himself in a “state of horror, at nature, at the deep fountains of cruelty in the human make-up” (67). In short measure, according to his story, Finchatton seeks out the counsel of Dr. Norbert.

Dr. Norbert, or as the chapter title dubs him, “The Intolerable Psychiatrist,” enters the scene just as Georgie Frobisher is becoming infected with the Evil through Finchatton’s narrative. The croquet player admits, the “ancestral skull, lurking unseen at first in the background, had slowly become visible… ! It was like something being lit up behind a transparency” (80–81). In Frobisher’s imagination, the skull takes on skin and lips and ghoulish eyes that stare out from its sockets. “The cave man,” he reports, “was becoming more and more plainly a living presence as the story germinated in my mind” (81). Thus the croquet player’s own animal nature surges up from his unconscious. On the following day, Frobisher and Dr. Norbert are left alone since Dr. Finchatton is not well enough, mentally, to join them. At this juncture, the psychotherapist reveals that Cainsmarsh is a fictive construction of Finchatton’s unstable mind created in order to control and mitigate his neurosis. Of course, the fact that the Evil does not reside in some geospatial location, the fact that it cannot be contained in a particular region, only magnifies its threat. These animal phantoms are ubiquitous because they exist in the mind. Wells’s phantasmatic device serves to problematize the traditional division between mind and matter: if the animal is manifested through our unconscious, then our unconscious mind is animal. No matter how subterranean the unconscious is considered to be, its centrality to the human psyche is clear. Thus, human logos is partly “contaminated” by the animal. Dr. Norbert confirms the radical nature of this implication when he rails against, “A sickness in the very grounds of our lives” (85). Norbert’s phrase indicates how profound the crisis was which humanism underwent after evolutionary theory was popularized and generally accepted as accurate. The very grounds, the very foundations of humanist identity were plagued with the return of the animal.

Indeed, Dr. Norbert’s agitated explanation of this psychic disruption should be remarked as the most overt and perhaps the most courageous passage in modernist literature that confronts the animal problem for humanism at that time:

Norbert expresses a central anxiety of the modernist age that stems from the unmasking of man as a member of the larger animal community and from the recognition that “progress” may only represent a new form of “blind domination” (Horkheimer and Adorno, xvi). His insistence that these discoveries about humanity are “no metaphors” is especially interesting for literary studies since literature is rife with metaphorical comparisons and metamorphical exchanges between humans and animals. But such metaphors, Norbert implies, do not intend a primary ontological symmetry between their terms of comparison and thus remain systems of substitution that do not trouble the fundamental divide between animal and human. In contrast, Darwinism insists upon a demetaphorizing of the overlap between human and animal ontogeny. Consequently, the human / animal comparison so long hierarchized in Western philosophy and literature is fundamentally changed by theories of evolution. The logic of the human / animal metaphor is altered: one can no longer say with the same force that humans are like animals because humans are animals.

Dr. Norbert’s characterization of the return of animality parallels a certain democracy of infection upon which the novel insists. The psychotherapist describes a worldwide rupture of animality in the human psyche, “A new plague—of the soul. A distress of the mind that has long lurked in odd corners of the mind, an endemic disorder, rising suddenly and spreading into a world epidemic” (86). The novel itself recapitulates a class-defying, democratic version of this story when it insists upon Frobisher’s infection alongside the less-sophisticated people of Cainsmarsh. Of course, the fact that Dr. Norbert himself has battled the Evil indicates its inevitable presence even among those trained to repress it.

This democracy of animality is notable in the context of other modernist writers who, as chapter 2 describes, displace the animal onto racialized and sexualized groups. For T. S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad, for instance, such disavowal has the effect of deanimalizing the white European subject and therefore maintaining its claim to imperialist privilege. But Wells’s novel refuses the scapegoating of a marginalized group and dramatically indicts the human species—or at least the English—as a whole. There is an almost courageous confrontation of the animal problem in Wells, a confrontation that acts as a leveling force for human communities. In this text, as in The Island of Dr. Moreau, the European is forced to acknowledge its own humanity as connected to the animal. In this way, Wells disallows the construction of imperialist privilege through the discourse of species.

