“AM IA MAN AND A BROTHER?”: CODIFYING POST-EVOLUTION THEORY APE FIGURES

Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of A5 the requirements for the Degree

EAGL Master of Arts

•H 3 £ In English: Literature

by

Tauva MiLyse Hellie

San Francisco, California

January 2018 Copyright by Tauva MiLyse Hellie 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read “Am I a Man and a Brother?”: Codifying Post-Evolution Theory

Ape Figures by Tauva MiLyse Hellie, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree

Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.

Gitanjali Shahani, Ph.D. Associate Professor “AM IA MAN AND A BROTHER?”: CODIFYING POST-EVOLUTION THEORY APE FIGURES

Tauva MiLyse Hellie San Francisco, California 2018

Within the overlapping realms of popular and scientific Western discourses in the mid­ nineteenth century, the textual construction of the post-evolution theory ape figure contributed to a developing crisis of human identity that has been termed by Virginia

Richter as “anthropological anxiety.” This thesis looks at the historically specific ways

Punch’s satirical cartoon “Monkeyana” (1861), P.T. Bamum’s pithecanthropic spectacle advertisement What Is It? (c. 1860), Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue

Morgue” (1841), and the book and film King Kong (1932-1933) simultaneously affirm and problematize anthropological anxiety. Ultimately, the construction of these texts’ ape figures within the cultural milieu of evolution theory, antislavery, and colonial discourses opens up more complex webs of meaning making that challenge the Anglocentric, hierarchical construction of a human/animal binary. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my colleagues at Pacific Union College for their encouragement and

support during this project—especially my mentor, Cynthia Westerbeck, to whom I will be forever grateful for the accountability she gave me as a writing partner during the

summer of 2016.1 would also like to thank my advisor at San Francisco State University,

Gitanjali Shahani, for her participation on my thesis committee.

This work would not have been possible without the invaluable guidance of my thesis committee chair, Sara Hackenberg. Thank you for your thorough feedback and for helping me articulate my ideas with tea and conversation.

I dedicate this thesis to my family. To my brother, Mychal, for his warm encouragement

and interest in my topic. To my sister, Janae, for helping me persevere through the rough times and keep the end-goal in sight. Most of all, I dedicate this work to my parents,

Mike and Lisa. Your multi-faceted support and abundant love made the journey to

completing my degree possible. Thank you.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures...... vii

List of Appendices...... viii

“Am I a Man and a Brother?”: An Introduction...... 1

1. “What Is It?”: The Codification of Bamum’s “Marvellous” Ape Figure...... 16

2. Codifying the Specter of the “Monstrous” Ape Figures’ Hands in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and King Kong...... 33

Works Cited...... 60

Appendices...... 66 LIST OF FIGURES

Figures Page

1. “Monkeyana” ...... 2 2. A ntislavery Medallion...... 12 3. What Is It?—Gallery o f Wonders no. 12...... 17 4. Considering “Lower Races of Mankind” as “Connecting Links in the Animal Kingdom”...... 24 5. “Like Poe’s Famous Murders in the Rue Morgue”...... 39 6. King Kong, Facsimile Dust Jacket...... 41 LIST OF APPENDICES

Appendix Page

1. “Monkeyana”: Full Page in Punch...... 66 2. “Like Poe’s Famous Mystery in the Rue Morgue”: A Transcript of the Main Article’s Text ...... 67 1

“AM IA MAN AND A BROTHER?”: AN INTRODUCTION

In the early 1860s, the British popular press operated as a vehicle for public commentary about Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), especially its theoretical implications for human origins. In this realm, discourse on organic development—the general concept behind what would become known as evolution theory—is frequently boiled down to an issue of monkeys and men.1 On the heels of the controversies stirred up by the Owen-Huxley “hippocampus debate” and the popular reception of Paul du Chaillu’s gorilla-hunting exploits in 1861, the London-based periodical Punch published a provocative image.2 “Monkeyana” (Figure 1) describes a

1 As Stephen J. Gould notes, neither Darwin, Lamarck, nor Haeckel used “the word evolution in the original editions of their great works. Darwin spoke o f ‘descent with modification,’ Lamarck of ‘transformisme.’ Haeckel preferred ‘Transmutations-Theorie’ or ‘Descendenz-Theorie.’” Because the term “evolution already had a technical meaning in...embryology,” Darwin, in particular, was loath to apply it to his theory of natural selection by means of modification. Expropriating the term from vernacular usage, “[e]volution entered the English language as a synonym for ‘descent with modification’ through the propaganda of Herbert Spencer. ... Evolution, to Spencer, was the overarching law of all development.” In this sense, and, indeed, in the vernacular usage, the term “was firmly tied to a concept of progress” (34-36). 2 The passionately-charged “great hippocampus debate” between Sir Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley was widely publicized in the early 1860s, especially March and April, 1861, when the two anatomists countered one another in a series of articles (Blinderman and Joyce). As Gould synthesizes, Owen sought to distinguish Homo sapiens from anthropomorphic apes (and, by extension, all other animals) by arguing that only the human brain possessed “a small convolution” called the “hippocampus minor.” Huxley, drawing evidence from his own primate anatomy dissections in preparation for his forthcoming work, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, passionately disagreed. His work demonstrates “that all apes had a hippocampus, and that any discontinuity in the structure of primate brains lay between prosimians (lemurs and tarsiers) and all other primates (including humans), not between man and the great apes” (49). While Huxley asserted, based on these anatomical similarities, that the human and the anthropoid apes should share the same taxonomical status in the primate order, Owen proposed that the human species should be assigned to a new subclass of mammalia, which he called Archencephalia, to distinguish the human on the basis of the species’ unique mental capacity. Simultaneously, the adventurer- explorer Paul du Chaillu’s gorilla-hunting exploits and importations catapulted Britain into “gorilla-mania” in the early 1860s (Petzgold 60). Preceding the May-release of his popular book, Explorations & Adventures in Equatorial Africa, in February, 1861, “du Chaillu came to London on the invitation of the Royal Geographic Society, bringing along a large collection of gorilla bones and skins” and presenting a paper at the society’s annual meeting, all of which were covered by The London Review (59). Within the first two years of Explorations & Adventures publication, “more than 10,000 copies were sold, at the substantial price of one guinea (60). 2

Figure 1. “Monkeyana.” 3

placard-wearing gorilla that satirizes the taxonomic aspect of the so-called species question by parodying the well-known abolitionist slogan, “Am I Not a Man and a

Brother?” While the image prefaces a 13-stanza poem summarizing the scientific—and pseudoscientific—discourse concerning organic development that underscores the image’s visual ties with evolution theory, considered alone, “this image might be read as racist commentary just as easily as evolutionary commentary about species difference”

(Fielder 509).3 Within the system of the image, the codes of science (evolution theory discourse) and race (antislavery discourse) seek to reaffirm, but ultimately problematize, the separate identity of the human from the animal that is constructed on both spatial and temporal axes. The image attempts to reaffirm the boundary between human and animal by poking fun at the absurdity of seeing a gorilla as “a Man and a Brother.” However, its inability to preference either an affirmative or negative answer to the gorilla’s question opens up the possibility for the dismantling of hierarchical order in nature that manages the status of living beings based on both species and, for humans, race.

In this way, both the proposed classification of the “Monkeyana” gorilla as a

“man”—the equivalent species of Punch's predominantly white, male bourgeois readership— and (not or) as a “brother”—to be fraternally united with man,

3 The first stanza in the poem provides context for the ape figure’s overarching question on the placard (“Am I a satyr or man? / Pray tell me who can, / And settle my place in the scale”), but consigns the discussion within evolution theory discourse. It follows with allusions to Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and The Origin o f Species, and others (“Homer,” “Pengelly,” and “Prestwich”) whose geological work problematizes the historical dates surmised from the biblical account of creation. It closes with the “rivalry” of Thomas Henry Huxley and Richard Owen, ultimately determining their butting assertions about human and simian brains to be a “labour in vain, / Unproductive of gain.” The narrative voice then ends the poem with an abrupt ‘“Adieu!”’ (“Monkeyana” 206). See Appendix 1 for a facsimile copy of the full “Monkeyana” page in Punch. 4

simultaneously provide grounds for a developing sense of human identity crisis in the

West that Virginia Richter has termed anthropological anxiety: “an insecurity about the continuity of man’s dominant status in the natural world” brought about by “the dissolution of the demarcation line between humans and animals” (18).4 Building on the theories of Gillian Beer’s D a r w i n ’sPlots and George Levine’s Darwin and the Novelist,

Richter identifies the role of the ape figure, specifically the metaphoric missing-link, as

“a disturbing misfit in the constitution of identity and otherness” that negotiates “the precariousness of the human-animal boundary” (3-4, 53, 60). Richter appropriates the theoretical framework of Susan Bernstein in “Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre Question” to compartmentalize anthropological anxiety into two dimensions: one of space, which she names the anxiety of assimilation, and one of time, which she labels the anxiety of simianation. The anxiety of simianation encompasses concern for “the collapse of difference on the historical, genealogical axis,” making

Darwinian evolution theory its matrix (119,13). The anxiety of assimilation is concerned with “the fusion [of the European] with other [non-European] groups in a hierarchically structured space,” making colonialism its “indispensable background” (120,13). It is, however, usually impossible to discuss one dimension without the implications of the

4 Although anthropological anxiety is a term developed to enhance our twenty-first century understanding of this sense of human crisis caused by the historical moment of the mid-nineteenth century, there was certainly a synchronic awareness of it, too. In Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, Thomas Henry Huxley shares his keen awareness “of a certain shock” caused by bringing his reader “face to face with these blurred copies of himself’: anthropomorphic apes. He attributes the cause of this shock to, “perhaps, not so much... disgust at the aspect of what looks like an insulting caricature, as to the awakening of a sudden and profound mistrust of time-honoured theories and strongly-rooted prejudices regarding his own position in nature, and his relations to the under-world of life” (73-74). 5

other since, particularly “in colonial discourse, the temporal axis is projected on the geographical axis” in a way that conceives “contemporary ‘primitive peoples’., .as living in the evolutionary past” (13-14). The construction of anthropological anxiety on both spatial and temporal axes suggests codification of the ape as both brother and Other, or, br/Other (65). In this overlapping of identities, human/animal elides with self/Other in a way that simultaneously mobilizes and destabilizes the white/black and civilized/savage binaries.

The Darwinian staging of the organic development of species as “a great tree” collapses the concept of genealogical difference (Darwin 176). This flattening of time on a genealogical axis (the anxiety of simianation) disrupts the traditional, Judeo-Christian staging of the separate origin of different species by a divine, creative force. In Origin,

Darwin uses tree imagery to chronicle “the history of living beings” in a way that links

“nature and history into a single indivisible living whole, spanning the ages” (Browne

73). According to this simile, the “extinct ancestral forms” comprise “the roots and trunk, each main group of organisms” are “the branches, and all the multitude of species in existence at the present day” are represented “as the green leaves and buds” (Browne 73;

Darwin 176-177). Darwin’s staging of organic development as a tree counters the hierarchical biblical narrative that suggests that all animals are made “according to their kinds” and occupy separate, designated spaces in the world: “the fish of the sea,” “the birds of the air,” “all the creatures that move along the ground,” and “the beasts of the earth” (Genesis 1:21,24-26,28, 30). According to a historical reading of the biblical 6

staging of creation, these concise boundaries—a “harmonious balance of opposites”—do not overlap; there is no perceived extension of one species into the development of another (Moye 585).5

In a culture obsessed with hierarchical order, the notion of progress, and the determination of differences it is somewhat ironic that Darwin did not champion, as

Gould notes, “an abstract ideal of progress defined by structural complexity or increasing heterogeneity.” Instead, he “stood almost alone in insisting that organic change led only to increasing adaptions between organisms and their own environment” (37). Indeed,

Darwin was against using the modifiers “higher” or “lower” to describe “the structure of organisms—for, Gould synthesizes, if the amoeba is as well adapted to its environment as we are to ours, who is to say that we are higher creatures?” (Gould 36). This theoretical connection between organic development and progress was popularized by Vestiges o f the Natural History o f Creation (1844). Initially published anonymously, but ultimately attributed to Scottish journalist Robert Chambers, this “evolutionary epic” proposed a general theory of organic development that maintained the traditional assignment of

5 While there is certainly different theological interpretations of Genesis 1-11, Richard H. Moye asserts that “[i]t is commonly acknowledged that [this] first” section of the book, referred to as “the Primeval History,” “is predominately”—even “unmistakably”—“mythical” (580). In “looking at the relation between myth and history in the Hebrew Bible,” Moye conceptualizes myth “as a mode of understanding distinct from logical or discursive understanding, [which] illustrates how a narrative construction embodies a way of conceptualizing and representing reality, including the reality of the past” (578). Darren Aronofsky’s polarizing adaptation of the biblical creation story in Noah (2014) provides an alternate reading of the “reality” of creation. It blends biblical language with imagery of organic development in a time-lapse, CGI animation sequence that begins with the origin of the cosmos, proceeded by the formation of Earth, and the evolution of life forms from single-celled organisms to water-dwelling animals to birds and all varieties of land-dwelling animals. 7

creative credit to a Supreme Being.6 However, each creature is not created separately,

“according to their kinds,” as they are in Genesis (1:21; 1:25). Instead, every living being begins existence at the bottom of nature’s order, moving through a scaled hierarchy of forms—the long-standing tradition of the Great Chain of Being—to eventually arrive at its permanent form. All species are directed by a divine order—that is, “natural laws which are expressions of [the Deity’s] will”— that compel “each animal” to pass, “in the course of its germinal history, through a series of changes resembling the permanent forms of the various orders of animals inferior to it in the scale” (154,198). This explanation of the progressive development of different species proposes a clear trajectory towards the “perfect” being; asserting that humankind, as the intended end- result of natural development, is not exempt from these laws of organic development.

