"The Jungle Books": 's Lamarckian Fantasy Author(s): ALLEN MACDUFFIE Source: PMLA, Vol. 129, No. 1 (January 2014), pp. 18-34 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24769419 Accessed: 08-04-2020 06:50 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PMLA

The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy

ALLEN MACDUFFIE

ling's second Jungle Book (1895), hinges on 's attempt to THE PLOT save his OFsurrogate "RED family, DOG" the Seonee THE Wolf PENULTIMATE Pack, from a ram STORY IN RUDYARD Kip paging horde of wild dogs. Perched on the branch of a tree, Mow gli taunts the dogs (known as "dholes") until the leader of the pack makes a mistake: "At last, made furious beyond his natural strength, he bounded up seven or eight feet clear of the ground. Then Mowgli's hand shot out like the head of a tree-snake, and gripped him by the scruff of his neck.... With his left hand he reached for his knife and cut off the red, bushy tail, flinging the dhole back to earth again" (293). This moment is crucial to the narrative, since the dholes' ha tred of Mowgli will induce them to chase him into the elaborate trap he has prepared. But it is also important for the evolutionary questions it raises and how the implications of those questions af fect our reading of The Jungle Books. For Mowgli does not just cut off the dhole's tail, he mocks him with a vision of mutilated genera tions: "Nay, but consider, wise rat of the Dekkan. There will now be many litters of little tailless red dogs, yea, with raw red stumps that sting when the sand is hot. Go home, Red Dog, and cry that an ape has done this" (294). The idea of heritable punishment is a familiar conceit from fables and folktales, of course, but it also alludes to the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, ALLEN MACDUFFIE is an assistant which profes was enjoying a resurgence of scientific and popular interest sor of English at the University of Texas, while Kipling wrote The Jungle Books. Austin. Elis first book, Victorian Literature, Although is commonly described as a collection Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, will be published by Cambridge of Univer Lamarckian fables, The Jungle Books has long been associated with sity Press in 2014. This essay is froma Darwinian his imaginary.1 In a contemporaneous review in the At book project about Lamarckian lantic evolu Monthly, the stories were hailed as an investigation of animal tionary discourse and Victorian fiction.psychology and an imaginative elaboration of Darwinian thought

> 2014 ALLEN MACDUFFIE i8 PMLA 129.1 (2014), published by the Modern Language Association ot America

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 9-1 Allen MacDuffie 19

("R. Kipling" 858). Kipling, however, emphasized declared the value of experience, the direc himself repulsed by Darwin's work: tive role "I'veof culture, been and the potential for active trying once more to plough throughself-shaping. ThroughThe De Mowgli's Lamarckian scent of Man and every fiber narrative, ... of themy first body Jungle Book can structure a revolted against it" (Writings potentially 114). The wayward seem developmental trajectory, ing contradiction, I argue, demonstrates embedding Mowgli's not growth in a teleological so much the reviewer's misreading narrative, of stableKipling taxonomic hierarchies, and as confusion over Darwin's ideas at this mo ordered patterns of metamorphosis. But by the ment. In some contexts, Darwinism denoted end of , as Kipling at something specific: evolution by natural se tempts to move Mowgli's story into historical lection. But in others it served as an umbrella time, the space that has allowed for the happy term for any science or philosophy of evolu convergence of myth and science, fantasy and tionary transformation.2 Given the lexical realism begins to unravel. In this way, The uncertainty, the Atlantic reviewer is not nec Jungle Books expresses the elaborate fantasies essarily misguided to invoke Darwin's name that underwrote the neo-Lamarckian project in reference to The Jungle Books. Neither are and exposes the deeper theoretical vague present-day critics who have linked Kipling's ness those fantasies only partially concealed. work to Darwin's.3 Seth Lerer has recently In tracing these patterns and the relation be argued that "if the Jungle Books are Kipling's tween scientific theory and narrative conven Descent of Man, then the Just So Stories are tions, I hope to suggest some of the ways in his Origin of Species" (181). which a more capacious, less Darwin-centered Such an analogy frames Kipling's sto picture of Victorian evolutionary discourse ries in broadly evolutionary terms, whereas, might open up new possibilities for our read as I hope to show, The Jungle Books can be ings of the period's literary texts.6 read as a participant in specific fierce late Victorian debates over alternative scientific paradigms of species change. If we define Darwinian more narrowly (as many Victori Lamarck's theory, described in Philosophie ans did) to signify not "evolution" but "evo zoologique (1809), was a significant part of lution by natural selection," then we can see pre-Darwinian evolutionary and material the ways in which The Jungle Books functions ist sciences and, in British radical circles in as a profoundly anti-Darwinian narrative the 1820s and 1830s, an alternative to the and as part of a widespread neo-Lamarckian precepts of mainstream Anglican natural reaction against the troublingly wasteful, theology.7 Although Lamarck articulated a nonhierarchical, and nonteleological natural comprehensive theory of the origin and direc selection mechanism.4 In what follows, I tion of life, the term Lamarckism eventually position Kipling's Mowgli stories in the late became synonymous with one component of nineteenth-century resurgence of Lamarck that theory: the inheritance of acquired char ism known as the "eclipse of Darwinism."5 acteristics. A key to this mechanism was the The fantastic quality of these stories uniquely role individual effort, responding to environ expresses the cultural logic of Lamarckism, mental pressures, played in shaping heritable which played a crucial role in late Victorian traits, both instinctual and morphological. imperial mythmaking about human and Eu Lamarck writes: ropean evolutionary centrality. Lamarckian logic provided ideal underpinnings for nar The bird which is drawn to the water by its ratives of individual development because it need of finding there the prey on which it

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy PMLA

lives, separates the digits of its Lamarckians feet in try like Samuel Butler and Alpheus ing to strike the water and move Packard, about partly on in reaction to Weismann's the surface. The skin which unites perceived these dogmatism, dig sought to relegate its at their base acquires the habit natural of selection being to subsidiary status in the stretched by these continually evolutionaryrepeated sepa process (Bowler, Eclipse, esp. rations of the digits; thus in course of time 59). By the 1890s the interest in Lamarckian there are formed large webs which unite the ideas was so strong that Herbert Spencer, En digits of ducks, geese, etc. (119) gland's most prominent Lamarckian thinker,

