Empathy, Anxiety, and the Boundaries of Humanity: Vivisection Discourse and The Island of Doctor Moreau

In the second half of the nineteenth century, vivisection, a technology of evolutionary biology, inspired debate regarding the limits of human connection with other species. Vivisection exists at the nexus of opposing positions within evolutionary theory: it is predicated at once on physiological sameness and moral/emotional difference between humans and animals. In both policy debates and artistic representations, vivisection practice forced an uncomfortable confrontation with the shifting margins of self and Other implied by evolutionary biology. H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) engages these dialogues. In Wells’s text the pain of the vivisected animal discomfits not through conscious connection with another being’s unique suffering, but rather through horrified recognition of the self in the Other, cognizance of a shared capacity for pain that threatens rationality. By locating empathy in instinctive physiological reflex rather than reason, the novel undermines humanity’s claim to moral superiority over animals.