According to this theory, the “organization” of the human being

gradually passes through conditions generally resembling a fish, a reptile,

a bird, and the lower mammalia, before it attains its specific maturity. At

one of the last stages of his foetal career, he exhibits an intermaxillary

bone, which is characteristic of the perfect ape; this is suppressed, and he

may then be said to take leave of the simial type, and become a true

human creature. (199)

6 In scientific discourses, Vestiges is “dismissed as a ‘popular’ work, a failed precursor of the ” (Secord 1,4). Even so, it has more recently gained the interest of scholars as a sensational publication because of the wide readership its mystery and controversy drew, prompting, “in Britain alone”, the publication of “fourteen editions and almost forty thousand copies"— "running ten editions within a decade" of its first publication (Secord 3; Goodall 4). 8

Vestiges connects all living beings in one continuous developmental chain. Western readers—who may have felt alarmed by Vestiges s inferred suggestion “that the human fetus had a tail at certain stages of gestation” and “that a prematurely bom man would approximate to an ape”—could regain their sense of superiority in the narrative’s overarching theme of Anglocentrism (Secord 176-177). Not only does Vestiges assert that humankind is of a biblically-determined singular status, but it also affirms that the

“Caucasian” sits atop the pinnacle of creation, suggesting that the non-“Caucasian” race represents a developmental stage in, or a degenerate form of, human development:

after completing the animal transformations,. . . [the human brain] passes

through the characters in which it appears, in the Negro, Malay, American,

and Mongolian nations, and finally is Caucasian.. . . The leading

characters, in short, o f the various races o f mankind, are simply

representations ofparticular stages in the development o f the highest or

Caucasian type. (306-307)

7 The idea that human beings evolved from apes is not original to Chambers. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is credited as the first naturalist to publicly propose an explicit connection between apes and humans in organic development. In the Introduction to his translation of Philosophie Zoologique (1809) in 1914, Hugh Elliot explains that Lamarck elaborates a hypothesis as to how man might have developed, if he were only distinguished from other animals by his structure and organisation. According to this hypothesis, the evolution of man would be due to inheritance of acquired characters. Lamarck supposes that some race of apes conceived a desire to obtain distant views over the country, and for that reason contacted the habit of standing up on their hind legs, to get a better view. The constant assumption of this posture would, according to Lamarck, produce suitable modifications of structure, which would be inherited: in course of many generations, the erect position would become the normal one. The modifications of feet and jaws are accounted for on similar lines. Lamarck assumes that as the human race became dominant, it would everywhere be brought in contact with a new environment, develop new wants, and make efforts for the satisfaction of these wants. These efforts would result in corresponding structural alterations, which would be inherited, (lxii-lxiii) 9

Vestiges appropriates the taxonomical categorization of eighteenth-century comparative anatomist Johann Blumenbach, who constructed a divergent map of humanity into “[f]ive principal varieties of mankind”: namely, the “ Mongolian, Ethiopian,

American, and Malay.”* Blumenbach ultimately organizes these varieties on a horizontal plane, placing “Caucasian” in the center and “Ethiopian” and “Mongolian” on opposite ends, with “American” and “Malay” occupying middle spaces (264-265):

Ethiopian *— Malay <— Caucasian —> American —* Mongolian

Blumenbach’s rationalization for privileging the “white” variety of humankind is based on “physiological” evidence (namely the shape and color of human skulls), suggesting

“that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind.” Blumenbach also suggests that “white” is the “primitive color of mankind, since,... it is very easy to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white, when the secretion and precipitation of this carbonaceous pigment... has once deeply struck root” (269). It is from within this traditional line of thinking—of “brown” as a degenerate form of “white”—that Vestiges reimagines Blumenbach’s divergent, horizontal mapping as a hierarchically organized

8 Blumenbach is the first to apply the “inept but remarkably adhesive” term “Caucasian” to describe “the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa” (Jordan 222, Blumenbach 265). He uses the term “Mongolian” to signify “the remaining inhabitants of Asia (except the Malays on the extremity of the trans-Gangetic peninsula) and the Finnish populations of the cold part of Europe, the Lapps, &c. and the race of Esquimaux, so widely diffused over North America, from Behering’s straits to the inhabited extremity of Greenland.” The term “Ethiopian” designates “all the Africans, except those of the north.” “American” encompasses “the inhabitants of America except the Esquimaux.” Lastly, “Malay” is applied to “the islanders of the Pacific Ocean, together with the inhabitants of the Marianne, the Philippine, the Molucca and the Sunda Islands, and of the Malayan peninsula” (Blumenbach 265-266). 10

vertical taxonomy, while also replacing Blumenbach’s “Ethiopian” terminology with the less spatially limited term “Negro,” ultimately locating this type on the bottom of the scale, nearest to the anthropoid apes, as illustrated by the satirical gorilla in Punch

(Chambers 309,306-307).

To combat this post-Darwinian temporal dimension of anthropological anxiety,

“Monkeyana” attempts to reaffirm the boundary separating the human from the animal by poking fun at the absurdity of classifying an ape as a human. The hairy, four-handed appearance of the gorilla’s body leaves little room for identifying physical characteristics that would support human classification—with, perhaps, the exception of his erect posture (which may be aided by the support of his staff). However, the employment of a placard—or sandwich board—to both communicate his two-pronged question and, as

Kate Holterhoff suggests, physically “conceal his species identity” opens up the possibility of awarding him with human status (218).9 One area that overlaps temporal and spatial anxieties is in determining what actually facilitates a species (or an individual within a species) to move from one metaphorical rung on the “ladder” of evolutionary development to another.10 In fiction, “apes achieve human status by mastering language and cultural symbolisation” (Richter 63). The gorilla’s employment of a sandwich board suggests mastery of both.

9 Indeed, Holterhoff asserts that the sandwich board “visibly obscures and subordinates” those who wear them (218). In this way, the ape figure’s species identity (based on his physical appearance) is ostensibly being hidden behind—being obscured and subordinated by—his affiliation with these two groups. 10 Gould talks about the inaccuracy of this frequently used metaphor to describe Darwinian evolution theory. He perceives “ Homo sapiens [as] not the foreordained product of a ladder that was reaching toward our exalted estate from the start,” but rather “the surviving branch of a once luxuriant bush” (62). 11

On the spatial axis of anthropological anxiety, as a native of Africa, the ape figure illustrates the Western practice of displacing the “dark” race of colonized peoples onto the “dark” body of the simian (Haraway 153). By asserting the possibility of a fraternal relationship with man, the ape figure not only blurs “the divide between the European self and the exotic other” (indeed, the intention of the abolitionist slogan it parodies, and a central component of the anxiety of assimilation), but he also challenges the master- slave hierarchical relationship between Anglo Americans and people of African descent

(Richter 15, Holterhoff 217). Read against colonial discourse, “Monkeyana” asserts reaffirmation of a post-Darwinian-weakened boundary between the human/animal binary by aligning the ape figure with two marginalized populations in Western culture: slaves in America and impoverished laborers in Britain. Through parody and the cultural practice of displacing notions of race on ape figures, “Monkeyana” is connected to people of African descent enslaved in America. The two-pronged question posed by the ape figure parodies the slogan for The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in

England coined by Josiah Wedgewood in the late eighteenth-century: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” In drawing attention to the dehumanizing nature of slavery, the effectiveness of the supplicating form of the slave figure on the medallion (produced by

Wedgewood’s pottery firm) hinged on its ability to encourage white sympathy for the plight of the black slave (Figure 2). This supplication was intended to draw a hearty 12

Figure 2. Antislavery Medallion.

“Yes!” from those who considered the question posed by the medallion. However, in the

“Monkeyana” parody, Brigitte Nichole Fielder suggests that the syntactical omission of the word “not” in the original slogan “suggests that a negative answer might follow more easily...than from the abolitionist image” (510). This omission, coupled with the hairy body of the ape figure posing the question, prompts the reader to recognize the absurdity in classifying the ape figure as a man.

While the “Monkeyana” figure is not on his knees, his advertisement (the sandwich board) entreats the human reader to determine if his likeness to the human species is enough to qualify him as “a Man and a Brother.” By employing a sandwich board, a “staple of nineteenth-century commercial advertising,” to communicate the ape figure’s question, Punch associates the implications of evolution theory to human origins 13

as an idea that must be “sold” to viewers (HolterhofF218). With a hairy, quadruped- looking ape marketing the question, the newly-permeable boundary imagined between humans and apes has little purchase. At the same time, however, the sandwich-board mode of communication affiliates the ape figure with “one of the most wretched classes” in Western communities through the early twentieth century: they were “casual laborers, part-time and non-unionized” workers, “society’s cast-outs” (Booth 112, Buck-Morss

110). Within a social order organized by class, the ape figure remains at the bottom of the hierarchy in a way that reaffirms the Darwinian-challenged boundary separating the human from the animal and therefore seeks to abate the anxiety of assimilation.

These same affiliations, however, also work to problematize the reaffirmation of the human/animal boundary due to the historical moment of the image. Slavery had been abolished in England since 1772, and the larger British Empire in 1833. In America, abolition discourse was underscored by the beginning of the Civil War. The medallion’s supplicating appeal to white sympathy—the recognition of sameness in the Other— prompts support for the abolition of slavery in order to “elevate” the classification of people of African descent. Within these discourses of class mobility, the ape figure’s role as a lower-class laborer (both in terms of “slave” and “sandwich man”) consigns him to the lowest rungs on the social ladder. However, his ability to participate in a free market system (his work as a “sandwich man”) suggests, as Holterhoff notes, that “[n]othing bars primates in possession of sufficient willpower from social and species advancement”

(219). While the extent of the “Monkeyana” figure’s “willpower” is not fully showcased 14

by the image, beyond his determination to “sell” the idea of a permeable boundary separating the ape from the human, ape figures emerging from other works of fiction— like the Ourang Outang in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the eponymous ape figure in Delos W. Lovelace’s novelization of King Kong—more fully exercise assertions of agency and self-determination, revealing the anthropological anxieties of simianation and assimilation in their diverse historical moments.

The following analyses extend the theoretical framework of Richter’s anthropological anxiety, the spatial and temporal dimensions of which are rendered apparent by my reading of “Monkeyana,” to the signification of the ape figures in P.T.