Even after Darwin articulated the more rigor could argue in "The Inadequacy of Natural Selection" that "either there has been inheri ous theory of natural selection in The Origin of Species (1859), the inheritance of acquired tance of acquired characteristics, or there characteristics remained, in principle, a viable has been no evolution" (346). Although most evolutionary mechanism. Although Origin neo-Lamarckians spoke admiringly of Dar solved many problems central to a nascent win,sci many worked to establish Lamarck as ence of species change, it also raised questions the true progenitor of modern evolutionary Darwin could not answer. Nature might science, "se as the provocative titles of Theodor lect" one advantageous variation over another, Eimer's The Origin of Species by Means of In but what caused variations to arise in the first heritance of Acquired Characteristics (1888) place? With characteristic modesty, Darwin and Packard's Lamarck: The Founder of Evo acknowledges the problem: "our ignorance lution of (1901) testify. Indeed, Packard's book the laws of variation is profound. Not in engages one in optative fantasies of an alternative case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign course of Victorian intellectual history: any reason why this or that part has varied" [H]ad [Lamarck's] way of looking at this sub (155). These conceptual gaps opened space ject prevailed, how much misunderstanding for Lamarckian explanations to take root. To and ill-feeling between theologians and sa some nineteenth-century biologists like Ernst vants would have been avoided! Had his spirit Elaeckel, the inheritance of acquired charac and breadth of view animated both parties, teristics served as a necessary companion to there would not have been the constant and natural selection, and his Generelle Morpholo needless opposition on the part of the Church gie (1866) sought to establish a working alli to the grand results of scientific discovery and ance between the paradigms. Darwin himself philosophy, or too hasty dogmatism and skep increasingly made concessions to Lamarckian ticism on the part of some scientists. (373) mechanisms in The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication (1868), The De That last comment suggests the way in scent of Man (1870), and his revisions to whichThe many Victorians found the Lamarck Origin of Species in the 1860s and 1870s.8 ian model attractive not just because of what it But if the inheritance of acquired char seemed to explain about evolution but also be acteristics and natural selection were cause by it could paint a less threatening picture no means incompatible, there were diver of the natural world. Whereas under natural gent opinions about which mechanism wasselection an organism was simply a vector of the primary evolutionary driver and which genetic transmission (in Gillian Beer's phrase, supplementary. By the 1880s lines were "both vehicle and dead end" [Darwin's Plots being drawn between rival camps. 38]),Neo Lamarckian evolution did not abandon Darwinians, led by Alfred Russel Wallace the individual to the fitness of its inborn bi and August Weismann, argued for the comology; instead, as seen in Lamarck's descrip plete sufficiency of natural selection, while tion of the bird at the watering hole, it allowed

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 129-1 Allen MacDuffie

for the active efforts of an organism Through the toprocess shape of acquiring char itself. The changes produced acteristics, by those transmitting efforts them, and recapitu are, in turn, preserved and latingpassed them down embryonically, to its experience was offspring. The neo-Lamarckian imagined psychologistto be, in effect, "remembered" by Sylvia Bliss stated that "among the body. Thethe seeming various isomorphism between responses of a developing heredity organism and memory to wasenvi not simply a con ronment those proving useful venient heuristicwould for persistneo-Lamarckian think as habits and eventually becomeers; it was a organizedtheoretical linchpin. Since the as instincts" (qtd. in Stocking, process by"Lamarckian which experience was converted ism" 246). As David Livingstone into heritable has material argued, was unknown, the Lamarckism's developmental memory teleology analogy had to pro bear a great deal of vided a source of "cosmic comfort" and an explanatory weight.12 In fact, it served as a evolutionary paradigm more easily reconcil kind of double analogy: the organism's expe able with natural theology (19).9 riences were stored as instincts or changes to A second key component in the neo its morphology, and the transmission of those Lamarckian paradigm was the idea that on new characteristics to offspring was a form of togeny (the development of the individual) intergenerational remembering. Embryonic recapitulates phylogeny (the development of recapitulation, therefore, was the material the species)—what Haeckel referred to as the chronicle of ancestral history. Laura Otis ar "biogenetic law" (140). In The Vestiges of the gues that such theories of organic memory Natural History of Creation (1844), the book that first popularized Lamarckian evolution promised the expansion of knowledge and, in the English-speaking world (Moore 143), more important, the restoration of dignity Robert Chambers describes this mechanism: and a sense of purpose. Darwin's version of evolution had shaken Europeans' confidence, "each animal passes, in the course of its ger but Haeckel's and Lamarck's teleological ver minal history, through a series of changes sion and the organic memory theory that resembling the permanent forms of the vari rested upon it glorified Europeans' posi ous orders of animals inferior to it in the tion in the universe. ... In short, the theory scale" (198-99). Recapitulation theory thus promised eternal life. (25) established an implicit teleology and hierar chy of developmental stages. Although the In this way, the anxiety about oblivion and theory traces its conceptual roots to early forgetting that Beer has described as a central nineteenth-century German Romantic sci component of the Victorian cultural imagi ence (rather than to Lamarck), it became anary was assuaged by the automatic work of cornerstone of neo-Lamarckian thought.10 organic retention ("Origins," esp. 63). Recapitulation suggested an essentially ad ditive process whereby the more advanced II organisms were those that had grafted new, advantageous qualities onto the old; the La We may read the story of Mowgli's ascent to marckian evolutionary model posited the "Master of the Jungle" as not simply a story mechanism through which these additions of growth but also a narrative in which a La were obtained. Although it is a matter of on marckian mnemonics informs the develop going debate whether Darwin subscribed to mental trajectory. At first Mowgli must recall embryonic recapitulation, its consolidating consciously the education he receives from linearity sits uncomfortably with the aleatory, , , and various members of the nondirectional logic of natural selection.11 wolf pack, and Kipling puts great emphasis

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy PMLA

on the active work of remembering. about re-membering In the the human, in his mind early story "'s Hunting," in which and through Mowgli his somatic constitution. Kipling is by a tribe of monkeys, here echoes he uses another evolutionary children's his training in various animal talelanguages he knew to well, Charles Kingsley's The send word to his allies: '"He has not Water forgotten Babies, in which an orphan boy reca to use his tongue,' said Baloo, with pitulates a chuckle the stages of animal development in of pride. 'To think of one so young order toremem re-member his full humanity.13 bering the Master Word for the "Redbirds Dog,"too then, draws on Lamarck while he was being pulled across-trees!"' ian fantasies (34). of converting experience into The story hinges on discrete acts instinctof recall and tracing humankind's path to recitation, his ability to do the animals becoming in dif the culminating figure of the evo ferent voices. But by "Red Dog," lutionary the climax process. After defeating the dhole, of the second book, Mowgli's lessons Mowgli have has be his supremacy ratified by the come encoded in his very person, abjection a fact ofcon his former teachers before him: veyed through his embodied metamorphic "the panther's head dropped. Bagheera knew language: "'Mowgli the Frog hishave master" I been,' (303). But to attain this position said he to himself; 'Mowgli the Mowgli Wolf havenot onlyI calls on an explicitly neo said that I am. Now Mowgli the Lamarckian Ape must Imodel of change—cutting off be before I am Mowgli the Buck. the At dhole's the end tail, recapitulating his own tra 1 shall be Mowgli the Man (291). jectory—but Ihe trajec also confronts what looks like a tory suggests Mowgli's journey challenge through toThe this model, which ipso facto in Jungle Books as a whole, from embryonic volves a threat "na to his aspirations to mastery. ked frog" (9) and surrogate wolf With in thethe firsthelp of Kaa the python, he plans his book to the threshold of human trap maturity for the in dholes: he will lure them to the the second. It also corresponds lair to ofthe the vari "Little People of the Rock," the "fu ous tasks he must perform in thisrious, particular black wild bees of India" (287). Kipling describes the location: story. "Red Dog" is thus explicitly framed as a narrative of recapitulation: Mowgli's The length of the gorge on both sides was development through all the stories is to be hung as it were with black shimmery velvet consolidated in one final test, and his attain curtains, and Mowgli sank as he looked, for ment of mastery, in turn, recapitulates those were thethe clotted millions of the sleep developmental telos through which ing bees. "Man" There were other lumps and festoons becomes Master of the Jungle. His and thingssuccess like decayed tree-trunks studded over the dholes hinges not on reciting on the specific face of the rock, the old combs of past lessons or commands but on performing years, or new cercities built in the shadow of the tain learned physical actions that windless have gorge,been, and huge masses of spongy rotten trash had rolled down and stuck in Bliss's words, "organized as instincts." His embodied remembrance of his trainingamong the trees is and creepers that clung to the rock-face. As he listened he heard more than put in the service of his conscious strategiz once the rustle and slide of a honey-loaded ing, which will determine the evolutionary comb turning over or falling away somewhere destiny of the entire pack; without Mowgli's in the dark galleries; then a booming of angry intervention, extinction awaits. If, as the wings, and the sullen drip, drip, drip, of the early-nineteenth-century German wasted anatomist honey, guttering along till it lipped Lorenz Oken argues, "the animal overkingdom some ledge in the open air and sluggishly is but a dismemberment of the highesttrickled down ani on the twigs. There was a tiny mal, i.e. of Man" (494), then Mowgli's little story beach, notis five feet broad, on one side

