‘Some Familiar Animal:’ Scott, Wells and The Colonial Gothic

John Bowen identifies the Gothic with the return of a repressed past, as ‘everything that characters and readers think that they’ve safely left behind comes back with a vengeance.’[1] As such, Gothic horror is indebted to what Freud terms the ‘uncanny:’ ‘in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar,’ and ‘has becomes alienated… through the process of repression.’[2] Meanwhile, in colonial literature, the colonised frequently figures as a horrifying Other, an embodiment of outmoded primitivity or savage exteriority. Thus, in the colonial Gothic, the colonised Other embodies the uncanny past, returning to unsettle racist assumptions. In this essay, I will read Walter Scott’s Waverley (1815) and H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) in terms of the colonial Gothic, examining how their uncanny effects variously reinforce and trouble colonial discourse.

Botting writes that ‘the definition of Enlightenment reason… require[d] carefully constructed antitheses,’ with ‘figures of feudal darkness and barbarism providing the negative against which it [could] assume positive value.’[3] Likewise, in Makdisi’s reading of Waverley, Scott posits ‘a rigid dualistic structure of space;’ ‘an opposition between the Highlands’— a ‘darkness’ fraught with violence and superstition— ‘on the one hand, and the,’ Enlightened ‘Lowlands and England on the other.’[4] Botting suggests that, while Gothic ‘monsters serve a useful… function, distinguishing norms and values,’ from ‘immoral… practices,’ they only do so as ‘long as the boundaries… remain clearly delineated.’[5] Herein lies Waverley’s horror: the monstrous Highlanders’ continued existence within the ‘boundaries’ of a modern Britain that they were diametrically opposed to troubled its Enlightened self-image. Bronfen and Neumeier insist that ‘while the transgressions we attribute to Gothic sensibility serve to trouble identity categories... they never fully shatter these… their revolutionary impulse is always again contained.’[6] Thus, Waverley stages the return of the Highlanders, along with their containment through repression.

Beshara argues that colonial discourse establishes ‘spatial… difference… based on the notion of ‘barbarians,’ or those… outside the centre of Euromodernity,’ while ‘temporal… difference is premised on the concept of ‘primitives’ or those who still live in a premodern past.’[7] We see Scott’s employment of this discourse when he describes a ‘Highland loch’ as ‘wild,’ its surrounding mountains ‘savage.’ [8] It is as though the land is conducive to the breeding of barbarians, as the children of Tully Veolan (contaminated by continued Highland intrusion) exist ‘almost in a primitive state of nakedness.’[9] Makdisi argues that the convergence of spatial and temporal difference in the Highlands make it a ‘Wordsworthian ‘spot of time.”[10] As such, Waverley’s quasi-colonial ‘tour of the imaginary terrain of the Highlands… involves a kind of time-traveling.’[11] By extension, the movements of the Highlanders form the inverse: the army headed by Charles Edward Stuart which ‘storm[s] into Waverley’s Lowlands’ is ‘like a horde of ghosts issuing forth from the past.’[12] Makdisi justifies this assertion by highlighting that ‘the army’s encampment is repeatedly described from the vantage point of ‘present-day’ Edinburgh, as though it were being superimposed on an 1814 map of the city.’[13] Scott writes:

the hollow between the mountain of Arthur’s Seat and the rising grounds on which the southern part of Edinburgh is now built, lay beneath him, and… was occupied by the army of the Highlanders…[14] [My emphasis].

The allusion to contemporary Edinburgh makes it ‘as though a Highland host were actually descending on the Edinburgh of Scott’s own time.’[15] The army develops a spectral quality, being projected from the page to occupy a space beyond their ‘spot of time’ and transgress the binary between past and present.

Scott’s invocation of this Gothic trope is not exhausted in the Highland army, as he integrates a literal ghost into the narrative. Fergus MacIvor, the novel’s paramount Highlander, recounts to Waverley that the “Bodach Glas” had haunted his predecessors “before approaching death.”[16] For Cottom, in Scott’s novels, ‘superstition’ is attributed to ‘the immaturity of the past,’ since it ‘involves a surrender of rational control which makes one, in Scott’s moral judgement, childish.’[17] Superficially, then, Waverley’s question— “How can you, my dear Fergus, tell such nonsense with a grave face?”[18]— seems to enact this moral judgement, his patronising tone (‘my dear’) reasserting his rationality by juxtaposition. Yet, Fergus tells Waverley: “I have seen the Bodach Glas,” before appearing to fall in battle, causing Edward to question: “What, can the devil speak truth?”[19] Freud writes that we have ‘surmounted’ superstitious ‘modes of thought,’ but ‘we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us.’ Thus, ‘as soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny.’[20] In this light, the Bodach Glas shows that, like the Highlanders, irrational superstition cannot be entirely repressed into exteriority to the modern British consciousness.