Bamum’s “marvellous” [sic] pithecanthropic spectacle “What Is It?” (early 1860s) in

Chapter 1, as well as Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and Lovelace’s pre- film-release novelization of King Kong (1932) in Chapter 2. Like “Monkeyana,” despite these texts’ best efforts to reaffirm the delimitation of the human/animal binary (which mobilizes other binaries, including white/black and civilized/savage), their construction of ape figures within the cultural milieu of evolution theory, antislavery, and colonial discourses ultimately enables them to problematize the Anglocentric, hierarchical construction of its boundaries. However, given their differing historical moments, these ape figures do so in different ways. As one of Bamum’s deceptions, a humbug, “What Is

It?” attempts to reaffirm the human/animal boundary by catering to the public’s expectation that the spectacle can be unraveled as a hoax. The ape figure simultaneously, however, resists final classification through his staging as a missing link in the 15

dramatization of an evolutionary animal-human continuum. My comparative reading of

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and King Kong suggests that both texts attempt to abate the anthropological anxiety caused by the specter of the “monstrous” ape figures’ human-like hands by distinguishing its visible differences from human hands. In doing so, each text reaffirms the boundary distinguishing the human from the animal within a synchronic understanding of comparative anatomy and cultural assumption. However, even by focusing on the discemable differences between the human hand and the simian hand, the lingering specter of their similarities and the fostering of sympathy for the ape figure encourages the reader to reconfigure their own understanding of nature’s order. By opening up more complex webs of meaning making in these ways, the post-evolution theory ape figure—as represented by “What Is It?”, Poe’s Ourang-Outang, and Kong— challenges—and even works to dismantle—the hierarchical order in the West. 16

1. “WHAT IS IT?”: THE CODIFICATION OF BARNUM’S “MARVELLOUS”

APE FIGURE

‘“What Is It’?”11 Although the question is used to identify P.T. Bamum’s

pithecanthropic spectacle in 1860, it is not so much a name as it is the absence of a

name—a placeholder inviting the viewer to assign the “marvellous creature”—an

extraordinary zoological specimen resisting classification in the natural order—with not

only a name, but a place in the natural order. Through the expectation of “humbuggery,”

at his American Museum in New York Bamum constructed “a mode of viewership” that

prompted “interactive decipherment and debate” (Cook 4). Within this space, patrons

“understood humbug on almost precisely [Bamum’s] own terms: not as criminal

11 “What Is It?” was not the first hoax of its kind, but a revival of a tradition Bamum used to attract the public to his “Humbug Hall” shortly after it opened in 1841 (Cook 75). Perhaps the most famous of his hybrid conjurings—a “gross deception” that decidedly put the museum on the map—is the so-called “Feejee Mermaid” (1842), a skeleton fusing the skull of a monkey with the body of a fish (4). Following the popularity of this hoax, Bamum continued to display pithecanthropic spectacles, including a variety of apes in the years following the Feejee Mermaid, like the dress-wearing “Orang Outang” Mad’lle Fanny in 1845 (Irmscher 123-124). However, the curious “What Is It?” stood apart from its predecessors as Bamum’s first successful human-performed missing-link spectacle. In 1846, actor Hervey Leech, or “Hervio Nano,” who was known for his portrayal of the monkey Jocko on the theatrical stage, “contracted with Bamum to appear as the missing link—‘The Wild man of the Prairies, or “What Is It?”—at the Egyptian Hall” in London (Goodall 53; Saxon 98). However, “Leech was unlucky enough to have his bluff called by a theatrical acquaintance who recognized him instantly,” debunking the spectacle (Goodall 54). Leech unexpectedly died a few months later. A.H. Saxon attributes “his untimely death” to “the ‘maltreatment’ and humiliation he had suffered as the result of his exposure” (98). Following the publication of Origin, Bamum revived “What Is It?”, casting New-Jersey-bom African American William Henry Johnson in the part. Given that the spectacle spans three decades, there is some disagreement about whether “What Is It?” was played by more than one actor. For more on the life and career of William Henry Johnson, or “Zip, the Pinhead,” see Bluford Adams’s E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture (1999): 158-163; James R. Cook, Jr.’s “Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P.T. Bamum’s ‘What is it?”’ in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (19%): 140-143; Janet M. Davis’s The Circus Age: Culture & Society Under the American Big Top (2002): 182-183; Jane R. Goodall’s Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (2002): 54-61; Christoph Irmschar’s Poetics of Natural History (1999): 131-136; and A.H. Saxon’s P.T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (1989): 98-99. WHAT (S IT"?

‘ in »**» *»A«*r*uiiMt t*ip rune ^ 1 1 1 4 2- 1 2 ** 4? ****** *«#*** ** «*»mf J%* »^« «tf * *** 4 W *. • ~*w *>- **• ** * «VW« W . a*, . . . , , r , . ^ ...... ,4 ' 6 HAW* ***•*»„, rmvtiTi'KMi^fjjr y * m u m a w * * h l TIJ BF S E E N AT * 1 1 M0U#|,tlN*

Figure 3. What Is It?—Gallery o f Wonders no. 12. 18

‘swindling,’ but as a series o f‘novel expedients’ devised by an honest impresario who delivers a quota of fun more than equal to the admission price” (86).12 Unlike Punch’s

“Monkeyana,” a figure who demonstrates the ability to employ cultural symbolism to pose What am I? to a discerning, anxiety-motivated Western eye; Bamum’s nondescript figure is completely Othered through the objectifying narrative voice of the American

Museum. This voice constructs a system that supplies a pre-determined set of binaries within which the reader is challenged to classify the nondescript figure: Is it “man” or

“monkey,” “orang outang” or “human being?”

One particular lithograph for the spectacle from the early 1860s, What Is It?—

Gallery o f Wonders no. 12 (Figure 3), illustrates how Bamum encourages his patrons to discern similarities and differences between what qualifies “human” as separate from

“animal” in a post-evolution theory context (a question of time), and also, what it means to be “civilized” in a racially dichotomized colonial landscape of Western contact with

12 In situating the American Museum within the landscape of natural history exhibitions in the nineteenth- century, Christoph Irmscher asserts that Bamum’s museum provided visitors with a space “where they could reassure themselves about themselves” (116). A “huge looking-glass of magnifying power” prefacing the portraits in the Picture Gallery on the second floor provides an excellent illustration of the provocative power of Bamum’s simultaneous shock-and-reassurance strategy for humbug entertainment. Having just ascended the staircase, patrons were invited to behold themselves “all at once transformed into a giant.” Enlarging the facial features “ten-fold” so that “even every pore” of the skin is visible, patrons enjoy an amusing shock {Bamum’s American Museum Illustrated). Irmscher asserts that reflective surfaces were frequently used in museums, in general, to encourage visitors to recognize “that seeing was a complicated activity that crucially involved and affected their own sense of self.” However, the purpose of this particular mirror “is a feat of cunning engineering.... Encouraging people to take a look at themselves, Bamum would shock them with the brief reflection of the distorted face of a monster, only to reassure them, quickly, that everything was ‘as usual’” (108-109). Similarly to the mirror, Irmscher asserts that Bamum used pithecanthropic spectacles to stun “his visitors into sudden recognition of their closeness to the animal kingdom and then allowed them to detach themselves from the disturbing implications of his ‘connecting links’” (131). In a way, this mirror—like Thomas Henry Huxley’s prefacing of his assertions regarding the proximity of humans and apes with Satumian irony at the beginning of Evidence As to Man’s Place in Nature invites patrons to shed “the mask of humanity” in preparation to consider their physical, taxonomic, and cultural similarities to exotic and/or biologically ambiguous (freakish) Others (85). 19

diverse cultures and peoples through trade and colonization (a question of space) (Richter

8). Indeed, the use of quotation marks in the title of the spectacle signifies the advertisement’s appropriation of the reader’s voice initiating the process of determining what the figure should be classified as. The reader’s expectation that the instability of the human/animal binary posed by the nondescript figure will be righted once the hoax is unraveled falsely anticipates reaffirmation of the Darwinian-disturbed boundary

separating the human from the animal. The conflicting messages in the subcodes of the advertisement problematize this reaffirmation process. As a hybrid creature, the figure resists final categorization by inhabiting both boundaries simultaneously—compelling the reader to come to the American Museum to see the spectacle in person. Confronted by the figure’s liminality in a post-evolution theory reconstruction of time (the organic development of the human species over time) and space (the collapse of a European/non-

European binary), Western viewers are forced to question the validity of hierarchical order in nature in favor of an understanding of human-animal connectedness through

similarities, rather than alterity, in physical appearance and anatomical structure.

Paul Bouissac’s analytical framework for reading the signification of a typical

circus poster can be adapted to reveal the codification process at work in the lithograph,

enabling a reading of the signification of the advertisement—“What Is It?”: human or

animal? While Bamum’s series of advertisements for his museum’s “Gallery of

Wonders” are not circus posters, they fits within the genre of circus-like, “freak show”

spectacles, which makes the transference of Bouissac’s categories of the circus poster 20

possible. Bouissac specifies three elements of the typical circus poster (the signifier) that codify the spectacle (the signified), thereby providing “the semiotic key to it”: the linguistic message, the nonfigurative iconic message, and the figurative iconic message

(176,189, 190 and 180). The elements of the linguistic message include “the name of the circus and the place and date of the performance,” as well as any “information that qualifies the circus and/or figurative iconic components.” The nonfigurative iconic message describes “the typography and the polychromy of the letters making up the linguistic message, as well as” any “decorative elements.” Lastly, the figurative iconic message “is formed by discrete, articulated units that are identified and qualified according to a code of the contextual culture,” including “attitudes” (as signified by facial expressions and the physical bearing of the figure), costumes, and accessories or props

(180-181). These subcodes inform one-another in a signifying process as follows: the figurative iconic message—the dominant image of the “savage” creature in the lithograph is mediated by the printed linguistic message at the bottom of the advertisement. The nonfigurative iconic message directs the reader’s gaze by magnifying (and/or distinguishing) the features of the figurative iconic message that are highlighted in the linguistic message. Collectively, Bouissac’s framework renders apparent the mechanisms of separation distinguishing the human from the animal (the ape) in the binary system the advertisement constructs.

Although Bouissac begins his own analyses of the circus poster with the linguistic message, since the figurative iconic message (the image) is the most eye-catching and 21

substantial aspect of this particular advertisement, I begin my analysis of Bamum’s What

Is It? poster with the latter subcode. Each of the visual elements in the lithograph align the figure with a species less-than-human: at most “an ape more anthropoid”

(Huxley 184). The mechanisms of separation—the subcodes signifying the spectacle and

staging the ape figure’s difference from both the human and the animal—are separated

into four categories: his spatial/temporal location (the setting of the figure’s natural habitat), his physical features, his costume-enhanced appearance, and his social behavior.

The figurative iconic message centralizes “What Is It?” in his “natural” habitat: a

semi-rocky, fern-dotted terrain. In the distance, a single palm tree stands erect, in contrast to the slightly-stooped figure in the center of the image. The figure’s dark, hairless skin and hair-like tunic shirt further suggest that this space is, perhaps, the jungles of Africa.

As a hairless, two-handed creature standing on two feet and flashing a level set of teeth, the nondescript figure seems to possess the general physical appearance of a human being, or at least, in Huxley’s description of what a missing link might look like, “a Man more pithecoid” than “an Ape more anthropoid” (184). In terms of physical characteristics, perhaps one of the clearest indicators of the image’s challenge to the boundary between human/animal is lack of hair on the body. Whereas humans are considered to be comparatively “without hair,” the ape species have “a shaggy hide”

(Blumenbach 88). Indeed, due to the prominence of hair on most land-dwelling mammals’ bodies, Virginia Richter labels it “the mark of the beast” (66). Additionally,

late-eighteenth century comparative anatomist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 22

determined that the “level, round, smooth, and perfectly regular” teeth of the human

“differ greatly in form from those o f’ the apes, who possess “canines” that “are longer, sharper” and more separated from neighboring teeth” (Blumenbach 88-89). Without the distinctive elements of prominent body hair and beastly canines, the physical appearance of “What Is It?” suggests human affinity.

However, the figure’s classification as a human is complicated by the staging of his other physical features, especially his stooped posture, limp hand and oddly-shaped feet, and the elongated shape of his head. His stooped-over, potentially propped-up posture suggests that, even though he is standing, he may not actually be bipedal.

