The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School the College

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School The College of the Liberal Arts ANIMALS, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE ZOOPOETICS OF AMERICAN MODERNISM A Dissertation in English by Christopher T. White 2008 Christopher T. White Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2008 ii The dissertation of Christopher T. White was reviewed and approved* by the following: Sanford Schwartz Associate Professor of English Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Deborah Clarke Professor of English and Women’s Studies Mark Morrisson Associate Professor of English Susan Squier Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English Philip Jenkins Sparks Professor of History and Religious Studies Robin Schulze Professor of English Head of the Department of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii Abstract This dissertation addresses a striking paradox of American modernity: the historical disappearance of wildlife from the natural environment and the simultaneous proliferation of animal forms across the cultural landscape—in literature, in visual and material culture, and in popular scientific writings during the half-century of dramatic change from 1890 to 1940. Across these venues the figure of the “vanishing animal” emerges as a dominant trope, as modern extinctions and the explosion of machine culture combine to frame animals within a spectral logic—disappearing, but more visible than ever. The first half of this dissertation examines the extensive technological, ideological, and representational apparatus through which animals and animal life are rendered in modern American culture, while the second half explores a significant, if surprising, correlative phenomenon whereby the modernized figure of the animal returns to haunt, and in fact disrupt, the very technics that facilitated its emergence in the first place. Chapter One addresses the popular genre of the “realistic” wild animal story and the hunting narratives of Theodore Roosevelt, and identifies the figure of the vanishing animal as a significant trope linking a number of prominent Americans at the turn of the century. Chapter Two focuses more explicitly on the elaborate techné through which animals become nostalgia-laden images of the primitive, by examining Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon in the context of modern taxidermy, wildlife photography, and early nature films. Chapter Three shifts directions in order to explore the “primitive” behind, or within, modern technologies of communication. This chapter addresses the modern reconfiguration of “the animal” and its relation to both language iv and subjectivity through an examination of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Chapter Four continues this investigation of the animal’s haunting presence within modernist cultural and aesthetic productions through a discussion of Val Lewton’s classic 1942 film, Cat People. By employing the deconstructive notion of “spectrality” to read the zoopoetics of modernist texts, my goal is to open up cultural texts to their nonhuman other; and in turn, to open up the larger nonhuman world to the force of the figurative— letting zoon inform both our logos and our poeisis, and indeed, vice versa. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Civilizing Beasts: Turn-of-the-Century Animal Stories and the 19 Invention of American Wildlife Chapter 2: Vanishing Animals and the Modern Technics of Nostalgia 72 Chapter 3: The Modern Magnetic Animal: As I Lay Dying and the Uncanny 114 Zoology of Modernism Chapter 4: Gothic Animal: Val Lewton’s Cat People 155 Afterword 214 Works Cited 218 vi Acknowledgments Many thanks to my committee members (Deb Clarke, Mark Morrisson, Susan Squier, and Phil Jenkins) for their thoughtful and encouraging responses to my work. I am especially grateful to Sandy Schwartz, my advisor, who has helped me bring order to my seeming chaos of ideas. Sandy has consistently helped me to see the significance (and sense) of what I’ve been doing these past three years. Not only am I grateful to have worked with someone who values as much as I the serious thrill of intellectual discovery, I can also say that our invigorating mountain bike rides have given me some of my fondest memories of life in Pennsylvania. I’d also like to thank the “Visualizing Animals” group, especially Joan Landes, Sushmita Chatterjee, Guna Nadarajan, Irina Aristarkhova, Doc Rissell, and Shannon Walters. Our meetings, dinners, and events have been a special source of encouragement and stimulation in my work. Thanks to my friend, Dustin Stegner, for his support and camaraderie at Penn State. Thanks also to my family: both the Whites and the Muthlers—who, while perhaps baffled by my desire to be in school for so long—have supported me all the way through. My greatest debt is to my wife, Laura, for her patience, endurance, and unflagging support. Over this long and meandering road, she has been my first reader, my greatest booster, and my steadfast partner in an endeavor she has nonetheless often been tempted to call “criminal.” Lastly, thanks to our son, Sebastian, who was born about the same time as this project, and who reminds me all the time of just how life-sustaining the thrill of discovery, intellectual or otherwise, can be. 1 Introduction Any attempt to render the cultural significance of animals and animal life in American modernism runs up against a strange paradox. Just as animals begin to disappear from the natural environment, animal forms simultaneously become a ubiquitous presence across the cultural landscape – in literature, in visual and material culture, and in post-Darwinian scientific and popular scientific writings. Modern American literature abounds with animals. London, Steinbeck, Austin, Moore, Faulkner, Hemingway, Wright: all feature prominent animal figures. Expanding the literary scope to include turn-of-the-century African American folktales and Native American trickster tales, one could add Harris’s “Uncle Remus” stories, the folktales in Hurston’s Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the writings of early Native American authors, Zitkala-a, Mourning Dove, and Charles Eastman. Within visual and material culture, there is a virtual explosion of animal forms: in early wildlife photography, safari/nature cinema, and Disney animation; in children’s toys and picture books; in circuses and Wild West shows; and in zoos and natural history dioramas. Within science, the turn of the century witnessed a tremendous surge of scientific and popular scientific interest in animal psychology, and then, of course, there was (and still is) the enormous controversy over Darwinism. This dissertation is a study of the relations between “the animal” and modern American technologies of representation. Its starting point is the observation that, in modernity, it becomes increasingly impossible to separate the meaning of animals and of 2 animal life from the distinctly modern systems of representation through which we apprehend them. Across many venues the figure of the “vanishing animal” emerges as a dominant trope, as modern extinctions, exterminations, and the explosive growth of machine culture combine to frame animals within a spectral logic – disappearing, but more visible than ever. Rendered spectral, animals are transfigured throughout American culture into modernity’s “primitive” Other, nostalgic objects of premodern enchantment, vitality, and innocence. In the early twentieth century, “wildlife” becomes a privileged symbol of American national identity and origins, and a vicarious source of primitive regeneration. Yet, animals do not embody “the primitive” in any simple or straightforward way; rather, an extensive technical and ideological apparatus is required in order to construct them as such. This dissertation aims, in part, to expose this apparatus, and to trace the complex social, cultural, political, and technological networks “behind” the construction of wildlife in modern America. At the same time, it is precisely because the animal is figured as spectral that its presence returns – particularly in the realm of literary and visual aesthetics – to haunt modern communication technologies and representational forms.1 A second major aim of this dissertation then, is to examine the animal’s uncanny – and destabilizing – presence within modern technics. Two sources in particular have proven indispensable to this project. The first is John Berger’s famous 1977 essay, “Why Look at Animals?” – significant for being the first widely read study to assess the modern disappearance of animals in terms of its broader cultural implications. Berger argues that, in the process of capitalism’s rise to dominance, “real” animals have disappeared, only to resurface everywhere in the form of 3 mass produced “images.” Though he cites Disney toys, photographs, and family pets as illustrations of the “cultural marginalization” of animals in modernity, his primary emphasis is on the modern zoo. “Public zoos,” he notes, “came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals from daily life. The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters” (19). Berger argues that animals, having for time immemorial existed at the center of “man’s world” as a sacred source of meaning and identity, have in the last two hundred years been relegated to the outer margins of human life. Thus, at the zoo, “the view

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