However, the text’s colonial Gothicism reach its peak not in the Scott’s recourse to ghostliness, but to Orientalism. Makdisi notes that ‘the novel continually compares the Highlanders… to the natives of Africa and America, India, and the Orient.’[21] We see this first in Scott’s description of the fire outside of Donald Bean Lean’s lair, which ‘resembled the fiery vehicle in which the Evil Genius of an Oriental tale traverses land and sea.’[22] Said asserts that, in Orientalist discourse, ‘the Orient is transformed from a very distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar.’[23] This familiarity is evident in Scott’s simile, which assumes a knowledge of various ‘Oriental tales’ and a rather specific ‘figure’ within them. The threat of the Oriental Other works in a converse manner to the Freudian uncanny, becoming familiar due to its repression into discourse. Nonetheless, like the Gothic past, it ‘[helps] to define Europe… as its contrasting image.’[24] As such, despite functioning in opposition to Freud’s framework, Scott’s Orientalist imagery creates an uncanny effect, as familiar, yet ‘distant’ figures acquire an unfamiliar interiority to the Occidental modernity they ought to oppose. Scott figures the climax of the Highlanders’ ‘military adventures’ in similar terms, writing that:

The character and appearance of [the Highlanders]… conveyed to the south-country Lowlanders as much surprise as if an invasion of African Negroes or Esquimaux Indians had issued forth from the northern mountains of their own native country.[25]

He hyperbolises the interiority of the scene, describing the country with three near-synonyms: ‘their’ ‘own’ and ‘native’. Therefore, it is clear that ‘wild appearance of these men… [creates] terror,’[26] because it allows the Orient— or the empire— to come home. This quality of simultaneous interiority and exteriority, familiarity and unfamiliarity represents the unique Gothic threat of the Highlanders to the binary between coloniser and colonised that propped up Britain’s imperial ambitions.

Botting suggests that Gothic monsters ‘combine negative features that oppose (and define) norms,’ containing ‘an amorphous or unpresentable threat in a single image.’[27] This description perfectly encapsulates the role of the Highlanders in Waverley. At once, a primitive past, a barbarian Highland space and an Oriental Other seem to invade Britain. Moreover, the monstrous encounter is also multifaceted, as Makdisi asserts that it takes place at two simultaneous spatio-temporal levels; for it is a confrontation between the Highland Jacobites and Lowland Hanoverians of 1745, and also symbolically between the forgotten Highlands of the early nineteenth century and the Lowlands trying to forget them.[28]

Waverley enacts both a physical— the 1745 invasion— and discursive— the 1814 invasion— violence on the Lowlands and England. This Gothic ‘revolutionary impulse’[29] must be contained, and so it is no surprise that Makdisi suggests this ‘eruption’ is met with a physical and discursive ‘exorcism’ through the ‘political’ and ‘symbolic’ colonization of the Highlands.[30]

The physical exorcism entails the defeat of Charles’ army, referred to elusively as the ‘affair of Culloden.’[31] Lincoln notes that Scott ‘strategically veils… the horrific consequences of Culloden,’ by having Edward avoid witnessing what, in reality, was a massacre.[32] In this way, physical repression of the Highlanders is itself discursively repressed. Likewise, Scott represses the real-life colonial violence that followed the failed revolution, making no mention of the ‘Clearances’ which ‘uprooted’ ‘up to a third of Scotland’s population,’[33] in his post-script discussion of the ‘complete… change… of Scotland.’[34]

Discursive repression in Waverley is two-pronged, however. The real-life history of the Highlands— one of violent repression by the British colonial government— in Makdisi’s terms, is not just ‘silenced’ but ‘written over.’[35] We see this ‘writing over’ of history in the fate of Fergus. He is executed for his role in the rebellion, but immortalised elsewhere:

a large and spirited painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass… [Fergus’] impetuous character…was finely contrasted with the contemplative… expression of his… friend.[36]

