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Renderings of the Abyss: Some Changing Nineteenth-Century Literary Perceptions of the Animal / Human Divide

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Renderings of the Abyss: Some Changing Nineteenth-Century Literary Perceptions of the Animal / Human Divide Tabitha Kan 1 Renderings of the Abyss: some changing nineteenth-century literary perceptions of the animal / human divide. Tabitha Kan A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD Literature Department of LiFTs University of Essex Date of Submission: November 2016 Tabitha Kan 2 Tabitha Kan 3 Contents Abstract 7 Introduction 9 Yawning Chasms 14 Minding The Gap 18 Theseus and the Minotaur 28 Previous Work in This Field 31 Structure of the Thesis 34 Chapter 1: ‘… an animal as complex and wonderful as man’ How Shelley uses Frankenstein’s creature to explore humanity, animality, and the in between 37 Evolution, Galvanism and Vitalism; Mary Shelley and the Principles of Life 44 Shelley’s Presentation of the Abyssal Divide in Frankenstein 54 The Monster of the Abyss; Shelley’s Liminal Creation 54 The Significance of the Monster as an Abyssal Resident 70 The Monstrous Body: Matter without Meaning 71 The Social Monstrosity 82 The Monster of the Mind 94 Conclusion 103 Tabitha Kan 4 Chapter 2: “I grin at thee, thou grinning whale” the blurring of boundaries and animal will in Moby Dick 107 Eons of Doubt; Melville living on the brink of scientific revolution 110 Whaling and the Objectification of the Animal Body 127 The Blurring of Boundaries and the Integration of Bodies 135 Schopenhauer and the struggle of Wills: Ahab’s contrary beasts 144 The Noble Savage: the optimistic portrayal of human nature in Moby Dick 154 Conclusion 159 Chapter 3: Super or Superfluous Men; Dostoevsky’s spiritual approach to the animal/human divide in Crime and Punishment 161 The Explosion: Dostoevsky and the Effects of Darwinism 162 Science at War: The Immediate consequences of Origin of Species 162 Dostoevsky: Life, Inspirations and the Miraculous Years 173 Svidrigailov: The Human Beast 180 The Superfluous Man: Humanity Without Purpose 194 Dostoevsky and the “Pochvennichestvo” Principles 207 Conclusion 215 Chapter 4: “They may once have been animals. But never before did I see an animal trying to think” Evolution, Regression, and Mutable Humanity in The Island of Doctor Moreau 219 Tabitha Kan 5 A Darwinian Zealot: How Huxley’s Influence over Wells Inspired his Work 223 Wells’s Abyssal Space 238 Speaking Beasts; Giving the Animal a Voice 248 Mutable humanity; The Abyss in Flux 256 Turning back the clock: Devolution and the Regression of Humanity 267 Conclusion 275 Conclusion 279 Bibliography 291 Tabitha Kan 6 Tabitha Kan 7 Abstract The aim of this thesis is to amalgamate philosophy and history of science with literature to achieve an overview of changing ideas of the animal/human divide during the nineteenth century. Drawing on the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche, Julia Kristeva and Giorgio Agamben. I consider this divide and its contents, often regarded as an abyss. The study is written like a time line, starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century and finishing at the end. I split the nineteenth century into four time periods centred around the emergence of Darwinian theory, considered by this study to be the single most prolific scientific event to have occurred during the nineteenth century. These time frames are the pre-Darwinian, the early Darwinian, the late Darwinian and the post-Darwinian. The study is split into four chapters which coincide with these time frames, covering four different novels which exemplify contextually relevant ideas of the abyss. These are Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells. During the course of this study I consider various ideas applied by the authors about the abyssal limits and what they consist of. These include considerations on reason, society, morality and spirituality, all ideas used in various different manners to attempt to explain the abyss. From these various deliberations I formulate a conclusion which takes into account the various nuances which would have effected each of the writer’s formulations of the abyss. Tabitha Kan 8 Tabitha Kan 9 Introduction The implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection are humbling considering how religion and Cartesian philosophy had previously elevated the human species. With his revolutionary On the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin produced viable evidence for a theory that had been in scientific discussion for years but never published as a single study1. Humans, according to Darwinian theory, could no longer be considered the favoured species of a supreme being. Sigmund Freud summarizes this concept in An Infantile Neurosis: In the course of the development of civilization man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this supremacy, he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which permitted him to break the bonds between him and the animal kingdom . We all know that little more than half a century ago the researches of Charles Darwin and his contributors and forerunners put an end to this presumption on the part of man. Man is not a being different from animals or superior to them; he himself is of animal descent, being more closely related to some species and more distantly to others.2 1 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, By Means of Natural Selection, London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2012 Subsequent page references in text. 2 Sigmund Freud, An Infantile Neurosis, London: Random House, 2001 (140) Subsequent page references in text. Tabitha Kan 10 Freud’s argument posits that what separates humanity from the animal is evolutionary success alone, yet arrogance had allowed humans to imagine a gulf between themselves and other creatures. What Freud alludes to when he mentions a “gulf”, is a conceptual enigma in philosophy that is described as an “abyss”. It is a concept approached by various philosophers in an attempt to explain the distinction between the animal and the human. During the nineteenth century, with the introduction of Darwinism, more philosophical considerations of the difference between animal and humankind were produced, as humanity’s place in the world was considered increasingly more dubious. According to Gillian Beer whose seminal Darwin’s Plots inspired this study: “Instead, in Darwinian myth, the history of man is of a difficult extensive family network which takes in barnacles as well as bees, an extended family which will never permit the aspiring climber-man-quite to forget his lowly origins.”3 What had been a clear, yawning division between human and animal, was now in a state of flux, depending upon whether you were a conservative creationist, a radical evolutionist, or somewhere in between. Darwinism effectively problematized the abyss, opening it up to a discussion that still seems unlikely to ever be resolved. That discussion can be found embedded in much of the literature of the nineteenth century. The purpose of my study is to examine how approaches to the abyss changed and developed throughout the nineteenth century, so I can effectively demonstrate how Darwinism changed the literary perception of humanity’s relationship with the animal. 3 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Subsequent page references in text. Tabitha Kan 11 Few philosophers would argue that there is absolutely no abyss separating humanity and animality. For example, in The Animal That Therefore I Am Jacques Derrida explicitly states: “I have never believed in some homogenous continuity between what calls itself man and what he calls animal”4. Furthermore scientists still actively research and discuss what constitutes the difference between human and animal, for example, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, in his bestselling The Tell-Tale Brain (2012) neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran argues that: There is no region or structure that appears to have been grafted into the brain de novo by an intelligent designer; at the anatomical level, every part of our brain has direct analogue in the brains of the great apes. However, recent research has identified a handful of brain regions that have been so radically elaborated that at a functional (or cognitive) level they actually can be considered novel and unique.5 Ramachandran demonstrates that although the brain is more developed in humans, each part of its structure can be traced back to our simian origins. Although Darwinian theory is generally accepted today in the scientific community, the philosophical implications are still under scrutiny. During the nineteenth century, Darwin’s scientific revolution inspired re-examination of many of these questions. Once the theory of the separate creation of humanity could be considered void, there was a necessity for a new explanation of our 4 Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, Trans. David Wills, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008 (30). Subsequent page references in text 5 V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain, London: Windmill Books, 2012 (22) Subsequent page references in text. Tabitha Kan 12 individuality as a species. Even “Darwin’s bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley found difficulty explaining the difference that was evidently there. He demonstrated this whilst lecturing at the Royal Institution by saying of humans, gorillas and baboons: Now I am quite sure that if we have these three creatures fossilized or preserved in spirits for comparison and were quite unprejudiced judges, we should at once admit that there is very little greater interval as animals between the gorilla and the man than exists between the gorilla and the baboon. (3) Huxley’s position demonstrates how, even as a devout Darwinian convert, he still struggled with the concept that man is inherently closer to animals that he may have originally seemed. His attitude was shared by a variety of intellectuals, and not just those working in the field of science.
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