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1 2 9 • 1 Allen MacDuffie 23

of the river, and that was piled high with the the Lamarckian paradigm emphasized con rubbish of uncounted years. (287-88) servation—indeed, Spencer explicitly aligned it with the conservation of energy.15 The indi It is a striking description, a vision of extrava vidual life was not to be discarded in unfath gant fecundity and biophysical disorder found omable heaps of carcasses but to be stored in nowhere else in The Jungle Books. The empha the living matrix of future generations. sis on such qualities aligns the bees' lair with The lair of the "Little People" in "Red a Darwinian picture of generation, elimina Dog" opens a vista into the natural world that tion, and natural inefficiency. Indeed, in reflectsOri the generative nightmare and "in gin Darwin uses the bee to illustrate what stinctive he loathing" occasioned by the natural termed in a letter the "clumsy, wasteful, selection blun mechanism. As Kipling describes it, dering low & horridly cruel works of nature" the lair is a place of waste and death, where ("To Joseph Hooker"): intimations of oblivion, "the rubbish of un counted years," disrupt faith in the retentive As natural selection acts by competition, it power of the natural world. The anthropo adapts the inhabitants of each country only morphizing gestures ("velvet curtains," "new in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates. . . . [W]e need not marvel cities") are tellingly ringed with obscurity at the sting of the bee causing the bee's and own disorder ("other lumps and festoons death; at drones being produced in such and vast things," "huge masses of spongy rotten numbers for one single act, and being trash").then This is a place in which the human slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the can asfind no stable purchase, and the anthro tonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees; pomorphic, at which has until now served the the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for narrative her as a means of ordering the jungle, own fertile daughters 14 (412) becomes part of the indecipherable mass, swallowed up as another element in a hash of For many Lamarckians, this picture epitomized descriptors that allow the eye no comfortable the world of natural selection. Butler found that center of focus. It recalls James Krasner's ac such a model "arouse[s] instinctive loathing; itcount of Darwin's resistant representational is my fortunate task to maintain that such atechniques in The Origin of Species: "Darwin nightmare of waste and death is as baseless as portrays the natural world as lacking distinct it is repulsive" (308). As the following passage visual forms through the use of rhetorical from the Times indicates, the natural-selection techniques designed to confuse and disorient mechanism was often confounded with the the reader's mental vision—imaginative illu phenomena it was used to explain: sions that parallel the perceptual illusions of physical vision" (119). To this universal law of the greatest economy, No other locale in The Jungle Books the law of natural selection stands in direct an poses such a challenge to the perceiving eye. tagonism as the law of "greatest possible waste" And this scene, not coincidentally, presents of time and of creative power.... [A]ges must elapse and whole generations must perish, and Mowgli with the most potent challenge to countless generations of the one species be cre his ascent to the top of the natural hierar ated and sacrificed, to arrive at one single pair chy. "Tell me, Master of the Jungle," Kaa asks of [a new species]. (qtd. in Wallace 296-97) him, "who is the Master of the Jungle?" To which Mowgli whispers, "These" (287). The This is not so much an argument as a visceral paradoxical question makes sense if we see in rejection of the idea of natural inefficiency. In this scene a conflict not between competing contrast to the "law of greatest possible waste," species but between competing evolutionary

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 24 The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy P M L A

schemata. "Red Dog" is about the tinct) threat forces ofof invasion, warfare, and exter extermination posed by the dholes, mination but that it play is such large roles in Origins also about the threat the "clotted millions" selection plot are managed by the agencies of pose to the very idea of order. In the bees memory and thought. The profligate natural we have a species that, unlike all the other power embodied in the bees is instrumental animals of the jungle, cannot be threatened, ized by Mowgli's planning, and the narrative tricked, bargained with, or stared out of logic of "Red Dog" presses disorder and waste countenance. They reside beyond the novel's into the service of a coherent narrative of in anthropomorphized natural paradigm and cipient mastery. In this way, Mowgli's direct pay no heed to Mowgli's status in the organic reference to recapitulation and the Lamarck hierarchy or to his developmental telos. ian mutilation he visits on future generations The title of Butler's final book on evo of dholes reveal his conscious embrace of lutionary inheritance, Luck or Cunning, enan evolutionary paradigm congenial to his capsulates, as Peter Bowler notes, the entire dreams of command; meanwhile, his mas difference between the neo-Darwinian and terly use of the wild Indian bees overcomes neo-Lamarckian paradigms (Eclipse 74). For a vision of natural selection inimical to his Butler a Darwinian world was wasteful and sense of hierarchy, order, and exceptionalism. mindless, governed solely by chance. A La marckian world, in contrast, was a world of III cunning, in which purposeful, conscious ac tivity increasingly came to shape individual Although my argument has thus far been and evolutionary history. Mowgli's plan for centered on the representation of the the dholes arises only after he hears an oldhuman-animal relation in Kipling's work, story about a buck that escaped a pursuing the Lamarckian inheritance paradigm had horde by running past the lair of the bees. Thesignificant implications for the understand buck's survival was a result of mere chance: he ing of human cultural and racial difference "came hither from the south, not knowing the in nineteenth-century anthropological dis Jungle, a Pack on his trail. . . made blind by course. As Lewis Petronovich argues, a good fear" (288). But the story is remembered by the deal of Victorian evolutionary anthropology Jungle and transmitted for future use. Thus, was based on the assumptions that strict after infuriating the dholes with his tail trim Darwinism had no relevance to the under ming, Mowgli follows the pattern of the ear standing of social evolution. Inheritance of lier narrative, leading them on the same chase acquired characteristics was considered the to the hives and allowing the insects to once important, and perhaps chief, cause of hu again overwhelm the pursuers. This new story man social evolution, with natural selection recapitulates the old, but this time the actions of little importance" (42). For many Lamarck are deliberate. A plot governed by chance be ians, including Spencer, Lester Frank Ward, comes a plot governed by strategy and effort. and W. B. Carpenter, Western culture had The red dog is cousin to the wolf, and, as created a virtuous, accelerating inheritance Darwin tells us, "competition should be most cycle—as Bowler describes it, "a higher level severe between allied forms, which fill nearly of culture stimulates greater use of the brain the same place in the economy of nature; but and thus increases the race's mental capac probably in no case could we precisely say ity, which in turn paves the way for further why one species has been victorious over an cultural growth" (Non-Darwinian Revolu other in the great battle of life" (Origin 77). tion 138). Conversely, the supposedly indolent But here the mindless (and narratively indis savages had created a self-fueling negative