This painting encapsulates the representation of the Highlands in the text, depicting the wild character of the landscape, as well as the unreasonable, uncontrollable nature of its inhabitants. Elsewhere, Scott asserts that ‘had Had Fergus MacIvor lived Sixty Years sooner than he did, he would… have wanted’ the skills necessary to lead his army, but ‘had he lived Sixty Years later, his ambition… would have lacked the fuel which his situation now afforded.’[37] Put simply: Fergus is the man of the revolutionary 1745 Highlands.[38] Thus, in Fergus’ death and subsequent immortalization, Scott betrays a desire to freeze the Highlands in the spot of time that his text depicts. Lincoln suggests that, for Scott, the ‘artist’ had a ‘special role’ in the British project of nation-building, because ‘modernising [entailed]… much forgetting… [and] reshaping of memory,’ which ‘alienates the present from the past,’[39] and the uncanny overtones of this passage are unmissable. That Makdisi asserts: ‘Scott’s image of the Highlands has in cultural terms virtually taken over from and supplanted ‘the real thing,”[40] testifies to the success of this project of repressive, discursive modernisation, metaphorised by the painting. In his postscript, Scott writes that Scotland’s change has been

Gradual… and like those who drift down… [a] river, we are not aware of the progress we have made, until we fix our eye on the now distant point from which we have been drifted.[41]

The microcosmic painting of Fergus functions as that ‘distant point from which we have drifted,’ the ‘impetuous’ violence of the past ‘finely contrasted,’ with the ‘contemplative,’ rational present. Bronfen and Neumeier write that the Gothic ‘evokes a past which the present looks to... as the embodiment of a barbarism that must, once more, be overcome,’ and in this way, we see how Scott’s Gothicism serves to highlight the ‘progress’ brought about by Britain’s colonization of the Highlands.

Finally, however, it is important to note that Scott’s Gothic representation of the Highlands can be read, in Lincoln’s terms, as ‘a highly self-conscious performance.’[42] P. D. Garside observes that ‘Waverley… is filled with incidents where evidence, often of a literary kind, is misjudged or potentially deceiving,’ producing a ‘Radcliffian… world of historical mystery.’[43] Indeed, Botting notes that ‘misread manuscripts… link a sense of reality (or unreality) to structures of fiction,’ in the Gothic (of which Radcliffe was a master practitioner).[44] Scott’s use of this trope betrays an awareness of his distortion of the past, which is most apparent in the central metaphor of the painting, which Makdisi suggests ‘emphasizes’ its own ‘artificiality,’ by making clear its removal from reality. [45] The portrait is by ‘an eminent London artist,’ and is based on a sketch by a separate artist (‘a young man of high genius’) of the pair in ‘Edinburgh,’ rather than immersed in the ‘wild’ scenery of the painting.[46] Thus, Makdisi argues that the painting, and by extension the novel, implies that

whether such a past had or had not “really” existed does not matter… once it has been claimed and mapped out, it “becomes” real: that is, it takes on political, cultural and symbolic significance on its own terms.[47]

Lincoln notes ‘a common strategy of irony among… Scottish writers,’ such as Scott, and I would argue that Waverley must be understood in terms of a Gothic irony. The novel ironizes the way in which British colonialism reproduces and represses history, while simultaneously taking part in this repression, appealing to ‘those who see through the’ fictitious nature of this history, ‘as well as those who do not.’[48] This Gothic irony confronts the reader with a monster more terrifying and certainly more familiar than the Highlanders: the discursive violence of the British colonialism. Lincoln sees the text’s presentation of the Highlands as romantic, because ‘romance is what the reader must not wake up from, if [they are] to avoid seeing the fundamental amorality of history.’[49] If this is the case, then the Gothicism of the text is a nightmare, keeping the reader in ignorant sleep, but haunting them with the amorality which they have repressed.

