ABSTRACT
This chapter looks to two contemporary young adult retellings of The Island of Dr. Moreau to further explore the division between humans and animals. It analyzes humanist assumptions about gender and animality in The Madman's Daughter before turning briefly to Dr. Franklin's Island. To undergo an examination of animality in these retellings, the chapter turns to human-animal studies, especially scholarship informed by ecofeminist perspectives. Nature, as the excluded and devalued contrast of reason, includes the emotions, the body, the passions, animality, the primitive or uncivilised, the non-human world, matter, physicality and sense experience, as well as the sphere of irrationality, of faith and madness. Rather than view the young adult retellings of The Island of Dr. Moreau animalizing their protagonists as a method of oppression that reflect Victorian anxieties about women, it is more significant to note the various ways that the characters ultimately embrace their animality.