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 9-1 Allen MacDuffie 25 feedback loop. Kipling's father, If Lockwood, "The White Man's Burden" dwells on describes this Lamarckian dynamic the thankless in taskhis ofes educating a recalcitrant say "A Word on Indian Progress": population, "Languor The Jungle Books stages a more is the normal physical state of complexthe town-bred (though still troubling) negotiation Indian mother, and resignation between is her the forces chief of nature, culture, and evo characteristic.... [B]y the iron lutionary law of patrimony. hered "Kaa's Hunting" tells the ity, the peculiarities of their character story of Mowgli's and the schooling and acculturation limitations of their mental powers into the waysare offaith the jungle and (not coinciden fully transmitted to their children" tally) raises (qtd. the kinds in of questions about so Havholm 163). In this way, as cial George development Stock that were also the subjects of ing argues, neo-Lamarckian anthropology neo-Lamarckian evolutionary en anthropology. dowed culture with "a crucially The determiningstory signals its Lamarckian allegiances role" in human evolutionary history early on, in becausea reference to Mowgli's heritage: it "helped to explain and to validate "Mowgli, as the a woodcutter's cul child, inherited all sorts of instincts, and used to make little huts tural progress of mankind in biological terms" ("Lamarckianism" 256). Culture of fallenthus branches func without thinking how he tioned as sign and cause of racial came difference. to do it, and the Monkey-People, watch In a related way, the recapitulation ing in the trees, the considered his play most won ory that was so often a component derful" (27). of It isneo a fanciful moment, but the Lamarckian thinking also biologized idea that a parent racial s professional skills would so hierarchies. Stephen Jay Gould directlywrites: encode themselves onto the bodies of offspring was at this time widely held. Grant

For anyone who wishes to affirm Allen, the ininnate a discussion in of heredity in 1890, ar equality of races, few biological guesarguments that "a talent can for music is developed and have more appeal than recapitulation, transmitted with in musicalits families" and that insistence that children of higher "special races muscles (in and muscular aptitudes are variably one's own) are passing developed through and andtransmitted in the families of beyond the permanent conditions acrobats of and adults tumblers" (537). This Lamarck in lower races. If adults of lower races are like ian moment in "Kaa's Hunting" is pivotal, be white children, then they may be treated as cause it sets the terms for the complex allegory such—subdued, disciplined, and managed. of inheritance that the rest of the story devel (126) ops. Notice that at the very moment Mowgli activates his native inheritance, he draws the This, of course, is the kind of thinking that attention of the "Monkey-People," who put in undergirds Kipling's "The White Man's Bur their own claim on his body by asserting kin den" and its infamous description of the ship and, later, by physically seizing him. If native subject as "half devil and half child" Mowgli's hut-building instincts represent the (359). Gould (132) and Stocking ("Lamarck positive legacy carried in his native "blood," ianism" 253) single out the poem as a crucial then the Monkey-People (also known as the instance of the way Lamarckian conceptions "Bandar-log") represent the dark side of that of species formation and racial divergence background, the shiftless elements that lurk in underwrote European paternalism. Reca the jungle and represent the genetic drag on pitulation drew a biological cordon sanitaire his development. Baloo tells Mowgli: between imperial and native cultures, while fashioning a kinship that rationalized struc I have taught thee all the tures of domination. for all the peoples of the jungle—except the

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 26 Thejungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy PMLA

Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. biological They commonality: have "We be of one blood no law. They are outcasts. . . . Theythou and have I," he no says to Rann the kite, to the remembrance. They boast and cobraschatter he encounters and in the ruined city, and pretend that they are a great people to Kaa theabout python, to who rescues him (29, 39, do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling 40). Mowgli's facility with these various lin of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all guistic codes indicates not just the mastery of is forgotten. (26) different kinds of cultural knowledge but also

The forgetfulness of thethe embedding Bandar-log of that knowledge suggests into his a cultural vacuum and, in a Lamarckian very self so that culture and biology, train paradigm, a state of evolutionary stagna ing and blood, knowing and being become indissociable. If, on one level, the insistence tion in which no lasting progress can occur. Thus, three vectors of inheritance compete for on shared blood indicates a broadly conceived Mowgli's body in this story: the useful knowl evolutionary point or view in wmcn com edge encoded in his woodcutter's genes, the mon ancestry unites organisms as dissimilar insipid anarchy of the monkeys, and the order as men, birds, and snakes, it also suggests a transmitted through training in the "Jungle Lamarckian understanding of the malleabil Law." The allegory is structured by the con ity of an organism's genetic architecture and the transformative dialectic between train flicts between and among these various forces. The Bandar-log at first fascinate Mowgli, ing and instinct. Thus, the allegorical world since they represent an alternative to Baloo's of the beast fable, in which different animal disciplinary regime: "When Baloo hurt my types embody different moral qualities, meets head ... I went away, and the gray apes came the transformative dynamism of Lamarck down from the trees and had pity on me" ian evolution, in which the willed exercise of (25). But this fascination quickly ends, and those qualities produces that embodiment. when they carry him off, the initial affec The Bandar-log represent a threat to tive or psychological captivation becomes a Mowgli precisely because apes claim the clos mere physical bondage from which he seeks est ties of blood kinship to humans. Likewise, to escape: "For a time he was afraid of being insofar as they are meant to represent a na dropped; then he grew angry but knew better tive human civilization, they threaten his de than to struggle, and then he began to think" velopment because their genetic ties conjure (29). This moment echoes the recapitula the specter of cultural atavism, or simply raise tive trajectories we have seen elsewhere, as the fact of an unwanted consanguinity.16 But Mowgli's reaction "evolves" from basic fear "Kaa's Hunting" is about uncovering these ties through anger to conscious strategizing and to reconfigure them. Mowgli's inner states, emotional management rooted in cultural and the forces competing within him, must training. As Beer has shown, in late Victorian be fully externalized so they can be managed evolutionary discourse emotional reactions through identification, habit, and will. By sto like fear were often coded as simultaneously ry's end, we are left with the counterintuitive childish and primitive, to be "controlled, sup (but, under this paradigm, explicable) notion pressed, outgrown" through the maturation that Mowgli shares more blood with a python of the individual and the species alike (Dar than with an ape. "Have a care, Manling," win's Plots 220). Mowgli's training involves Kaa tells him, "that I do not mistake thee for his knowledge of the "Master Words" of the a monkey some twilight...." To which Mow jungle, which he uses not simply to commu gli replies, "We be of one blood, thou and I. nicate with other jungle creatures but also to ... I take my life from thee, to-night" (43). insist on ties of mutual responsibility based in The monkey in Mowgli has become a mere