Like Waverley, Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau portrays the Gothic horror of an uncanny threat from within that troubles the binary between coloniser and colonised. Again, much like the Highlanders, Moreau’s monsters are highly overdetermined. Responding to contemporary Darwinian discourses, Wells makes his Beast Men metaphors for a prehistoric humanity governed overwhelmingly by forces akin to the Freudian id. Thus, Prendick’s quasi-colonial encounter with the Beast Men constitutes the return of a repressed truth: in Darwin’s terms: ‘man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin;’[50] in Freud’s,:we are all “lived’ by unknown and uncontrollable forces.’[51] If this is the case, then the coloniser is no different from the supposedly primitive and irrational colonised.

Wester suggests that ‘often marked by a monstrous visage, racial minorities appear throughout… Gothic texts… as objects of discourse,’ ‘around which authors spin debates about civilisation, enlightenment… and human nature.’[52] In Moreau, the Beast Men are the monstrous form which the racial minority takes. Like Scott, Wells takes recourse to Orientalist discourse in order to Other his monsters, asserting that some of them ‘seemed to [Prendick] then to be brown men,’ as ‘they wore turbans.’[53] Moreover, Prendick’s descriptions betray an obsessive focus on anatomical labelling, as he notes that ‘their bodies were abnormally long and the thigh part of the leg short and curiously twisted.’[54] This recalls a similar tendency to anatomise in Enlightenment racial theory (see footnote on Kant’s Physical Geography[55]) again situating seeming to situate the Beast Men within established racial discourses.

These discourses soon integrated Darwinian science, and the racial Other was presented as not just primitive, but evolutionarily primal. McNabb notes that E. B. Tylor suggested in 1894 that ‘Tasmanian Aboriginal people represented a Palaeolithic race… who had not evolved any further because,’ their ‘culture was the same as that of,’ prehistoric man.[56] Unsurprisingly, then, Moreau’s racial Others are similarly primalised. McNabb highlights that, in a paper called ‘Outline of History’ published later in his life, Wells identified primitiveness with a ‘lack of effective speech and… cannibalistic habits.’[57] Accordingly, he writes that the Beast Men ‘spoke to one another in odd guttural tones, and… began chattering… [in] a foreign language.’[58] Antor argues that the terms ‘guttural’ and ‘chattering,’ commonly associated with animal calls, dehumanise the islanders, and thus Well’s reference to a “foreign language’ picks up colonialist assumptions about the primitivism of other… races.’[59]

Furthermore, in the racial discourses of the period, the Other was associated with what Freud would later come to term the “id,” the ‘other part of the mind… which behaves as if it were unconscious… [and] contains the passions.’[60] The 18th century taxonomist Linnaeus wrote that black people were ‘governed by caprice,’[61] identifying the racial Other with the changeable passions of the unconscious. As such, there is an identification between the id and the Beast Men in the novel. In his vivisections, Moreau hopes to remove the Beast from his Men, but he complains to Prendick that there is ‘something that [he] cannot touch… in the seat of the emotions… a strange hidden reservoir [ready] to burst.’[62] Wells’ lexis uncannily predicts Freud’s terminology as ‘hidden’ suggests ‘unknown,’ ‘strange’ connotes alienation and ‘burst’ evokes the disruptive return of the repressed. Freud’s id is itself Gothic, as the genre ‘seeks to create in our minds the possibility that there may be things beyond human… reason and knowledge,’[63] and so its combination with racialised primitivity in the Beast Men is a source of immense horror to Prendick and to European colonial discourse.

As such, Prendick’s uncanny encounters with the Beast men constitute a return of the repressed, primal id, which troubles the coloniser/ colonised binary. At the time of its publication, one reviewer wrote that ‘the reader will creep with uncanny feelings to read of the stalking of Prendick by the Leopard Man,’[64] and this is indeed the novel’s clearest instance of the return of the repressed. Prendick sees the Leopard Man drinking water from a stream and alerts the creature to his presence. He recounts that the Leopard Man ‘looked up guiltily, and his eyes met mine… So, staring at one another out of countenance, we remained for perhaps half a minute.’[65] Here, Glendening argues, ‘perceiver and perceived, self and other, are intertwined in… a complex and unsettling manner,’ as the Leopard Man becomes ‘Prendick’s double,’ a ‘primordial embodiment of [his] unconscious.’[66] Freud writes that an ‘extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny pervades the conception [of]… the double,’ and this feeling is emphasised by the stalking later in the chapter (‘as I moved, one among the lurking shadows moved to follow me’[67]). Glendening sees this as Prendick being stalked by ‘an animal nature that he does not wish to acknowledge as his own,’[68] because it is at odds with European rationality. These events take place in the ninth chapter, titled ‘The Thing in the Forest,’[69] and Glendening highlights the significance of this setting. He notes that Darwin famously employed the metaphor of an “entangled bank” in his Origin of Species to argue that while evolution appeared to function by chance, it in fact “tend[ed] to progress toward perfection.”[70] Conversely, Glendening suggests that ‘in Wells’ text entanglement means disorder… it entails the… upset [of] boundaries and categories; and it points to the limits of knowledge.’[71] As such, the Leopard Man’s appearance ‘upon the bank of [a] stream’[72] within an entangled forest points to the way in which he, like Darwin’s evolutionary theory, troubles the binaries between man and animal, modern and primal, and by extension, coloniser and colonised.[73]

