Beast Lives
Beast Lives
Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau
Chapter 1 combines animal studies and disability studies to explore the complicated negotiation with human exceptionalism woven within H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). It argues that the novel’s critique of human exceptionalism founders on what disability studies scholar Alison Kafer has called the “curative imaginary”—a view that seeks perfection in human beings, or as I apply it to the case of Wells’s scientist, in animals. The chapter reads Wells’s Moreau as a proto-transhumanist, seeking not just to turn animals into human beings, but to transform human beings, to purge our animality in an effort make us “perfectly rational creatures.”
Keywords: H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, animality, vivisection, disability, human exceptionalism, curative imaginary, Alison Kafer
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