Coupled by the specter of his strangely limp hand and even more oddly shaped feet, he could be staged as a “Quadrumana” that is, in some sense, transitioning (those preferring hierarchical order would say advancing) to bipedalism—a characteristic of the Bimana, a term used to singularly classify the human species. In On the Natural Varieties of

Mankind (1776, 1781, and 1795), Blumenbach revised the Linnaean system of classification into “ten natural orders of mammalia.” In this system, he distinguishes humans from apes (which Linnaeus had combined in one order, the primate order) based on their possession of two hands and two feet, labeling anthropomorphic apes with other monkeys as members of the “quadrumana” order, meaning four-handed creatures, and humans solely comprising the “bimana,” or two-handed creatures (152-153,171-172).13

13 Scottish geologist Sir Charles Lyell asserts that Blumenbach appropriates the quandrumana and bimana terminology from Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, but applies it “in a strict zoological classification.... Twelve years later, [Georges] Cuvier adopted the same order Bimana for the human family, while the apes, monkeys, and lemurs constituted a separate order, called Quadrumana” (475). 23

Blumenbach determines that the human hand is the “highest prerogative of his external conformation.... By this conformation he so much excels the rest of the animals” (171).

In regards to the “quadrumanous” classification of apes and monkeys, Blumenbach points to “their hind feet” as being “furnished with a second genuine thumb, not with the great toe, which is given to the biped, man, alone; indeed their feet deserve the name of hands more than their anterior extremities” (171-172). Both the limp posture of the Bamum’s nondescript figure’s hand—suggesting the figure’s imperfect use of it—and the thumb­ like appearance of his big toe—giving it more of a hand-like appearance than that of a foot—align him with the so-called “quadrumana,” suggesting animal classification.

The elongated, narrow shape of his head—which is accentuated by his lack of hair—suggests affiliation with animal classification. In Types o f Mankind (1854), J.C.

Nott asserts the “similitudes between some of the lower races of mankind.” While he disavows degrading” any type of humanity to the level of the brute creation,” he suggests that these so-called “lower races of mankind” can be “viewed as connecting links in the animal kingdom.” Quoting Harvard University anatomist Dr. Jeffries Wyman, Nott acknowledges ‘“the wide gap which separates’” “‘the skeletons of the Negro and

Orang.’” ‘“Yet,”’ he contends, “‘it cannot be denied, however wide the separation, that the Negro and Orang do afford the points where man and the brute, when the totality of their organization is considered, most nearly approach each other’” (457). Figure 4 24

Fio. MJ*

FlO, 841. — Negro#*

Fio. 842.**

Cmli IVagro.

Fio. 848. — Toom, M

(468)

Figure 4. Considering “Lower Races of Mankind” as “Connecting Links in the Animal Kingdom.” 25

illustrates a “comparative series of likenesses” meant to affirm “[t]he truth of these observations” of Notf s assertions (457-458). Of the three caricatures popularly associated with differences between the “Caucasian” and “Negro” type of humanity, and the anthropomorphic chimpanzee, Bamum’s pithecanthropic spectacle suggests alignment closer with the skull of the Young Chimpanzee.

The possibility of human classification is also complicated by the nondescript figure’s social behavior. His expression suggests a shriek-like pretense of ferocity.

Although he is the only figure in the image, “What Is It?” seems to be looking back at something, or someone; perhaps a pursuer—perhaps even party that allegedly captured him, as stated in the linguistic message. His “half-crouching attitude” could equally suggest withdraw from his pursuers (e.g., cowering; indeed there is something defenseless about his demeanor) or preparation to spring at them in counterattack (Saxon

99). His behavior is ostensibly animalistic in its staging.

As each of these physical and behavioral representations are less prominent than his general description as a hairless biped (in terms of scale within the advertisement), the figurative iconic message seems to classify the nondescript figure as more human than animal. Curious readers must next move to the fine-print linguistic message on the bottom of the lithograph for more information on what this creature could be:

Is it a lower order o f MAN? Or is it a higher order o/MONKEY? None

can tell! Perhaps it is a compilation o f both. It is beyond dispute THE

MOST MARVELLOUS CREATURE LIVING. It was captured in a 26

savage state in Central Africa, is probably about 20 years old, 4 feet high,

intelligent, docile, active, sportive, and PLAYFUL AS A KITTEN. It has

the skull, limbs and general anatomy o f an ORANG OUTANG and the

COUNTENANCE o f a HUMAN BEING.

Segmented into its component parts, the linguistic message is comprised of

1) a catalogue-like title above the image (“Bamum’s Gallery of Wonders. No.

12”), which guides the reader to where the spectacle can be found within the

museum;

2) the specific title of the spectacle under the image (‘“What Is It’?”), which also

serves as an invitation for the viewer to decipher the identity and meaning of

the figure (indeed the figurative iconic message); and

3) additional qualifying information—in addition to when and where the

spectacle can be seen—at the bottom of the advertisement, which aids in the

process of deciphering.

This qualifying information, the smallest print in the poster, mediates the figurative iconic message by directing the gaze of the reader to specific aspects of the image—the creature’s spatial location (“Central Africa”), his physical and anatomical features (his estimated age; specific height; “skull, limbs, and general anatomy”; his “countenance”), and social behavior (“intelligent, docile, active, sportive, and PLAYFUL AS A

KITTEN”). In this liminal space between human and animal, the linguistic message 27

suggests racial implications associating close hierarchical proximity between Africans and apes.

The African setting of the lithograph simultaneously provides fodder for both dimensions of anthropological anxiety. By projecting the historical time of the West onto the geographical landscape of Africa, “What Is It?” is staged as a single representative of a larger, hitherto undiscovered group of “primitives” living in the evolutionary past

(Richter 13-14). Like modernity, in the age of imperialism the human is “a creation not of the West but of an interaction between West and non-West” (Mitchell 2). According to

Timothy Mitchell, in the “often threatening intermixture of social ranks, genders, and skin colors” at play in colonial society, “colonial discourse became preoccupied with establishing distinctions of race, sexuality, culture, and class.” Such markers “were then available to be transferred back to the metropole, where in the later nineteenth century they helped form the racial, cultural, class, and sexual identities that defined the modem bourgeois self’ (5-6). As suggested by the preceding analysis of “Monkeyana,” the

Western response to a temporally shifted understanding of human origins is to apply scientific racism to construct a hierarchical ordering of all living beings. In this way,

Western culture attempts to restore Anglocentric notions of human identity and superiority in Darwinian-evolution-theory-induced “topsy-turvey” accounts of the modem world (7).

A key element in the practice of distinguishing the European from the non-

European and the human from the animal was comparative anatomy. From Carolus 28

Linnaeus, the founder of the modem taxonomic classification system, in the mid­ eighteenth century; through Thomas Henry Huxley, the applicator of Darwinian evolution theory to the development of the human species, in the mid-nineteenth century, detailed comparisons of human and animal bodies were used to hierarchically distinguish, in the words of Sir Charles Lyell, “the degree of affinity in physical organisation between

Man and the lower animals” (473). While the description of the nondescript figure’s

“skull, limbs, and general anatomy” are connected to an animal classification, his countenance suggests humanity. The juxtaposition of his age (“about 20 years old”) and height (“4 feet high”) brings him closer to the height of an anthropomorphic ape (or irregularly developed, or underdeveloped human; a so-called “freak”), according to his age.

The rhetoric of this linguistic message constructs systems of binary oppositions— including man/monkey, civilized/savage, and human being/orang outang (echoing man/monkey, where human being is a more general form of man and orang outang a more specific form of monkey). These three binaries—man/monkey, civilized/savage, and human being/orang outang— constructed by the linguistic message of What Is It? form the context within which patrons are asked to categorize this “most marvellous creature living.”14 They are additionally encouraged to place the figure hierarchically in that order as either “a lower order of man” or “a higher order of monkey,” based on

14 The civilized/savage binary is, perhaps, more understated than the other two, but it is, nonetheless an important part of the codification process. The reference to the figure being “playful as a kitten” post­ capture suggests his ability to participate like a domesticated pet in the civilized world. 29

representations of its characteristics in the lithograph. Or, “perhaps,” to provocatively determine it “a compilation of both.” As only the description of his “countenance” is decidedly human, the linguistic message codes the nondescript figure as mostly animal— juxtaposing the figurative iconic message it mediates.

Since the figurative iconic message seems to emphasize the nondescript’s human classification, and, through its mediation of the image, the linguistic message seems to conflate the message of the image by emphasizing the animal characteristics of the figure; the nonfigurative iconic message is the last source of emphasis determining the advertisement’s codification of “What Is It?” To begin, the lithograph employs two classifications of type: serif and sans serif. It also uses five different type styles to emphasize important words in the advertisement: roman, italic, all-uppercase, bold, and rimmed. There are ten instances of typographical emphasis in the lithograph, that is, typography that varies from the dominant pattern: italicized serif type. Variations to the italicized-serif pattern established by the qualifying information below the figurative iconic message suggest a hierarchy of information being shared. The dominant form of emphasis is all-uppercase. In fact, all 10 instances of emphasis are set in all-uppercase.

Next in importance is sans serif (9 instances), followed by roman (8 instances), bold (7 instances), and rimmed (1 instance) type. Based on similar type, the distinguished elements form the following groups:

1) Serif + Roman, all-uppercase, rimmed:

a) BARNUM’S GALLERY OF WONDERS. No. 12. (Other) 30

2) Sans Serif, Roman, All-uppercase, Bold:

a) “WHAT IS IT”? (Both/Neither)

b) MAN (Human)

c) MONKEY (Animal)

d) THE MOST MARVELLOUS CREATURE LIVING (Both/Neither)

e) ORANG OUTANG (Animal)

f) HUMAN (Human)

g) TO BE SEEN AT ALL HOURS AT BARNUM’S MUSEUM (N/A)

3) Italicized + Sans Serif, all-uppercase:

a) PLA YFUL AS A KITTEN (Animal)

b) COUNTENANCE (Human)

Given the quantifiable nature of the typography, it is obvious that the advertisement equally emphasizes the human and animal qualities of “What Is It?” Both the first and third group contain at least one form of the dominant typographical pattern: italicized sans serif. As the first group’s singular distinction as a rimmed type is due to its titular nature, little more attention should be drawn to it beyond that it supports the creature as an object—a numbered exhibit in a museum—which suggests categorization closer to animal (other) than human (self). The third group emphasizes qualities of the figure that directly contrast the “savage” creature described by the figurative iconic message, describing him as docile (or domesticated), with an approachable (if uncanny) countenance. In other words, Bamum seems to be pushing the message that, in spite of 31

his savage existence prior to capture, the creature now exhibited at his museum is, ultimately, family friendly.

The second group, the largest collection of like-distinction, emphasizes the two key binary systems established in the advertisement: man/monkey and human being/Orang Outang. It is within these two primary systems that the viewer is encouraged to classify the figure as either human (albeit a “lower order of man; a “savage” African) or ape (a higher order of monkey; a domesticated, family-friendly museum attraction)— or perhaps a compilation of both—some form of abnormal human, a freak. These typographically emphasized terms, the most important words in the linguistic message, ultimately mediate the figurative iconic message by drawing equal attention to human and animal indicators of classification.

A complete reading of all three subcodes of the poster determines that there is no clear message referencing the classification of the nondescript figure as n/either human or animal. The figurative iconic message seems to preference human classification. But, the linguistic message juxtaposes this assertion by suggesting the nondescript figure aligns more with an animal classification. These similar indicators in the linguistic and figurative iconic messages contradict one another in order to confound the reader and incite curiosity to see the spectacle in person—which is, ultimately, the entire purpose of the advertisement. For example, the figure’s “savage”-like facial expression in the figurative iconic message and the description of his human “countenance” in the linguistic message are at odds. Additionally, the figure’s hairless body and human 32

accoutrements of clothing and a staff in the figurative iconic message are confused by the

“Orang Outang”-like description of his “skull, limbs and general anatomy” in the linguistic message are. Tied 1:1 by these first two subcodes, the non-figurative iconic elements of the advertisement do not tip the scale in favor of either a human or animal classification. Rather it evenly distributes typographical emphasis for both pre­ determined options for the nondescript figure.

In the mid-nineteenth century, pithecanthropic spectacles, like Bamum’s “What Is

It?”, provided discerning Westerners with an opportunity to evaluate their distorted mirror-image—a seemingly insulting caricature of the human form; to confront, in other words, their anthropological- and colonial-discourse-based anxieties of assimilation and simianation within a post-Darwinian conceptualization of human origins. The process of discernment, of unraveling the hoax of a pithecanthropic spectacle, is an integral part of

Bamum’s entertainments because it was expected to reassure the viewer about the stability of their Anglocentric notions of identity. And yet, merely by posing the question of a permeable boundary, the spectacle challenges the traditional assessment of cultural markers distinguishing the human from the animal. Essentially, Western culture’s attempt to reaffirm the boundary inevitably problematizes it by merely posing a question: What

Am I? Am I a Man and a Brother? It does not matter if the answer to the question of classification is “animal,” the question itself challenges the validity of a human/animal binary. The resulting blurring of the boundary separating “us” from “them” necessitates the revision of Western hierarchical order. 33

2. CODIFYING THE SPECTER OF THE “MONSTROUS” APE FIGURE’S HANDS

IN “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE” AND KING KONG

Separated by nearly a century, two well-known ape narratives demonstrate

Western culture’s attempt to reaffirm the post-evolution theory boundary separating the human from the animal: Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the 1932-1933 book and film King Kong.15 As with the “Monkeyana” and What Is It? images, the process of boundary reaffirmation in these two texts simultaneously problematizes the reconstruction of a clear boundary organizing the human/animal binary. “Murders” and King Kong might be seen to bookend nineteenth-century-based anthropological anxiety discourse. Poe’s detective-genre-defining short story predates

Darwin’s Origin by nearly twenty years, during the formative period for transmutation theories and their implications for human origins. As such, it offers an early engagement with anthropological anxiety discourse in Western culture. In the twentieth century, the dual platform of King Kong operates within a post-war period that gives way to

“apocalyptic scenarios of cultural pessimism” in the late 1930s (Richter 16). Both of these texts feature human-like apes, and specifically take the traditional assessment of the hand as a unique organ of the human body to task by extending its symbolic currency as an “instrument of agency” to non-human primates (Rowe 8). In doing so, these texts end

15 The now-iconic film was released in 1933 and the novelization, written by Delos W. Lovelace, which was “based upon the final screenplay credited to James Creelman and Ruth Rose,” the wife of producer Ernst Schoedsack, was published in 1932, just a few months before the film debuted (Wallace xii). Edgar Wallace, “a famous and prolific English novelist,” is credited with developing the story, along with Cooper, as he penned the first draft, but suddenly died one month later from pneumonia (ix, xi). 34

up working to destabilize the valuation of the human species’ elevated status in nature.

By incorporating ape figures in their narratives, both texts are asking the same questions concerning the newly-permeable boundary between “human” and “animal” that are explicitly posed by Punch’s “Monkeyana” image and Bamum’s advertisement for the

“What Is It?” spectacle, questions that boil down to concern about what separates “us” from “them.”

The difference between the ape hand and the human hand is not so much a matter of anatomy as it is function. In The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as

Evincing Design (1834), Sir Charles Bell distinguishes the human hand as “the seat” of

“every effort of will” (16). The distinction of the human hand lies in its ability to “design and sign,” to communicate through gesture, which articulates workings of the mind. In this way, [a] 11 the work of the hand is rooted in thinking” (Heidegger 16). The human hand is, therefore, distinguished from other grasping organs (including “paws, claws, and fangs”) by “its expressive capability” (Heidegger 16, Rowe 124). Both “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and King Kong contradict this traditional assessment of the human hand by constructing ape figures who express their self-determined mind through the works of their hands, problematizing a rigid human/animal dichotomous system. Through the expressive capability of their hands, we begin to see the ape figure’s mind at work. From the signs of his hands, we see a self-aware creature who experiences desire, betrayal, anger, and suffering like we do. Although each text maintains the difference between ape 35

figures and humans, their ape-figures’ assertions of their own self-determination and agency call into question that difference even as it is insisted upon.

Two narrative devices in the texts mediate the simultaneous reaffirmation and problematization of the post-evolution theory human/animal binary system: the construction of the character of the ape figure and the unfolding of the plot in the narrative. On the level of constructing the character of the ape figure, both texts attempt to reaffirm the post-evolution theory boundary between human and animal by distinguishing the visual differences between the human hand and the ape hand. They also simultaneously problematize the reaffirmation of this boundary through the lingering specter of the ape hand’s capacity for communication and assertion of agency. Similarly, on the level of unfolding the plot in the story, both texts attempt to reaffirm the post­ evolution theory human/animal binary system by confining and commodifying the ape figure. However, the texts also simultaneously problematize its reaffirmation by allowing the ape figure to resist subjugation by transgressing human spaces and committing acts of violence. Although these acts of violence are mediated by an assignation of motive, prompting the reader’s sympathy for the human-like ape figure, they ultimately seek to characterize them as “monstrous” beasts.

Both texts construct the ape figure as a liminal being, oscillating between classification as animal and, if not human, at least something more than animal. “The

Murders in the Rue Morgue” serves as Poe’s debut of citizen-detective C. Auguste

Dupin. Through the account of an anonymous first-person narrator (Dupin’s companion 36

and roommate), the reader is led through a maze of printed testimony and physical evidence involved in the seemingly unsolvable murder of two women, a mother and daughter, Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye, in the upstairs apartment of their home on Rue Morgue in Paris. This crime-scene evidence provides the clues for Dupin to separate fact from conjecture—which turn out to be the signifiers of what is non-human from what is human—to determine the identity of the L’Espanayes’ assassin. Although the clues seem to suggest either a human mastermind or “[a] madman,” the murderer turns out to be an ape, identified as an “Ourang-Outang,” captured by Maltese sailors in

Borneo and brought back to sell in France (133,137). Despite the ape figure’s multiple attempts to renegotiate his status as a commodity in the Western world—including shaving the hair, the “mark of the beast,” as Virginia Richter labels it, from his face and adapting the ritual of grooming in his pre-murder interaction with the L’Espanayes—the denouement for the Ourang-Outang is confinement in the Jardin des Plantes (66).

The eponymous character in King Kong similarly oscillates between “man” and

“beast,” a liminality fostered by circulated reports of his legend before he physically appears in the narrative. Based on Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack’s “true-life movie expeditions,” and growing out of Cooper’s infatuation with gorillas and the exploits of du Chaillu, King Kong describes a film expedition to the mysterious Skull

Mountain Island (Wallace vi, vii). Guided by reports of an uncharted island “‘[w]ay west of Sumatra,”’ adventurer-director Carl Denham hopes to film a Beauty-and-the-Beast narrative that has “‘never been seen; never even dreamed o f’ before (34,10). Two 37

primary members of Denham’s crew are Ann Driscoll, a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, down- on-her-luck, first-time actress with “transparently white” skin whom Denham has cast as

“Beauty”; and Jack Driscoll, Denham’s seasoned first mate and Darrow’s handsome love interest (15, 5). When the arrive at the prehistoric space of the island, hitherto relatively untouched by Western notions of progress, the crew encounters the “beast-god” Kong, an ape figure who is “[mjounstrous beyond conception, as hairy as any of the simian creatures of an African jungle he resembled in all but size” (80, 87). When Denham first shares the legend of Skull Mountain Island and the “God, or devil, or something” called

Kong who rules it, he describes him as “neither man nor beast. Something monstrous. All powerful. Terribly alive. Holding that island in the grip of deadly fear,” a powerful threat that is signified by the giant wall separating the precipice from the peninsula of the island

(36-37). While Denham does not capture the film he dreamed of, he brings a living

Beauty-and-the-Beast narrative back to New York, a narrative that concludes with the now-iconic fatal battle between Kong and the biplanes atop a skyscraper.

Both “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and King Kong attempt to reaffirm the boundary separating the human from the animal by highlighting the physical differences between the human hand and the simian hand. In “Murders,” the final, most definitive clue identifying the L’Espanayes’ murderer is a “little sketch” Dupin traced of the ‘“dark bruises, and deep indentations of finger nails’” left on the young victim’s throat. The narrator’s inability to seamlessly match each finger to “the respective impressions” traced onto the paper illustrates the anatomical gap separating the human from the not-human. 38

The unmatched proportions of the fingers leads the narrator to assert, ‘“This ... is the mark of no human hand’” (134). Refining the mysterious not-human identity produced by layering a human hand over the facsimile copy, Dupin next layers a “zoological text”—a passage from Georges Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom—over the drawing “to produce a knowable identity”: “the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands” (Rowe

120, Poe 134). Matching Cuvier’s “‘description of the digits,”’ the hand-looking impression left on Mademoiselle L’Espanaye’s neck is marked as the Ourang-Outang’s

“fearful talons,” not hands (Poe 134,138).

The specter of the indeterminate handprint lifted from the second victim’s neck is so provocative an image that on January 16,1916, an American newspaper, the

Richmond Times-Dispatch, produced images of these “most remarkable and essential features” of the tale to suggest that “one of the most fantastic stories ever imagined seems to have been re-enacted in real life” (Figure 5). In October 1916, twenty-four-year-old

Mademoiselle Marie Christophle was found dead in her fourth-floor bedroom in a provincial French city, Clermont-Ferrand. While her brother and mother were initially suspected for the young woman’s murder, based on reports that “the police had been examining all the monkeys in the possession of persons in Clermont-Ferrand,” some had deduced that they “were working on the theory that an ape had committed the mysterious crime.” In corroboration, “enterprising reporters” uncovered the police’s “remarkable record of fingerprints found in and about the room where the tragedy occurred and upon 39

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the body of the dead girl” that did not match the prints of the victim’s brother, Jean

Christophle, nor the prints “of any other man preserved in collections of fingerprints.”

(See Appendix 2 for the full text of the article.)

To demonstrate the unmatchable distinction between human hands and simian hands, the article includes several illustrations of the differences between the two. It presents images juxtaposing the handprint of a human with the “peculiar” hand of an

“Orang-Outang,” images highlighting the visual similarity between an “Orang-Outang’s” hand and foot. The article also provides two images depicting a beastly ape with his female victim. The central image is an illustration of an ape hand gripping the throat of a young woman. Just next to it, the other reprints one of the four images created by Aubrey

Beardsley to illustrate Herbert S. Stone and Company’s reprint of Poe’s stories in 1901.

Like “Murders” and King Kong, this spread illustrates the Western obsession with discerning differences between self and Other that simultaneously evokes the uncanny implications of sameness.

Both the novelization and proceeding film of King Kong magnify the specter of

“Kong’s., .great furry hand” that haunts Ann Darrow’s first memory of the “apelike creature” (98, 102). On the dust jacket for the first publication of the novelization (Figure

6), each of the three images of Kong highlight the fearsome power of his hands. On the back (left image), Kong is shown going toe to toe with a T-Rex, using his hands in a battle-proven strategy to overcome his vicious foe. On the binding (middle image), Kong is shown behind zoo-like bars. A young family looks up at the spectacular ape figure Figure 6. King Kong, Facsimile Dust Jacket. 42

whose hairless, human-looking fingers wrap around the bars. This anthropological anxiety inducing aspect of the image, however, is mitigated by Kong’s hand-like foot that also grasps the base of the bar. The front cover (right image), like the back, shows Kong in profile going face to face with the remaining pilot in an airplane he has grabbed from the sky, while the other plunges to his death, in the final moments of the narrative. In both the front and back images, a scantily clad (and noticeably not blonde) Darrow is in the foreground. On the right, Darrow is depicted in what is arguably perhaps the most iconic image from the film, apart from the image of Kong battling biplanes atop a skyscraper: clutched in the “monstrous” hand of Kong. In the film, this dramatic feat was accomplished with a combination of a “giant mechanical gorilla arm” that actor Fay

Wray clung to while shooting scenes for the film and Willis O’Brien’s “painstaking stop- motion animation process” using an “eighteen-inch gorilla figure.” As Cynthia Erb notes,

“Kong’s facial expressions... [and] hands were repeatedly molded.. .to give the ape dimension and personality (110). Both the careful attention to the detail of the hands in the film, and the repeated application of the word “hand” in the novelization suggest the significance of Kong’s hand in communicating and enacting his agency.

It is significant to note the three references in the novelization that describe

Kong’s hands as “paws”: once in the Skull Mountain Island portion of the narrative and twice in New York. The narrative’s repeated employment of this terminology for animal

“hands”—“paws”—illustrates the text’s attempt to draw a clear boundary between human and animal in regards to the possession of hands versus not-hands. During Driscoll and 43

Darrow’s narrow escape from Kong’s lair, from the point of view of Darrow, Kong’s

“hairy, reaching paw” is juxtaposed by Driscoll’s reassuring “hand upon her heel,” letting her know he is right behind her in their underwater escape from Skull Mountain (121).