Inevitably, repression is necessary to contain this Gothic horror. In Freud, the repressive mechanism is expressed thus:

in relation to the id, [the ego] is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces.[74]

These ‘borrowed forces’ are the superego or ‘ego ideal,’ which consists of ‘religion, morality and a social sense.’[75] This idea finds parallel in 19th century evolutionary science, as according to McNabb, T. H. Huxley (Prendick’s tutor in the novel and Wells’ in reality) argued that although we ‘have not lost our primal instincts,’ ‘living in an ethical society will overcome our baser nature,’[76] which speaks to Tylor’s ideas on evolutionary stagnation in the absence of modern culture. In both psychoanalysis and evolutionary science, an internal animal is repressed by a moralising external discourse; indeed in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the superego becomes the ‘Name-of-the Father,’ which is situated in the Symbolic Order of discourse. [77] For Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father is ‘at the very heart of the law,’[78] and so it is no surprise that repression in Moreau is appears in the motif of the ‘Law.’[79] This law, which includes such prohibitions as “Not to go on all-Fours,” “Not to eat Flesh or Fish,” and “Not to chase other Men,” [80] is devised by Moreau to keep the animalistic side of the Beast Men ‘in check.’ The central tenet of this law is the broken sentence: “For everyone the want that is bad;” in other words, the primal desires of the id are essentially immoral, and must be repressed by the language of the Law.

The idea of a repressive discourse speaks to Linnaeus’ account of racial difference, as he opposes the capricious black man with the white man who is ‘governed by opinions,’[81] the societal ethics that make up the superego. Similarly, the black colonised, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, were described as ‘an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself’[82]— in Freudian terms— in the absence of an ‘external world’ for the superego to bring ‘to bear upon the id.’[83] Thus, implicit in colonial discourse is the unsettling suggestion that the white coloniser’s superiority, rather than being inherent, is precariously reliant on a discourse exterior to him. This is reflected in Prendick’s assertion that M’Ling ‘was a man… because he could talk,’[84] which insinuates that the capacity to engage in discourse-as-superego is the prerequisite for white humanity, recalling Wells’ belief in the primitivity of poor communication. Whilst learning the Law, Prendick says that ‘deep down within [him] a laughter and disgust struggled together.’[85] In this moment, Prendick is faced with the knowledge of his own precarious humanity which is familiar (causing him to ‘laugh’ with ironic recognition) because it is implied by colonial and evolutionary discourses, but simultaneously unfamiliar (hence his ‘disgust’) due to its repression in assertions of innate European superiority. After Moreau’s death, Prendick constructs a new Law and consequently confesses that ‘an animal may be ferocious… but it takes a real man to lie.’[86] This association of humanity with dishonesty indicates an unsettling awareness that European humanity depended on the repression of the ‘indelible mark of his lowly origin,’ his ‘uncontrollable’ desires— after all, what is repression but a lie we tell ourselves?

