A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History 9780674937369, 0674937368

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
PREFACE (page xi)
1 The Killer Ape (page 1)
2 The Rich Smell of Meat and Wickedness (page 15)
3 Virgin Huntresses and Bleeding Feasts (page 28)
4 The White Stag (page 52)
5 The Sobbing Deer (page 76)
6 The Noise of Breaking Machinery (page 92)
7 The Sorrows of Eohippus (page 112)
8 The Sick Animal (page 134)
9 The Bambi Syndrome (page 161)
10 The Fatal Disease of Nature (page 189)
11 The Spirit of the Beast (page 211)
12 View to a Death in the Morning (page 225)
NOTES (page 247)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (page 289)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (page 321)
INDEX (page 323)

Citation preview

A View to a Death in the Morning

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Copyright © 1993 by Matt Cartmill , , All rights reserved , Printed in the United States of America Second printing, 1996

Credits and copyright notices appear at the back of the book.

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1996 | Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cartmill, Matt. A view to a death in the morning : hunting and nature through

history / Matt Cartmill. : | p., Includes cm. bibliographical references (p. _) and index. :

ISBN 0-674-93736-8 (pbk.) :

ISBN 0-674-93735-X (cloth)

1, Nature—cultural conceptions. 2. Hunting—History. 3. Human-animal relationships. 4. Animals—Symbolic aspects.

5. Hunting stories. I. Title.

304.5—-dcz0 92-44960 , CIP — : Designed by Gwen Frankfeldt GN388.C37 = 1993

FOR KAYE © with love and thanks

BLANK PAGE

CONTENTS S-

| PREFACE XI a | 1 The Killer Ape 1

2 The Rich Smell of Meat and Wickedness 15 5 Virgin Huntresses and Bleeding Fi vats 28

4 The White Stag 52 5 The Sobbing Deer 76

6 The Nowe of Breaking Machinery 92 :

7 The Sorrows of Eohippus 112 |

8 The Sick Animal 134 | | 9 The Bambi Syndrome 161

10 A Fatal Dusease of Nature 189

The Spirit of the Beast 211 12 A View to a Death tn the Morning 225 |

NOTES 24700 ss BIBLIOGRAPHY 289

INDEX 328 -

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 321

Tllustrations The fossil skull of the infant Australopithecus from Taung 3

Adam and Eve, by Albrecht Diirer 39 |

_ The Celtic stag-god Cernunnos 54 | St. Giles embracing a hunted doe 57 | | Fewmets for Queen Elizabeth 63 |

The Diane @Anet 73 — |

Head of a Stag, by Albrecht Diirer 81 a The Progress of Cruelty, Stage 1, by William Hogarth _ tos

The Progress of Cruelty, Stage 2, by William Hogarth 106

| Dart’s picture of Australopithecus m | The Wanderer above the Mists by Caspar David Friedrich 1: | Tyger Attacking a Wild H orse, by Eugene Delacroix 18

The End of the Chase, by Gustave Courbet 137 | A Random Shot, by Sir Edwin Landseer 140

Cartoon of the nature-fakers controversy _ 155 |

Hugh Harman’s Peace on Earth 172 a Bambr’s mother meets President Bush 183

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Preface | THIS BOOK is about the connections that various people have tried to draw between hunting and being human. It deals above all with the hunting hypothesis of human origins, which is the story of how some

apes became human when they took up weapons and began to kill. The killer-ape story has roots in older tales, and so this book is in part a literary history. But it is also a book about science, because scientists have been the chief tellers of that story. I have begun my history near its end, by tracing the rise and ascendancy of the hunting hypothesis in anthropological thought after the

end of World War II. In Chapter 2, I describe the collapse of the hypothesis during the 1970s and ask why such a flimsy story with such unpalatable implications was accepted for so long by thoughtful scientists. Some critics argue that the vision of Homo sapiens as a lunatic killer ape attracts those who seek to excuse war, violence, and cruelty as inherent in human nature. But that argument cannot apply to the early versions of the hunting hypothesis, which contain some of the most vitriolic denunciations of these evils ever written. What, then, do we get out of seeing ourselves as sick, disordered animals—and — | why should anyone think that the origins of our sickness are somehow

tied to hunting? | | | |

The central part of the book tries to answer these questions. In Chapter 3 (“Virgin Huntresses and Bleeding Feasts”), I show that hunting has been likened to warfare throughout the history of Euro- | pean thought. In ancient Greek myth and literature, the hunt was — usually regarded as a just war, a triumph of the humane and rational

yam Preface over the bestial and irrational; but throughout the Christian era,

hunting has been viewed in an increasingly unfavorable light. | Chapter 4. (“The White Stag”) tells how the meaning of hunting began _ to change in the later Middle Ages, when the hunt became an exclusive

| privilege of the aristocracy, the wild forest came to be seen as a lovely | place, and the hunter’s quarry took on an air of tragedy, nobility, and

