You Can't Go Home Again: Exile, duality and disgust in The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Left Hand of Darkness (updated)

In Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver, after being stranded on an island with the refined Houynhnhnms and the vulgar Yahoos, returns home and is repulsed by his countrymen's similarity to Yahoos (1). Prendick and Genly experience similar feelings when meeting their compatriots again after a period of exile. Both travellers are exposed to a situation which both heightens their awareness of a fundamental binary opposition, and erodes their confidence in the border between the opposing states.

In The Island of Doctor Moreau the binary opposition is humanity versus animality. Prendrick is forced to confront the nature of this dyad, and determine how each side is constituted. His confidence in the border between the two states is eroded by his experiences with the Beast-Men. When he returns to England, he is repulsed by the animality he sees in humans (2).

Poe: the first proponent of body horror? (part one)

Body horror is defined by the ever-useful Wikipedia as "horror fiction in which the horror is principally derived from the graphic destruction or degeneration of the body. Such works may deal with disease, decay, parasitism, mutilation, or mutation." It's a term primarily associated with film: David Cronenberg is usually identified as the leader in the field, along with Clive Barker and a few other inferior directors. I think there's a very good case to be made for the Silent Hill video game series as a leading light too, as it revolves around the notion of a space where people's darkest fears and guilts are made literal flesh. The 'otherworld' of the canonical Silent Hill games is an intersection of open, bleeding flesh and rusty metal; the creatures are all human/monster hybrids or gigantic fleshy masses. But more on that in another post: I get carried away when I talk about Silent Hill.

There are definitely elements of body horror in Gothic fiction, which often fetishises the dead body as a location of intense emotions (fear, horror and disgust, but also love, romantic and erotic). It's brought to a pinnacle with the work of Poe, who might as well have taken the Wiki description of body horror as a personal artistic manifesto. I want to look at some of the devices of body horror (the Wiki definition is as good a place as any to start) and how Poe makes use of them.

Bradbury's bizarre love triangle: Ylla, Yll, York and the battle for the colonised space

Colonised countries are often "feminised" in the culture of the coloniser: for instance, Orientalist art of the Victorian era concentrated almost exclusively on harems and odalisques, presenting the Middle East as languorous, exotic and sexual (1). In the second chapter of The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury underlines this connection by making his female Martian Ylla represent her planet in the process of colonisation. The battle over possession of the planet is replaced with a battle over the female body.

The connection is heightened by the language used to describe Ylla. She is depicted by reference to natural images: eating fruit, handling dust, walking through mist. Mars and Ylla are described in the same language: Mars is "warm and motionless", echoing Ylla's languidity (2). They are both painted in brown, red and yellow tones.

Dejah vu: John Carter as a coloniser of two worlds

A Princess of Mars is foremost a novel about colonisation. Barsoom doubles Arizona: they have a similar desert terrain, and both are inhabited by warriors who, the book seems to say, it is the white man's destiny to rule. The same words describe the Tharks as the Apaches: they are "vicious" (1), "cunning" (2), "ferocious" (3). The connection is made explicit: "I could not disassociate these people... from those [Apache] warriors" (4).

The scene where Tal Hajus threatens to rape Dejah Thoris plays on the vicious stereotype of the non-white "brute" obsessed with despoiling white women (5). The connection between Tharks and Apaches is, again, made explicit: rather than have Dejah assaulted by Ptormel, "better that we save friendly bullets for ourselves at the last moment, as did those brave frontier women of my lost land, who took their own lives rather than fall into the hands of the Indian braves" (6).

"Learn the Law. Say the words": Discourse and exclusion in The Island of Dr Moreau

The term discourse is here defined as the shared language of a society. In Foucault’s "Discourse on Language", three methods for controlling discourse are defined which operate around the principle of exclusion: first, objects (what can be spoken of); second, ritual (how and where we can speak); and third, privilege (who has the right to speak) (1). In The Island of Dr Moreau, Wells demonstrates how, through these methods, discourse is a powerful tool for controlling and constructing social identity.

By defining certain subjects as forbidden, discourse functions to control thought. If certain concepts cannot be spoken about, they can be removed entirely from consciousness. Moreau forbids Prendick from speaking about the possibility of injury or death befalling the Ones with the Whips, because they cannot allow the Beast-Men to conceive of the idea. By speaking about it, it becomes a possibility; unspoken, it cannot exist.

Illustrating Burroughs

For the first time in one of these posts, I'm running into the problem that a lot of the illustrations I'd like to feature are...ahem... somewhat graphic. There is a plethora of attempts to illustrate Burroughs' Barsoom, but given that most of the characters run around naked or semi-naked, and the overwhelming tendency to focus on Dejah Thoris'... assets, most of them are NSFW. It's also interesting that there's a strong tendency to sexualise the Thark women (think the Na'vi in Avatar, but green and with tusks). If you're interested, you'll have to hunt them down yourselves :)

The most interesting aspect of the other illustrations is trying to decipher the visual cues to race and culture: instead of dreaming up something truly strange, many of these artists throw in visual references to some Earth culture they consider exotic. This is the classic cover, the one I've seen most often: