"The Jungle Books": Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy Author(s): ALLEN MACDUFFIE Source: PMLA, Vol. 129, No. 1 (January 2014), pp. 18-34 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24769419 Accessed: 08-04-2020 06:50 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PMLA The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy ALLEN MACDUFFIE ling's second Jungle Book (1895), hinges on Mowgli's attempt to THE PLOT save his OFsurrogate "RED family, DOG" the Seonee THE Wolf PENULTIMATE Pack, from a ram STORY IN RUDYARD Kip paging horde of wild dogs. Perched on the branch of a tree, Mow gli taunts the dogs (known as "dholes") until the leader of the pack makes a mistake: "At last, made furious beyond his natural strength, he bounded up seven or eight feet clear of the ground. Then Mowgli's hand shot out like the head of a tree-snake, and gripped him by the scruff of his neck.... With his left hand he reached for his knife and cut off the red, bushy tail, flinging the dhole back to earth again" (293). This moment is crucial to the narrative, since the dholes' ha tred of Mowgli will induce them to chase him into the elaborate trap he has prepared. But it is also important for the evolutionary questions it raises and how the implications of those questions af fect our reading of The Jungle Books. For Mowgli does not just cut off the dhole's tail, he mocks him with a vision of mutilated genera tions: "Nay, but consider, wise rat of the Dekkan. There will now be many litters of little tailless red dogs, yea, with raw red stumps that sting when the sand is hot. Go home, Red Dog, and cry that an ape has done this" (294). The idea of heritable punishment is a familiar conceit from fables and folktales, of course, but it also alludes to the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, ALLEN MACDUFFIE is an assistant which profes was enjoying a resurgence of scientific and popular interest sor of English at the University of Texas, while Kipling wrote The Jungle Books. Austin. Elis first book, Victorian Literature, Although Just So Stories is commonly described as a collection Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, will be published by Cambridge of Univer Lamarckian fables, The Jungle Books has long been associated with sity Press in 2014. This essay is froma Darwinian his imaginary.1 In a contemporaneous review in the At book project about Lamarckian lantic evolu Monthly, the stories were hailed as an investigation of animal tionary discourse and Victorian fiction.psychology and an imaginative elaboration of Darwinian thought > 2014 ALLEN MACDUFFIE i8 PMLA 129.1 (2014), published by the Modern Language Association ot America This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 9-1 Allen MacDuffie 19 ("R. Kipling" 858). Kipling, however, emphasized declared the value of experience, the direc himself repulsed by Darwin's work: tive role "I'veof culture, been and the potential for active trying once more to plough throughself-shaping. ThroughThe De Mowgli's Lamarckian scent of Man and every fiber narrative, ... of themy first body Jungle Book can structure a revolted against it" (Writings potentially 114). The wayward seem developmental trajectory, ing contradiction, I argue, demonstrates embedding Mowgli's not growth in a teleological so much the reviewer's misreading narrative, of stableKipling taxonomic hierarchies, and as confusion over Darwin's ideas at this mo ordered patterns of metamorphosis. But by the ment. In some contexts, Darwinism denoted end of the second Jungle Book, as Kipling at something specific: evolution by natural se tempts to move Mowgli's story into historical lection. But in others it served as an umbrella time, the space that has allowed for the happy term for any science or philosophy of evolu convergence of myth and science, fantasy and tionary transformation.2 Given the lexical realism begins to unravel. In this way, The uncertainty, the Atlantic reviewer is not nec Jungle Books expresses the elaborate fantasies essarily misguided to invoke Darwin's name that underwrote the neo-Lamarckian project in reference to The Jungle Books. Neither are and exposes the deeper theoretical vague present-day critics who have linked Kipling's ness those fantasies only partially concealed. work to Darwin's.3 Seth Lerer has recently In tracing these patterns and the relation be argued that "if the Jungle Books are Kipling's tween scientific theory and narrative conven Descent of Man, then the Just So Stories are tions, I hope to suggest some of the ways in his Origin of Species" (181). which a more capacious, less Darwin-centered Such an analogy frames Kipling's sto picture of Victorian evolutionary discourse ries