_ mystery. Chapter 5 (“The Sobbing Deer”) describes the emergence of

, the hunt as a symbol of tyranny and an object of moral indignation — in the Renaissance. | From the seventeenth century on, the growth of antihunting sentiment has been linked in various ways to the growth of science. In Chapter 6 (“The Noise of Breaking Machinery”), I show how science itself has called into question the moral foundations of man’s dominion over nature by blurring the boundary between people and beasts. The Romantic reaction against science, described in Chapter 7 (“The Sorrows of Eohippus”), has taught us to think of nature as a sacred realm

opposed to the spreading pollution of technology. Conversely, the opposing, Darwinian view of nature as a struggle for existence is often

cited as a justification for hunting. In the Victorian era, Darwinism was also widely invoked to justify imperialism and laissez-faire cap1-

talism. In Chapter 8 (“The Sick Animal”), I show that big-game _ hunting was embraced by European colonialists as a symbol of human dominion over the lower orders, and attacked as cruel and oppressive

by opponents of imperialism. Chapter 9 (“The Bambi Syndrome”) describes how fear of war, Romantic reverence for nature, Freudian pessimism about man’s future, and the symbolic values we attach to deer entered into the making of the most influential piece of antihunting propaganda ever produced. In Chapter 10 (“A Fatal Disease of Nature”), I return to the scientific versions of the hunting hypothesis and show that essentially the same

stories that scientists embraced warmly in 1960 were coldly ignored when others proposed them in 1920. Part of this difference was due to the triumph of neo-Darwinism in the 1930s and the recovery of new fossils in the 1940s; but I argue that much of it reflects underlying cultural and historical changes, including the collapse of Nazi Germany

and the European empires, the postwar rise of ecological conscious- | ness, and the fears of scientific technology spawned by the atom bomb Xil

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, Sp | a annpms A Po _A yahoo-like portrayal of Australopithecus from Dart and Craig (1959). In this

depiction, the killer apes are female. , | ing chapters, which he thought “filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.””3 In painting Yahoos, sniffed Orrery, Swift “becomes one himself.”’* And yet, as Sheridan pointed out long ago,” Swift’s depiction of the Yahoos is a logical consequence of three highly

orthodox beliefs: that reason distinguishes people from brutes, that reason is a godlike faculty that ennobles our animal nature, and that people are nevertheless more wicked than the beasts. If all this is true,

then our purely animal nature must be uniquely debased—or else adding reason to it would leave us better, not worse, than the other , | animals. And if our animal nature is uniquely debased, then Swift’s degrading portrait of the Yahoos follows as a corollary. The Yahoo is

_ what is left of man when reason is subtracted. It is no coincidence that Swift’s picture of our animal nature is strikingly reminiscent of _ Dart’s picture of Australopithecus. It is also no coincidence that the __ Yahoos feed chiefly on the flesh of asses, dogs, and cows, while the

Houyhnhnms live chastely on hay, oats, and milk.” |

| | | III

| SEVEN —rr The Sorrows of Eobippus “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes solemnly __

| as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this , circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthink-

able.” |

—Arthur Conan Doyle

By THE latter part of the eighteenth century, many European intellec-

tuals were getting tired of hearing that they were only animals, and not very nice animals at that. “It really seems,” fumed Johann Gottfried von Herder in 1774, “as though all the great geniuses of our century— Helvetius, Rousseau, Voltaire, Buffon, Maupertuis—have been trying

each in his own way to vilify the human race.”! From the mid-1700s on, young French and German intellectuals began increasingly to rebel against the materialism and empiricism of the Enlightenment. Their

protests marked the onset of the Romantic movement. , The Romantic rebellion took different forms in different countries,

and it was always more of a style than a real philosophy; but there | were some distinctive ideas that many Romantics shared. They added —

up to a sort of inversion of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment prized clarity; the Romantics craved mystery and mists and shadows. The Enlightenment extolled reason; the Romantics praised feelings, and the stronger the better. (“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,” proclaimed William Blake. “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.”?)