However, discursive repression of the primal id cannot uphold the colonial binary indefinitely. Instead, Moreau highlights the precariousness of this opposition in the return to the repressed. According to Glendening, in Huxley’s scientific theory, ‘biological degeneration,’ or regression, was a ‘significant… threat to humanity.’[87] In McNabb’s terms, ‘evolution could potentially take any developed animal species, including ourselves, and return it to a more primitive state.’[88] This threat is represented in the novel through the phenomenon of ‘reversion.’[89] After the death of Moreau (the Name-of-the-Father) Montgomery insists that the Beast Men “are sure to change,” while Prendick ponders Moreau’s earlier words: “The stubborn beast-flesh grows day by day back again.”[90] Wells’ term ‘Beast-flesh’ recalls Darwin’s ‘indelible’ bodily mark, and in the prophesized ‘change,’ he shows just how indelible this mark is. In the absence of the Law, the creatures regress towards the inarticulacy (incompatible with humanity), and cannibalism that Wells considered the symbols of primitivism. Prendick’s companion the Dog Man ‘day by day… [becomes] dumb,’ and is soon killed by the Hyena Swine, who ‘[gnaws] at [his]… quivering flesh.’[91] Prendick comes ‘face to face’ with the cultural phantasm of regression here, and— as is typical of Gothicism— seems to contain the threat by killing the cannibalistic creature, announcing that the ‘danger’ is ‘over.’[92] However, the reversion of the Beast Men comes  ‘without any definite shock for’[93] Prendick; in isolation, the regression of the racial Other would validate Enlightenment discourses. What is ‘strange’ to Prendick’s colonial assumptions is that these ‘changes’ are mirrored in himself, as he announces: ‘I am told that even now my eyes have a strange brightness, a swift alertness of movement.’[94] The ‘brightness’ of his eyes anaphorically references the ‘stark inhumanity’ that Prendick observes in the ‘reddish luminosity’ of M’Ling’s eyes early in the text, signalling his return to an innate, primality governed by the capricious id.[95] Upon his return to England, Prendick admits:

I could not persuade myself that the [people] I met were not also another, still passably human, Beast People, animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that.[96]

Prendick’s final realisation inverts his earlier uncanny feeling: his quasi-colonial encounter makes the ‘bestial,’ ‘uncontrollable,’ ‘indelible’ mark more familiar to him than the ‘animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls,’ by the discursive superego of British modernity, which appears to be a repressive ‘lie;’ one that ‘it takes a real man to tell.’[97]

To conclude, like Waverley, the Gothic horror of Moreau lies in its capacity to bring a monstrous imago of irrational primitivity, usually limited to the exteriority of the colonies, within the borders of British modernity, revealing that— in Wells’ words— it is a ‘familiar animal.’[98] Interestingly, Lincoln notes that in Hazlitt’s review of Scott’s work, he claimed that “as we read… the wild beast resumes its sway in us,’ and we are ‘restored once more to freedom and lawless unrestrained impulses.”[99] Indeed, a ‘wild beast’ returns from the past in Scott and Wells’ Gothic fictions, and in spite of Hazlitt’s evident enthusiasm, it is easy to see how this caused an uncanny rupture in the colonial rationalism of the period, which sought to exorcise this beast. Perhaps the most unsettling quality that the texts share, however, is their focus on discursive dishonesty: Moreau with the superego’s lies, and Waverley with the distortion of the past. Despite participating in colonial racism, the texts show an ironic awareness that this discourse abounded with repressions and reconstructions, and so its binary tenets could not be relied upon. As Bowen suggests, the ‘Gothic is thus a world of doubt,’ and, in Prendick’s words: ‘a vague uncertainty’ is ‘far worse than any definite fear.’[100]

Endnotes

[1] John Bowen, “Gothic Motifs,” British Library, May 15, 2004, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs.

[2] Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, volume 17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1910), 241.

[3] Fred Botting, Gothic, (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 2-3.

[4] Saree Makdisi, “Colonial Space and the Colonization of Time in Scott’s Waverley,” Studies in Romanticism 38, no. 2 (1995): 161, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/stable/25601111#metadata_info_tab_contents.

[5] Botting, 8-9.

[6] Elizabeth Bronfen and Beate Neumeier, Gothic Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 3.

[7] Robert K. Beshara, Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 41.

[8] Walter Scott, Waverley, Gutenberg, last modified October 25, 2022, ch. 18, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5998/5998-h/5998-h.htm#ch43b [All subsequent references to Waverley will be by chapter].

[9] Scott, Waverley, 18.

[10] Makdisi, “Colonial space,” 161.

[11] Makdisi, 160.

[12] Makdisi, 165.

[13] Makdisi, 167.

[14] Scott, 15.

[15] Makdisi, 167.

[16] Scott, 30.