Indeed, the novel vigorously mocks psychoanalysis and its inability to repress the animal, “the pursuing brute who never desists,” within every human psyche (91). When Frobisher inquires about a cure, Dr. Norbert elaborates his theory of “rational insensitiveness” (72). Summoning the powers of reason and repression, Dr. Norbert instructs Frobisher, “Do as I have done and shape your mind to a new scale…. We have to bind a harder, stronger civilization like steel about the world. We have to make such a mental effort as the stars have never witnessed yet. Arise, O Mind of Man!… Or be for ever defeated” (92). The repressive philosophy of psychoanalysis in relation to the modernist animal is reflected in Norbert’s invocation of the human mind. Reason, he asserts, in all its steely fortitude, can extinguish humanity’s own animality. This rationalization is akin to the violent process identified by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the process by which reason acts as a repressive and leveling totality.

Norbert’s call to rationalism and the repression of animal instincts is immediately compromised by Frobisher’s remark that the psychotherapist was now “fairly raving. There was even a touch of froth on his lips. He paced up and down and talked on and on, in a fine frenzy” (92). Dr. Norbert’s attempt to suture animality within a reason-driven mind only reinstantiates his animal behavior, his own “bow-wowing” at Frobisher (94). Consequently, when he warns Frobisher that “There will be no choice before a human being but to be either a driven animal or a stern devotee to that true civilization, that disciplined civilization, that has never yet been achieved” (94–95), the reader sees through this putative choice. Wells makes it clear that being a staunch rationalist equals being a driven animal. The novel implies that rationalist psychoanalysis not only fails to repress animality, but that it actually enacts a form of animality. Repression itself is accused of being uncivilized. Ultimately, the novel insists that there is no escape from one’s animal nature, which is violent and menacing.

The croquet player confirms this inevitable contagion of the human in the final pages of the novel. He admits that the two doctors have managed to “hypnotize” him and that he is unable to detach himself from the story (95). Wells’s reference to hypnosis further indicts the repressive mantle of Freudianism. In Electric Animal, Lippit carefully outlines Freud’s early interest in hypnosis and theories of animal magnetism that influenced his ideas about transference. Though Freud eventually disavows his work on hypnosis, Lippit argues that the “communicative powers of animal magnetism… can be said to lie at the origin of psychoanalysis” (101). And if psychoanalysis carries this Derridean trace of animality, its later efforts to exorcise the animal enact an attempted disavowal of its own deep ideology.

Even though he has avoided the doctors since Norbert’s raving episode, Frobisher laments, “Yet all the same the mischief had been started in me and it grows. In those two brief mornings, I got myself infected, fool that I was to listen to them! And now the infection is working in me” (96; emphasis added). The reader knows, therefore, that despite his last dismissal of Dr. Norbert in the name of a croquet round, Frobisher remains contaminated by the Evil. Thus critics like William J. Scheick—who contends that Wells challenges the reader to participate in the mind of Man—miss the point that Wells’s story reveals the therapeutic method as impossible and thus undermines the curative hope.¹⁹ The novel’s end signals the increasingly infectious haunting of Western subjectivity by its own unearthed, phantasmatic animality.

