Abstract
This chapter explores three short stories by H. G. Wells in which his human protagonists encounter hitherto unexpected levels of nonhuman intelligence and intentionality. In “In The Abyss” (1896), “The Sea Raiders” (1896), and “The Empire of the Ants” (1905), nonhuman creatures possess the power to reason, communicate, and cooperate, and perhaps build empires and construct civilisations. They are also potentially hostile or already predatory, even rapacious. Are they resisting humankind’s relentless intrusion into their own habitats, and trying to liberate themselves from human interference, or simply mirroring human patterns of aggression? Tantalisingly, Wells’s stories leave these questions unanswered. Even as these creatures expose the myth of human exceptionalism, with its assumption that humans (and humans alone) possess the capacity for reasoned thought, they withdraw from human comprehension; in their inscrutable strangeness, they exist beyond the reach of humankind’s own ability to penetrate their mysteries, and in so doing, exert control over them. These creatures exist beyond the humanistic conception of what an animal is and should be; they are at once posthuman and postanimal.
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Notes
- 1.
As Elliott Sober explains, Darwin and his “chosen successor” George Romanes insisted on the “mental continuity of human and nonhuman organisms” (2005, p. 87). In the later Victorian period, however, this view was challenged by a scientific community that was increasingly dubious about the attribution of “human mental characteristics to nonhuman organisms” (Sober, p. 85). To the psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan, for example, such a process of attribution was simply an instance of the kind of anthropomorphic bias against which scientists must guard. Instead, Morgan argued that animal behaviour should never be interpreted “as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale” (qtd in Sober, p. 86). As Sober points out, Morgan’s desire to avoid the anthropomorphic projection of human qualities onto animals risked introducing “an opposite bias of its own” (p. 88). These were discussions in which Wells’s work actively participated. It is relevant to note that, compared to its first draft, “written over the last quarter of 1894” (McNabb, 2015, p. 393), the published version of The Island of Doctor Moreau downplays the Beast-Folk’s level of intelligence, a change that reflects Wells’s own engagement with this late-Victorian shift in perspective (McNabb, p. 395).
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Tait, A. (2021). Posthuman, Postanimal? Nonhuman Intelligence and Intentionality in Three Short Stories by H. G. Wells. In: Maiti, K. (eds) Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76159-2_5
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