[17] Daniel Cottom, “The Waverley Novels: Superstition and the Enchanted Reader,” ELH 47, no. 1 (1980): 81, https://doi.org/10.2307/2872440.

[18] Scott, 30.

[19] Scott, 30.

[20] Freud, “The Uncanny,” 247.

[21] Makdisi, 159.

[22] Scott, 17.

[23] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 21.

[24] Said, Orientalism, 1-2.

[25] Scott, 15.

[26] Scott, 15.

[27] Botting, 8-10.

[28] Makdisi, 168.

[29] Bronfen and Neumeier, Gothic Renaissance, 3

[30] Makdisi, 168-169.

[31] Scott, 42, 40.

[32] Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 62.

[33] Makdisi, 181.

[34] Scott, 43.

[35] Makdisi, 175.

[36] Scott, 42.

[37] Scott, 19.

[38] Makdisi, 164.

[39] Lincoln, Modernity, 31, 50.

[40] Makdisi, 155.

[41] Scott, 43.

[42] Lincoln, 51.

[43] P. D. Garside, “Waverley’s Pictures of the Past,” ELH 44, no. 4 (1977): 665-666, https://doi.org/10.2307/2872430.

[44] Botting, 5.

[45] Makdisi, 174.

[46] Scott, 42.

[47] Makdisi, 174.

[48] Lincoln, 19.

[49] Lincoln, 20.

[50] Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 494. Quoted in Roger Bowen, “Science, Myth, and Fiction in H. G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau,’ Studies in the Novel 8, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 326, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/stable/29531800#metadata_info_tab_contents.

[51] Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, volume 19: The Ego and the Id and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1910), 23.

[52] Maisha Wester, “The Gothic in and as Race Theory,” in Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles ed., The Gothic and Theory: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 53.

[53] H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Steve McLean and Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 27.

[54] Wells, 27.

[55] [‘from there to Gambia are the blackest Moors… The Fuli are black-brown… on the gold coast they are not so black and have very thick lips,’] Immanuel Kant, ‘from Physical Geography,’ in Samuel Chuckwudu Eze ed., Race and Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 60.

[56] John McNabb, “The Beast Within: H.G. Wells’, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Human Evolution in the Mid-1890s,” Geological Journal 50, no. 3 (2015): 389, https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1002/gj.2607.

[57] McNabb, “The Beast Within,” 391.

[58] Wells, 28.

[59] Heinz Antor, “Monstrosity and Alterity in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau,” in Monsters and Monstrosity, ed. Daniela Carpi, (Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 98.

[60] Freud, “The Ego,” 23, 25.

[61] Carl von Linné, “The God-given Order of Nature,” in Eze ed. by, Race and Enlightenment, 13.

[62] Wells, 78.

[63] Bowen, “Gothic motifs.”

[64] “REVIEWS. A New Frankenstein,” Pall Mall Gazette, April 17, 1896, British Library Newspapers.

[65] Wells, 40.

[66] John Glendening, “‘Green Confusion’: Evolution and Entanglement in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 2 (2002): 586-587, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058605.

[67] Wells, 46.

[68] Glendening, “‘Green Confusion,’” 586.

[69] Wells, 39.

[70] Charles Darwin The Origin of Species. Quoted in Glendening, “‘Green Confusion,’” 572-573.

[71] Glendening, 573.

[72] Wells, 39.

[73] Glendening, 586.

[74] Freud, “The Ego,” 25.

[75] Freud, “The Ego,” 34, 37.

[76] McNabb, 391-392.

[77] Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (W. W. Norton & Company: London, 2006), 428.

[78] Lacan, Écrits, 723.

[79] Wells, 58.

[80] Wells, 59.

[81] von Linné, “God-given Order,” 13.

[82] “Entries in the Encyclopédie and the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” in Eze ed. by, Race and Enlightenment, 94.

[83] Freud, “The Ego,” 25.

[84] Wells, 55.

[85] Wells, 59.

[86] Wells, 120.

[87] Glendenning, 580.

[88] McNabb, 389.

[89] Wells, 119.

[90] Wells, 116.

[91] Wells, 123, 125.

[92] Wells, 126

[93] Wells, 123.

[94] Wells, 124.

[95] Wells, 20.

[96] Wells, 130.

[97] Wells, 120.

[98] Wells, 42.

[99] Bowen, “Gothic motifs.”

[100] Wells, 80.

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