Sandra Gilbert, in her careful study of Lawrence’s poetry Acts of Attention, observes that Lawrence’s poems in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers fail when they become “polemical essays, almost mechanical impositions of ideas on their subjects.”²⁰ Specifically, the use of animals to elaborate some human tendency or political theory leaves the poetry stiff and forced. In “Bibbles,” for instance, Lawrence’s antidemocratic strivings spoil the poem’s rendering of his dog. These observations implicitly explain the centrality of poems like “Snake” and “Fish” in critical exegeses of the collection. That is, when Lawrence uses humanity as a poem’s ultimate reference point, the poetry usually becomes symbolic and trite. In a poem like “Fish,” however, Lawrence resists anthropomorphic symbolism as he confronts the alterity of the animal other. The struggle to resist human ways of codifying the animal is thematized in the much-anthologized poem, “Snake.” It is worth noting here that the more obvious sexual interpretations of the snake and fish poems as part and parcel of Lawrence’s phallic and semen imagery seem thin in comparison to a more philosophical reading of the poems in their engagement with questions of animals and animality. In fact, I will argue in chapter 4 that Lawrence’s recurrent reliance on sexuality is actually one particularly important current in his larger project of recuperating a kind of animal consciousness or being in the twentieth-century subject. That is, Lawrence’s emphasis on the sexual should not be understood as his ultimate philosophical focus, but rather as one step in a broader recuperation of animality. Reading these two poems in terms of the animal, rather than the sexual, begins to move us toward this broader understanding of Lawrence’s ideology.

The well-known poem, “Snake,” opens with a swift inversion of the human / animal binary since Lawrence immediately places himself / the narrator in a secondary position to the snake:

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was

Lawrence emphasizes the inferiority of his narrator’s position through repetition: he must wait, must stand and wait. The snake, he explains, came before him. This theme of animals’ evolutionary primogeniture, so to speak, is a recurring one in the collection. Animals have something over Lawrence, and over humanity; they came first and thus have a kind of originary knowledge that the latter-day human species lacks. This view of the animal displaces, almost marginalizes, the human in Lawrence’s poems. It also provides a certain relief from the burden of superiority that humans bear in traditional Western species hierarchies. After describing the snake as it drinks without forcing metaphoric gestures, Lawrence affirms once again the momentary and evolutionary primacy of the snake: “Someone was before me at my water-trough, / And I, like a second-comer, waiting.”

Just when human supremacy seems diminished and the snake’s being exalted, Lawrence unsettles the reversal of values with a psychological intrusion which reasserts humanism’s traditional speciesist injunction: “The voice of my education said to me / He must be killed,… And voices in me said, If you were a man / You would take a stick and break him now, and finish / him off.” These are the internalized “voices” of what Derrida calls the sacrificial structure of Western humanism, the carnophallogocentric symbolic order, which defines subjectivity—especially white male subjectivity—in sacrificial relationship to otherness. Lawrence’s description reduces Derrida’s schema to its essential form: to be a man, you must kill the animal.

“But,” replies the narrator to this call of the Big Other, “must I confess how I liked him, / How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to / drink at my water-trough.” A close reading of the poem reveals that the narrator’s ambivalence toward the reptile is initiated by the voices of his education. Moreover, fear itself seems to issue from these same voices. At the poem’s beginning, the narrator is only watchful and transfixed. The first mention of fear comes in response to those humanist injunctions: “Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? / Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? / Was it humility, to feel so honoured? / I felt so honoured. / And yet those voices: / If you were not afraid, you would kill him! / And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid.” Accusations of cowardice incite the narrator’s dread. The poem suddenly translates the confrontation between man and animal into the realm of fear and reverence. The text constructs a kind of religious subject-position in response to the snake.

The narrator’s fear becomes loathing, despite—or perhaps because of—his observation that the snake “looked around like a god.” As the creature slowly withdraws into the earth, “A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his with-/ drawing into that horrid black hole” takes hold of the speaker. Surrendering to the precepts of humanism, he throws a log toward the snake, who convulses in “an undignified haste” and is gone:

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

And I have something to expiate:

The central lesson of Lawrence’s poem resides in the narrator’s inability to act outside of the “accursed” voices of humanism, which are paltry in their unilateral abjection of the animal. Because he tritely enacts a small-minded, violent gesture toward the snake, the narrator despises himself. Indeed, he has diminished his own ability to experience and somehow be enlightened by “one of the lords of life.” The poem ultimately implies that the Western tendency to reject and destroy the animal in turn impoverishes humanity’s own animality. Lawrence would have understood this disavowal as the impoverishment of humanity’s “blood-consciousness.”

Christopher Pollnitz explains how Lawrence’s formulation of blood-consciousness stemmed from his reading of J. G. Frazer’s anthropology, especially Golden Bough and Totemism and Exogamy.²² In a 1915 letter to Bertrand Russell, Lawrence explains the dualism between mental consciousness and blood-consciousness: “One lives, knows, and has one’s being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life, belonging to the darkness. And the tragedy of this our life, and of your life, is that the mental and nerve consciousness exerts a tyranny over the blood-consciousness… and is engaged in the destruction of your blood-being or blood-consciousness” (qtd. in Pollnitz, 11). It is precisely this tyranny or interference of the blood-being by the mental life that Lawrence narrates in “Snake.” Lawrence goes on in his letter to insist that all creatures and plants possess this blood awareness, and that the origin of the animal totem in tribal societies results from the ancient, shared being of humans and animals. Pollnitz rightly observes that the poems of Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, therefore, occupy “a privileged place as touchstones of what blood-consciousness consists of” (13). Nonhuman animals, for Lawrence, possess the intuition or primal awareness that he finds lacking in his own species.

At the outset of “Fish,” Lawrence attempts a description of fishness, of the being of fishes, with a clear, though subtle, envy:

Whether the waters rise and cover the earth

Or whether the waters wilt in the hollow places,

Aqueous, subaqueous,

And never emerge.²³

Lawrence describes fish being as oneness, or as Georges Bataille puts it in Theory of Religion, “immediacy or immanence.”²⁴ Fish have a privileged experience of immanence since their milieu is contiguous, ubiquitous water. Indeed, one is tempted to suspect that Bataille had Lawrence’s poem in hand when he formulated his reductionist definition of animal ontology: “every animal is in the world like water in water.”²⁵ Certainly, this is the theory with which Lawrence’s poem initially describes the fish: “As the waters roll / Roll you.”

Fish have no sense of self, no differentiated consciousness; indeed, they have no kind of knowledge in the metaphysical sense according to the poem. Lawrence describes their emancipation from the prison house of abstraction: “Never know, / Never grasp. / Your life a sluice of sensation along your sides, / a flush at the flails of your fins, down the whorl of your / tail.” Lawrence’s recurring appeal to the body, to primordial, animal ways of being, and his often contradictory rejection of sexuality, find a special convergence in the fish:

You lie only with the water;

No fingers, no hands and feet, no lips;

No loins of desire—

Admitted, they swarm in companies,

They drive in shoals.

But soundless, and out of contact.

They exchange no word, no spasm, not even anger.

Many suspended together, forever apart,

Each one alone with the waters, upon one wave with

Roughly the first half of the poem, then, is a meditation on the ontology of fishes that emphasizes their unconscious, vitalistic mode of being in contrast to self-conscious and intersubjective humanity: “To be a fish! / So utterly without misgiving / To be a fish / In the waters.” As in the poem “Snake,” Lawrence emphasizes the evolutionary primacy of the animal other, and here he most clearly values the firstness of fish being: “Loveless, and so lively! / Born before God was love, / Or life knew loving. / Beautifully beforehand with it all.” It is at this halfway mark, however, that the poem undergoes a radical shift; its second half presents a critique of itself, particularly of its ecstatic meditation on being a fish.

At this point the narrator begins to reflect upon the process of describing and naming nonhuman animals. Interestingly, the narrator suggests that understanding a water-serpent comes easily, and one is reminded again of the kingly snake who looks around like a god at Lawrence’s water-trough. The stanza that follows this observation masks the poem’s fundamental shift with its first word, “But”:

But sitting in a boat on the Zeller lake

And watching the fishes in the breathing waters

Lift and swim and go their way—

I said to my heart, who are these?

And my heart couldn’t own them.

This admission marks the first of many descriptions in the poem that name the limits of human epistemology. Lawrence takes pains to insist that the human mind is incapable of comprehending the fish. In order to emphasize this point, Lawrence inserts the poem’s most anthropomorphic metaphor:

A slim young pike, with smart fins

And a grey-striped suit, a young cub of a pike

Slouching along away below, half out of sight,

Like a lout on an obscure pavement.

