Dr. Moreau and Hubris: A Critical Reflection on the Character of the Mad Scientist

Yesterday I read H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau. I found it really intriguing. It brought to mind some thoughts about the recurring science fiction character archetype, the "mad scientist." This is such an interesting and persistent character trope throughout science fiction. Considering this kind of character makes me wonder who the first "authentic" mad scientist was: Dr. Frankenstein? Hmm...

Well, before we can even begin to answer that question, we probably need to develop a working definition of, precisely, what a "mad scientist" is.

A primary attribute of the mad scientist, it seems to me, is that they are a scientist. But what does that mean? To be a scientist? Is to say someone is a scientist also to say they have an academic position? That they lead a lab? Or, is it much less specific than that? Do non-professional researchers who understand scientific theories--are they scientists by virtue of their knowledge? Hmm... I don't think so. I think it takes more than a knowledge base to be considered a scientist. It think there's an ethos to being a scientist, and that ethos goes something along these lines: in order to be a scientist you have to be driven to understand or to know or to fill out a theory or hypothesis that stirs your imagination or captures your curiosity. 


So we figured out what the scientist part of "mad scientist" means. How about that term, mad? What does it mean to be "mad"? Mentally deranged? Well, "mad" comes from the old English word gemædde which means, "out of ones mind." It's a hunch of mind that the "mad" in "mad scientist" is more than just being irrational, insane, demented. There's so much more to it than that. I think this is the case because, on the surface, mad scientists rarely seem insane. Sure, occasionally they laugh maniacally in the worst science fiction; occasionally they indulge in eccentric behavior. But there's more to their behavior than that. This is where the word "deranged" comes in. "Deranged" comes from the old french and means "to throw out of order." No this feels right! Mad scientists are deranged. What do they throw out of order? The natural order. In the case of Dr. Moreau, he throws the natural order out of order by bringing animals out of their primal state into a perverse, civilized state. He flagrantly disregards human morality by engaging in the living surgery of animals.

So here's our new, working definition of "mad scientist":  A mad scientist is someone who is driven to understand or to know or to fill out a theory or hypothesis that stirs his or her imagination, and as a result of this impulse/obsession they upset the balance of the natural order.

It's strange. In other Wells science romances, science and technology seem to offer the promise of turning humans into gods. For example, the time machin allow the time traveler to witness time on a cosmic, semi-divine scale. Scientific theorizing and fact also carries with it risks: consider the horror of the Morlock and Eloi evolutionary fork.

The mad scientist, it seems to me, appears to be the agent, the active "reagent," if you will, of the "rising humanity to the level of gods" promised by science and technology. The mad scientist is the human, equipped with scientific theory, who would play god. Who would be a god. They're not unlike, say, the ancient alchemists who searched for the power to turn basic elements into gold and for the secret of immortality.

Like the alchemist, the key feature of the mad scientist key, their major sin, turns out to hubris.

Charles Dicken's and the "Tweaking" of Reality: Collapsing Subjectivity and Objectivity

All the Year Round: the Magazine

where Great Expectations was 

originally serialized.

So, I'm auditing a Victorian literature course this semester. And I'm interested in sharing some of my thoughts about the texts we're reading in there. We're currently reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Why discuss Charles Dickens? Why discuss Charles Dickens on a blog that is ostensibly focused on science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror?

Good question. I have a roundabout answer that will require a brief excursion in more general issues.

Tweaking Reality

I felt this for a while and am only now beginning to articulate it clearly, but, what draws me to science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror aren't necessarily their content--the aliens, the zombies, the sorcerers, etc.. Rather, what draws me to them is their unique relationship to reality. These genres--which I call the "weird genres"--tweak reality. What do I mean by tweak?

This is an obscure word usually thought to come from twiccian (to pluck) but has been used since the late sixties to refer to "fine-tuning or adjusting a complex system" (Lord Wikipedia). It's also used more colloquially to refer being "under the influence of methamphetamine" (Urban Dictionary).

I like calling upon all these shades of meaning when using the word tweak in terms of tweaking reality: (1) slightly altering the ontological rules that determine reality; (2) doing so in such a way the experience/effect of it suggests a drug-induced state, a different mode of perception; (3) and doing so in a slightly aggressive, violent way.

By tweaking reality, I mean, making it strange, bending its rules, allowing something to exist or something to happen that shouldn't happen. And the effect of this tweaking reality might be best articulated as a kind of altered perception, a new experience.

For science fiction, fantasy, and horror, quotidian reality is a starting point that is deviated from. It is a kind of base that, through contrast, foregrounds non-reality. Its aesthetic effects depends on a reality principle to deviate from.

Back to Charles Dickens...


In Great Expectations Dickens plays with reality in a significant sort of way. He continuously "tweaks" reality. Consider the following passage. Some background: the main character, Pip, is watching as a convict is being taken to a prison ship:

"By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners.” (39)


I’m struck by the figurative language here, the simile comparing the soldiers to the ship and vice-versa. Also, I’m struck by how Pip metaphorically figures the Hulk as a “wicked Noach’s ark.” Let me try to explain why.

Not only do we have individuals being turned into objects, we have a reversal of this effect here, the turning of the ship (an object) into an individual (a subject). Also, we have the ship being figured through a kind of literary citation, if you will, an allusion to the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark.

We have here an intense example of what narrative theorists would call “focalization.” The surface texture of the world is filtered through the interpretive lens of young Pip. It's focused through him.

Indeed, the world derives from his subjectivity—his identification of visual patterns, his literary corpus knowledge.

Remember: “Seemed in my young eyes” (39, my emphasis). This verb “seemed” gives me pause.

“Seems” implies that the world unfolded through narration is an interpretation. We don’t have here a purely subjective interpretation of the world. Folded into the narrative is an allegorical “material,” a—I’m not sure what to call it—“story substructure” that Pip’s subjectivity is colliding with.

My hunch is that there is an interplay between two worlds here: the subjective world of the narrator and the objective world. It seems that Dickens tends to play with collapsing clear cut distinctions between the subject and the object.

He tweaks reality by breaking down clear cut distinctions between where characters' "interior" consciousnesses end and where the material, "external" world begin.

Subjectivity (consciousness, if you will) spills out onto the the objective world.