When you’re 12 you tend to focus on different aspect of the story. A bit like the first time you read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne and you didn’t fully realize the fight between Nemo and his “British” enemies.
Like, the Morlocks could be the working class who feast on the Eloi while they maintain the engines that make the surface a paradise.
Or the Morlocks could be a 19th-century take on an over-industrialized society that have destroyed their native habitat, while the Eloi exist in balance with nature. Morlocks coming to the surface to eat the Eloi are more akin to settler colonists than industrial workers.
There are a couple of additional takes on Morlocks in TV and movies. One, in which the Eloi are lured into the Morlock caves with air raid sirens, implying a kind of adaptation resulting from millennia of endless wars. Another, written by Wells’s grandson, posits the Morlocks as having a strict racial caste system of their own while the Eloi exist in a primitive classless society.
Even past that, the idea of the Morlocks and Eloi really root themselves in the horror of factory farming. What if cows and pigs were as smart as Eloi? It is, after all, what makes the story so horrifying. Not that we might exist in a rigid class hierarchy, but that we might be cannibalizing a sentient race so cavalierly.
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