Monkey in the Mirror: The Science of Professor Higgins and Doctor Moreau

Abstract

In 1916, when George Bernard Shaw published Pygmalion in book form, he included a sequel describing Eliza's life after she left Higgins's laboratory. (1) To the two painful transformations depicted in the play, he now added a third. After reading the novels of H. G. Wells, Freddy's snobby sister Clara undergoes changes almost as drastic as Eliza's or her father's: When Mr. H. G. Wells lifted [Clara] on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth. (2) (115) In the formulaic tales of Salvation Army founder William Booth, degraded workers recovered their humanity when they were dragged back across a boundary between animal and human. Shaw's Pygmalion parodies such conversion narratives, in which miserable creatures are rehumanized and achieve enlightenment. Aligning the younger, politically concerned writer with Booth's views, Shaw mocks Wells as an apostle of social change. Nevertheless, Pygmalion bears a striking resemblance to Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, which two decades earlier had depicted the sufferings of vivisected taught to speak. Both works suggest the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of Booth-style transformations. Wells's novella and Shaw's play overturn Booth's narratives by problematizing the animal/human divide, suggesting the limits of plasticity and the futility of arbitrary individual conversions. London intellectuals with socialist leanings, Shaw and Wells knew one another and exchanged critiques of each other's work. From 1901 onward, they maintained a sharp, sometimes bitter correspondence in which they clashed about writing, Fabian socialism, and Wells's love life. Yet for all their disagreements, their works share a resonance frequency. The Island of Doctor Moreau appeared in April 1896, and Shaw envisioned the encounter between his flower girl and professor of phonetics as early as September 1897. (3) In both novella and play, self-centered experimenters try to make people from animals, mainly to see if they can do it. These transformations cause excruciating pain, and the scientists give little thought to how the creatures will live once they have been transformed. In both romances (4) language learning plays a key role, even as Wells and Shaw challenge the notion that speech distinguishes people from animals. Both works also draw on Darwin's evolutionary biology to imply that willed, targeted interference with evolutionary processes causes mostly pain, since all living beings have evolved in conjunction with their environments. While Pygmalion--not Moreau--is sometimes read as an educational success story, the works are equally ironic in the social experiments they depict. In both the play and the novella, talking animals question the facile application of biological laws to complex, hierarchical societies. The bath of burning pain In the 1890s comparisons of workers to savages were common, even among those trying hardest to help the poor. William Booth based his best seller In Darkest England on an extended metaphor comparing the living conditions in London to those in Central Africa. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? he asked. May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest? (11-12) Booth hoped to divert some of the Christian energy being poured into missionary societies into projects for England's own poor. Journalist Margaret Harkness, an outspoken advocate of the Salvation Army, built on Booths metaphors in her popular novels about slum life. …