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).


Genly in The Left Hand of Darkness confronts the issue of the opposition between male and female in a particularly poignant manner: by falling in love with the genderless Estraven. Estraven challenges him to define the two genders: "...how does the other sex of your planet differ from you?" (3). Genly, having lived so long among the genderless Gethenians, struggles to answer. His love for Estraven undermines his confidence in the essentiality of the gender opposition: "...it does, after all, go even wider than sex" (4). When he meets with his fellow Terrans again, he is repulsed by their ripe masculinity and femininity -- "They all looked strange to me... apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer" (5) -- and takes comfort in the Gethenian doctor, who has "not a man's face and not a woman's" (6).

Their cases are slightly different -- Genly rejects both sides of the dichotomy, while Prendick rejects one half and desperately seeks the other -- but the repulsion in both cases springs from the same source: the confrontation with, and subsequent erosion of confidence in, a fundamental human dyad. Disgust, as Kristeva  states, is our response to the abject: a part of the self which has been sealed off and cast out, becoming an object (7). Genly, while still physically a man, has sealed off the part of himself which recognises and responds to masculinity and femininity, and being confronted with this in others causes disgust. Prendick, too, shuts down and shuts out the animal side of his humanity, and his fellow human animals cause his bile to rise.

Notes:
1) Swift, chapter XII.
2) Wells, chapter XXII.
3) Le Guin, p. 252.
4) Le Guin, p. 252.
5) Le Guin, p. 318.
6) Le Guin, p. 319.
7) Felluga.

Works cited:
Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue U, January 8 2011. Web. August 18, 2012.
Le Guin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1976.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Project Gutenberg, 15 June 2009. Web. 23 September 2012.
Wells, Herbert George. The Island of Doctor Moreau. Project Gutenberg, 14 October 2004. Web. 23 September 2012.