Romantics also tended to be philosophical idealists, who saw the

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}to‘ms with the nati :ic] uderne |zation 5 hunts oe e€ native | Do a ee satis . ? kes white civil , e Great Whit iS Dasic ) CIVIite Hunter 1aneeds forxac food aAnehign oe ite riunter 1s e oo : , |man wear! , an Ccom wearing ac | ly the opposi eee| ,, aring conspi pposite: og oO! picuou cc. ite: an upper-cla

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ophies. For the Romantic h Nn toglory, for thril . an : h ; omantic hunte Is, mS 18 an ac | ter, e Man in i >) id os aoe an act of lovin 1 in th Leolelen Darwin oe } AMUNION with a ckskin Suit, th reve unter, ve thesupert Man re.rteelmet, imperial a1| | 7 a petits it Dot 2riormover tl iS an . ,| | oth concept > e natives 4 | no tm acets | in ropean m > ‘ | al| oe fauna. i ,man y expressions th relationshi | - a ture of the late nine found»

am The Sick Animal | | early twentieth centuries. In English-speaking countries, the stern Darwinian vision of a world ruled by the law of the jungle and lorded

over by the white man was celebrated in the paintings of Winslow Homer and set forth in the bestselling books of Rudyard Kipling and Jack London. Great White Hunters like Jim Corbett and Teddy Roosevelt were idolized by the young boys who devoured their tales of wilderness adventure. But the tender-minded Romantic view of animals and nature seized the public’s fancy as well, and probably had an even bigger impact on the popular imagination. It pervades so many works of nineteenth-century art and literature that hard-nosed critics have complained ever since about “the sentimentality and anthropo-

morphism of Victorian animal lovers.”” There was nothing new or distinctive about anthropomorphism as such. Dressed-up talking animals had for millennia been used to caricature people or satirize institutions, and eighteenth-century children’s authors had written talking-animal stories to discourage cruelty to animals. But before the nineteenth century, realistic animals had rarely been featured as view-

point characters in serious art and writing. | This tendency began to be visible in art galleries in the early 1800s. Animal genre painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had generally celebrated animals as possessions, memorializing the expensive livestock and the hunting exploits of the rural gentry who

bought the artists’ works. But in the nineteenth century, animal painting began to celebrate the animals themselves as subjects, in a psychological as well as an artistic sense, and famous animal painters like Courbet, Bonheur, and Landseer vied with each other to capture

the souls of beasts in their canvases. ,

It was generally acknowledged that Sir Edwin Landseer, Queen Victoria’s favorite artist, painted animals more expressively than any-

one else. “He penetrates the secret of these dark brains, he knows what makes these unconscious little hearts beat, and reads in these dreamy eyes the faint astonishment produced there by the spectacle of things,” exclaimed Théophile Gautier. “He is on intimate terms with beasts: the dog, giving him a shake of the paw like a comrade, tells him the news of the kennel [and] the stag, which like a woman has the gift of tears, comes to weep on his breast over the cruelty of man.”? The critic John Canaday summed up Landseer’s oeuvre less 138

| The Sick Animal | 1870s attest to the impact of Landseer’s images:

| On one wall was an engraving of Rosa Bonheur’s rearing horses .. . On the opposite wall was an engraving of Landseer’s “Stag at Bay.” We stood and stared at him in awe. Our other heroes, Crusoe and Christian,

| and still more of course Gulliver, in spite of all the adventures they had, were somehow at heart pretty humdrum. That stag was quite different. _

He was tragic and male and magnificent.!? | ,

Earlier hunting art had mainly provided artists with a pretext for painting still life of dead game or portraits of rich patrons on horse- | back. But in the hunting scenes painted by Landseer and other nine- | teenth-century animal painters, the focus shifted to the suffering of _ the quarry: writhing otters impaled on spears, exhausted foxes scream-

ing in terror at the advancing hunt, and red deer by the metric ton, tragic and male and magnificent, confronting death with their pointed faces frozen in masks of noble agony.!? Although Courbet, Bonheur, and Landseer were themselves enthusiastic hunters, at least some of these paintings were clearly intended to stir feelings of pity and indig-

, 139

in Scotland: |

nation at the things hunters do. In a letter written to Lord Ellesmere | in 1837, Landseer expressed his own mixed feelings about deer hunting.

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