The significance of this first “paw” reference to Kong’s hand is underscored by the innocent, yet provocative, interaction between Kong and Darrow just before her escape.

Framed within the Wanderer’s interpretation of the Skull Mountain Island villager’s ritualistic sacrifice as a wedding ceremony (55), Kong’s curious and somewhat accidental undressing of Darrow is mediated by his role as bridegroom and Darrow’s role as “the bride of Kong” (71). It is Kong’s solicitous touch that prompts Darrow to beg Driscoll not to let Kong touch her ever again (101,119-120). To Darrow, the touch of Kong’s hand on her body leads her to believe his interest in her is something more erotic than an animal’s curious fascination with a rare prize:

“Jack! It was horrible being in his hands. You can’t imagine such hands,

unless they have really touched you. . . felt you, as though trying to

puzzle you out.

“And sometimes, from the way he looked at me . . . from the way he

carried me carefully up in the crook of his arm instead of dragging me

along, as he did at the start. . . I wondered . . . I thought. . . ” Her voice

went up on a note of hysterical terror. (126-127)

Framed within the wedding-ceremony narrative and the accompanying wedding night, the horror Darrow is unable to name stems from her interpretation of Kong’s hands 44

removing the clothes from her body: the miscegenistic threat of sexual contact. In the

“genre logic” of jungle films, “to touch is to desire” (Erb 91). The purposeful application of the term “hands,” rather than “paws,” to describe Kong’s appendages makes the threat of miscegeny all the more clear. At the same time, the touch of his “paw” on Darrow’s body connotes “pawing,” which, when applied to a human action, suggests lecherous

“caressing or fondling [of] another” (“Pawing,” Oxford English Dictionary). It is, in this sense, a lascivious touch. In contrast, it is significant that Driscoll’s response to Darrow’s terror-filled memory is to “put out a steadying hand,” as he also does to reassure her while they swim out of Kong’s reach shortly before: “‘Forget about Kong!’ he ordered.

‘He’s no mystery. And if you weren’t so tired, you wouldn’t think so’” (127). To

Driscoll, Kong is not the preternatural mystery described by the legends Denham shares at the beginning of the narrative. He is not “something more than beast”; a being capable of feeling desire for a female human (110). Unlike Kong’s “paws,” Driscoll’s hands are non-threatening. Through the intentional application of the term “paw” to describe

Kong’s hands and Driscoll’s evaluation of Kong, the narrative attempts to reaffirm the post-evolution theory boundary separating the “superior” human from the “brute” animal.

Shifting to the New York portion of the narrative, Kong is interchangeably described as having both hands and paws. First, describing the Broadway premier of

Denham’s “King Kong” spectacle, though Kong’s “great paws” are held “immovable” by chains, the narrative voice concedes that “his hands were too tightly bound to drum now upon his chest” (142). Second, during his defense against the biplanes, through “the drum 45

note of his fists rose to a wild tattoo” challenging the descending planes, it is Kong’s

“great paw” that swings out to strike a biplane, sending it spinning “down to the distant street” (154). Both references underscore the reaffirmation of the dividing line between what constitutes the human and separate from the animal by describing an appendage that neither “signs” nor “designs” (Heidegger 16). Subjugated by Western civilization,

Kong’s immovable paws are unable to articulate his thoughts, and, even after he breaks free of the chains, his inferior “paws” are not enough to overcome the technological weaponry of Western culture in the end.

These appearance-based attempts to reaffirm the post-evolution theory boundary distinguishing the human from the animal are simultaneously undermined by the lingering specter of the ape hand’s capacity for communication and assertions of agency.

While “Murders” describes the Ourang-Outang’s attempts to renegotiate his status in the agent/commodity paradigm by assimilating in Western culture; the repetitive image of

Kong drumming his chest illustrates a self-determined creature bent on uncompromised agency.

In “Murders,” the Ourang Outang’s action of periodically “stopping to look back and gesticulate at his pursuer” as he flees from the sailor through the streets of Paris expresses a desire to communicate (137). Stephanie Rowe interprets these works of “the orangutan’s hands as signs,” or “willed expressions of individual sovereignty in negotiation with what the ape, for one, recognizes as another individual sovereignty,” the sailor (114). In conjunction with this clear attempt to communicate, Rowe also points to 46

the episodes of the Ourang-Outang shaving in the sailor’s apartment and later attempting to shave Madame L’Espanaye as two separate, hand-centered attempts to renegotiate his relationship from the agent/commodity paradigm he finds himself in with the sailor, to a relationship between two “sovereign beings with divergent interests” (114). The Ourang-

Outang’s self-shaving episode illustrates his intentional effort to reduce markers of difference between himself (an animal) and the sailor (a human). As emphasized in the previous analysis of the What Is It? advertisement, “hairiness” is generally perceived as an animal marker. In shaving himself, the Ourang-Outang not only, as Rowe notes, rehearses “an activity characteristic of the creature occupying the position of power in the orangutan’s world” (a gesture expressing the Ourang-Outang’s “attempt to obtain power—to become his own master”), but he also removes a primary marker distinguishing the animal from the human: hair (112). The second hand-centered episode, the Ourang-Outang’s “bizarre gesture” to shave Madame L’Espanaye, is, as Rowe notes, an “adaptive... transference of the solitary human ritual [of shaving]... onto the cultural practice in primate societies of mutual grooming as a means of soothing tensions and affirming community.” Indeed, “the orangutan’s hybridized gesture of grooming links the human and the primate at the site of their common denominator,... their ancient kinship,” highlighting their sameness over their differences (117). Each of these attempts of the Ourang-Outang to renegotiate his status through cultural rituals are centered on the dexterity and communicative power of the hand—the expression of the mind attached to the hand. In this way, the Ourang-Outang’s navigation of these shaving/grooming 47

cultural rituals problematizes the post-evolution theory boundary separating the human from the animal.

In King Kong, the repeating combination of Kong’s “black, furred hands” drumming his “black, furred breast” communicates his authority and power to those who would challenge him, as well as celebratory triumph in their defeat (73, 89). This particular mode of communication serves to highlight the physical feature which enables him to overpower the other prehistoric beasts on the island: his hands. Until Kong loses possession of Darrow on Skull Mountain Island, the narrative voice draws a clear distinction between Kong and the other prehistoric beasts based on the use of his hands

(62).16 In fact, Kong uses these hands to his advantage over the beasts he battles on his way to his lair atop Skull Mountain. In this way, his hands are the instruments of his will.

Not only can he use his hands, as a human would, to hurl projectiles at his foes, as he does with the asphalt missiles to fight off the triceratops; but he can also use them alone to overpower his enemy one-on-one, as he does against the T-Rex and, later, the

“serpentine” beast, ultimately using his hands to crush its head against his massive chest

(88-89,99-101,115-117). Kong’s hand-advantage is most clearly demonstrated when he battles the T-Rex, whose comparative “frail, clawlike members” are “good for nothing save to lift food to its mouth” (99). Kong is able to overpower the dinosaur using an experience-determined “technique of battle.” By grabbing and twisting “one of the frail

16 Within the space of the island, he does not have paw-like or “frail, clawlike” “forelegs” (78,99). In fact, nearly every account of Kong’s actions in the novelization use the descriptor “hands.” 48

forelegs” to wound and weaken the beast, Kong is ultimately able to pin him for the fatal maneuver: Kong’s

knees clamped about the narrow shoulders. His great hands reached up to

snatch at the open mouth. Before the meat-eater could use the powerful

leverage of its hind legs to shake off its rider, the hands found their

objective. They closed upon the upper and lower jaw and pulled. Nothing

could have withstood such fury. The meat-eater’s mouth gave in either

direction and Kong leaped clear. (100-101)

This iconic battle sequence illustrates how the work of Kong’s hands express the strategic work of his mind. Against the prehistoric beasts of Skull Mountain Island, Kong’s hands are clearly the instruments of his will. The communicative capacity of both the Ourang-

Outang and Kong’s hands combined with their symbolic value as instruments of will demonstrates that their visual differences from human hands is not as significant as the linguistic function they share.

Both texts attempt to reaffirm the post-evolution theory boundary between human and animal by physically confining the ape figure. The containment and commodification of the ape figure is an attempt to disassociate the term “hand” from the ape’s grasping organ, a disavowal that effectively strips him of his agency. In “Murders,” the elision of the ape figure’s hands into “fearful talons” serves to subjugate him before the concluding containment and commodification are possible (Poe 136). From the fingerprints lifted from the neck of Mademoiselle L’Espanaye, to Cuvier’s “description of the digits” that 49

are “in exact accordance with” Dupin’s tracing, to the sailor’s account of the Ourang-

Outang’s “fearful talons,” the description of the ape figure’s hands are animalized with increasing emphasis (Poe 134,136). As “talons,” the ape figure’s hands ultimately “cease to function as the instruments or agents of his deliberate will.” The works of his hands become “the effects of actions without objective,” which are “incidental to activity rather than directing it” (Poe 136, Rowe 117).

In conjunction with the intentional substitution of “talons” for the Ourang-

Outang’s hands in the sailor’s story, Dupin’s reduction of the ape figure to a zoological artifact serves to separate “the sign of the actor from the actor himself.” Starting with “the traces left on the neck of the second victim, the hand of the killer is reconstructed as an idea that... is put into circulation as a clue in the form of Dupin’s ‘fac-simile drawing.’

The severance of the hand from the body of the killer makes it.. .a signifier without a referent, circulating between Dupin and the narrator” (Rowe 119). This process enables

Dupin to take “possession of the figurative hand.” With the interpretive aid of Cuvier’s text and the sailor’s corroborating story, Dupin reduces the agent who once possessed it to a zoological artifact, a commodity (110). While the Ourang-Outang makes his escape

“from the chamber” upon seeing the sailor in the window, he “was subsequently caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the Jar din des ”

(136). With Dupin having already contained the identity of the killer, there, indeed, remains little else “to add” to the story (Poe 138). The Ourang-Outang’s final containment and commodification is achieved in one sentence. 50

The descriptions of Kong’s containment (his initial capture on Skull Mountain

Island and his final defeat in New York) are much lengthier, proffering a humanizing portrait of “the beast-god.” In the face of Western technological weaponry (first the gas bombs and, ultimately, the biplanes), Kong’s brute strength is diminished. First, when the great wall on Skull Island fails to separate Kong from Darrow, it takes four gas bombs to bring down her “monstrous pursuer.” By the third bomb, Kong’s “deep challenging cry changed into a strangling cough, his head swung from shoulder to shoulder and his gait was no more than a staggering walk.” Denham lands the

fourth bomb so squarely against Kong’s chest that the liquid in it soaked

into the thick hair and evaporated in a cloud which stayed with Kong as he

struggled blindly on .... [Kong’s] hands rose toward Ann, now almost

within arm’s reach. Unable to lift his heavy feet Kong groped, swung in a

wide circle and crashed to the sand. (136)

It is significant that Kong is captured after his pursuit of Darrow takes him beyond the wall. The wall separating the village from the jungle marks the boundary between human space and animal space. By crashing through the crack left in the gate, he transgresses the boundary distinguishing the separate spaces (134). By capturing Kong, Denham contains the threat Kong poses in his transgression of the spatial boundary separating the human from the animal.

Denham recognizes that Kong has “‘always been king of his world.’” To subjugate him, Denham has to teach Kong to be afraid of man. Fear, he asserts, is 51

“[something man can teach any animal That,’” he determines, ‘“will hold him, if chains alone won’t’” (137). When “King Kong,” the spectacle, is revealed on stage in

New York, Kong’s demeanor suggests that Denham has succeeded. Crouching “in a great steel cage under a weight of tangled chains” that “led from his hunkering body to the ring bolts in the thick steel floor,” Kong sits “mutely,” staring disinterestedly “upon his audience.” Denham, proud of his beast-taming abilities, tells the audience that Kong has

“not used his throat for any speaking purpose for days, and his hands were too tightly bound to drum now upon his chest” (142). By rendering his hands immovable, Denham strips Kong of his ability to use his hands, the instruments of his will, the expressive agents of his him, and silencing his voice.