in broadly evolutionary terms, whereas, might open up new possibilities for our read as I hope to show, The Jungle Books can be ings of the period's literary texts.6 read as a participant in specific fierce late Victorian debates over alternative scientific paradigms of species change. If we define Darwinian more narrowly (as many Victori Lamarck's theory, described in Philosophie ans did) to signify not "evolution" but "evo zoologique (1809), was a significant part of lution by natural selection," then we can see pre-Darwinian evolutionary and material the ways in which The Jungle Books functions ist sciences and, in British radical circles in as a profoundly anti-Darwinian narrative the 1820s and 1830s, an alternative to the and as part of a widespread neo-Lamarckian precepts of mainstream Anglican natural reaction against the troublingly wasteful, theology.7 Although Lamarck articulated a nonhierarchical, and nonteleological natural comprehensive theory of the origin and direc selection mechanism.4 In what follows, I tion of life, the term Lamarckism eventually position Kipling's Mowgli stories in the late became synonymous with one component of nineteenth-century resurgence of Lamarck that theory: the inheritance of acquired char ism known as the "eclipse of Darwinism."5 acteristics. A key to this mechanism was the The fantastic quality of these stories uniquely role individual effort, responding to environ expresses the cultural logic of Lamarckism, mental pressures, played in shaping heritable which played a crucial role in late Victorian traits, both instinctual and morphological. imperial mythmaking about human and Eu Lamarck writes: ropean evolutionary centrality. Lamarckian logic provided ideal underpinnings for nar The bird which is drawn to the water by its ratives of individual development because it need of finding there the prey on which it This content downloaded from 223.190.116.94 on Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:50:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy PMLA lives, separates the digits of its Lamarckians feet in try like Samuel Butler and Alpheus ing to strike the water and move Packard, about partly on in reaction to Weismann's the surface. The skin which unites perceived these dogmatism, dig sought to relegate its at their base acquires the habit natural of selection being to subsidiary status in the stretched by these continually evolutionaryrepeated sepa process (Bowler, Eclipse, esp. rations of the digits; thus in course of time 59). By the 1890s the interest in Lamarckian there are formed large webs which unite the ideas was so strong that Herbert Spencer, En digits of ducks, geese, etc. (119) gland's most prominent Lamarckian thinker, Even after Darwin articulated the more rigor could argue in "The Inadequacy of Natural Selection" that "either there has been inheri ous theory of natural selection in The Origin of Species (1859), the inheritance of acquired tance of acquired characteristics, or there characteristics remained, in principle, a viable has been no evolution" (346). Although most evolutionary mechanism. Although Origin neo-Lamarckians spoke admiringly of Dar solved many problems central to a nascent win,sci many worked to establish Lamarck as ence of species change, it also raised questions the true progenitor of modern evolutionary Darwin could not answer. Nature might science, "se as the provocative titles of Theodor lect" one advantageous variation over another, Eimer's The Origin of Species by Means of In but what caused variations to arise in the first heritance of Acquired Characteristics (1888) place? With characteristic modesty, Darwin and Packard's Lamarck: The Founder of Evo acknowledges the problem: "our ignorance lution of (1901) testify. Indeed, Packard's book the laws of variation is profound. Not in engages one in optative fantasies of an alternative case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign course of Victorian intellectual history: any reason why this or that part has varied" [H]ad [Lamarck's] way of looking at this sub (155). These conceptual gaps opened space ject prevailed, how much misunderstanding for Lamarckian explanations to take root. To and ill-feeling between theologians and sa some nineteenth-century biologists like Ernst vants would have been avoided! Had his spirit Elaeckel, the inheritance of acquired charac and breadth of view animated both parties, teristics served as a necessary companion to there would not have been the constant and natural selection, and his Generelle Morpholo needless opposition on the part of the Church gie (1866) sought to establish a working alli to the grand results of scientific discovery and ance between the paradigms.