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 129-1 Allen MacDuffie 27 shadow, a matter of superficial man and theresemblance, bestial parts of animal nature, while a new origin is established while the Jungle-People for the furepresent the law ture course of his life. If, aslike we human have and seen, the "heroic" the aspects of the inheritance of acquired characteristics animal, wanted and unwanted was moral quali grounded in the idea of organicties are connected memory, and separated across the "Kaa's Hunting" reveals the human-animalway in which divide. that In this way, the sav memory could function selectively, age and the bestial allowing can be equated and elimi unwanted features of an organism'snated through the genetic transformative rigors of history to be "forgotten" bioculturalthrough training. the Darwinright is ultimately, as kinds of future-oriented habits Schmitt andargues, discipline. insistently (if reluctantly) his As Cannon Schmitt (50-56) and Rose torical about the line of descent, clearly fram mary Jann (288-93) have shown, Darwin's ing his genealogical wish as a counterfactual anthropomorphic tendencies allow him to in fantasy (50). Kipling, on the other hand, is dulge in his own genealogical fantasies at the invested in the processes of self-creation and end of The Descent of Man. Darwin writes: self-transformation and in the affiliations and managed bloodlines by which (some) human He who has seen a savage in his native land beings construct their evolutionary future. will not feel much shame, if forced to ac For neo-Lamarckians, environment or knowledge that the blood of some more hum culture could directly introduce new elements ble creature flows in his veins. For my own into an organism's "blood," allowing for the part I would as soon be descended from that possibility of hybridization without sexual heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded congress. Although Stephen Arata does not enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, mention Lamarck, this concept forms the or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph backbone of his discussion of the hybrid ra his young comrade from a crowd of aston cial category "Anglo-Indian" in works by ished dogs—as from a savage who delights to contemporaries of Kipling's like J. A. Froude, torture his enemies . . . treats his wives like Andrew Lang, Edward Carpenter, and John slaves, knows no decency and is haunted by Strachey. All these writers imagined that the grossest superstitions. (689) alien cultural experiences could produce last ing biological changes in native Englishmen: Here the conversion of the concept of ge nealogical "descent" into the narrative act [I]n practice race operated more as a biocul of "descending" turns moral heroism into atural than a biological category. This fuzzi means of resisting the power of potentially ness allowed writers like Lang and Carpenter degrading genetic ties. The spatial meta to talk of the "hybridization" of the Anglo Indian, though neither had anything like sex phor of ancestry is momentarily remade into ual promiscuity in mind. Instead, their interest a narrative world not unlike Kipling's, in lay in the effects wrought on the individual by which willed movement through an imag a wholly alien cultural and physical environ ined space expresses and produces freedom ment. At this level, the fantasy of a healthy from genealogical burdens. Both narratives, "mixing of bloods" could be entertained with it is worth noting, are stories of emancipation out awakening taboos of miscegenation. from captors. But Kipling's genealogical alle (Arata 16-17) gory in "Kaa's Hunting" is more elaborately imagined and his genetic model more radi As Robert Young has argued, the ques cally malleable than Darwin's. Because the tion of sexual hybridity was at the heart of Monkey-People can represent the savage nineteenth-century hu racial discourse (esp. 86

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 28 The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy P M L A

93), but the Lamarckian world of man The evolution Jungle was concerned, the question of Books allows Kipling to play with wherethe kind the emphasis of was placed—on the up cross-fertilizing racial dynamics ward many dynamism theo of heritable acquisitions or rists found so compelling, while the temporarily inescapability of the ancestral past—piv bracketing the trickier questions oted of on sexualthe race of the subject under consid reproduction and the viability of eration. mixed-race For the Lamarckian political theorist offspring. The text's elaborate anthropomorWalter Bagehot, the modern savage lacks an phism helps keep the dynamism "abiding of Lamarck capacity" for progress because his ian change within carefully controlled mind is limits: "tattooed over with monstrous im insofar as the different animals ages" Mowgli from the en history of his race (135, 120). counters symbolize different human Bagehot's cultural metaphor, in his popular Physics groups, with a wide array of linguistic and Politics codes (1872), suggests a Lamarckian and cultural practices, the text offers interarticulation possibil of culture, body, and mind ities for an excitingly fertile biocultural that, in this inter case, has produced a hopelessly il change. But because those cultural legibledifferences genetic palimpsest. Because of this stra are encoded as species differences, tegically an uncross unresolved tension between flux and able reproductive boundary always fixity, separates the inheritance of acquired characteris Mowgli from his compatriots. Intics this could way,rationalize European domination in the anthropomorphism of The Junglethe name Booksof a progressive evolutionary ideal, creates a seemingly fantastic world while ofpositing biocul intractable barriers to change tural openness, while quietly inscribing that are permanently fixed inscribed by cultural biological distinctions between groups. biological history.As we As Stocking argues: will see in the next section, this tension be tween the desire for developmental The openness peculiar advantage of a more Lamarckian and the need to maintain fixed boundaries ex evolutionism was the opening it left for an up poses unresolved paradoxes in the Lamarck lifting philanthropic meliorism. Civilizing ef ian fantasy as the text nears its conclusion. forts on behalf of dark-skinned savages could, over time, eliminate savaserv from the world. not by destroying savage populations, but by IV modifying their hereditary incapacity. In the meantime—which might be shorter or longer Since the inheritance of acquired character depending on the weight one gave to present istics was a theoretical principle with empiri as opposed to cumulative past experience—it cally undefined parameters, it could be flexibly was both scientifically and morally respectable deployed to suit the demands of a variety of for civilized Europeans to take up the white arguments. As a transformative mechanism man's burden. (Victorian Anthropology 237) that described the adaptive interplay between organism and environment, biology and cul In the context of Bagehot's remark, we can see ture, this principle could be used to argue for the pernicious catch-22 for colonized peoples: rapid evolutionary change and extraordinary the "hereditary incapacity" that was to be genetic plasticity. But as an archival process changed was often imagined as the hereditary in which the past experiences of a species incapacity for change. Paradoxically, then, or nation were encoded in the bodies of its although neo-Lamarckian thought empha present-day members, it could also be used sized the transformative possibilities of pres to emphasize the genetic drag of accumulated ent experience, it could at the same time be history and, thus, the near impossibility of used in the service of a conservative genetic significant future transformation. Where hu determinism when applied to non-European