Aha, there’s somebody in the know!

That motionless deadly motion,

That unnatural barrel body, that long ghoul nose…

I left off hailing him.

Rather than contrast humans and fishes, this moment in the poem implies a similarity. Like the fish who can never know, never grasp, humans themselves can never fully grasp fishness. This epistemological limit, this inevitable lack of human knowledge becomes the poem’s second major consideration. Lawrence writes, “I left off hailing him,” and that is precisely what the poem does from this point forward. While the work’s second half contains a few physical descriptions of the fish, it does not attempt “to be a fish” any longer, to inhabit fish ontology through the poetic imagination.

Rather, the poem insists upon the radical alterity of the fish and elaborates the narrator’s profound inability to comprehend its experience. In simple yet solemn language, Lawrence writes the limits of the human intellect in its relentless drive to divine and name the animal other:

I had made a mistake, I didn’t know him,

This grey, monotonous soul in the water,

This intense individual in shadow,

I didn’t know his God,

I didn’t know his God.

Which is perhaps the last admission that life has to

And I said to my heart, there are limits

And to the one God.

Fish are beyond me.

Lawrence acknowledges the difficulty with which this admission of limitations comes to the narrator / himself, and to the larger discourses of humanism. For the Western rationalist subject to name its intellectual limit requires a relinquishing of mastery and autonomy. Lawrence’s poem acknowledges that, for humanity, the subjectivity of the animal other is ultimately unknowable. Pollnitz has noted the poem’s ideology of otherness: “A subject’s furthest knowledge of another is that its knowledge is incomplete, that the other has a separate and numinous opening on to the unknown” (15).

This admission of epistemological limitation destabilizes the traditional humanist subject position in which human supersedes animal as a matter of course. In fact, the poem implicitly unearths and undermines the Genesis creation myth that narrates God’s own appointment of man as controlling master of nature and of nonhuman animals. The fish “was born in front of my sunrise, / Before my day,” notes the narrator. After hooking the fish and forcing it from its water-being, the narrator anticipates the creature’s immanent death that he is causing and replies, “And my heart accused itself / Thinking: I am not the measure of creation. / This is beyond me, this fish. / His God stands outside my God.” The radical otherness of the fish is underscored by the hyperbolic suggestion that humans and fish are created by two wholly divergent forces, two different Gods. Their worlds do not overlap in Lawrence’s cosmology. In contrast to the Judeo-Christian portrait of man as steward and cocreator of the universe, Lawrence’s narrator insists, I am not the measure of creation. The poem undermines Western hu(man)ity’s conventional vision of itself as preeminent among earthly creatures.

Though seldom noted by critics, “Fish” offers a rare poetic indictment of man’s sacrificial relationship to nonhuman animals. The narrator’s “heart accused itself” as he watches the fish die: “He outstarts me. / And I, a many-fingered horror of daylight to him, / Have made him die.” The poetic situation suggests that the recognition of one’s epistemological limitations parallels the recognition that one should refrain from destroying that which one cannot know. Deborah Slicer has argued that animal rights philosophy must move beyond the according of value to nonhumans based on their similarities to humans and begin to theorize the importance of alterity. She suggests, “There is no reason why animals’ differences, independence, indifference cannot be grounds for caring, for relationships characterized by such ethically significant attitudes as respect, gratitude, compassion, fellow or sisterly feeling, and wonder.”²⁶ Lawrence’s poem moves in the direction of Slicer’s theory since it regrets the sacrifice of the radically other.

The poem ends with the complex image of Jesus as fish: “In the beginning / Jesus was called The Fish…. / And in the end.” Sandra Gilbert suggests that Jesus as fish represents immortality and being that is unencumbered by thought (172). Jesus certainly parallels the fish in Lawrence’s poem as an innocent sacrifice, a being unknowable to his sacrificers. More importantly, Jesus as fish represents the broad coincidence of the animal, the human, and the divine. The poem’s ending not only celebrates the erasure of species boundaries, it also, like Lawrence’s work in The Plumed Serpent, spiritualizes the animal.