The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

Structurally, Moreno-Garcia employs a time jump (resuming the plot action six years after Montgomery’s arrival at the Yaxaktun estate), juxtaposing the initial arrival of an outsider (Montgomery) with the novel’s inciting incident: the arrival of Eduardo Lizalde who breaches the isolated and cloistered atmosphere of Yaxaktun. The arrival of Montgomery six years earlier represented the start of a gradual permeability in which the estate ceased to be entirely isolated and self-contained. Prior to Montgomery’s arrival, Yaxaktun functioned as a kind of Edenic space (its lush natural beauty echoes the parallel), but with Montgomery, experience and a greater knowledge of the outside world entered Carlota’s formerly innocent and private world.

Both Montgomery and Eduardo introduce the possibility of sexual desire instigating Carlota’s coming-of-aging character arc and her journey between Innocence and Experience. Doctor Moreau’s relationship to sexuality is vague and ambiguous; his wife is long dead, and he describes his relationship with Carlota’s mother with cold, almost clinical brevity even prior to the reveal that she was simply part of his experiment. His scientific work allows for reproduction and the creation of new organisms without any kind of sexual activity, suggesting that his ideal world would focus on rationalism, science, and the world of the mind, rather than the more unpredictable reality of bodies and their desires.

Carlota’s arc toward experience necessitates a recognition of and disenchantment with her innocence. She’s reached an age where she is no longer satisfied with the quiet and secluded life she enjoyed as a child. She longs for new experiences, craving knowledge and seeing her innocence as a constraint. Carlota’s seclusion has also potentially allowed her to remain more attuned to her body and desires, rather than constrained and repressed by social norms applied to young women. For example, Montgomery contrasts Carlota’s casual and functional dress with the gowns typical of a young woman in the city of Mérida: “a wealthy woman would have never ventured out of her house dressed like this. She would have needed layers of silk” (57).

The central tension of Moreno-Garcia’s novel falls between Carlota, a young woman stepping into adulthood and autonomy, and her father, who seeks to keep her subservient to him and who represents the patriarchal norms constructed to oppress her. In the 19th century, the term “natural daughter” was sometimes used for an illegitimate child, and operates on multiple levels when it comes to Carlota. She believes she was conceived “naturally,” outside of the social strictures of wedlock and has also grown up away from society in Yaxaktun, largely free to follow her impulses and desires, remaining closely bonded with the natural world. However, while Carlota has developed a level of confidence and comfort with pursuing her own desires, she remains a bargaining chip that can be commodified to allow her father to pursue his own goals. Doctor Moreau schemes to marry Carlota into the Lizalde family to secure financing for his research and ultimately treats her as property; this attitude reflects systems of patriarchal power, but it also alludes to the eventual reveal that Carlota is actually a hybrid. Doctor Moreau views Carlota as even more of his “creation” than he would if she were simply his biological child, and also sees her as less human, and less deserving of autonomy, than he is, both because she is a woman, and because she is in fact part animal.

Moreno-Garcia progressively reveals Doctor Moreau as a tyrant engaged in Parental Abuse and Oppression rather than the benevolent father figure he presents—and even believes—himself to be. As the creator of the hybrids, Doctor Moreau fuses the images of father and God, and as the primary source of authority on the estate, he also functions as a kind of king, making laws and administering justice. Doctor Moreau feels entitled to this power, demanding that everyone on the estate to show absolute deference to him. Carlota notes that when the hybrids refer to Moreau as a kind of God-like creator, “the owner of the deep salt sea […] her father didn’t always correct them” (93). The position of power that Moreau occupies seduces him into seeing himself as omnipotent, and deserving of absolute authority. This characterization connects Moreno-Garcia’s character to his antecedent in Wells’s novel, in which the Doctor Moreau character provides a critique of those who pursue scientific knowledge at the expense of suffering and positions Moreau in a literary tradition that includes Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark.” Each of these characters pursues their scientific ambition to dangerous ends, exerting Power and Domination Over the Vulnerable and it is women, children, and animals who end up suffering for the pursuit of these ambitions.

Doctor Moreau roots his power in a traditional hierarchy in which rationality, knowledge, and science are linked to both masculinity and European heritage, and treated as superior to feminine identities defined in opposition to them as irrational, emotional, and simple. The hybrids are seen as lesser because of their animal heritage, while Carlota is treated as less intellectually capable than her father because she is a woman, and because of her mother’s non-European heritage. Doctor Moreau treats the estate as a personal colony, in which he claims to be providing benevolent “guidance” and “instruction” to inferior individuals who will benefit from it, while actually oppressing and exploiting them. These colonial allusions are heightened by Moreau imposing Christian beliefs and rituals onto the hybrids; he indoctrinates them with Christian instruction and ideology as a means to reinforce his own claims to power—a practice utilized by many European powers (including Spain during the conquest of Mexico) while laying claim to colonized territory and oppressing the Indigenous peoples inhabiting it.

The novel’s historical context highlights the parallels Moreno-Garcia draws between the hybrids and the Indigenous Mayan peoples. A desire to assert control and suppress attempts at autonomy led by Mayan rebels is what first brings Eduardo to Yaxaktun. As explains to Montgomery: “we’re on the trail of an Indian raiding party” (61). Eduardo fears the Mayans’ assertion of their own sovereignty similar to Doctor Moreau’s concerns that his daughter and the other hybrids will rebel and demand their own autonomy—evidenced by the drastic steps he takes to keep them all docile and dependent on him.