Nichols, Rachael L. (Author)
University of Pennsylvania
Kaplan, Amy
Edition Details: Advisor: Kaplan, Amy.
Physical Details: 241 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation reexamines literary and scientific inquiries into the relationship between the human and the animal in the U.S. at the turn of the century. Departing from a critical consensus that reads analogies between human and animal as symptomatic of the period's fears of degeneration, I argue that new literary forms developed out of a desire to imagine what the human might become in the new century. Acknowledging the optimistic curiosity driving the creation of forms such as literary naturalism and early science fiction allows us to see literature thinking with, not against, science. Alongside proliferations in form, I also consider how writers explored the ideological potential of the human animal. This potential has been difficult to see given the history of the human animal as a negative association, particularly in the U.S. context, where national identity as well as gender and race hierarchies had long been expressed through comparisons of humans to animals. I argue that the rhetorical force of the human-animal as a marker of inhumanity lost its heft as it shifted from metaphorical epithet to literal description. Paradoxically, as the human-animal acquired the status of fact, it was reinvigorated as a site for reimagining the human outside the pre-existing frames of race, gender, and class. To describe the complex interweavings of human and animal in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, I theorize a concept of entanglement derived from Darwin, who used it as a metaphor for the process of evolution. My chapters analyze descriptions of human-animals that emphasize the inextricability of the one from the other. Characters like the missing link in Jack London's Before Adam, the urban dandy werewolf in Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute, and the human-turned-microbe in Mark Twain's 3,000 Years Among the Microbes possess double identities and speak overtly of their entanglement, claiming their right to be both at once. Even Tarzan, the epitome of white manhood, astonishingly declares, "My mother was an Ape." These figures show how thinking through human-animal relation opened up a way of seeing the human as enmeshed in an animate world and subject to unpredictable growth.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 72/05, Nov 2011. Proquest Document ID: 858609083.
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