Both the Ourang-Outang and Kong resist human subjugation by escaping confinement and committing acts of violence. Escaped animals, suggest Chris Philo and

Chris Wilbert,

inject what might be termed their own agency into the scene, thereby

transgressing, perhaps even resisting, the human placements of them. It

might be said that in so doing the animals begin to forge their own “other

spaces”, [or “beastly places,”] countering the proper places stipulated for

them by humans. (14)

“Murders” designates the sailor’s closet as the proper post-capture place for the Ourang-

Outang. When he escapes this space, he transgresses the boundary into the human space of the sailor’s apartment. Jolted by the sudden appearance of the sailor and his whip, the 52

Ourang-Outang crosses from the private space of the apartment to the open streets of

Paris. Seeking refuge from the pursuant sailor, the figure determines to penetrate the upstairs room of the L’Espaneyes’ apartment, the scene of his violent crime.

By comparison, in pursuit of Darrow, Kong crashes through the wall separating the human portion of the island from the prehistoric beasts’ side. Kong continues to transgress human-defined spaces in his quest to find Darrow. Breaking free from his shackles, Kong bursts “out the stage entrance” into the street, then crashes “into the hotel lobby” where Ann and Driscoll have just taken refuge in the elevator. Having just missed them, Kong crashes “back into the street” (147). Once Driscoll and Ann think they are safe in the security of Driscoll’s hotel room, “Kong’s black arm thrust[s] through the window” and, despite Driscoll’s attempts to overpower him by grabbing the remnant of the chain around his wrist, lifts “Ann through the window” (149). By escaping confinement and transgressing the boundaries separating “human spaces” from “animal places,” both the Ourang-Outang and Kong threaten, as Philo and Wilbert argue in regard to escaped animals, “the imagined and materially constructed spatial orderings of human societies” (14). Their resistance to confinement in a human-constructed place for animals

(e.g., the sailor’s closet in “Murders,” and the prehistoric side of Skull Mountain Island and the Broadway stage in King Kong) signifies their transgression of the spatial boundaries of human-defined spaces.

The rationalizations assigned to both ape figures’ violent acts render their assertions of self-determination more apparent. In “Murders,” Even though Dupin’s 53

resolution omits the possibility of the Ourang-Outang having any motive for his violent act, the corroborating eyewitness account (as told by the narrative voice) offers the possibility that both the sailor and the L’Espanayes’ inability to recognize the ape’s attempts to negotiate his assimilation into shared human spaces, rather than confinement in animal places, is what effectually changes “the probably pacific purposes of the

Ourang-Outang into those of wrath,” resulting in the murder of the two women (138).

While Poe’s main detective plot (Dupin’s process of solving the case) “reduces the agent glimpsed in the story to the artifact at the Jardin des Plantes that concludes the narrative as a whole,” the layering of the sailor’s story onto Dupin’s tracing of the handprint constructs an ape figure who is neither Cuvier’s zoological specimen nor the sailor’s commodity, “but an expressive and self-aware creature resisting subjugation and confinement in a deliberate, strategic attempt at self-determination” (Rowe 109,110).

This characterization ultimately “calls into question the plot’s work of restoring the human order by establishing animal difference” (111). Even with the Ourang-Outang confined in his proper place in the zoo, the lingering specter of the expressive self­ shaving, gesticulating, social-grooming figure leaves the text open to a more inclusive, non-hierarchical understanding of nature.

Although King Kong attempts to reaffirm the human/animal binary problematized by Kong’s expressive behavior on Skull Island by capturing him and bringing him to

New York to exhibit to masses of paying audiences, Kong’s suspended agency is restored when he reasserts his will by escaping from Denham’s confinement. Ultimately, the 54

threat Kong poses to the elevated status of the human being in the natural order is not contained by killing him in the end. The lasting image of Kong drumming his chest and fighting off the biplanes atop the New York skyscraper enables the reader to recognize

“that modes of consciousness, desire, and suffering transcend species boundaries” (Rowe

125). Through layering the narrative structure of beauty and the beast onto Kong’s actions, Denham provides Kong with a motive for his violence. From the initial battles against the prehistoric beasts on Skull Mountain Island, to the final battle against the biplanes, Kong’s violence is rationalized as his determined protection and defense of

Darrow.

Over the course of the story, Denham refines the Beauty and the Beast narrative he layers over Kong’s actions. Before arriving at Skull Mountain Island, in Noir-inflected language Denham shares with Driscoll “the idea” he is “building” the “picture on”: “The

Beast was a tough guy, tougher than you or anybody ever written about. He could lick the world. But when Beauty came along, she got him. When he saw her, he went soft. He forgot his code. And the little ham-and-egg fighters slapped him down” (34). Kong’s victorious encounters with the prehistoric beasts necessitates the revision of Denham’s preemptive narrative structure. Kong’s prowess is not softened by Darrow. If anything, arguably, it is enhanced. Indeed, after observing his fierce defense of Darrow against the prehistoric beasts, Denham determines that “‘Kong...is the one thing outside the wall that is something more than beast. He’s one of nature’s errors, like all the others, but he was nearly not an error. And in that huge head of his is a spark. Ann means something to 55

him.’” Denham asserts that Kong senses something “different” distinguishing Darrow from “the native girls they tied to the altar.’” Therefore, “‘when he looked at her something inside him gave way’” (110). Foreshadowing the denouement, Denham anticipates that Kong will ‘“lose Ann in the end,... [o]ne way or another.... Brute strength will have yielded to something higher, and by the extent of its yielding will be weakened for its future battles with other brutes’” (110-111). Denham’s “other brutes” turn out to be himself—launching gas bombs to take down Kong—and the biplanes summoned to dethrone the “beast-king” from his tower. Kong’s single-minded pursuit of

Darrow sparks a rage in him that diminishes the alert suspicion he applied to his previous navigation of the island (115). The strategies he employs to fight the prehistoric “brutes” on Skull Mountain Island are no match for the technological weaponry of the West.

On stage in New York, Kong deliberately and strategically resists Denham’s subjugation and control by breaking his chains. He asserts his own agency and power by not succumbing to Denham’s plan to overpower the “beast-god” using, in addition to chains, fear. But neither the chains nor the fear Denham has attempted to inspire can hold him. Initiated by Denham drawing Darrow and Driscoll from the wings of the stage to stand next to the cage, Kong is brought out of his stupor. He curls “his mobile lips back from long white teeth and then, unexpectedly, he roared. For the first time in days, he found his voice”:

As Driscoll swung an arm protectively around Ann the captive beast-god

struggled furiously. His rage was a wild and cataclysmic emotion which 56

surged from his inmost being.... The great body which had been held by

chains to a crouch was suddenly and terribly erect. Kong’s head struck the

top of the cage and tore it loose. His hands, dangling broken bits of chain,

began to drum upon his broad chest. (145,146)

Darrow awakens a dormant agency in Kong, enabling him to break free from the chains, and use his hands and voice as agents of his self-determination.

Kong determines to make his stand against Western civilization atop a giant skyscraper, a defensible part of the New York landscape he undoubtedly associates with his home on Skull Mountain (156). As noted earlier, in addition to the iconic image of a struggling Darrow in the giant grasp of Kong’s hand, this final episode in the narrative produces one of the most enduring images from the film. In this final battle, however, the prehistoric pterodactyls he had easily swat from the sky outside his mountain-top lair are replaced by machine-gun armored “army planes” (153). Although Kong strikes the first blow, he is, once again, overpowered by the technological weaponry of Western civilization:

One after another the planes slid down, poised each for its successive

murderous instant, and then curved away. The rattle of the successive

machine guns grew louder over Kong’s tattooing. He swayed, and in spite

of his gripping feet, began to topple. He fought to the end. With his last

strength he leaped for the rearmost plane as it curved away. He missed,

but his mighty spring carried him clear of the setbacks below, and out 57

above the street. For a breath then, high above the civilization which had

destroyed him, he hung in the same regal loneliness that had been his upon

Skull Mountain Island. Then he plunged down in wreckage at the feet of

his conquerors. (155-156)

Kong’s final battle illustrates his self-determined agency. His determination to not succumb to “the fear” Denham seeks to inspire by subjugating and confining him—to, rather, “nobly” fight to the end—encourages readers to identify something human in his resolve to live and die on his own terms. It is this signification of self-determination that enables Kong to challenge—if not transcend—the boundary separating the human from the animal by blurring the distinction between markers that separate “us” from “them.”

The great effort expended by Dupin and the sailor in “Murders,” and Denham

(and the others he enlists) in King Kong to re-contain the escaped ape figure mirrors the efforts of the anthropological-anxiety afflicted seeking to quell their post-evolution theory fear that there is no difference between the human species and the “lower” animal species. While the physical containment of both the Ourang Outang and Kong’s bodies seems to affirm their human-subjugated location in the natural order, their ideological confinement in the classification of “animal” is destabilized by the lingering specter of their hands. Both texts conflate the traditional assessment of the hand as a unique organ of the human body by extending its symbolic currency as an “instrument of agency” to non-human primates (Rowe 108). While they both attempt to reaffirm the post-evolution theory boundary separating the human from the animal by distinguishing the visual 58

differences between the human hand and the ape hand, this reaffirmation is problematized by the lingering specter of the ape hand’s capacity for communication and assertions of agency after the threat of his physical body is contained. The expressive capability of the ape figure’s hands, resisting subjugation, illustrates the mind at work.

The signs of the ape figure’s hands illustrate a self-aware creature who experiences desire, betrayal, anger, and suffering analogous to humans. It is this recognition of sameness over difference that problematizes a rigid human/animal dichotomous system.

* * *

My analysis of “Monkeyana,” What Is It?, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and King Kong illustrates that the codification of the ape figure within evolution theory, antislavery, and colonial discourses reveals Western anthropological anxiety regarding evolution theory’s challenge to the delimitation of a human/animal binary system, and, by extension, “the continuity of man’s dominant status in the natural world” (Richter 18).

These texts demonstrate that the very act of questioning the post-evolution theory boundary distinguishing “human” from “animal” (in addition to “white” from “black,” and “civilized” from “savage”) challenges the traditional understanding of what it means to be human based on markers of what separates “us” from “them,” including physical appearance and social behaviors. Each texts’ efforts to clarify the boundary distinguishing a human/animal binary are problematized by the questions they pose in the process of reaffirming their differences. In all four texts, the lingering specters of ape- 59

human sameness blurs the certainty of their difference, offering in its stead a more inclusive, non-hierarchical understanding of nature. 60

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what-is-it-gallery-of-wonders-no>. APPENDIX 1. “MONKEYANA”: FULL PAGE IN PUNCH

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. [M a y 18, 1861.

Then Huxley and O vfen, MONKEYANA. With rivalry glowing, With nen and ink rush to the scratch; ’Tis Brain ten u s Brain, Till one of them’s slain; By Jove I it will be a good match!

Says O w e n , you can see The brain of Chimpanzee Is always exceedingly small, With the hindermost “ horn ’’ Of extremity shorn. And no “ Hippocampus” at all. The Professor then tells ’em That man’s ** cerebellum,” From a vertical point you can’t s e e ; That each convolution*' Contains a solution, Of * Ajrchencephaiic ” degree. Then apes have no nose, And thumbs for great toes, And a pelvis both narrow and sligh t; They can’t stand upright, Unless to show fight. With “ Du C haillc, that chivalrous knight!

