The gap between science and ethics had widened in 1876 with the growing advances in vivisection and grafting. While the latter was an agricultural advancement, the former created a domain for the vertebrates on whom experimental dissection, toxin injection, and grafting would be performed. In 1867, such experimentation on animals kindled an ethical dilemma, from which sprouted the Anti-Vivisection Act, leading to the unlicensed and unsupervised continuation of experimentation. Furthermore, human experimentation had also picked up a pace during the times of World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War. Unit-731, a research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, performed various lethal experiments on humans; likewise, the records from the Nazi camps contain accounts of vivisections of Josef Mengele on live subjects and other similar medical experiments. While human experiments were never re-recorded, animal experimentation continued and burrowed into the late Victorian science fiction narratives. Some of the most accurate accounts of animal grafting and vivisection in fiction are from The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells. The reader is exposed to a myriad of chimeric subjects entities and Moreau’s vivisectional zeal, the power-hold he keeps over his engineered subjects, and the strange yet conditioned behaviour of the ‘beast folk’ that changes over time. When studied through the lens of bio-power, the subjects' limited cognitive and emotional structures lead to subjectification and docility. The paper discusses the notion of bio-power in the context of Moreau’s scale of power over his engineered subjects, while also studying their locomotion, speech, and thought processes to argue that these experiments were intended to instil subjectification and docility, extinguishing any form of resistance.
Gautham Vaasudev (Thu,) studied this question.