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 129.1 Allen MacDuffie 29 peoples and other marginalized Messua, and thus throughgroups.17 the grip of his ge John Haller notes, "Ironically netic past. Persecuted . . . asthe a witch envi by the other ronmentalist tradition became villagers, weightedMessua seeks redress with in a sphere be hereditarian ideas as soon yond village as raceand jungle: analysis "If we reach Khani focused upon the non-Aryan wara, andpeoples" I get the ear (ix).18 of the English, I will This indeterminacy in thebring neo-Lamarckiansuch a lawsuit against the Brahmin paradigm between progressive and old Buldeo dynamism and the others as andshall eat the racial-biological fixity troubles village to the bone"Kipling's (197). The wordde lawsuit piction of Mowgli's development comes as a mild lexical toward surprise inthe a text that conclusion of The Jungle hasBooks. been so far In all aboutstories the unwritten like codes "Red Dog" and "Kaa's Hunting," of honor and self-discipline, the inheri and it signals tance of acquired characteristics an important change allows in the frame for of refer rapid change through increased ence. If, in other control stories, the over "Jungle Law" potentially unruly forces that Mowgliwithin internalizes and is set with in contrast to a out. We have seen that use inheritance serves blind Darwinian "law of the jungle," here the as an instrument of punishment, as a means contrast is drawn between "Jungle Law" and of knowledge acquisition and consolidation, "lawsuit"—that is, between the local practices as a conceptual bulwark against the wasteful that govern behavior in and among tribes and processes of natural selection, and as a way the apparatus that provides large-scale insti to manage one's blood through training and tutional order. There is clearly a new, more discipline. Because Mowgli at first resides in complex way to manage violent energies and a vaguely defined jungle world, during an un thus a new way of "mastering" the jungle. The specified historical time, he can represent Man, villagers themselves believe that "when the who recapitulates in his ontogenetic bildung of Jungle moves, only white men can hope to increasing self-mastery the phylogenetic narra turn it aside" (208). Significantly, it is at the tive of human ascendancy over nature and the same moment that Messua introduces the animal. Mowgli's superiority is foretold from need for this larger apparatus of order that the first conflict with the apex predator Shere she claims an unbreakable biological kinship Khan ("he shall live to run with the Pack and with Mowgli: "I gave thee milk, Nathoo; dost to hunt with the Pack; and in the end ... he thou remember?... They [the villagers] said shall hunt thee!" [5]), thereby organizing his that I was thy mother, the mother of a devil, various Lamarckian acquisitions in a mytho and therefore worthy of death" (193). If Mow logical recapitulative teleology. In "Letting in gli's escape from the Bandar-log symbolized the Jungle," however, the narrative introduces emancipation from a burdensome genetic the first concrete indicators of nineteenth past, here the emphasis on milk and memory century English historical time, bringing suggests his enmeshment in personal and about a new "stage of development" beyond biohistorical genealogies that undermine the Mowgli's capacities. With the introduction of control he has previously exercised over his Europeans, he can no longer function as rep own developmental narrative. resentative Man or, indeed, as "Master of the Once he frees his mother, a wrathful Jungle." The emphasis begins to fall on the de Mowgli decides to "let in the jungle"—to re velopmental limits of his native-born identity cruit elephant and antelope herds to trample rather than on the transformative possibilities the village. This plan seems to echo earlier of his experiences. narratives like "! Tiger!," where his skill This shift in emphasis is focused through in organizing violence signified a progressive his relationship with his biological mother, mastery of environment and self. But now

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 30 The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy PMLA

that Messua is safe with the English make andhimself the stop. Then he swam round and conflict resolved, such a plan has round,become ducking nar in and out of the bars of the ratively excessive. Bagheera makes moonlight this clear: like the frog, his namesake. (205) "Now, Little Brother, there is nothing more to do. . . . The man and woman will For notBagheera be theput raw exercise of power com into the Red Flower [fire], and pletes all goesMowgli's well ascent to mastery and adult in the Jungle. Is it not true? Let hood us forget(the animals the are now all "cubs" before Man-Pack" (201). But in this Lamarckian him). For Mowgli another level of power on context, "forgetting" is precisely the problem. the margins of his comprehension redefines Mowgli's wish to destroy the village expresses him as evolutionary child in the biogenetic the futile desire to obliterate his own origins schema. The recapitulation narrative that and displays a loss of self-command through had previously endowed his story with an his desperate attempt to assert it. Indeed, this allegorical centrality (note Bagheera's com story is notable for its emphasis on the invol ment that when Mowgli was young, "all was untary physical reactions ("Mowgli had hardly young") now suddenly frames him as belated, time to catch his breath—he was shaking all marginal, and behind "bars"—captive in the over with rage and hate" [205]) that serve as metaphoric tide pools of his biological past. a pointed contrast to the successful manage Theodore Koditschek argues that through a ment of the "primitive" emotions of fear and anger he displayed in "Kaa's Hunting." vague neo-Lamarckism . . . the superior In the changing narrative circumstances races (i.e. Anglo-Saxons and, to a lesser de gree, other Aryans) were deemed to be fast of The Jungle Books, then, we see the paradox evolving, and therefore capable of acting that Stocking and Haller identify more broadly purposefully and progressively in history. By in the application of Lamarckian evolutionary contrast, the more or less inferior races were mechanisms to questions of racial difference. relegated to the longue durée timescale of The inheritance of acquired characteristics was evolution. Where the former were historical

embedded in a hierarchical evolutionary telos subjects, the makers of history, the latter were that subordinated animals to humans and na conceived as the objects of evolution, to be tives to the civilized; in each binary structure, classified, managed, and restrained. (14-15) the superior term was imagined to be dynami cally progressive and the inferior term limited Mowgli's loss of self-command and narra and relatively fixed. The crucial point is that, tive power in "Letting in the Jungle" suggests with the appearance of the English in "Letting precisely this loss of developmental subject in the Jungle," Mowgli operates as a term inhood. He slips back down the phylo- and on both binaries at once: superior in one, inferior togenetic rungs, his body and narrative both in the other. The crisis this engenders is most subject to forces beyond his control. Whereas vividly apparent in his conversation with Bain earlier stories the relation between internal gheera near the end of the story: state and environmental conditions had been imagined as dynamically transformative, "Art thou the naked thing I spoke for in the here the phrase "letting in the jungle" (not Pack when all was young? Master of the Jungle, unlike "heart of darkness") bitterly ironizes ... [w]e are cubs before thee! Snapped twigs the relation between within and without. As under foot! Fawns that have lost their doe!" The idea of Bagheera being a stray fawn Mowgli commits savage actions in the name upset Mowgli altogether, and he laughed and of punishing savage actions, we see that the caught his breath, and sobbed and laughed jungle does not need to be let in, because it again, till he had to jump into a pool to is in him already. In a sense, the conflict be

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 129. Allen MacDuffie 31 tween progressive dynamism fixing andMowgli genetic as ideal native fix subject—child ity is embedded in the title, like butsince not childish, by story's animal but not bestial, end the grammatically progressive intrepid but not "letting"unruly—who gratefully sur ironically comes to express renders something his personal developmental un narrative changeable and limiting for aboutthe sake of imperialMowgli's development. cultural-biological identity. Modern editors, perhaps finding the style But the conclusion of The too Jungle discontinuous Books and Mowgli's is submission not a straightforward tale oftoo total,Kipling's usually consign putting "In the Rukh" to the native boy in his place. Asan appendix John or McBratney omit it altogether.19 In "The argues, Kipling's depictions Springof hybrid Running," protagthe story that concludes onists like Mowgli and The areJungle riven Books in by most con modern editions, flicting allegiances and desires: running they becomes represent a metaphor for the dy exciting possibilities for pluralismnamic reproductive and energies new in Mowgli that embodied vectors of knowledge, can find noeven outlet orif final they form. The animals threaten the clear racial distinctions on which "run" with their partners during the mating the imperial project depended (Imperial Sub season, leaving him to dash aimlessly through jects 128-29). If "Letting in the Jungle" brings the jungle: "Mowgli's muscles, trained by to the surface conflicting teleologies in the years of experience, bore him up as though figure of Mowgli, two stories—"In the Rukh" he were a feather. When a rotten log or a and "The Spring Running"—represent rival hidden stone turned under his foot he saved visions of the ultimate evolutionary issue of himself, never checking his pace, without ef his experiences. The conceptual split in neo fort and without thought" (310). His train Lamarckian thought between the fixity of bio ing has been "internalized as instinct," but racial categories and the plasticity of genetic here it is exercised without issue. As we have material can be seen in the forking paths rep seen, the unresolved tension between hered resented by these two different conclusions. In ity and plasticity in neo-Lamarckian thought "In the Rukh," written first and independently allowed for a strategically flexible account of of the other Jungle Book tales, a grown Mow racial difference, but it introduced congeneric gu marries, raises a ramuy, oecomes a ranger conceptual problems about intergenerational in the British Department of Woods and transmission: how was individual experience Forests, and seems happily reconciled to his translated into the stable genetic matrix of the subordinate position as imperial functionary species (Bowler, Eclipse 61, 77; Loison 69-75)? (his ambition is to earn a pension). Evolution The theory only made sense in the context of appears here less as a dynamic process than a shared environment in which many organ as a classificatory regime in which the grown isms interacted with the same conditions. wolf child can be plotted as an object of study: Despite the rhetorical emphasis many La "he is an anachronism," notes the German marckians placed on the individual, the in born inspector Mueller, "for he is before der heritance of acquired characteristics, to work Iron Age, and der Stone Age [H]e is at der as a plausible evolutionary mechanism, even beginnings of der history of man" (344). The tually had to subordinate individual gains recapitulative teleology that had structured to collective trends.20 Mowgli's story, sui ge Mowgli's fantastic upward development in neris as it is, provides no coherent reproduc earlier stories here cements his status as an tive context in which his attainments can, thropological curiosity, a freakish, but valu in Paul Kammerer's words, "enter into the able, evolutionary artifact the empire can use. life-sap of generations" (qtd. in Koestler 28). In this way, the story achieves resolution by Mating with the animals is impossible, while