Next H u x l e y replies. That O w e n he lies. And garbles bis Latin quotation ; That bis facts are not new, H is mistakes not a few, Detrimental to his reputation. “ To twice slay the slain,” By dint of the Brain, (Thus H uxuv concludes his review) Is but labour in vain, Unproductive of gain, And so i shall bid you ' ’ A d ie u ! **

A m 1 s a t j r o r m an r Ecological Garde**, Map, 1S61. G o r il l a . Pray tell me who can, A id settle my place in the scale. A man in ape's shape, An anthropoid ape, PUNCH’S ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT. Or monkey deprived of his tail ? M o x d &t , May 0. The Lords had a discussion about the Canal of the The Vestiges taught, Future, that is to say, the impossible trench which M. L e sse e s pre­ That all came front naught tends to think he can cut through the Isthmus of Suez. The Govern­ By " development," so called, ** progressive ; ment opinion upon the subject is, that if the Canal could be made, we That insects and worms ought not, for political reasons, to allow it, but that inasmuch as the Assume higher forms Canal cannot be cut, the subject may. and the wise course is to let the By modification excessive. speculator* rum themselves and diddle the Pacha. This seems straight- forward and benevolent enough. T h e n D a r w in set forth. In a book of much worth, M r . Speaker Denison, who had had a relapse into indisposition, The importance of ‘‘ Nature’s selection re-appeared, and made his apologies for having been ill. The House liow the struggle for life cheered him so loudly that he began to think he had done a clever Is a laudable strife, thing, rather than not, in catching the rheumatism. M r, Punch hope* And results in “ specific distinction.” to behold the brave Speaker “ astir in Ins saddle” (as Mr. D i s b s e u ’s song goes) in due season, and to sec him, like a true W hig, following Let pigeons and doves Fox and avoiding pit. Select their own Loves, Lord John Russell made an important reply to an important And grant them a million of ages, question from Mr. Gregory. The American Difficulty is beginning Then doubtless you’ll Rod to create English difficulties. The North is calling on P r e s i d e n t They’ve altered their kind, L in c o ln to blockade the porta of the South, and the South is sending And changed into prophets and sage*. out Privateers to intercept the commerce of the North. L o r d J o h n announced that England can recognise no blockade except n real one, L eo n a r d H o r n e r relates, and that she is prepared to regard the South as sufficiently consolidated That Biblical dates to entitle her to be treated as a Belligerent, not as a mere rebel and The age of the world cannot trace; therefore her right to issue letters of marque must be acknowledged. That Bible tradition, This is a very prosaic paragraph, but M r. Punch ” reserves to himself" By Nile's deposition, the right to be grave, gay, lively, and severe exactly when it pleases Is put to the right about face. him. Then there’s P exgellt Our Daughter A lic e is to have £30,000 down, and £0,000 a year, W ho next will tell ye Lord Palmerston remarking, very properly, that she is not our That he and his colleagues of late Eldest Daughter, and may not require the same allowance as the Find celts and shaped stones future Q u e e n or P r u s s i a , but that it is not for the honour of Mixed up with cave bones England.that her Princesses should go out as paupers. Quite the Of contemporaneous date. reverse, and what is more, Mr. Punch insists that all the money be settled on his amiable young friend A l ic e, so that she may draw her Then P restwick, he pelts own cheques, and not have to ask her husband for money every time With hammers and celts she wants to buy pins or postage stamps, or a little present to send All who do not believe his relation, over to her dear Mr. Punch. That the tools be exhumes Then was the Paper Resolution moved by M r. G ladstone. L ord From gravelly tombs R o b e r t Ce c il opposed it, and hoped the Lords would reject the Bill Date before the Mosaic creation. to be based on i t ; M r. L eveson G ow er approved it, and pamded the 67

APPENDIX 2. “LIKE POE’S FAMOUS MYSTERY IN THE RUE MORGUE”: A

TRANSCRIPT OF THE MAIN ARTICLE’S TEXT

Paris, Dec. 28

AN advanced psychologist has made the argument that fiction creates fact and that the most fantastic occurrences imagined by a writer are sure to repeat themselves in real life.

This argument receives support from the extraordinary murder mystery exciting France just now, which is said to repeat the most remarkable and essential features of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous and grewsome [sic] tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

The most plausible explanation of this present French murder mystery is that it was committed by a great ape. This is the theory upon which the police are now working. Thus one of the most fantastic stories ever imagined seems to have been re-enacted in real life nearly a hundred years after is was written.

In the present case the victim was a young woman. Mademoiselle Marie Christophle, aged twenty- four, belonging to an old and wealthy family, living in No. 42 Cours Sablon, at Clermont-Ferrand, an important French provincial city. Her father, now deceased, was a prominent lawyer in this city and her grandfather was the Prefect under Napoleon III, of the Department of Puy-de-Dome, in which the city is situated.

The family consisted of the daughter, Marie; her mother, and a brother, Jean Christophle, one year younger than herself. They enjoyed a large income and lived in a fine old house. The son was called out as a soldier on the outbreak of war, but obtained a comfortable position on the staff, which enabled him to live at home in Clermont-Ferrand.

Mademoiselle Christophle occupied a bedroom on the fourth floor of the house. At half-past two in the morning agonized shrieks in different tones and cries of “Fire!” coming from this house were heard by the neighbors. The firemen broke into the house and hurried to Mademoiselle Christophle’s room, where the fire was burning. 68

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They found that it was already nearly extinguished, and soon put an end to it. Jean Christophle and his mother had apparently been busily engaged in trying to put out the blaze. The big old fashioned wooden four-poster bedstand, with canopy, had been partially burnt up.

In the midst of the ruins, by the side of the bed, lay the dead body of Marie Christohle. The fireman and others at first assumed that she had been suffocated by the fire.

In due course a judicial inquiry into her death was begun, and at once the interesting fact was established that her death was not due directly to the fire or to suffocation caused by it. She had received severe blows on the head from a blunt instrument probably capable of causing death.

She had also received injuries in many parts of the body which, it is thought, might have been caused by the hands of a powerful man.

Jean Christophle gave what appeared to be a reasonable explanation of his sister’s death. He said that she was subject to heart disease, and thought that when she found that a fire had broken out she had an attack of this disease, which killed her.

It is well known that in a French trial or judicial inquiry the witnesses are not limited by anything like American rules of evidence, but are encouraged to give any explanation they believe has any bearing on the matter and are even brow-beaten by the Judge, if he thinks he can make them give any more information.

“How do you explain that your sister’s body bears marks that show she was beaten to death?” asked the Judge in the case.

“I do not believe she was beaten,” said young Christophle. “I believe the injuries to her head were caused by the top of the bed falling upon her. You see it was partly burnt and lying on the bed. 69

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“I think the other injuries were due to her falling on the table and chair by the bedside in her terrified condition. These injuries and her terrors would naturally have induced an attack of her heart trouble, which would have been fatal.

“I do not believe she was attacked by any one. The first information I had of trouble was when I heard her shrieks and then the noise of her body falling on the floor. Then I rushed to her room. No man who had attacked her could have escaped without passing my room and being seen by me.”

The case remained an utter mystery for many weeks. Then the local newspapers began to hint at a shocking state of affairs. They said that Madame Christophle was devoted to her son and was not fond of her daughter. It was suggested that she was displeased at the idea that the family property would have to be divided equally between son and daughter.

At least these rumors culminated in the arrest of Madame Christophle and her son for causing the girl’s death. If the great war had not been raging this would certainly have been regarded as one of the most famous criminal cases ever known in France. The leading Paris newspapers, however, considered it patriotic not to deal at great length with a case that pointed to a shocking scandal in a prominent French family.

The Magistrate who had begun the inquiry was relieved from the duty on account of old associations with the Christophle family, and a very important judge was appointed in his place. This inquiry, it should be understood, is not a trial.

The Christophles—mother and son—made a most effective defense. They engaged the ablest lawyers in France to represent them. Madame Christophle said she was overcome by horror at the charge, but her son fought vigorously against the accusations.

He explained that the family had many enemies in the department on account of ancient quarrels, and that they had inspired these attacks on them. He pointed out how reasonable was the original 70

APPENDIX 2. “LIKE POE’S FAMOUS MYSTERY IN THE RUE MORGUE”: A

TRANSCRIPT OF THE MAIN ARTICLE’S TEXT explanation of the tragedy and how unreasonable it was to suspect him of a horrible crime simply on the ground of rumors of a family quarrel. Indeed, his explanations persuaded most people that there was no basis for the charge.

Then it became known that the police of Clermont-Ferrand were working on the theory that an ape had committed the mysterious crime. This fact first leaked out when it was learned that the police had been examining all the monkeys in the possession of persons in Clermont-Ferrand.

This led enterprising reporters to the discovery that the police had left a remarkable record of fingerprints found in and about the room where the tragedy occurred and upon the body of the dead girl.

Some of the injuries on the body of the girl were, it was reported, apparently caused by fingers and thumbs of enormous strength. They were not the fingers and thumbs of young Christophle, and they differed in type from those of any other man preserved in collections of fingerprints. The same fingerprints were found on the back of a chair in the bedroom and upon the window pane.

Five monkeys were found by police in Clermont-Ferrand, but they were all small, and their fingerprints could not possibly have been confused with those of a man.

It was clear that if one of the simian family was concerned in the tragedy it must have been a great ape, such as an orang-outang, a gorilla or a chimpanzee. If that was so it must have belonged to some wandering showman who had passed through the town. The police are now hunting for such a showman who passed through the town at the time of Mademoiselle Christophle’s death.

A theory has been put forward that the ape escaped from its house or cage during the night, ran through the empty streets of the town and was attracted by the light in the fourth story window of the

Chrisophle house. Then the ape ran up the rain-pipe, reached the window, entered the room, attacked the girl, beat and choked her to death and upset a lamp in the struggle. Finally it escaped in the way it came. 71

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Now a very important question naturally arises: “Is it possible to prove that these finger marks are those of an ape?” Professor Paul Combes, a distinguished naturalist, has pronounced his opinion that the ape’s fingerprints, though like a man’s are unmistakable by an expert.

“The most striking difference between the two hands,” he said, “lies in the thumbs. The ape’s thumb is very short, not reaching to the fleshy base of the forefinger, while the man’s thumb ordinarily reaches to the second joint of the forefinger or reaches beyond it. A relatively long thumb is generally regarded as an evidence of mental and physical ability.

“If the finger and thumb prints in the Clermont-Ferrand case show a thumb which does not reach the base of the forefinger it is reasonably certain that they are those of an ape. Of course, other ape-like characteristics must be looked for. There are many men whose hands show ape-like tendencies, but in my opinion there is always an unmistakable dividing link between the human hand and that of the highest ape, such as the orang-outang.

“The man’s hand is made so that it can grasp a sphere easily, while that of the ape is more fitted to grasp a cylindrical object, such as a tree branch. The man’s fingers move obliquely, so that they close over the base of the thumb. The ape’s fingers close directly over the palm of the hand.

“The apes are right-handed like the vast majority of men. The large lines upon the palm of the hand run straight across in the ape, while they are curved in man, owing to the different action of the fingers.

“The ape has an opposable thumb, a feature that has been of enormous value in man’s development, but the lines show that the former uses his thumb more for hanging on to trees than for closing it upon the palm. The fleshy, muscular formation at the base of the human thumb is represented by a relatively small flat formation in the ape. The whole palm of the simian hand is comparatively flat and undeveloped. The bones of the palm and fingers are proportionately larger than the man’s. 72

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The ape has a complicated system of lines upon its hand like those of a man although here again there is an unmistakably [sic] difference between them. The ape was bom with these lines upon its hand, and they have been transmitted like ours for incalculable ages. No two apes have hands that could be confused with one another, and if a record of ape finger prints [sic] were kept it would be easy to identify the simian suspect of Clermont-Ferrand.

When we examine the ape’s foot we realize clearly that it belongs to a distinct family from man, whatever the relationship may be. The ape has a big toe that is opposable to the sole of its foot even more than its thumb is opposable to its hand. In man there is a ligament connecting the big toe with the second toe, which is lacking in the ape. Man does not use his foot to grasp things with, while the ape uses it even more than his hand for this purpose. The ape’s small toes have an oblique movement toward the base of the big toe. In fact, the ape’s foot is more like a human hand than is its forehand.”

There are perhaps some facts in the possession of the Clermont-Ferrand police which prove more strongly than is now known that an ape was in the room. They have not made public the fingerprint impressions they have obtained. Did the ape leave any of its hair about the room? What was the weapon that it used? These are obviously points of the utmost importance.

It is astonishing in how many respects the Poe story and the real French case resemble one another. In the story a girl, Mademoiselle L’Espanaye, and her mother were the victims. They were mysteriously murdered in their bedroom at night.

When the facts in “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” were so ingeniously cleared up by Poe’s fictitious detective, M. Dupin, it was found that the ape had been supposed shaving itself with its owner’s razor, that the owner pursued the animal through the streets, and that it ran up a lightning rod, carrying the razor to the women’s room, where it slaughtered them. 73

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In the Poe story the unintelligible sounds heard coming from the room by the neighbors formed an important clue in unraveling the mystery. This feature has not been dwelt on very strongly in the Clermont-

Ferrand case, but the curious discoveries about fingerprints add a modem scientific element to the latest mystery.