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 32 The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy P M L A

a European female would raise the sure" specter (436), it does so not so much in the spirit of miscegenation. Natives, meanwhile, of open-endedness have that George Levine de been consistently portrayed as scribes culturally as a principle of Darwinian narrative and biologically stunted and would but threatenas a result of the impasse brought about to submerge Mowgli's various acquisitionsby the unresolved conflict between flux and back into what Kipling wants us fixity,to regard dynamism as and hierarchy, and the pos a swamp of superstition, cruelty, sibilities and childof the present and the accumulated ishness. "In the Rukh" solves this problem weight of theby past in late-nineteenth-century linking Mowgli's career serving the neo-Lamarckian Raj with thought.21 the family he raises on the British-managed territory: biological reproduction thus merges with the reproduction of empire. "The Spring Running," unwilling to make this Notes bargain, can offer no stable resolution. Mowgli's glimpse of a mysterious girl in a I whiteam grateful cloth to Neville Hoad, whose careful reading im proved this essay immensely. I would also like to thank (319) intensifies rather than addresses this un my research assistant Casey Sloan for her help. certainty: "The Red Flower is in my 1.body, History-of-science my texts today often use Just So Sto bones are water ... I know not what I know" ries to illustrate Lamarckian logic (Hayes 494; Alder 81; (321). This is, as W. W. Robson puts it, a "mar Piel 323-24). velous and delicate evocation of the upsurge 2. Bowler discusses the different meanings of Darwin ism at this moment (Non-Darwinian Revolution 6-14). of new life" (xxxii), but it is also an indication 3. Arata 16-17; Hotchkiss 442-43; McBratney, "Impe that Mowgli's metamorphic past might strand rial Subjects" 280; Borkfelt 565; Stevenson 374. him without a coherent reproductive future. 4. Although the term neo-Lamarckian was coined by Indeed, the troubling possibility remains Alpheus Packard to refer to a group of American scien tists, I use it here to refer more broadly to post-Origin that the only available form of reproduction European and American thinkers who argued that the for Mowgli is fictional, through the potentially inheritance of acquired characteristics (rather than natu inexhaustible variations of his childhood ad ral selection) was the primary driver of evolution. ventures: "the things that he did and saw 5. The phrase is (ulian Huxley's. Bowler borrowed it and heard when he was wandering from one for the title of his book on the subject (Eclipse 5). 6. Morton and Glendening separately have also made people to another, with or without his four productive inroads into this territory, especially with re companions, would make many many stories, gard to Hardy and Wells. each as long as this one" (278). Kipling then 7. For a discussion of this radical background and of describes all the tales we could hear but will the status of Lamarckian thought in England before the not. The untold (in both senses) tales reinforce publication of Origin, in 1859, see Desmond 59-77. 8. For more on Darwin's concessions to Lamarck, see the Lamarckian idea of acquisition through Desmond and Moore's biography (580, 617). repetition, but they also suggest something 9. Livingstone's essay provides an excellent account of akin to Zeno's paradox, where the infinitely how Lamarckian thought helped reconstitute a sense of divisible imaginative space of storytelling teleology and purpose in nature following the challenge to providentialism leveled by Darwin's Origin. turns development into endless process and, 10. Gould notes that recapitulation "achieved great thus, not into development at all. As Baloo est popularity among Lamarckian thinkers. Its two nec tells Mowgli, "[T]he Jungle is full of such tales. essary principles . . . received easy explanations within If I made a beginning, there would never betheories supporting the inheritance of acquired charac teristics" (100). an end" (165). In this way, The Jungle Books is 11. Richards, Endersby 76-77, and Bowler, Non an evolutionary fable that follows its logic to a Darwinian Revolution 75, provide excellent starting developmental dead end. If "The Spring Run points for Darwin's understanding of the relation be ning," as Jane Hotchkiss argues, "refuses clo tween natural selection and embryonic recapitulation.

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 9-1 Allen MacDuffie 33

12. For a good Borkfeit, discussion Sune. "Colonial Animals and Literary Analysis: of the connection between memory and heredity The Example of Kipling's Animal Stories." in English neo-Lamarckian thought, see Gould 96-100. Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 13. For more on this topic, see Beer, Darwin's Plots 90.5 (2009): 557-68. EBSCO. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. 123-29, and Straley 593-97. Bowler, Peter. The Eclipse of Darwinism. Baltimore: Johns 14. In "The Vortex" Kipling describes bees as develop Hopkins UP, 1983. Print. mentally arrested: the queen "had paralysed locomotion, . The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a wiped out trade, social intercourse, mutual trust, love, Historical Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. friendship, sport, music ..., and yet, in the barren desert Print. she had created, was not one whit more near to the Butler, evolu Samuel. "The Deadlock in Darwinism." Essays on tion of a saner order of things" (398). Life, Art and Science. By Butler. Ed. R. A. Streatfeild. 15. For this connection, see esp. his Principles of Biol London: Fifield, 1908. 234-340. Print. ogy (1897) 256. Chambers, Robert. Vestiges of the Natural History of 16. The idea that the Bandar-log represent a native Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings. 1844. Ed. population is widely accepted (Stevenson 374). James Secord. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Print. 17. Thus, the idea of inherent incapacity, brought Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Re about by the transmission of inherited experiences, waslation to Sex. 1871. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print. also often applied to social class and gender (Jones 83-85). . On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selec 18. As Nancy Stepan has argued, physical anthropol tion. 1859. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. ogists undermined their own putative commitment -.to "To Joseph Hooker." 13 July 1856. Letter 1924 of evolutionary dynamism by their desire to construct fixed The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1856-1857. typological categories. The result was a project commit Ed. Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith. Vol. 6. ted to shoring up racial divisions at the expense of Cambridge:its Cambridge UP, 1990. 178. Print. 22 vols. own conceptual coherence (102-04). Desmond, Adrian. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, 19. E.g., Penguin Classics (ed. Karlin) omits, while Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. Chicago: Oxford World's Classics (ed. Robson) appends. U of Chicago P, 1989. Print. 20. For an excellent discussion of the relation be Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. Darwin: The Life of a tween individual and collective development in neo Tormented Evolutionist. New York: Norton, 1991. Print. Lamarckian thought, see Gissis 89-101. Endersby, Jim. "Generation, Pangenesis, and Sexual Se 21. For Levine's influential reading of Darwinian lection." The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Ed. open-endedness, see Darwin and the Novelists 85-97. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 73-95. Print. Gissis, Snait B. "Lamarckism and the Constitution of Works Cited Sociology." Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology. Ed. Gissis and Eva Alder, Ken. "Thick Things: Introduction." Isis 98 (2007): Jablonka. Cambridge: MIT P, 2011. 89-100. Print. 80-83. JSTOR. Web. 8 Apr. 2012. Glendening, John. The Evolutionary Imagination in Late Allen, Grant. "Our Scientific Causerie: The New Theory Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank. Hampshire: of Heredity." Review of Reviews Jan. 1890: 537-38. Ashgate, 2007. Print. ProQuest. Web. 1 Apr. 2012. Gould, Stephen Jay. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge: Arata, Stephen D. "A Universal Foreignness: Kipling Harvardin UP, 1985. Print. the Fin-de-Siècle." English Literature in Transition, Haeckel, Ernst. The Evolution of Man: A Popular Ex 1880-1920 36.1 (1993): 7-34. Project MUSE. Web. position of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny 2 June 2012. and Phylogeny. Vol. 1. New York: D. Appleton, 1897. Bagehot, Walter. Physics and Politics; or, Thoughts on the Google Books. Web. 19 Nov. 2013. Application of the Principle of "Natural Selection" and Haller, John. Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes "Inheritance" to Political Society. New York: D. Apple of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900. Illinois: Southern Il ton, 1873. Print. linois UP, 1971. Print. Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Havholm, Peter. Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kipling's Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. • Fiction. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. Print. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. Hayes, Brian. "Computing Science: Experimental La . "Origins and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative." marckism." American Scientist 87.6 (1999): 494-98. Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century JSTOR. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. Novel. Ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Baltimore: Johns Hotchkiss, Jane. "The Jungle of Eden: Kipling, Wolf Boys, Hopkins UP, 1986. 63-87. Print. and the Colonial Imagination." Victorian Literature

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 34 The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy P M L A

and Culture 29.2 (2001): 435-49. Cambridge Moore, James. Journals The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Online. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Jann, Rosemary. "Darwin and the Anthropologists: Darwin in Great Sex Britain and America, 1870-1900. ual Selection and Its Discontents." Victorian Studies Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print. 37.2 (1994): 287-306. JSTOR. Web. 2 June 2012. Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Jones, Greta. Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Imagination, 1860-1900. London: Allen, 1984. Print. Intersection between Biological and Social Theory. AtOken, Lorenz. Elements of Physiophilosophy. Vol. 9. lantic Highlands: Humanities, 1980. Print. Trans. Alfred Tulk. London: RaySoc., 1847. Print. Karlin, Daniel. Introduction. The Jungle Books. By RudOtis, Laura. Organic Memory: History and the Body in yard Kipling. New York: Penguin, 1990. 7-27. Print. the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Books. 1894-95. Ed. W. W. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1994. Print. Robson. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Packard, Alpheus. Lamarck: The Founder of Evolution: . Just So Stories for Little Children. 1902. Ed. Lisa His Life and Work. New York: Longmans, 1901. Print. Lewis. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Petronovich, Lewis. Darwinian Dominion: Animal Welfare . "The Vortex." A Diversity of Creatures. Garden and Human Interests. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999. Print. City: Doubleday, 1917. 383-404. Print. Piel, Gerald. The Age of Science: What Scientists Learned . "The White Man's Burden." Stories and Poems from in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic, 2001. Print. Rudyard Kipling. New York: Grosset, 1909. 359-61. Print. Richards, Robert. "Darwin on Mind, Morals, and Emo -. Writings on Writing. Ed. Sandra Kemp and Lisa tions." The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Ed. Lewis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick. Cambridge: Koditschek, Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism and the Cambridge UP, 2009. 96-119. Print. Historical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. "R. Kipling: Comparative Psychologist." Atlantic Monthly June 1898: 858-59. UNZ.org. Web. 30 Sept. 2013. Koestler, Arthur. The Case of the Midwife Toad. New York: Random, 1972. Print. Robson, W. W. Introduction. Kipling, The Jungle Books xii-xxxvi. Krasner, James. "A Chaos of Delight: Perception and Illu sion in Darwin's Scientific Writing." Representations Schmitt, Cannon. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: 31 (1990): 118-41. JSTOR. Web. 18 Apr. 2012. Evolution, Savages and South America. Cambridge: Lamarck, J. B. Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. Regard to the Natural History. 1809. Trans. Hugh Spencer,El Herbert. "The Inadequacy of Natural Selection." liot. London: Macmillan, 1914. Print. Littell's Living Age May 1893: 341-54. ProQuest. Web. Lerer, Seth. Children's Literature: A Reader's History from 2 June 2012. Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. . The Principles of Biology. Vol. 1. New York: D. Ap Print. pleton, 1897. Print. Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Stepan, Nancy. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, Science in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard 1800-1960. Hamden: Archon, 1982. Print. UP, 1988. Print. Stevenson, L. C. "Mowgli and His Stories: Versions of Livingstone, David. "Natural Theology and Neo Pastoral." Sewanee Review 109.3 (2001): 358-78. Lamarckism: The Changing Context of Nineteenth JSTOR. Web. 1 May 2012. Century Geography in the United States and Great Stocking, George W., Jr. "Lamarckianism in American Britain." Annals of the Association of American Ge Social Science, 1890-1915." Race, Culture, and Evolu ographers 74.1 (1984): 9-28. JSTOR. Web. 2 June 2012. tion: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Chicago: Loison, Laurent. "The Notions of Plasticity and Heredity U of Chicago P, 1982. 234-69. Print. in French Neo-Lamarckians (1880-1940): From Com . Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free, 1987. plementarity to Incompatibility." Transformations of JSTOR. Web. 14 Feb. 2012. Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biol ogy. Ed. Snait B. Gissis and Eva Jablonka. Cambridge: Straley, Jessica. "Of Beasts and Boys: Kingsley, Spencer, MIT P, 2011.67-76. Print. and the Theory of Recapitulation." Victorian Studies 49.4 (2007): 583-609. Print. McBratney, John. "Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space in Kipling's Jungle Book." Victorian Studies 35.3 (1992): Wallace, Alfred Russel. Contributions to the Theory of 277-93. JSTOR. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. Natural Selection: A Series of Essays. London: Mac . Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard millan, 1875. Print. Kipling's Fiction of the Native-Born. Columbus: Ohio Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, State UP, 2002. Print. Culture, and Race. Hoboken: Routledge, 1994. Print.

This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms