Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 147) 1009409956, 9781009409957

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BIOPOLIT ICS AN D ANIMAL SPECIE S IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AN D SC I E N C E

Principles of species taxonomy were contested ground throughout the nineteenth century, including those governing the classification of humans. Matthew Rowlinson shows that taxonomy was a literary and cultural project as much as a scientific one. His investigation explores animal species in Romantic writers including Gilbert White and John Keats, taxonomies in Victorian lyrics and the nonsense botanies and alphabets of Edward Lear, and species, race, and other forms of aggregated life in Charles Darwin’s writing, showing how the latter views these as shaped by unconscious agency. Engaging with theoretical debates at the intersection of animal studies and psychoanalysis, and covering a wide range of science writing, poetry, and prose fiction, this study shows the political and psychic stakes of questions about species identity and management. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details. matthew rowlinson is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Real Money and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Tennyson’s Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry (1994). His edition of Tennyson’s In Memoriam was published in 2014.

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cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture FOUNDING EDITORS Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley GENERAL EDITORS Kate Flint, University of Southern California Clare Pettitt, University of Cambridge Editorial Board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Ali Behdad, University of California, Los Angeles Alison Chapman, University of Victoria Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London Josephine McDonagh, University of Chicago Elizabeth Miller, University of California, Davis Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia Mark Turner, King’s College London Nineteenth-century literature and culture have proved a rich field for interdisciplinary studies. Since 1994, books in this series have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, gender and sexuality, race, social organisation, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. Many of our books are now classics in a field which since the series’ inception has seen powerful engagements with Marxism, feminism, visual studies, post-colonialism, critical race studies, new historicism, new formalism, transnationalism, queer studies, human rights and liberalism, disability studies and global studies. Theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts continue to unsettle scholarship on the nineteenth century in productive ways. New work on the body and the senses, the environment and climate, race and the decolonisation of literary studies, biopolitics and materiality, the animal and the human, the local and the global, politics and form, queerness and gender identities, and intersectional theory is re-animating the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of nineteenth-century literary studies, connecting the field with the urgent critical questions that are being asked today. We seek to publish work from a diverse range of authors, and stand for anti-racism, anti-colonialism and against discrimination in all forms. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

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BIOPOLITICS AND ANIMAL SPECIES IN NINETEENTHCENTURY LITERATURE AND SCIENCE MATTHEW ROWLINSON University of Western Ontario

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009409957 doi: 10.1017/9781009409940 © Matthew Rowlinson 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Rowlinson, Matthew, 1956– author. title: Biopolitics and animal species in nineteenth century literature and science / Matthew Rowlinson. description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2024. | Series: Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2023041845 | isbn 9781009409957 (hardback) | isbn 9781009409919 (paperback) | isbn 9781009409940 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. | Animal species – Research – History. | Animals in literature. | Animals – Classification – History. | Biopolitics in literature. | Biopolitics – Great Britain – History – 19th century. | Romanticism – Great Britain. | Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882 – Influence. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. classification: lcc pr468.a56 r69 2024 | ddc 820.9/36209034–dc23/eng/20231116 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041845 isbn 978-1-009-40995-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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To the memory of Elizabeth and Hugh, my mother and father

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[T]he unknown of a science is not what empiricist ideology thinks: its “residue,” what it leaves out, what it cannot conceive or resolve; but par excellence what it contains that is fragile despite its apparently unquestionable “obviousness,” certain silences in its discourse, certain conceptual omissions and lapses in its rigor, in brief, everything in it that “sounds hollow” to an attentive ear, despite its fullness. –Louis Althusser, Reading “Capital”

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Contents

List of Figures Preface and Acknowledgements Note on Citations

page ix xi xvi 1

Introduction: Method and Field part i species, lyric, and onomatopoeia 1

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Species Lyric

2 “How Can You Talk with a Person If They Always Say the Same Thing?” Species Poetics, Onomatopoeia, and Birdsong

24

3 Onomatopoeia, Nonsense, and Naming: Species Poetics after Darwin’s Origin

46

part ii how did darwin invent the symptom? 4 Darwin’s Unconscious: History, the Work of the Negative, and Natural Selection

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5 Foreign Bodies: The Human Species and Its Symptom

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part iii societies of blood 6 “Whose Blood Is It?” Economies of Blood in Mid-Victorian Poetry and Medicine

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7 The Totem and the Vampire: Species Identity in Anthropology, Literature, and Psychoanalysis 150 Notes Works Cited Index

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180 215 228

Figures

1 Christina Rossetti, “A city plum is not a plum,” with page 51 wood engraving after Arthur Hughes. From Sing-Song (1872). Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University 2 Edward Lear, “There was an Old Man of Whitehaven” (1861) 53 3 Edward Lear, “Manypeeplia Upsidownia” (1871) 56 4 Lithograph from Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species 81 (1859). Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University 5 Photograph from Guillaume B. Duchenne de Boulogne, 102 Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse ÉlectroPhysiologique de l’Expression des Passions. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France 6 Photograph from Guillaume B. Duchenne de Boulogne, 103 Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse ÉlectroPhysiologique de l’Expression des Passions. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France 7 “Terror, from a photograph by Dr. Duchenne,” engraving 103 from Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University 8 “Men simulating indignation,” photograph from Charles 104 Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University 9 From James Blundell, “Observations on the Transfusion 123 of Blood, with a Description of his Gravitator,” Lancet (1828–9), part 2, 321. Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University 10 From J. H. Aveling, “On Immediate Transfusion,” 123 Transactions of the Obstetrical Society of London, 6 (1864): 134. Courtesy Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University ix

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Preface and Acknowledgements

This book is about a cluster of problems in human–animal relations in the nineteenth century. It belongs to the field of literary animal studies, both because in it I presume that the techniques of literary analysis can produce historical understanding, and because, as Jacques Derrida wrote, poetry has a special privilege in thinking about animals.1 The first part of the book concerns poetry about non-human animals that intervenes in the age-old debate on their capacity to speak. There is an immense literature of speaking animals; my topic is a contrasting tradition that deprives them of speech and makes poetic onomatopoeia a medium for their extralinguistic utterance. In the nineteenth century, in a turn of events that is one of the book’s points of departure, this poetic technique was appropriated for science, and onomatopoeic renderings, or “spellings,” of their songs became a tool with which naturalists could assign birds heard in the wild to their proper species.2 The writings I will study here have as context the decentering of the species concept over two centuries of history.3 Europeans’ expeditions of exploration and conquest introduced them to new types of flora and fauna worldwide. The seventeenth-century development of microscopy revealed the existence of new types of life on hitherto unsuspected spatial scales; in the late eighteenth century, discoveries in geology enlarged life’s extension on the scale of time and began to establish the regular extinction of previous forms and the serial appearance of new ones. A result of these developments was the Linnaean taxonomical revolution of the eighteenth century, and ensuing debates about the nature of species, including discussion by the Comte de Buffon and Lord Monboddo of the relation between human and non-human animal species. In the same period, species became more plastic. Speculation on species transmutation was frequent in the natural philosophy of late eighteenthcentury Germany; Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus also believed in the mutability of species. More centrally for the purposes of this book, xi

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eighteenth-century animal breeders like Robert Bakewell developed techniques of herd management and record-keeping that enabled them to modify species in type more quickly and predictably than had hitherto been possible. In the field of political economy, Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, viewed species populations as modifiable in number by influences coming to bear on their rates of reproduction and mortality. Darwin acknowledged scientific breeding and Malthusian political economy as major influences on his work; more generally, they established the basis for a nineteenth-century understanding of species as biological populations with sex and death as basic influences on the species body’s number and type. Biopolitics and Animal Species does not undertake a comprehensive view of either of its topics, certainly not of biopolitics, the emergence of living populations as targets of power, which Michel Foucault viewed as “one of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century.”4 A comprehensive history of the species concept from Linnaeus and Buffon to Darwin is a book I wished for while I was thinking about this one, but it isn’t what I have written, and indeed I have come to the conclusion that no such history is possible. In something like Karl Marx’s sense, the concept has no history because it is ideological; it has no independent existence, and once it becomes unmoored from theology, it has no clear and determinate sense for anyone who uses it. Species nonetheless matter in the nineteenth century, as objects of desire and identification; as populations subject to improvement, protection, and extinction; and as subjects of scientific inquiry. In the absence of a stable referent, this book argues that the species concept becomes associated with symptomatic behaviour in those who use it, and indeed that species identity itself is held to depend on different kinds of automatic and unmotivated action. This argument will be pursued in three distinct fields. After an introductory chapter, Part I is on poetry about species: poems that use onomatopoeia as a technology for species identification and more generally poems in which species are given voice; nonsense poetry, which I will read as onomatopoeia’s antithesis, and which we will see also to be engaged in representing species. Part II consists of a close reading of the motifs of automatism and unconscious action in the writing of Charles Darwin. I will argue that Darwin is preoccupied with these topics because, while he never develops a systematic concept of species, species play an indispensable role in his theory as agents in natural selection and as the objects it works to improve; they are thus invested with different kinds of agency that cannot know

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itself as such. In Chapter 5, I argue that Darwin’s figures of unconscious and automatic agency had an important influence on Sigmund Freud, and, in an argument to be taken up in Part III, that the subject of Freudian psychoanalysis is shaped by a problematic in the species concept. Part III returns to literature, reading literary texts in conjunction with episodes from the history of medicine and from the new science of anthropology to consider how the nineteenth century embodied species, race, and kin groups in fantasized collective bodies having a shared circulation of blood. At its close, the book picks up a thread from Part II and returns to the links between Darwin and Freud, arguing that they shared the concept of a species body that unconsciously bears the traces of its own history, and thus both present their work as a lifting of repression, a bringing to consciousness of knowledge that already has an unofficial existence in poetry, figures of speech, and animal lore. The book’s three parts can be read separately, and to some extent intervene in different fields, including nineteenth-century poetry and poetics, Darwin studies, and the history of medicine. They originated, moreover, as occasional papers on three different topics: poetic onomatopoeia, Darwin and the Freudian symptom, and economies of blood. As I accumulated archives in each of these fields, it struck me that they were all related to the topic of biological species, and this book began to take shape. My principal hope for it is that the readings of literary and scientific texts it contains will add to our understanding of the nineteenth century. Among the audiences I hope for are readers and teachers of poems about animals, readers and teachers of Darwin, of late Victorian anthropology, and of the extensive late Victorian literature about the shedding, sharing, and circulation of blood. Beyond whatever contribution it makes in the individual readings, the book as a whole also mounts an implicit argument for the value of symptomatic reading as a tool for understanding discourses, like the nineteenth-century discourse of species, that appear in the ruins of theology. As this narrative implies, Biopolitics and Animal Species has been a project with a long gestation, and I have had much help in researching it and in thinking about the problems it takes up. My principal resources in doing the archival work the book includes, especially on the histories of bloodletting and blood transfusion and on the Edinburgh bloodletting controversy, were the Wellcome Library and the British Library. I have relied throughout on the resources of the D. B. Weldon and Allyn and Betty Taylor Libraries at Western University, especially on the remarkable Hannah Collection in the History of Science and Medicine. My sincere

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thanks to all these institutions, and to the many librarians who over the years have assisted me. I also must thank Western University for research funding and for sabbatical release over the years, and above all for the colleagues and students with whom it has been my privilege to work for more than twenty years in the Department of English and Writing Studies and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. In particular, I was first led to think about Darwin and Walter Scott by an invitation to participate in a conference at Western on “Romanticism and Evolution,” organized by Joel Faflak, Josh Lambier, Chris Bundock, and Naqaa Abbas in 2011; my thanks to them, and especially to Joel, who edited the conference proceedings, in which appeared a version of Chapter 4, alongside the work of eminent Darwinians whose work as presented at the conference had a profound influence on my thinking going forward. Also at Western, I would like to thank the other members of the Animal Studies Research Group, especially the convenors Stuart Cheyne and Raj Banerjee and my colleague Josh Schuster, with whom I have had the privilege of exploring the developing field of animal studies. Outside Western, I have benefitted from presenting parts of this work in talks; I should note at least two sessions at different meetings of the North American Victorian Studies Association, where I was grateful for conversations with Meredith Martin and Julia Saville, among many others. Alan Bewell and Terry Robertson arranged a visit to the University of Toronto Nineteenth-Century Studies group (WINCS), with Alan in particular offering detailed responses to a version of material here in Part III. Later on, mid-pandemic, Elaine Freedgood arranged an online talk through New York University; Elaine and others including Marjorie Levinson gave valuable responses to some early-stage writing at a moment when I, like everyone, was feeling particularly isolated. At the close of these acknowledgements, I will mention print publications of different versions of material that has now found its way into this book. Each publication was peer-reviewed, largely by readers who were not identified to me, but to whom I am nonetheless grateful. Charles Rezpka, then the editor of Studies in Romanticism, gave a highly clarifying response to a version of Chapter 2 before it appeared in that journal, much improved by his intervention. I continued to appreciate Chuck’s help as I revised it for this volume. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Bethany Thomas and the editorial team at Cambridge, to the anonymous readers for the Press, and to the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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series editors, for bearing with this work through a protracted development process. Above all, my thanks to friends with whom I have been discussing the ideas in this book for years. Peter Stallybrass pointed me towards Edward Lear’s nonsense botanies, and also tracked down details of the family history of Sarah Waring, author of Minstrelsy of the Woods, to be discussed in Chapter 1. Carla Freccero has been my friend, teacher, and comrade now for forty years; part of this work premiered at a Modern Language Association panel we co-organized, where I met Nicole Shukin. Sharon Sliwinski has generously read parts of this book and has discussed Freud, animals, and many other topics with me here at Western. Above all, thanks to Sasha Torres, from whom, along with much else, I have learned everything there is in this book about sheep. A version of Chapter 5 was published as “Foreign Bodies: How Did Darwin Invent the Symptom?” in Victorian Studies, 52.4 (2010): 535–59. A version of Chapter 4 appeared as “Darwin’s Ideas” in Marking Time: Evolution and Romanticism, ed. Joel Faflak (University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 68–91. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared as “Onomatopoeia, Interiority, and Incorporation” in Studies in Romanticism 57 (2018): 429–5. Copyright © 2018 Trustees of Boston University. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Part of Chapter 1 appeared as “Towards a Theory of Species-Lyric: Darwin, Swinburne, Biopolitics” in Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 30 (Spring 2021): 52–62. I am grateful to Indiana University Press, the University of Toronto Press, and the Johns Hopkins University Press, and to the editors of these journals for permission to reprint.

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Note on Citations

Citations are given in endnotes as prescribed by the Chicago Manual of Style, seventeenth edition, except that references to the following editions will appear parenthetically in the body of the text. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Poems. Edited by William Keach. London: Penguin, 1997. Darwin, Charles. Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries. Edited by Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sidney Smith. London; Ithaca, NY: British Museum of Natural History; Cornell University Press, 1987. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 1879. Edited by Adrian Desmond and James R. Moore. London: Penguin, 2004. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 1872. Edited by Paul Ekman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. On the Origin of Species. Edited by Gillian Beer. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey et al. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. Hardy, Thomas. The Variorum Edition of the Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy. Edited by James Gibson. London: Macmillan, 1976. Keats, John. The Poems of John Keats. Edited by Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Lear, Edward. The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse. Edited by Vivien Noakes. London: Penguin, 2002. Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings. Edited by Robert Mayhew. London: Penguin, 2015.

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Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems. Edited by R. W. Crump with notes by Betty S. Flowers. London: Penguin, 2001. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Edited by Glennis Byron. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1998. Tennyson, Alfred. The Poems of Tennyson. Edited by Christopher Ricks. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

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introduction

Method and Field

The studies that follow rely on historical claims made by the historian Michel Foucault in the last decade of his work, though their method is not Foucauldian, nor are their principal arguments about history. In his late lectures on biopolitics, Foucault describes the two-century-long replacement of a politics of sovereignty – where the sovereign’s power is quintessentially the power to kill – by political technology focused on life – where life itself becomes the object that power aims to know and control. In this account, Foucault specifies the nineteenth century as the period when biopower shifts its point of application from the individual body to the population or species. This book shows that the new political salience of biological species put the species concept into crisis. Treating the species concept as a problematic rather than as a statistical aggregate, it proposes a series of symptomatic readings of the concept at work, preponderantly in English poems, but also in fiction and texts from anthropology and natural history, especially the writing of Charles Darwin, and in certain episodes in the history of medicine. In these readings, I take up Nicole Shukin’s call to extend Foucault’s treatment of biopolitics to encompass the lives of non-human animals; I follow scholarship in the field of animal studies more broadly in arguing that it is in relation to other animals that human beings recognize themselves as such.1 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida proposed that thinking about the animal (la pensée de l’animal) derives from poetry, and in Part I, this book will consider the constitution of animal species as a poetic undertaking.2 Finally, while it engages in symptomatic reading as a practice, the book also in part resembles an animal chasing its own tail, in that it makes a secondary argument for the biopolitical ground of key psychoanalytic concepts, including those of the unconscious and of the symptom broadly defined. In lectures from 1975 to 197 published under the title Society Must Be Defended, Foucault distinguishes between the discipline of individual bodies, 1

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which for him characterized the biopolitics of the eighteenth century, and a new technology of power of which “the theory of right and disciplinary practice knew nothing.” This technology bears on “the population as political problem, . . . as a biological problem and as power’s problem.”3 This “seizure of power” in the late eighteenth century “is directed not at man-asbody but at man-as-species.” Addressed not to the individual but to the population, this biopolitics includes among its “objects of knowledge and the targets it seeks to control” processes such as “the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on.”4 From the late eighteenth century, species and populations emerge as actors on the stage of history; in Britain their centrality to the emergent discipline of political economy is established in Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. From Malthus on, life and death cease to be effects of chance or acts of God, but become facts in the field of political economy, amenable to political management, and determining in their turn other fundamental facts of social life such as the wage rate and the price of staple foods.5 Though little of my concern in what follows will be with political economy, I will come back to Malthus near the end of this book as part of an argument that Sigmund Freud’s concept of the death drive is grounded in thinking about the collective life of populations. Besides his claim about the nineteenth-century emergence of the population as biopower’s target, a second strand of Foucault’s argument also orients the studies to follow. It arises from the question, “what becomes of the sovereign’s right to kill under the new dispensation of biopower?” Foucault’s answer is that under biopower, the monopoly of death loses its juridical function, and that what had indeed always been the logic of war is internalized and made central to the modern state. The hinge on which this transformation turns is that of racism, which is actually Foucault’s central topic in the entire series of 1975–6 lectures. In a remarkable passage, he personifies the species subject, asserting its inextricable relation to racism and eugenics: [R]acism does make the relationship of war – “If you want to live, the other must die” – function in a way that is completely new and . . . quite compatible with the exercise of biopower . . . [R]acism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biologicaltype relationship: “The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I – as species rather than individual – can live.”6

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As the Foucauldian philosopher Roberto Esposito writes, every biopolitics is also a thanatopolitics.7 For Foucault and Esposito and for those who have built on their work, the nineteenth-century emergence of the species as biopower’s primary object gives a framework for study of the pseudosciences of racial difference and degeneration and of the discourse and practice of eugenics. For Foucault – and for Esposito and Giorgio Agamben among others – the claim that modern state power has the living population as its primary object is historically consequential above all because it provides a framework for understanding fascism and the Holocaust. For all of these writers, from the moment that biopower takes the population as its object, it is implicitly genocidal. The genocidal tendency in nineteenth-century technologies of power and knowledge will not directly be my concern until we come to consider human populations in the last part of the book. Nevertheless, Foucault theorizes biopower as inscribing racist taxonomies in the mechanisms of the modern state in terms that form part of the context for everything that follows: What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races . . . : all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is . . . a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain.8

Foucault’s work has a bitter timeliness in the pandemic times in which I write, which have accelerated the politicization of biological life he described and made the marking of differences – of age, ability, economic productivity – within biological populations into a political and cultural obsession. In the earlier lectures of his 1975–6 course, Foucault traces the biological racism of the nineteenth century to what he represents as the seventeenthcentury beginning of the discourse on race in the West. His large claims about race in European history are beyond my scope here; it is a weakness, though, that his treatment deals almost exclusively with events within Europe and includes no accounting for wars of extermination carried out by Europeans against Indigenous populations on five other continents, or for the enslavement and forced transportation to the New World of more than twelve million Africans. The Eurocentrism of Foucault’s writing on

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race is replicated when it is developed by Agamben and Esposito; Alexander Weheliye pointedly asks how would “Foucault’s and Agamben’s theories of modern violence differ if they took the Middle Passage as their point of departure rather than remaining entrapped within the historiographical cum philosophical precincts of fortress Europe?”9 Given its Eurocentrism, it is no surprise that Foucault’s work on race has rarely been taken up in current critical race studies.10 Besides Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus, the major exception has been in the writing of Achille Mbembe, whose “Necropolitics” supplements Foucault’s history of biopolitics with a topography of necropolitics. Necropolitics subjugates life to death; it appears outside the nation state, in the plantation, the colony, or in siege states like contemporary Gaza, as well as in such internally excluded spaces as the concentration camp.11 Located in the field of literary animal studies, this book does not directly contribute to our developing understanding of the history of race and racism; nonetheless, I write in response to current calls for an animal studies engaged with anti-racism.12 As the texts to be discussed here think about the species category in the context of animal life, they repeatedly come back to race in humans. This is especially true in Darwin and his successors. All of Darwin’s work is haunted by race; while the figuration of species kinship as a shared circulation of blood to be studied in Chapter 6 was incorporated in racist discourse and indeed in legislation, especially in the United States; and the discourse of totemism I will take up in Chapter 7 projects onto Indigenous peoples in Australia and North America a post-Darwinian crisis in the species concept of anthropology itself. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson writes in her study of anti-black racism in the historical conceptualization of human beings as a biological species, “the categories of ‘race’ and ‘species’ have coevolved, and are actually mutually reinforcing.”13 Jackson goes on to mount a critique of work in animal studies which views the human–animal binary as foundational for discourses of difference among humans, including those on race. This version of animal studies advocates “on behalf” of animals “without questioning how advocates are constituting themselves in the process.”14 In this book, I take as my point of departure not the supposed difference between humans and other animals, but the fissured and internally differentiated concept of species itself, as applied to life on both sides of the human–animal divide. I have found Foucault indispensable to this project, notwithstanding the Eurocentrism of his work and the lack of attention to non-human animals that Shukin has noted.15 Foucault’s definition of biopower as making life in fact makes most sense to me as a characterization of human power over animals. This book is

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largely about how human agency makes species; most of its work is done with texts, and making species is certainly in part something we do with words. But biopower as I understand it in this book is principally a force that shapes bodies and forms of life. Human culture is founded on the manufacture of new forms of plant and animal life, a practice that was rationalized in the eighteenth century by Robert Bakewell, who pioneered intensive selective breeding of farm animals, especially cattle and sheep.16 All domestic species have emerged in a dialectical relation with human agency, sometimes in the period of recorded history and sometimes prior to it. Like biopower as Foucault theorizes it, selective breeding introduces a chiasmus between what must live and what must die within the aggregated life that is its object. Here is Donna Haraway writing about a breeder of Great Pyrenees livestock dogs: Weisser emphasizes love of a kind of dog, of a breed, and talks about what needs to be done if people care about these dogs as a whole, and not just about their own dogs. Without wincing, she recommends killing an aggressive rescue dog or any dog who has bitten a child; doing so could mean saving the reputation of the breed and the lives of other dogs, not to mention children.17

Biopower does not moreover only make species, breeds, and races. As Foucault says, it makes life, and at our historical moment, the link between the power to make life and the machinery of mass death is most inextricable and agonizing in the industrial farms where much of the world’s meat, egg, dairy, and fish production now takes place. In the nineteenth-century texts to be studied here, this development is not yet present, though it is intimated. In reading these texts, I will not be distinguishing in a systematic way between so-called wild and domesticated species; indeed, part of the aim of my reading of Darwin will be to show that this distinction is not rigorously sustainable. A bird to be treated in Chapter 1 provides the first of several different kinds of test case: the wood-grouse, or capercaillie, appears in an 1832 guide to woodland birds and their songs. Originally native to Scotland, the wood-grouse had become extinct there in in the late eighteenth century owing to hunting and loss of habitat. It was reintroduced from northern Europe after the Clearances had begun a process of rewilding, by landlords who wished to increase the rental value of their new estates by offering game-bird hunting. The attempted reintroduction began in the late 1820s, finally succeeding a decade later.18 Who is to say whether the resultant population is best viewed as wild or not? The fact of

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its existence – which is now once again under threat – surely belongs in the field of politics. Many of the works to be treated in this book, including Darwin’s Origin, are of notable aesthetic value. I will close by saying that I do not believe this value grants them special privilege as a communicative medium or a ground for sympathy between human and non-human animals.19 My own understanding of the relation between politicized life and the aesthetic in the nineteenth century, which in the broadest view is this book’s topic, is closer to that of John Keats in “To Autumn,” discussed in Chapter 2.20 For Keats, writing poetry about non-human living things resembles eating them, and his poem’s concerns with making live, letting die, speciation, food, and song are also my own in the studies that follow.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009409940.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

part i

Species, Lyric, and Onomatopoeia

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

chapter 1

Species Lyric

My focus in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 will be on lyric poetry, where in verse for children and elsewhere, species began to speak during the nineteenth century. As we will see, the stereotyping of animal utterances in onomatopoeias is an ancient poetic device which has always had the implication that animals of a single species share a single voice. As early as 1819, Keats’s “Ode” refers to the “self-same song” (65) of the nightingale that sounds the same in 1819 as it did to Ruth when she was a gleaner in Judea. Though the nightingale does not speak in the poem, nor is its song represented in an onomatopoeia, these lines endow it with a species identity defined by an unchanging voice. Later in the nineteenth century, at a crossing of poetic history and the history of science, onomatopoeia comes to be used as an aid to species identification, and a genre I will call species lyric emerges in which species are personified and endowed with speech to describe their own habits, diet, and appearance. A little-noticed work for children published anonymously in 1832 was as far as I know the first work in any genre to use onomatopoeia as an aid to species identification, and also enables us to establish the generic traits of species lyric. It was titled The Minstrelsy of the Woods, or Sketches and Songs Connected with the Natural History of . . . British and Foreign Birds.1 It is explicitly addressed to young readers, both in its dedication to the anonymous author’s “beloved young relatives” and in the introductory poem, “To my Brother’s Children.” The book’s introduction states its debt to Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds (1797–1804) and to Georges Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom (published in 1807 as Le Règne Animal). Bewick and Cuvier are indeed major sources for Minstrelsy’s descriptions of birds’ appearance and habit; it also draws from them fundamental principles of organization. The basic object of study in Minstrelsy, as in Bewick and Cuvier, is the species, and the work’s aim is to teach its readers to identify the species of birds they encounter in the wild. Its organization is thus modeled on that which Bewick made standard for field guides to this day, with the work divided 9

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into sections grouping birds by families, and, within these sections, a chapter devoted to each species. The family divisions used, however, are not the traditional ones found in Bewick, but the six orders of Cuvier’s classification. To the taxonomic markers of habit, plumage, and so forth that it adopts from Bewick and Cuvier, Minstrelsy adds phonetic transcriptions of bird calls. In some cases, these transcriptions are traditional, as when the cry of the tawny owl is described as “well imitated by the syllables tee-whit or toowhit, and the hollow shuddering kind of note too-whoo.”2 The book’s title points two ways; as well as a handbook on identifying birds by their song, it is also a miscellany of poetry about birds. While it includes long passages from other poets including James Thomson and Charlotte Smith, much of Minstrelsy’s poetry is original. Each of the birds it treats has a poem dedicated to it, in many of which the birds speak for themselves, with the syllabic transcription of their songs making a refrain. Thus, “The Song of the Wood-Grouse”:3 You must look for me On my mountain tree, Where the hardy pine uncultured grows, Where the foaming torrent wildly flows, There look for me, On my mountain tree, With my clarion note he-de-he-de-he.4

This lyric’s speaker is not exactly an individual grouse. Rather, the lyric subject in this poem is a species, and the landscape it represents is not a particular place but a species’ habitat, in which is set the syllabified call that typifies the species in the abstract. Formally, the lyric’s most striking feature, shared by other poems in the volume, is the split between the speech in which the wood-grouse describes itself and the incorporated call that it quotes as an onomatopoeia. This split between onomatopoeia and speech will recur in different forms throughout the studies that follow and will open fissures in the species concept itself. In this chapter and the next, we will observe a generic contrast between texts that endow animals with speech and texts that represent their calls by onomatopoeia. In reading Darwin, we will attend to a related problem in the representation of species when we trace the recurrent tension in his work between representations of species consciousness and of the automatic and involuntary behaviours in which species identity is embodied.

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Both the genres of animal onomatopoeia and that of species lyric flourished during the nineteenth century. We will return to onomatopoeia in Chapter 3; species lyric will be considered here as providing clearer examples of the emergence of biological species and populations in literary history as collective subjects. Species lyrics with a singular speaker personifying a species, as in Minstrelsy, are relatively rare. Poems in which the species speaks in chorus, though, become common enough during the century to be an object of parody. An example attributed to Thomas Hardy from 1912 can stand for many others. It was not published under his name, but appeared in The Book of Baby Birds, a work for children authored by his second wife, to characterize the yellowhammer: When, towards the summer’s close, Lanes are dry, And unclipt the hedgethorn rows, There we fly! While the harvest wagons pass With their load, Shedding corn upon the grass By the road. In a flock we follow them, On and on, Seize a wheat-ear by the stem And are gone. . . . With our funny little song, Thus you may Often see us flit along, (1–16; ellipses thus in the original) Day by day . . . .

As we will see, in poetry published under his own name, Hardy resists the idea that species are a form of collective life, as well as the use of onomatopoeia to give such lives voice. But here, writing anonymously in what by this time had become a conventional genre, especially in works for children, he adheres closely to the model Sarah Waring had established eighty years before. In this poem, the yellowhammer speaks as a species, describing its own habits, diet, habitat, and song as aids to recognition for young readers. Unlike Hardy, his contemporary Rudyard Kipling is committed throughout his work to representing and distinguishing what he takes to be species and racial types. In Part III, I will discuss the Lamarckian fables of the Just-So Stories (1902) and the species relations in The Jungle Book (1894). When in the latter text, Kipling writes a species lyric for monkeys,

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its major concern is to police the distinction between species, which it represents as threatened by interspecies envy and rivalry, and by the monkey species’ gift for mimicry: Here we go in flung festoon, Half way up to the jealous moon! Don’t you envy our pranceful bands? Don’t you wish you had extra hands? Wouldn’t you like it if your tails were – so – Curved in the shape of a Cupid’s bow? Now you’re angry, but – never mind, Brother, thy tail hangs down behind! ... . All the talk we ever have heard Uttered by bat or beast or bird – Hide or fin or scale or feather – Jabber it quickly and all together! Excellent! Wonderful! Once again! Now we are talking just like men. Let’s pretend we are . . . never mind, Brother, thy tail hangs down behind! This is the way of the Monkey-kind.5

As we will see in Part III, Kipling’s representation of the human boy Mowgli whose education is The Jungle Book’s subject defines him as a universal animal – one who can learn to speak with all the other animals in their own languages. The monkey appears in this lyric as a parody of the human – a mimic who can “talk just like men” by reproducing the sounds of all the other beasts and birds as “jabber.” In Chapter 2, we will discuss the suspicion of onomatopoeia as a form of mimicry that pervades nineteenth-century English poetry from the Romantics on; Kipling’s representation of monkeys in this species lyric belongs to this tendency. In the course of the nineteenth century, defining and policing species identity became a project inseparable from racial politics. The poetics of species lyric resemble and shade into those of lyrics that personify racial identities. This is the formal premise of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921). I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.6

Here, as in other poems I have listed, a first-person lyric subject personifies an identity that encompasses many individual lives. This aspect of Hughes’s project in this poem seems clear; we should not, however, take for granted that it will always be obvious when an individual lyric speaker embodies a species or racial identity. In the decade before he died in 1892, Alfred Tennyson wrote in a note to his 1850 poem In Memoriam that “‘I’ is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him.”7 Making In Memoriam a species lyric focuses or refocuses the poem’s explicit discussion of the improvement of the human “type” over the course of time in its epilogue; if the speaker personifies the human race, however, he does so from the standpoint of whiteness.8 In a late section, the poem imagines how in the time to come, the race will “Move upwards, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die” (118. 27–8). References to the ape and the tiger are frequently used in Victorian racist discourse to animalize racial others; in 1865, during the controversy occasioned by Governor Edward Eyre’s mass murders in Morant Bay, Jamaica, Tennyson himself (who subscribed to Eyre’s legal defence fund), intervened in a discussion of the events by repeating “n*****s are tigers, n*****s are tigers.”9 In the nineteenth century, the life of the species becomes inseparable from extinctionist discourse directed at presumptively competing species, and also at the racial other. As biological species and races become historical agents, then, they also become able to speak in lyric. By 1876, species lyric appears to have become recognizable enough as a poetic genre to be parodied. In Chapter 3, we will see how central jokes about natural history and taxonomy are to the nonsense of Edward Lear; in this context, it’s not surprising to find him writing a parody of species lyric. I will be arguing in particular that the nonsense words in Lear’s late verse are a kind of anti-onomatopoeia, as we

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see in “The Pelican Chorus,” where the pelicans describe their habitat, diet, and song: We live on the Nile. The Nile we love. By night we sleep on the cliffs above; By day we fish, and at eve we stand On long bare islands of yellow sand. And when the sun sinks slowly down ... . Wing to wing we dance around, – Stamping our feet with a flumpy sound, Opening our mouths as Pelicans ought, And this is the song we nightly snort; – Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee! We think no birds so happy as we! Plumskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill! We think so then and we thought so still!

(9–13, 17–24)

I will return to the antithetical relation between onomatopoeia and nonsense in Lear; in this stanza, he uses onomatopoeia, not as a means of recording the species’ characteristic song, but rather to register the “flumpy” sound of webbed feet on sand. The pelicans’ song itself, far from being onomatopoeic, is made of densely layered linguistic, rhetorical, and grammatical word games. The suspension of meaning in the song derives not from the primacy of sound, but from incoherence, paradox, and aporia in the process of signification. The pelicans’ utterance is not outside language, like a bird’s song, but rather belongs to too many languages: “Ploffskin” and “Ploshkin” sound like Russian, while “Pelican jee” includes a term of endearment from Hindustani. The irony of “We think no birds so happy as we” is not resolved by the poem’s story, which concerns the ambivalent feelings of the parent pelicans on the day of their daughter’s marriage to a crane. And rhetorical balance of the last line produces grammatical and logical perplexities that defy explication; Sara Lodge discovered that it parodies the Augustan style of a sentence in a 1770 speech by Lord Mansfield, which Lear knew from Lindley Murray’s English Reader.10 The pelican’s nightly song locates them not in a field guide, but in an anthology.

***

The emergence of biological species and populations onto the stage of history as collective subjects was a long process, dating back to the

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eighteenth century and the emergence of statistical demographics, of scientific breeding, and of Malthusian political economy. In this book, however, my discussion of the problematic of species will center on the work of Charles Darwin. I hope this move seems intuitive, given the fundamental importance of Darwin’s work to the nineteenth-century species concept. Though, even if the move to Darwin seems intuitive, it must be confessed that while his best-known book ostensibly has “species” as its topic, Darwin’s work in fact has surprisingly little to say about the concepts of species and population. In particular, Darwin overwhelmingly theorizes natural selection as operating on individual organisms. The same is true of sexual selection. In Darwin’s theory, individual traits that give an advantage in survival or reproduction tend to become dispersed in the population as a whole, but there is no mechanism by which a population as such can be subject to selection. In evolutionary theory in our own time, natural selection is understood having multiple levels of operation – possibly acting on the gene, the family, and the entire population or group, as well as on the individual living being.11 Darwin’s work, as I have said, deals almost exclusively with selective forces that act on individuals. One exception to this generalization, though, is a passage from The Origin of Species where he theorizes what has come to be known as kin selection. In a chapter where he considers apparent difficulties confronting the theory of natural selection, Darwin devotes an extended passage to the problem posed for his theory by the existence of neuter or sterile members of insect species with body types specially adapted for the role they play in the communal life of the hive or of the ant colony. The problem posed by neuters, which Darwin initially thought posed an “insuperable” difficulty for his theory (Origin, 175), is that their adaptations seem impossible to account for by natural selection, which works on variations that spread in a population when they are transmitted by inheritance. Darwin solved this problem by recognizing that individual organisms are not the only objects of natural selection. The comparative advantage to a population of close kin bestowed by the traits of members who do not reproduce can be transmitted by heredity through their relatives. As Darwin says, “selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual” (Origin, 177). His evidence for this claim, as often in The Origin, comes from selection under domestication: “A well-flavoured vegetable is cooked, and the individual is destroyed; but the horticulturist sows seeds of the

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same stock, and confidently expects to get nearly the same variety; breeders of cattle wish the flesh and fat to be well marbled together: the animal has been slaughtered, but the breeder goes with confidence to the same family” (177). Darwin’s analogy compares non-reproductive members of a population to animals and vegetables killed for food. The analogy is not directly eugenic; it doesn’t describe killings that aim to improve the species. It suggests – in some ways more disturbingly – that the species or family is constituted as an object of selection by a primal sacrifice. Darwin’s personified “Nature” – if she existed – could certainly select a trait without killing its bearer; but for a population or family to become recognizable to science or indeed to poetry, a sacrifice seems to be required, just as in artificial selection, the establishment of a new breed of tasty vegetables or of cattle with well-marbled meat requires sacrificing one of its members. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault proposed that in the nineteenth century, “Western man” learned “what it meant to be a living species.”12 By so learning, “he” acquired a new form of identity and became able to say, as in the remarkable passage of Foucauldian ventriloquism already quoted: “I – as species rather than individual.”13 To consider the question of who it is that can say “I” in this way, and under what circumstances, I return to lyric to close this chapter by considering two poems that engage critically with the conventions of the species lyric. In both works, the question whether the speaker is an individual bird or an entire species lies at the center of the poem’s interpretation. The first of these poems is Algernon Swinburne’s “Itylus,” written in 1863 or 1864 and published in his 1866 volume Poems and Ballads. A major part of Swinburne’s project in this entire volume is to unravel the fictions of presence that enable Romantic lyric and its ironized Victorian doppelganger, the dramatic monologue. The volume thus abounds in “heres” and “nows” without a stable referent (“The Garden of Proserpine”) and confessional utterances that turn out never to have been spoken (“The Triumph of Time”). Even in a volume so self-conscious in its reflection on lyric norms, “Itylus” may be the single poem most actively selfreflexive about its own genre. The poem’s speaker is Philomela, after her transformation into a nightingale. The words of the poem can thus be identified with the nightingale’s song, a canonical figure for lyric utterance in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Barrett Browning, and elsewhere. Besides its renown as a songbird, the nightingale’s return to Europe in the spring and its habit of singing at night are two other traits that recur

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in its appearances as a figure for lyric; they determine the time and season in which Swinburne’s poem appears to present its speaker: I the nightingale all spring through ... . Clothed with the light of the night on the dew, Sing, while the hours and the wild birds follow, Take flight and follow and find the sun.

(19–24)14

Even in this stanza, a single sentence with the present-tense declaration “I . . . sing” at its center, the present – spring, night-time – is defined antithetically. The nightingale sings clothed with “the light of the night”; the wild birds that follow it into the northern spring are said to “find the sun” – though, coming as they do from the south, they might equally be said to flee it. The chiastic interchange of opposed terms is indeed the organizing principle of this poem. The song of the nightingale, who was once Philomela, is addressed to her sister the swallow, formerly Procne. The difference between the two birds as it is presented in the nightingale’s song is the basis for the canonical reading of “Itylus,” in which Margot Louis argues that each of the birds personifies a style of nineteenth-century lyric: the nightingale is haunted by the memory of traumatic past she and her sister share, and represents an art of truth-telling; her utterance is her rebuke to what Louis terms art of denial, personified by the swallow, whom her sister charges with singing in forgetfulness.15 The antithesis between the sisters is real and important, but the drama of the poem comes from its tendency to collapse as the nightingale worries whether she can remain different from her sister: “Hast thou forgotten ere I forget?” she asks; “Can I remember if thou forget?” The main sense of the nightingale’s address to her sister is that she should stop singing: “O swallow, sister, O rapid swallow, / I pray thee sing not a little space” (49–50). It doesn’t require a very subtle dialectician to see that in a poem about two singing birds, the one whose song urges the other to be silent is as much her double as her opposite: both birds, after all, are singing. The differences between them, problematic as they are, are differences of species. The nightingale and the swallow have different songs, though the poem does not represent this difference. They also differ in their migratory habits, a difference whose appearance in the poem shows Swinburne’s awareness of current natural history. Until the nineteenth century, Europeans did not know what became of the swallow in winter. Unlike nightingales, whose migration to North Africa and Arabia was generally

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understood, the swallow’s migration was a mystery, and indeed writers from Aristotle to Gilbert White of Selborne held that swallows did not migrate at all but rather went into hibernation.16 Only after 1808, when a French ship reported encountering swallows off Senegal in October, did it come to be accepted that the European swallow winters in the southern hemisphere, often in sub-Saharan Africa.17 In Swinburne’s poem, the nightingale’s address to the swallow refers repeatedly to their different migratory habits: O swallow, sister, O fair swift swallow, Why wilt thou fly after spring to the south, The soft south whither thine heart is set?

(7–9)

These references also decentre the nightingale’s own speech, which I read earlier as taking place in the spring. If that is the case, how could she speak to her sister and rebuke her for seeking spring elsewhere? There is no here and now in this poem that is not also far away. (Which is not to address the ambiguity of “after,” which could either have a spatial reference, meaning “fly towards,” or a temporal one, meaning “fly when spring is done.”) Another kind of ambiguity appears in the poem because what seem like specifications of presence can also be read as abstractions. When the nightingale tells us that she sings “all spring through,” “Clothed with the light of the night on the dew,” she may not be describing her own particular circumstances in the present moment of her song, but giving an abstract account of her habits. She would speak as the personification of her species, brought forward to represent it as in other species lyrics. The place and time from which this description issues would also be abstract and impossible to identify with any of the times and places referred to in the poem, notwithstanding its appearance of lyric immediacy. This is what it would mean for a species to be a lyric subject, who could say – or sing – “I – as species.” In Swinburne’s lyric practice, the “I” who speaks for the species is not present, but rather enacts the displacement or depresencing of the individual lyric subject. The poem thus stages, on one hand, a dialogue between two sisters, and, on the other, a contrast between two species. The choice between these two readings might be understood as depending on whether we understand lyric as predominantly a dramatic form – that is, as mimetic – or as a rhetorical one in which a personified abstraction is characterized metonymically by a list of specific traits. The poem allegorizes this undecidability in its own concept of lyric by narrating the split between

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the sisters, telling the story that led to their transformation into birds of different species. The symbol of both their sameness and their difference, the symbol in which the poem’s ambiguities are concentrated, is that of blood. As sisters, Procne and Philomela are figuratively of one blood. After Philomela’s rape by Procne’s husband, Tereus, he renders her mute by tearing out her tongue. Blood, however, substitutes for her lost power of speech and becomes the means by which the bond between the sisters is restored, when the imprisoned Philomela tells her story by weaving it in “a scarlet design on a white ground” and having the resulting fabric smuggled to Procne – Swinburne’s “woven web that was plain to follow” (52). Blood is the thread that re-establishes the bond of kinship between the sisters, decisively privileging it over Procne’s relation by marriage to her husband. But the trace of blood also becomes the elementary form of difference that, in Swinburne’s rendering of the story, finally divides the sisters for good and transforms them into creatures of different species. In Ovid’s version, after Procne learns of her sister’s rape, she rescues her, and, to punish Tereus, the two sisters slaughter his and Procne’s son, Itys. (The name “Itylus” in Swinburne’s title is a diminutive form of Itys.) Having killed the boy, they “cooked his flesh, braising some in bronze pots, and roasting some on spits,” and served it as a meal for his father. Only when Tereus has eaten his fill does “Philomela [leap] forward . . . her hair spattered with the blood of the boy she had madly murdered [and] thrust Itys’ head, dripping with gore, before his father’s face” (Metamorphoses 6). At this, the enraged father draws his sword and rushes in pursuit of the sisters, whereupon the gods, appalled at the scene, intervene and transform all three into birds of different species – a hoopoe, a swallow, and a nightingale. It is the difference in species, and the difference in song, between the nightingale and the swallow that Swinburne’s poem ascribes to the differentiating agency of a blood trace: O sister, sister, thy first-begotten! The hands that cling and the feet that follow, The voice of the child’s blood crying yet Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten? Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow, But the world shall end when I forget.

(55–60)

The trace of Itylus’s blood makes a difference between the kind of animal that can follow it and the kind that can’t. It calls out in a trope that echoes the reference to Abel’s blood in Genesis 4:10 but is only heard by one bird

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and not by the other. For the nightingale who remembers, but only for her, it asks a question that establishes an unbridgeable difference between her and the swallow. Like the traces of blood haunting Victorian poems contemporary with “Itylus,” such as Tennyson’s Maud and Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold,” Itylus’s memory contains within itself the possibility of its own erasure or non-existence. One bird in Swinburne’s poem remains on the trace; for the other, it has gone. The swallow strays (43), but the nightingale remains fixed “To the place of the slaying of Itylus, / The feast of Daulis, the Thracian sea” (47–8). Swinburne’s poem can thus be read as a fable about the origin of species with the ambivalence of blood ties at its center. In this fable, as in Darwin’s analogical account of kin selection, species identity originates when someone is killed and eaten. The species can come into being only as a subject in a state of melancholy. This conclusion may very well seem too sweeping, and is perhaps based on a fanciful conjunction of texts. But in this book’s final part, I will discuss the emergent science of anthropology, founded in the decade of Poems and Ballads on the basis of Darwin’s work, whose major early contribution was the theory of totemism, proposing that all human kinship systems were originally founded on a concept of “blood brotherhood” established by ritual sacrifice and food sharing. Totem theory influenced late Victorian Gothic, especially Dracula, where we also find a theory of species identity founded on blood sacrifice. Notwithstanding my dalliance with lyric in this chapter, Gothic from Frankenstein and The Last Man to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Dracula may well be the richer genre in examples of the new biopolitical subject, who assumes the first person “as a species rather than as an individual.”

***

To close this consideration of species lyric, I turn again to Hardy, this time to poems published under his own name. “The Robin” was published in Moments of Vision (1917), and, like “Itylus,” it has a bird for its speaker:18 When up aloft I fly and fly, I see in pools The shining sky, And a happy bird Am I, am I!

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When I descend Towards their brink I stand, and look, And stoop, and drink, And bathe my wings, And chink and prink. When winter frost Makes earth as steel I search and search But find no meal, And most unhappy Then I feel. But when it lasts, And snows still fall, I get to feel No grief at all, For I turn to a cold stiff Feathery ball!

As in Swinburne’s poem, the interpretation of this also turns on whether its speaker is an individual or a species, and so on whether this poem should be read as a species lyric. In “The Robin,” the divergence between the experience of an individual bird and the abstract position from which it is narrated takes place during the course of the poem, culminating in what appears to be the speaker’s narration of his own death. By the end of the poem, the speaker has emerged as a personification of the robin species in the abstract, whose life is unaffected by the death of its individual members. The turn in the poem occurs at its midpoint, between stanzas two and three, as the season changes from summer to winter. The end of stanza two is also the moment when the robin’s speech is briefly suspended to incorporate an onomatopoeic representation of its non-linguistic call “chink and prink.” “Prink” is a near-synonym for “preen” and has a semantic function in designating the bird’s self grooming, as well an onomatopoeic one; “chink” is a pure onomatopoeia for the robin’s low chatter as it bathes. In the coming chapters, I will argue that onomatopoeia is associated by Hardy and other poets with the impersonal life of animal species, especially birds. The incorporation of onomatopoeia here coincides with the bringing to a point of the question that organizes the first half of the poem, that of the robin’s awareness of its species identity. Does the robin know it is a robin? Throughout the opening two stanzas, it looks into pools, and the poem

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represents it as always on the brink of seeing its own reflection. This is literally its position in stanza two; in stanza one, its situation on the brink of seeing itself is built into the experience of reading, as the line break at the end of line five briefly allows us to read “bird” as the object of “see” and to imagine the robin in flight, looking at a pool and seeing its own reflection as well as that of the sky – before the next line transforms it into the subject of a subsequent verb: “I see in pools / The shining sky, / And a happy bird.” Throughout its opening two stanzas, Hardy’s poem verges on showing the robin’s self-recognition. When the bird drinks the water in which its reflection appears, it precipitates the change of seasons in the poem’s second half and brings on its own death. The robin shares the fate of Narcissus, doomed to die if he recognizes himself. Like Lear’s “Pelican Chorus” and Swinburne’s “Itylus,” Hardy’s “The Robin” makes a critical response to the poetic and natural-historical genre of the species lyric; in this poem, the topic is the speaker’s recognition of his own species identity. Here as in Swinburne, species identity comes into being as self-alienation and melancholy. Hardy expresses trouble elsewhere in his work at the idea of collective life. In the late “Sine Prole” [“Without Children”] (1925), he reflects on his relation to his own lineal forebears and on his childlessness. He views his “line . . . As one long life” (4, 8), which now, in his person, sees “the close . . . coming” (10), and “Makes to Being its parting bow” in the poem itself (12). The speaker in this poem too is a kind of collective subject, here embodying a kin group. And in this poem as in “The Robin,” to embrace such a collective is to embrace death. In thinking about this topic with reference to human beings, Hardy makes clear its biopolitical dimension, as he concludes by reframing the looming extinction of his “line” explicitly in terms of race, contrasting his own equanimity at the prospect with the supposed concern for their racial future shown by Jews in biblical times: “Unlike Jahveh’s ancient nation, / Little in their line’s cessation / Moderns see for surge of sighs” (13–15). Hardy’s own childlessness is thus disturbingly imagined as a practice of autogenocide, which the Jews are represented as blindly or stubbornly rejecting. “Sine Prole” shows a particular combination of the originally Christian conception of the Jew as essentially anti-modern because incapable of embracing his own extinction, with a nineteenth-century idea of the history of the race as embodying a collective life. But it shares with Swinburne’s poem the sense that there is something melancholy about species life. In the remainder of this book, I will explore this sense as it is

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manifest in late Victorian anthropology, poetry, and Gothic fiction. I will also pursue the related topic of species identity as automatism, first in poetic onomatopoeia and subsequently in a reading of Darwin. In my discussion of Darwin, a recurrent topic will be the continuity of his thought and Freud’s, and I will close with a consideration of how the problematic of species Freud inherits from Darwin shapes cruxes in his thinking of sexuality, kinship, and the drive.

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chapter 2

“How Can You Talk with a Person If They Always Say the Same Thing?” Species Poetics, Onomatopoeia, and Birdsong

In our own time, syllabic representations of animal calls are most familiar in birders’ field guides and in stories and verse for children.1 Teaching a single iterable version of what each kind of animal says became a function of children’s literature in the first half of the nineteenth century, as did the syllabic representation of birdsong in field guides.2 As we saw in Chapter 1, the earliest field guide to have used this device, Sarah Waring’s Minstrelsy, was published in 1832, and it combines the two genres. Waring explicitly addresses her work to young readers in its dedication and in an introductory poem.3 Minstrelsy’s aim is to teach its readers to identify the species of birds they encounter in the wild, and though she models her work on Bewick and Cuvier, Waring’s use of onomatopoeias as an aid to identification appears to be her own innovation and makes an intervention into what I will argue in this chapter is a Romantic-era debate about animal utterance, automatism, and species identity. Besides Bewick and Cuvier, one of the work’s other acknowledged sources is Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. White’s letters on the natural history of his parish in Hampshire were first published in 1788 (dated 1789), and by 1827, they had reached a third edition. Birdsong is one of this work’s recurring topics; for White, it forms part of his larger project of investigating “the life and conversation of animals” to supplement the “bare descriptions” of “foreign systematics” like Linnaeus.4 Unlike Waring, White does not transcribe bird calls; nor does he view them as a tool for identifying birds by species. He is rather interested in interpreting them, and his treatment of them as meaningful amounts to a sustained rebuke to the Cartesian and Lockean philosophical tradition of denying non-human animals the power to speak: [M]any of the winged tribes have voices adapted to express their various passions, wants, and feeling; such as anger, fear, love, hatred, hunger, and the like. All species are not equally eloquent; some are copious and fluent in 24

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their utterance, while others are confined to a few important sounds: no bird, like the fish kind, is quite mute, though some are rather silent. The language of birds is very ancient, and like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood.5

White’s extensive discussions of birdsong thus characteristically view them as communicative, and seek to explain their meaning and social function: All of the tuneful passeres express their complacency by sweet modulations, and a variety of melody. The swallow . . . by a shrill alarm bespeaks the attention of the other hirundines, and bids them be aware that the hawk is at hand. Aquatic and gregarious birds, especially the nocturnal, that shift their quarters in the dark are very noisy and loquacious; as cranes, wild-geese, wild-ducks, and the like: their perpetual clamour prevents them from dispersing and losing their companions.6

Even when Natural History of Selborne aims to represent bird calls rather than interpret them, it stresses their variability, and never makes recourse to syllabic transcription. When White gives measurements of birdsong’s pitch, he concludes that they vary within species: [N]either owls nor cuckoos keep to one note. A friend remarks that many (most) of his owls hoot in B flat; but that one went almost half a note below A. The pipe he tried their notes by was a common half-crown pitch-pipe. . . . A neighbour of mine, who is said to have nice ear, remarks that the owls about this village hoot in three different keys, in G flat, or F sharp, in B flat and A flat. He heard two hooting to each other, one in B flat. Query: Do these different notes proceed from different species, or only from various individuals? The same person finds upon trial that the note of the cuckoo (of which we have but one species) varies in different individuals; for, about Selborne wood, he found they were mostly in D: he heard two sing together, the one in D, the other in D sharp, who made a disagreeable concert.7

In the nineteenth century, though, species identity becomes associated with forms of automatism like the syllabified call. The growing acceptance of onomatopoeia as a tool for identifying birds appears in Natural History of Selborne’s publication history; during the Victorian period, the work was repeatedly reissued, and in many of these reissues, Gilbert White’s descriptions of birds were supplemented with notes providing syllabic transcriptions of their calls.8 Waring’s Minstrelsy does not seem to have been widely read, so the emergence of this kind of transcription can’t be attributed to its influence. It does make clear, though, the technique’s source in poetry. As we have seen, the book is a compendium of poems about birds, including original species

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lyrics like “The Song of the Wood-Grouse,” in which a bird endowed with speech describes its own identifying traits, and uses onomatopoeia to quote a stereotyped version of its call. Another lyric on the same plan is given to the African Honey-Bird, whose refrain runs “Give heed to my note, so shrill and clear: / Come follow the honey-bird cheer, cheer, cheer.”9 The species lyric of the stormy petrel announces that it has no song to quote: “No song-note have we but a piping cry / That blends with the storm when the winds rise high.”10 The cuckoo’s lyric thematizes the incorporation of its song in human language, cheerfully terming it a mockery: Cuckoo! cuckoo! Cuckoo! I cry, And the children hear me joyfully: As with laugh and bound they hasten out, The valley rings with their merry shout. Gleeful and gladly they frolic along, And cheerily mock the cuckoo’s song. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! they cry: They are light of heart, and so am I.11

In syllabifying and transcribing bird calls, Minstrelsy adopts an approach to identifying birds by species that doesn’t have a precedent in earlier works of natural history. The precedents for such transcriptions are to be found elsewhere. Some are traditional and have come along with other onomatopoeias to form a regular part of English as such. The names of the owl and the cuckoo, for instance, both come into English from other languages, but are onomatopoeic in origin.12 In the eighteenth century, the practice of giving birds names that transcribe their calls was adopted as a specific response to encounters with hitherto unknown fauna of the New World. The English name of the whippoorwill, a species of goatsucker, is first recorded in 1709 in John Lawson’s New Voyage to Carolina, which writes of the “Whippoo-Will, so nam’d, because it makes those Words exactly.”13 The author of Minstrelsy is well aware of the precedent for her project in the travel literature of the Americas, and includes her own chapter on the whippoorwill, which quotes at length from Charles Waterton’s Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles (1825): There are nine species [of goatsucker] here. The largest appears nearly the size of an English wood-owl. Its cry is so remarkable, that having once heard it, you will never forget it. . . . Suppose yourself in hopeless sorrow, begin with a high loud note, and pronounce, “ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,” each note lower and lower, till the last is scarcely heard, pausing a moment or two between each note, and you will have some idea of the moaning of the largest Goatsucker in Demerara.

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Four other species of the Goatsucker articulate some words so distinctly, that they have received their names from the sentences they utter, and absolutely bewilder the stranger on his arrival in these parts. The most common one . . . alights three or four yards before you, as you walk along the road, crying, “Who-are-you, who-who-who-are-you.” Another bids you, “Work-away, work-work-work-away.” A third cries, mournfully, “Willy-come-go. Willy-Willy-Willy-come-go.” And high up in the country, a fourth tell you to “Whip-poor-Will. Whip-whip-whip-poor-Will.” You will never persuade the negro to destroy these birds, or get the Indian to let fly his arrow at them.14

Waterton elsewhere makes explicit the identification between the nocturnal whippoorwill and the enslaved Indians and Africans of the Caribbean and the American South that overdetermined its English name: “Whip-poor-Will,” and “Willy come go,” are the shades of those poor African and Indian slaves, who died worn out and brokenhearted. They wail and cry . . . all night long; and often, when the moon shines, you see them sitting on the green turf, near the houses of those whose ancestors tore them from the bosom of their helpless families.15

This identification disappears from Minstrelsy, however, where the author’s own transcriptions of bird calls typically have no semantic content, and where the meanings of the names and transcriptions she takes over from elsewhere are normally ignored.16 Contrast the poem she writes for the “Willy-come-go” with Waterton’s account, where its call is said to speak for enslaved people’s ghosts: Oh! Listen to my plaintive cry And let us thro’ the forest roam, From the Indian’s cabin fly, And from the whiteman’s prouder home: Each may prove a bitter foe, Safety here we cannot know, Willy-come-go, willy-willy-willy-come-go.17

Minstrelsy forgets Waterton’s identification of the bird and the Indian, and thus strips the social meaning Waterton had given them from its fear of humans and its call. Even where the poetry in Minstrelsy gives versions of bird calls that include English words, it tends to ignore or diminish their semantic content.

***

Minstrelsy is an early but by no means unique example of nonce transcriptions of birdsong in the nineteenth century. Not every such transcription

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was linked to species poetics. In a version of the of the Romantic aesthetic of particularity, syllabic transcriptions of a bird’s song could be used to distinguish the utterance of a particular bird at a given time and place from all others. The German forester and naturalist Johann Matthaus Bechstein made a transcript of a nightingale’s song in the late eighteenth century; according to a sceptical British writer in 1836, it begins “Tiuu tiuu tiuu – spe tiu zqua” and continues for thirteen lines of print, ending “gaigaigai gaigaigai–Quior ziozio pi.” This writer refers to Bechstein’s transcription as a “nursery ditty,”18 and argues that it is in general not “of much use to . . . describe the notes of birds in writing.”19 John Clare’s transcription of a nightingale’s song in his 1832 poem “The Progress of Ryhme” [sic] was not published in his lifetime; it fills nine lines of verse and makes an implicit rebuke to versions like “jug jug” that present themselves as normative or typical of the species. In his Why Birds Sing, the musicologist David Rothenberg praises the musicality of Clare’s transcription and connects his work and Bechstein’s to the Surrealist poetry of Kurt Schwitters.20 These experiments notwithstanding, most syllabic transcriptions of bird calls in the nineteenth century represent what is purportedly the call or song of a species.21 In some cases, the transcriptions, like Waring’s, are made up of nonsense words. In 1837, for instance, an article in the first issue of The Naturalist describes the song of the sedge-reedling: “it is a strange medley . . . combining a characteristic chiddy, chiddy, chit, chit, chit, with a very sparrowlike chou, chou, chou, and an occasional peet-weet, reminding one forcibly of the chimney-sparrow.”22 In others, the renderings use words, but always with the implication that the bird’s call conveys a meaning of which it is unaware. Also in 1837, William MacGillivray writes of the chaffinch’s song that “the people in the south of Scotland most unpoetically imagine [it] to resemble the words ‘wee, wee, wee, wee drunken sowie,’ to which no doubt it bears some resemblance.”23 Birders in North America seem especially given to this type of syllabification of birdsong: the well-known rendering of the white-throated sparrow’s song as “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody” is first found in print in 1871.24 The New York state naturalist and writer John Burroughs wrote about his visits to Britain in 1889’s Fresh Fields, where he says of the song-thrush that “it is easy to translate its strain into various words” and fancies that to a boy out walking with a girl it might say, “kiss her, kiss her; do it, do it; be quick, be quick; stick her to it, stick her to it; that was neat, that was neat; that will do.”25 For the yellowhammer’s song, he gives one of each kind of transcription: “Sip, sip, sip, see-e-e-e; or If, if, if you please-e-e-e.”26

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The lore of birdsong transcriptions is rationalized by Charles Louis Hett in his 1898 Dictionary of Bird Notes. This volume contains an alphabetical list of what it terms “spellings” of bird notes, keyed to the name of the appropriate birds, followed by a list of birds, each with its note. Verso pages are left blank for the book’s users to add their own notes. Hett frequently gives alternate “spellings” for a bird’s note – as in the entry on the chaffinch’s song: “‘tol-de-rol, lol, chickweedo’ [as we will see, this rendering had become conventional] or ‘tol, lol, lol, kiss me dear’ with occasional ‘wee, wee,’ or snore of a drunken man.”27 The song of the male capercaillie is given as “peller-peller-peller”; of the female as “gock-gock-gock.”28 Transcriptions of this kind were an important part of the culture of amateur naturalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they play little role in official science. They are also lacking from works catering to the large number of nineteenth-century fanciers of cage birds. Throughout the century, there was an extensive trade in what we would today think of as field birds, which were kept at home by fanciers. Species kept as pets or trained for competition included crows, ravens, many members of the families of larks, finches (including the canary), and thrushes (especially the nightingale), as well as exotic birds still widely domesticated today such as parrots. With the partial exception of corvids (who were sometimes taught to speak), all of these species were valued above all for their abilities as singers, and training these abilities was one of the fancier’s principal tasks. As this implies, fanciers did not view bird species as limited to a single characteristic song. On the contrary, guides to the management of cage birds give extensive advice on how birds can be taught both music composed by humans and the songs of other bird species. Samuel Beeton thus describes how thrushes may be taught tunes played on the flute or tin whistle, or whistled by the mouth.29 The bullfinch likewise, according to Bechstein, can “learn all kinds of songs, airs and melodies,” which they sing “in a soft, pure, round, flute-like note, which becomes the more agreeable if they are taught by means of a flute or of the mouth.”30 The skylark too can be trained by whistling.31 Many species will also learn music from other birds. The linnet, Bechstein writes, will learn the songs of other birds like the nightingale, the lark, or the chaffinch if kept near it.32 The reed thrush’s song is greatly improved when it is “disciplined” by proximity to a nightingale.33 The literature of bird fanciers is full of anecdotes about birds whose capacity to learn and reproduce the sounds they hear around them has humorous or uncanny consequences. Beeton relates how “once, on passing a bird fancier’s, my attention was arrested by a most extraordinary noise

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coming from a bird that was hung up for sale. It was a bullfinch, and as near as I can express it in writing this was his lay, ‘Chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff-creak -creak-chuff-chuff-chuff,’ and then a sort of ‘cluck, cluck,’ such as a nurse makes to a baby.” The seller cannot account for “this extraordinary music,” but on further inquiry Beeton finds that the bird’s previous owner had lodged at a tobacco manufacturer’s at Bermondsey and the bird’s discordant noise . . . was an exact imitation of that which was going on from morning to night at the tobacco-mill. The “chuff-chuff” was the noise of the cutting-knives, the “creak-creak” the unoiled crank turned by the horse, and the “cluck, cluck” the sound made by the horse-driver when he wanted his animal to go faster.34

When writers like Beeton do give transcripts of a species’ characteristic song, it is so they can be trained up to sing it, rather than so they can be recognized in the wild. In a discussion of chaffinch singing matches, on which he tells us “much money is lost and won,” Beeton opens by noting that chaffinches of different counties sing different songs, distinguishing between those on the Essex and the Kent sides of the Thames estuary. The Essex song is “Toll-loll-loll-chickweedo,” and it is this song that the birds must sing when competing in London’s East End.35 Beeton quotes an informant on the conditions of competition, which are “that the bird who delivered the greatest number of notes in fifteen minutes was to be declared the winner . . . A perfect note, according to bird-keeping phraseology, is a perfect and complete toll-loll-loll-chickweedo: if this phrase is a syllable short, it counts for nothing.”36 For fanciers, syllabic transcriptions of birdsong serve the formation rather than the recognition of species identity. The malleability of species traits implicit in songbird fanciers’ practice of teaching birds of different species to sing one another’s songs is also apparent in their fondness for biological hybrids. Crosses of the canary with other species were a particular favourite; Beeton describes canary–goldfinch crosses as the most beautiful and the most likely to succeed,37 but canaries were also crossed with linnets and other species of finches and with sparrows.38 The connection between hybridity of song and biological hybridity is made explicit by a naturalist cited in Bechstein, who, holding the consensus view of naturalists in the period that birdsong is normally a means by which male birds attract a mate, suggests that though birds in confinement “will learn the songs of birds they are constantly kept with,” in the wild, “the peculiar note of each is an unerring mark for each to discover its own species. If a confined bird had learned the song of another . . . and was set at

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liberty, it is probable that it would never find a mate of its own species.”39 By the mid-nineteenth century, birdsong and species identity are inextricably related – even for writers like Darwin, though he views the relation in a more complex way than Bechstein. In The Descent of Man, Darwin indeed represents song as a means by which male birds compete for mates – but recognizes that even in the wild, birds of different species imitate one another’s songs.40 Moreover, he argues that cross-species sex results from the aesthetic preference of some female birds for masculine traits – including song – of other species, leading to comedies of mésalliance of the kind he relates involving a blackbird and a thrush, as well as different species of geese, ducks, grouse, and pheasants (Descent, 465–6).

***

Poets know the technique we have been discussing as onomatopoeia, and as we return to poetry, I will argue that a submerged debate about onomatopoeia carried out in poetry throughout the century has species identity and the relation between humans and other animals as its implied topic. In the remainder of this chapter, I will consider two different kinds of animal onomatopoeia in Romantic poetry. In the examples to be discussed, I will argue that onomatopoeia is treated as a poetic error, incorporating animal utterance in the poem only to reject it, or to make the animal itself an object of sacrifice. Onomatopoeia’s foundational theorist was Quintilian, in whose late first-century Institutio Oratoria the term refers – as its etymology implies – to any new creation of a word. The examples Quintilian gives, however, are all of what would be termed onomatopoeias in our time, words coined to refer to a sound while also mimicking it: they are “mugitus, lowing, sibilus, a hiss, and murmur.”41 For the Elizabethan rhetorician George Puttenham, onomatopoeia is “the New namer”;42 Puttenham is explicit that the newly minted word should be “consonant” to the nature of its object, and gives a list of onomatopoeic representations of sounds as illustrations: “as the poet Virgil said of the sounding of a trumpet, ta-ra-tant, taratantara, or as we give special names to the voices of dombe beasts, as to say, a horse neigheth, a lion brayes, a swine grunts, a hen cackleth, a dogge howles, and a hundred mo.”43 It is the trope of onomatopoeia in this sense that Minstrelsy adapts from poetry to the purposes of natural history. As Puttenham implies, animals whose calls are rendered by onomatopoeia are viewed as “dumb” – that is to say capable only of making sounds that can be named or mimicked, not

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of uttering speech that might be translated. In its use of onomatopoeia, as we have seen, Minstrelsy makes a contrast with one of its sources, White’s Natural History of Selborne, which without using onomatopoeias represents birds as conversing in an unknown language.44 In what follows, I will view onomatopoeia as a trope that incorporates the utterances of non-human animals into language while also rendering them mute. Either by transcribing an animal call in nonce syllables – such as “he-de-he-de-he” – or by giving it a name, as in the examples from Quintilian and Puttenham, onomatopoeia incorporates animal sounds into human speech, while excluding any possibility that they might belong to language in their own right.45 In this view, the long history of onomatopoeia in poetry and – more recently – in nature writing constitutes a counter-tradition to the equally long literary history of talking animals. In The Open, Giorgio Agamben avers that “up until the eighteenth century, language – which would become man’s identifying characteristic par excellence – jumps across orders and classes, for it is suspected that even birds can talk.”46 As the passage from White I have just mentioned shows, this history is too simple. Romantic-era nature writing revives the idea that non-human animals have their own languages, and as we will see in the next chapter, the Darwinian critique of anthropocentrism rejected theories of language that exclude non-human animals. In what follows, I will argue that a revival of onomatopoeia in Romantic poetry stages the problem the animal–automaton poses for a poetry of nature. Both the onomatopoeic animal and the talking one are represented in Romantic-era poetry, though animal speech is in fact surprisingly rare.47 I begin, however, with texts from slightly later showing the contradiction between the two kinds of representation. Minstrelsy, for example, indulges a taxonomist’s dream by endowing birds with language so that they may describe in words their own wordless song. The contradiction between representations of non-human animals as speaking and as nonspeaking is still more acute in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, where Jacques Derrida aligns it with what he takes to be the difference between poetic and philosophical views of the animal. At the end of Through the Looking Glass, when the newly wakened Alice asks her kitten whether it had a role in her dream, she gets no answer: it only purrs. “It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens . . . that, whatever you say to them, they always purr,” writes Carroll, and goes on to ask, “how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?” (344). Derrida identifies the prose realm to which Alice awakes at the end of her dream with philosophy: Carroll’s complaint about the kitten, he breezily notes, is “exactly like

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Descartes.”48 In dreams and in poetry, though, Carroll and Derrida both imply, the animals can speak; for the latter, “thinking concerning the animal,” while excluded from philosophy, “derives from poetry [la pensée de l’animal, si il y’en a, revient à la poésie].”49 The first animal to speak in Carroll’s Alice books is the White Rabbit – who says “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late” as he hurries by on his way to a rabbit hole. Alice does not think his utterance is anything “very remarkable”; only when the Rabbit takes “a watch out of his waist-coat pocket” and looks at it before hurrying on does she start to her feet and follow down the hole to Wonderland (Carroll, 24). The talking animal is one who doesn’t know the time, and we will see that this conjunction in Carroll obeys a logic previously established by poetry. To understand this logic, let me recall Descartes, who does not in fact quite say that an animal always says the same thing. Rather he argues that animal utterance is automatic, unlike that of human beings, which he takes to be the expression of rational thought: And speech must not be confused with the natural movements that are signs of passion and can be imitated by machines as well as by animals; neither must one imagine, as did certain of the ancients, that animals speak, although we do not understand their language. For if that were true, they would be able to make themselves understood by us as well as by members of their species, since they have many organs that correspond to ours.50

The philosopher’s repeated analogy in his discussion of the animal’s automatism is between its action and that of a clock; here is the most extended version of this analogy: I know that animals do many things better than we do, but this does not surprise me. It can even be used to prove that they act naturally and mechanically, like a clock which tells time better than our judgment does. Doubtless when the swallows come in spring, they operate like clocks. The actions of honey bees are of the same nature, and of cranes in flight.51

Descartes’s examples of animal automatism – the swallows returning in spring, the bees’ labour, and the calls of cranes in flight – all refer to wellestablished poetic topoi.52 Far from differentiating philosophy from poetry, Descartes’s examples of animal behaviour have a specifically poetic origin. Since ancient times, as well as transcribing animals’ calls and birdsongs, poets have observed the synchronization of their behaviour with the hour and the season. Such transcriptions are especially common in late medieval and early modern poetry – as in the Middle English round “Sumer is icumen in, / Lhude sing cuccu!” which re-entered the canon in 1801 with

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the second edition of Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Poets.53 In Elizabethan lyric, the cuckoo, the cock crowing at daybreak, and the nocturnal owl are stock figures. Two of them are paired at the end of Shakespeare’s Loves Labour’s Lost, in songs contrasting “Hiems, Winter” and “Ver, the Spring; the one side maintained by the owl, th’ other by the cuckoo” (5. 2. 891–3). This song is also an example of the characteristically Elizabethan device of making the formula for a bird’s song into a pun, by which it is arbitrarily endowed with meaning: The owl’s “tu-whit, tu who” thus sums up the play’s theme: to wit, to woo; while the cuckoo’s song hails the cuckold, becoming a “word of fear, / Unpleasing to a married ear!” (5. 2. 901–2).54 This poetic tradition is eclipsed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but reappears in new contexts during the nineteenth. As we have seen, poetry for children takes on the function of teaching stereotyped versions of animal sounds. Works of natural history begin to use syllabic transcriptions, especially of bird calls, as a taxonomic device; this way of identifying birds presumes that, as Carroll said of kittens, they are animals who always say the same thing. The revival of lyrics that record bird calls and use animals to mark time was not limited to the nursery and the field guide. Other genres of poetry recover the convention to define themselves by contrast with animals’ supposed character as automata and mimics. The device of punning on the bird’s song and the convention of treating it as a natural clock or calendar both reappear as objects of parody in a poem from 1830 where Alfred Tennyson rewrites Shakespeare’s song from Love’s Labour’s Lost. Like its model, Tennyson’s song has two parts. In the first, the owl sits silent as the cock crows and the day begins; in the second, the poet recalls the owl’s nocturnal call, which neither part of the poem directly reproduces. The inability to do so is the second song’s topic: Thy tuwhits are lulled, I wot, Thy tuwhoos of yesternight, Which upon the dark afloat, So took echo with delight, So took echo with delight, That her voice untuneful grown, Wears all day a fainter tone. I would mock thy chaunt anew; But I cannot mimick it; Not a whit of thy tuwhoo, Thee to woo to thy tuwhit, Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,

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With a lengthened loud halloo, Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o.

(“Second Song. To the Same” 1–14)

Even as it echoes Shakespeare and repeats his pun, Tennyson’s poem disavows echo and breaks the identity between language and the cry of the owl on which the pun depends. “Thy tuwhit” becomes only the name of the owl’s call, rather than a representation or echo of it. Slight as it is, this jokey piece of Tennysonian ephemera belongs at the centre of a certain nineteenth-century poetic canon. For in the form of a Shakespearian song it revisits the topic and some of the key terms of one of William Wordsworth’s best-known autobiographical poems, eventually incorporated into The Prelude, but published separately in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads as “There was a boy.”55 In this poem, Wordsworth describes how a child – a version of himself – in the Lake District, at night, by the water, “with fingers interwoven, both hands / Press’d closely palm to palm and to his mouth / Uplifted . . . / Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls / That they might answer him” (7–11). At first the owls answer his call, “With quivering peals, / And long halloos” which are “redoubled and redoubled” by echoes across the water (13–15). But sometimes pauses of silence “mock’d his skill” (17) – and, at those moments, the boy would experience an access of consciousness – “a gentle shock of mild surprise” that would carry awareness of himself and his surroundings deep into his heart (19). In this access of consciousness, there is also an intimation of mortality – for the poem goes on to tell us of the boy’s death “when he was ten years old” (32). As Paul de Man notes, the adult poet, who stands “mute” over the boy’s grave, is a double of the silent boy, waiting in silence by the lake for an answer from the owls.56 The poem is thus legible as a parable of the poet’s coming into being through the contemplation of death, in a moment of rupture with the animal world. By combining in a single text allusions to Shakespeare’s song and to Wordsworth’s narrative, Tennyson’s poem rewrites this parable and shifts its setting from the life of the individual to the history of poetry. In his version, when Shakespeare’s stereotyped “tu-whit, tu whoo” – which does not appear in “There was a boy” – fails to mimic the owl, the poem stages its own specifically linguistic character, recalling the Elizabethan identification of poetry and birdsong only to make a break with it. Further, by making this break in a mash-up of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Tennyson implies that his poem’s relation to early modern lyric is not unique, but rather characteristic of his own period in literary history, with Wordsworth chosen as its exemplary figure.

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Let me for a moment take Tennyson’s parody seriously as a guide to the relation between Wordsworthian lyric and its models. Although the model for Lyrical Ballads was ostensibly to be found in the printed and oral ballad traditions, there are few examples to be found there of birdsong. The nightingale’s jug-jug, the cuckoo’s song, and the owl’s tu-whit-tu-woo, all to be found in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s collection, come from early modern lyric, and there is evidence that in their dialogue as they assembled their collection, the two poets had these conventional representations of birdsong on their minds as a kind of running joke. In the spring of 1798, about a year before the likely date of “There was a boy,” Wordsworth wrote “The Idiot Boy,” a poem whose narrative opens with the “lonely shout, / Halloo! Halloo!” of the young owl (5–6); the owls’ calls accompany the entire story of Johnny’s midnight ride, whose happy conclusion the narrator introduces by summing up: “The owls have hooted all night long, / And with the owls began my song, / And with the owls must end” (444–6). The last word, however, belongs to Johnny himself, who tells what has happened to him in only two lines: “The cocks did crow tu-whoo, tuwhoo, / And the sun did shine so cold” (460–1). Johnny’s narration of his adventures both repeats and parodies the stereotyped representation of the owl’s cry, along with its traditional time-telling function; as he transposes the names of the cock and the owl, Johnny also reverses night and day. In this poem too, as in “There was a boy,” the celebration of poetic power accompanies a mimetic or nominative failure.57 The same serious joke appears at the opening of Coleridge’s “Christabel,” written around the same time as “The Idiot Boy.”58 This passage displays a mimetic excess that like Johnny’s narrative has the effect of prying apart the links between a bird, the stock representation of its call, and the time of day or night: “Tis the middle of the night by the castle clock, / And the owls have awakened the crowing cock; / Tu-whit! – Tu-whoo! / And hark, again! The crowing cock, / How drowsily it crew” (1–5).59 A chain of allusions to cocks crowing at the wrong time stretches out from “Christabel” into later poetry. Walter Scott’s version of “Clerk Saunders” in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders has the cocks crowing at midnight (stanza 21), in a line that Tennyson acknowledged as a source for the cock’s crowing “an hour ere light” in “Mariana” (27).60 We also find other reworkings of the matter of “There was a Boy” contemporaneous with Tennyson’s. For instance a sonnet by John Clare, published in the Englishman’s Magazine in August 1831, also uses stock representations of bird calls to pry apart their attachment to a single type of bird or time or

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place. Here a boy mistakes the black-cap’s song for the nightingale’s, leading him to wonder if May has come in March: the Blackcap doth his ears assail With such a rich and such an early song He stops his own and thinks the nightingale Hath of her monthly reckoning counted wrong “Sweet jug jug jug” comes loud upon his ear Those sounds that unto may by right belong Yet in the [h]awthorn scarce a leaf appears How can it be – spell struck the wondering boy Listens again – again the sound he hears And mocks it in his song for very joy.

(“The March Nightingale” 5–14)61

*** For Keats, the connection of error with animals and with poetry is a recurrent theme. In a journal letter from the spring of 1819 he wonders how the “erroneous” reasonings of human beings would appear to a “superior being”: “though erroneous they may be fine.” This qualified fineness, he goes on, “is the very thing in which consists poetry; and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy – For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth.”62 On one side of the binaries organizing this passage lie philosophy and truth; on the other are the half-truths of poetry and animals. In the spring odes of 1819, contemporaneous with this letter, Keats picks up the topic of the animal voice that sounds at the wrong time from the earlier romantics, though his more subjective poetics tends to transform the animal’s error into an error of its hearer. Neither in the odes nor elsewhere in his poetry does Keats write out syllabic transcriptions of animal utterances, like those Wordsworth and Coleridge revive from Renaissance lyric. His work, however, is rich in onomatopoeia; as we will see two of the odes turn on canonical examples of the genre taken from Quintilian: “murmur” and “low.” In “To Autumn,” Keats develops techniques from late eighteenth-century works such as Collins’s “Ode to Evening” and Gray’s “Elegy.” Like the earlier Romantics, though, Keats adopts a critical relation to his models. Where for Wordsworth and Coleridge, animal voices are excluded from poetry, in Keats, they are incorporated under what we will see to be the sign of melancholy. The “Ode to a Nightingale” has birdsong as its occasion, and the temporal dislocation the song induces is one of its major topics. The

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poem is framed by inextricable confusions of day with night and waking with sleeping. It is set in the springtime month of May, when the nightingale arrives, but the bird sings “of” summer (10), and its song precipitates in the poet a reverie on the coming summer flowers, concluding with the “musk rose, full of dewy wine, / The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves” (49–50).63 This line, unlike any of the references to the nightingale’s song itself, mimics the sound to which it refers. The poem’s recourse to onomatopoeia occurs at the moment where it represents the poet as most thoroughly transported by the nightingale’s song, a moment corresponding to the “false surmise” of grieving nature that Milton summons up and then rejects in the form of a flower catalogue in “Lycidas.” Onomatopoeia marks an even more categorical poetic error in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Since the ode is addressed to a silent artifact and takes silence in the form of negation – as in unheard melodies – as a major topic, the representation of a voice makes a major break in its decorum. As with the “Ode to a Nightingale” and its representation of summer, though, the dialectical logic of this poem eventually leads it to represent the very thing whose absence set it in motion. In the ode’s penultimate stanza, the images on the urn are given, by means of rhetorical questions, the very thing that up to this point they, like the urn itself, have lacked – an origin and a destination: “To what green altar . . . ?” (32); “What little town . . . ?” (35). At this moment, the poem’s silence is broken, and Keats sums up the illusions about the urn that the poem has entertained – the illusions of consciousness, of change, of speech – in the onomatopoeic utterance of an animal: a heifer, “lowing at the skies” (33). Even more markedly than the murmur of flies in the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the heifer’s low breaks into the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a violation of its conventions and functions to signal a deepening of illusion, a moment of maximal enchantment that precedes the poem’s turn and its disenchanted close. In the last of Keats’s odes, a similar turn away from illusion also constitutes the main drama and, as in the earlier odes though in a more complex way, this turn is mediated by animal sounds. Keats wrote “To Autumn” on September 19, 1819, and more than any of his other writing it has affinities with the tradition of closely observed writing on English natural history White inaugurated in Natural History of Selborne. The poem shows White’s influence and that of the column on the calendar and rural life that Keats’s friend and mentor Leigh Hunt published in his paper The Examiner.64 A possible source for “To Autumn” is

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White’s attention to what he calls the language of birds and to its social function around the time of migration: We have, in the winter, vast flocks of the common linnets; more, I think, than can be bred in any one district. These, I observe, when the spring advances, assemble on some tree in the sunshine, and join all in a gentle sort of chirping, as if they were about to break up their winter quarters and betake them to their proper summer homes. It is well known, at least, that the swallows and the fieldfares do congregate with a gentle twittering before they make their respective departure.65

Keats’s swallows twittering in the skies as they gather to migrate echo White’s, as more generally does the way “To Autumn” in its last stanza gives its animals, birds, and insects utterances proper to the time and season when they occur. The poem’s opening, however, represents animals that, like others we have seen in Romantic poetry, mistake the time. As in Keats’s other odes, animals here appear as projections of a poetic false surmise, though here indeed the error is not even expressed in sound, but only imputed by the poem. The first stanza of “To Autumn” consists of an incomplete sentence apostrophizing autumn as the “bosom-friend” of the sun. In spite of this apostrophe, though, the stanza’s main point is that autumn is difficult to recognize. She is veiled in mists, and even her sex is hard to determine: partnered with the presumably masculine sun, she appears to be a goddess of the harvest. But Keats’s term “friend” is non-committal. Even more crucially, in the exceptionally warm September of 1819, in the first stanza of this ode addressed to her, autumn does not appear as herself, but as summer. Together with the sun, she loads the trees with fruit and nuts, and sets “budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease, / For summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells” (8–11). The bees’ deception is another one of the animals’ mistakes about time that I have argued open a space for poetry in Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Unlike other animals we have discussed, though, Keats’s bees are silent. Rather than making a sound at the wrong time, the bees are endowed with thoughts about the wrong season. Like the murmur of flies in the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the heifer’s low in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” neither of which properly belongs in the poem where it appears, the bees’ thought forms part of a fabric of illusion whose dissolution constitutes the poem’s action. The entire first stanza consists of misrecognitions, among which autumn’s appearance as an extended summer is only the most basic. Grammatically, the stanza is

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a sentence fragment that addresses autumn without telling or asking her anything, like an envelope without a letter inside. Together with the sun, she is personified as something like a divinity: the two of them collaborate, breathing together to shape the destinies of crops, animals, and human beings. Helen Vendler sees in them the hazy outlines of a “sky-god impregnating a goddess.”66 But the poem’s address to autumn as a goddess is no more to be relied on than the season’s apparent offer of a perpetual supply of more and later flowers and fruits. In the second stanza, the poem’s work of demystification replaces the supposed divinity with representations of human beings. Now autumn appears in succession as a reaper, a thresher, a gleaner, and a cidermaker. Autumn in this stanza is not made by gods, but by human labour. Like the divinities of the first stanza, however, the labourers of the second don’t actually do anything. As generations of the poem’s critics have observed, the stanza represents a thresher who doesn’t thresh, a reaper who doesn’t reap, and a gleaner and a cider-maker who are caught, motionless, respectively in mid-stride and between the last drops of cider falling from the press.67 The poem’s opening stanza, lacking a verb, shows autumn and the sun conspiring to bring about a fruit harvest that, in the stanza’s tenseless time, cannot occur. Though the second stanza has verbs, it nonetheless represents the harvest only under the sign of negation. In the motionless scenes the stanza shows us, the harvest is the thing that is not happening. In the first two stanzas of “To Autumn,” the personifications of the season conspire to hide it by presenting an autumn of endless warm days from which labour and even movement are excluded. More accurately, the trouble with the scenes where autumn appears in these stanzas is less what they exclude than a kind of excess in her self-presencing. Bringing surfeit and over-fullness, she is not recognized as herself. Personified as a reaper, she is unable to reap because the late-flowering poppies overcome her with their scent. At the end of the second stanza, the cider-press crushes out the juice with which the fruit had been filled to bursting in the first, in a metapoetic moment that announces the poem’s will to wring out its own figural excesses and confront autumn in its truth. Of these excesses, the most important is the personification of autumn itself. This figure organizes the poem’s first two stanzas and determines its genre as an ode. It provides the medium for the poem’s rejection of theology as it shifts from a representation of the season as made by gods to one in which it is made by human beings. But in the last stanza, to experience autumn as actually present – in the “now” first specified in line

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31 – requires giving up the idea that the season is made at all, or that there is any agency responsible for it. As it moves from its first to its second stanza, I have argued, the poem abandons its personification of autumn as a goddess and personifies her anew as a human being. In the course of the last stanza, though, it abandons personification altogether, and indeed more broadly the figure of metaphor that enables us to identify autumn as anything at all, whether human or divine. While the poem therefore does not represent autumn as animal, in its last stanza it does complete a trajectory begun with the shift from divine to human persons by representing an autumn scene populated only by non-human animals. These animals make sounds, breaking the silence that has prevailed in the poem until now, and replacing the static scenes which have hitherto been its object of representation with a soundscape constituted in time. By making sound the medium in which autumn appears, Keats recognizes the season as an essentially temporal phenomenon. But why animal sounds? These animals don’t sing out of time to announce a supernatural visitation or as part of a poetic reverie. The animal sounds that suffuse Keats’s poem are of the Cartesian type: they mark time. They are all proper to a warm September evening in the south of England, and their conjunction in Keats’s soundscape endows it with a determinate location in time and space.68 Keats’s animals function together as a clock, and he adopts the Cartesian model of animal behaviour precisely because, as we have seen, the main point of the poem’s final stanza is to produce a representation of autumn from which agency and thought have been emptied out. Nature here is observed with the eyes and ears of a natural historian, as the stanza suggests by its echoes of Gilbert White. Though the sounds that the poem represents in its final stanza are all animal sounds, the nature in which these sounds occur is not one from which human beings are excluded. It is a nature that includes culture, though unlike the nature of the first two stanzas, it is not entirely given over to it. Human beings shape this landscape, raise animals and crops in it, and use them for food. This is the significance of the stubble-fields over which the sun sets. The flowers that overcame the reaper in stanza two are gone now, and the day’s labour has been completed. Nonetheless, autumn’s presence in this final stanza includes absence, for instance in the after-image of flowers in Keats’s description of the fields and clouds at sunset: “barred clouds bloom the softdying day / And touch the stubble-field with rosy hue” (25–6). The synthesis of antithetical pairs, like nature/culture and presence/ absence, is indeed the governing formal principle of this representation of

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autumn. Its paradigmatic image is that of the gnats rising and falling on the intermittent breeze, “borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies” (28–9). Not only life and death come together in this liminal moment: the birdsong that suffuses it represents the final conjuncture of two species that the advancing year will separate. The swallows overhead are gathering to migrate, but the robins in the garden will remain to endure the winter.69 The evanescence of Keats’s autumn evening is the evanescence of the last moment in which these two songs will be heard together. A similar but somewhat grimmer conjunction of opposites appears in Keats’s soundscape with the reference to “full-grown lambs” that “loud bleat from hilly bourn” (30). The phrase “full-grown lambs” has sometimes been read as an oddly periphrastic reference to sheep.70 In fact, however, it does not properly refer to a living animal at all, but to meat – or, given the plural, to animals destined for slaughter. In the annual cycle of sheepherding, lambs are born in the spring. In flocks of dairy and wool sheep, which only require a small number of rams as sires, the superfluous males are normally slaughtered in the fall.71 Their meat was consumed as “full-grown lamb”; outside Keats’s poem, the phrase appears in the nineteenth century only in contexts informed by this practice.72 Its use here, in the plural, is a kind of catachresis, in which meat appears still on the hoof, at once bleating and bleeding. By introducing into his representation of sheepherding this reference to its sacrificial logic, Keats differentiates his poem from pastoral, as he had also done by his references to reaping and to the grain harvest. I will return to the significance of this reference to sacrifice and to the consumption of meat; before doing so, let me note another instance in Keats’s autumnal soundscape of apparently posthumous animal life. In lines I have already cited, Keats begins his catalogue of autumn’s sounds by referring to the gnats among the willows at the water’s edge: “in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows” (27–8). Like “bleat,” “twitter,” “whistle,” and probably even “sing” later in the stanza, the word “mourn” is an onomatopoeia, even though unlike them it does not name the act of making a sound. Unlike these onomatopoeias, where the mimetic and semantic functions coincide, in “mourn,” they are split. Mimetically, the word represents the sound of gnats’ wings in flight; semantically, it refers to an affective state or psychic process. Even more acutely than other onomatopoeias, with its double reference, “mourn” poses the problem of how an animal noise – the sound of gnats’ wings – becomes a word. I have read Keats’s poem as dramatizing the de-personification of autumn; as it unfolds, its figures of the season as produced by divine or

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human agency are replaced by the representation of nature as an automaton. In the context of this reading, it is impossible to take at face value the last stanza’s endowment of its gnats with the capacity to mourn proleptically their own impending deaths. Like most of the poem’s readers, I take the stanza’s description of the autumn landscape and its dwellers to express a consciousness of the passage of time in the observing poet. The “bloom” of the soft-dying day on the stubble-fields at sunset appears in this reading as a projection of the poet’s memory of actual blooms that had once been there. In this reading, the gnats that “mourn” at evening would be an example of what John Ruskin was later in the century to call pathetic fallacy. But regardless of where we locate the mourning consciousness in this line, pathetic fallacy cannot be the sole determinant of “mourn.” Rather, Keats’s poem asserts, the word also functions as a transcription of the actual sound of the gnats’ wings. Rising and falling with the wind rather than originating as a breath, the hum of the swarm in flight exemplifies the automatic, unconscious, and collective dimensions of animal life. But the word that represents it also signifies what philosophy for a long time took to be the most inward, profound, and characteristically human form of consciousness, the consciousness of death.73 In poetry, as we saw, Wordsworth identifies this consciousness with a break between the human and the non-human animal. To interpret Keats’s poem, we should ask what principle links the two referents it attaches to the word “mourn.” That principle appears later in the passage: it is the principle of sacrifice. The analogy the poem supplies for reading in “mourn” at once a sound and a state of consciousness is that of seeing full-grown lambs at once as live animals and as meat.74 The gnats themselves appear in “To Autumn” to serve as swallow-food. In this poem, to make an animal’s life-process into a concept or into a word is to eat it. We know that it was written as Keats abandoned his ambition to write an epic on the Hyperion story. Some critics have seen it as a farewell to poetry in general, and Keats certainly wrote little or no verse after September 1819. If, as I have argued, “To Autumn” compares making poetry out of animals to eating them, it is a suggestive conjunction that on his return to London the month after the poem was written, he became a vegetarian.75

***

In this chapter, my point of departure was the poetic basis of the philosophical and natural historical traditions in which the sounds animals make are understood as innate and automatic expressions of species identity. The first field guide to use onomatopoeias did so in verse. Descartes’s

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original examples of animal automatism – including the migration of swallows, the flight of cranes, and the social behaviour of bees – derive from poetry. The incorporation into philosophy and amateur naturalism of poetic versions of animal behaviour and animal calls, seems in the nineteenth century to have motivated a poetic counter-tradition, in which animals fail to behave like automata and poets insist that they can’t echo animal voices. This counter-tradition historically originated in the Romantic era, but it would be an error to identify it with Romanticism as such, which also includes much natural historical writing, including poems where the animals do not miss their proper time, and works, like many of Clare’s bird poems, that contain elaborate phonetic renderings of animal sounds. As we have seen, “To Autumn,” the last of Keats’s odes, ends by representing a chorus of animal sounds, all heard at their right time and season. I have argued that here, the incorporation of animal automatism in poetry, rather than being the object of demystifying critique or mockery, occasions melancholy. Keats identifies animals that tell time with animals killed for food. Along with many other allusions to Romantic poetry, Carroll includes in the Alice books a recollection of the gnats of “To Autumn.” In Through the Looking Glass, as Alice travels by train towards the fourth square of the chessboard where the story unfolds, she becomes aware of “an extremely small voice, close to her ear” (Carroll, 222). This voice belongs to a gnat, whose predominant characteristic is that it is “very unhappy” (223), much of its speech being accompanied by sighing. This unhappiness receives no explanation in Carroll’s text; it is motivated by the recollection of Keats’s onomatopoeic form of the sound of gnats in flight: “mourn.” Rather than explaining its unhappiness, the gnat’s discourse is largely concerned with the two topics at issue in the last stanza of Keats’s poem: naming and eating. In its survey of looking-glass insects the creatures the gnat describes turn out to be animated words – typically, words for food.76 Alice is thus introduced to the snapdragon-fly – whose “body is made of plum pudding, its wings of holly-leaves,” and whose “head is a raisin burning in brandy” – and to the Bread-and-Butterfly – “whose wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body . . . a crust, and its head . . . a lump of sugar” (227). Whereas in Keats the animal’s becoming-language makes it into food, in Carroll’s looking-glass world the transformation of words into animals makes them inedible: foodstuffs become insects. And as is very often the case in the Alice books, looking-glass insects are also jokes about what should be eaten and what shouldn’t, and about who eats and who is eaten. As the novel vomits out the language of food in insect form, the

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words not only become inedible animals, but also starving ones: when she learns that the Bread-and-Butterfly requires weak tea with cream for food, Alice recognizes a difficulty: “Suppose it couldn’t find any?” she suggested. “Then it would die, of course.” “But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully. “It always happens,” said the Gnat. (227–8)

A full account of the Alice books and their claims about poetry would need to discuss their representations of food and animals, as well as of language, and to explain the system by which Carroll’s narrative allows for any of these terms to be transformed into either of the others. Sometimes these transformations seem unremarkable – like the walrus and the carpenter’s consumption of live oysters – and sometimes they are very strange, like the lobster’s complaint that he has been baked too long. Such an account would bring into view a Victorian reading of Romanticism as a question of diet.77 Alice – who very much resembles some protagonists of the Lyrical Ballads – needs to be instructed in what she can eat and when. The readings in this chapter have described two kinds of Romantic language. One, in Wordsworth and Coleridge, is characterized by the non-incorporation of animal voices. This language opens out an interior space to which the animal remains a stranger. The other, which I have identified with the onomatopoeic last stanza of Keats’s “To Autumn,” incorporates the voices of non-human animals into human utterance. In so doing, it opens out an interior space that is alimentary as well as psychic.78

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chapter 3

Onomatopoeia, Nonsense, and Naming Species Poetics after Darwin’s Origin

The nexus of my concerns in this chapter is established in a passage from Jacques Lacan’s seminar that points to an antinomy between onomatopoeia and nonsense, while making apparently offhand reference to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and also to Darwin. Citations of Darwin are infrequent in Lacan’s works; he came on the anecdote referred to here (also discussed in an essay published in the 1967 Écrits) in Ernest Jones’s “The Theory of Symbolism,” and it derives not from the naturalist’s published works, but from a passage in George G. Romanes’s Mental Evolution in Man (1888).1 On its original publication, the anecdote was embedded in Victorian debates about the origin of language and about its relation to the utterances of non-human animals. When in the twentieth century it is appropriated by psychoanalysis, this context largely disappears, even though the relation between language and onomatopoeia remains a recurrent topic in psychoanalytic literature. When Romanes wrote Mental Evolution in Man, onomatopoeia was a key topic in debates on the origin of language. Since many non-human animals, especially birds, are gifted vocal mimics, the idea that human language originates in onomatopoeia was held to animalize it. In his discussion of these issues, Romanes quotes an observation Darwin made of one of his grandchildren: The child, who was just beginning to speak, called a duck a “quack”; and, by special association, it also called water “quack.” By an appreciation of the resemblance of qualities, it next extended the term “quack” to denote all birds and insects on the one hand, and all fluid substances on the other. Lastly, by a still more delicate apprehension of resemblance, the child eventually called all coins “quack,” because on the back of a French sou it had once seen the representation of an eagle.2

In this part of his work, Romanes is responding to Max Müller’s widely influential Lectures on the Science of Language (1861). There, Müller argues 46

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that language is inseparable from cognition, viewing every language as deriving from a small number of “roots,” each of which denotes a concept. Writing immediately after the publication of Darwin’s Origin, Müller argues that the possession of language “is a frontier between man and brute, which can never be removed.”3 In advancing his view of language as distinctively human, Müller rejects earlier theories of language as originally onomatopoeic – arising from the imitation of animal calls and other natural sounds – or as expressive – arising from the instinctive expression of primary affects, such as fear and disgust. These theories he memorably termed respectively the “bow-wow”4 and the “pooh-pooh”5 theories of language, and he rejects them both on the explicit grounds that if either were true, “it would be difficult to understand why brutes should be without language.”6 Of onomatopoeic theory, in particular, he gives the authority of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac for protesting that it would “place man even below the animal” by supposing him “to have taken a lesson from birds and beasts.”7 While Müller maintained that “no process of natural selection could ever distill significant words out of the notes of birds or the cries of beasts,”8 Darwin held that natural selection had in fact evolved human speech from forms of utterance observable in non-human animals, including song, imitations of the voices of other animals, and instinctive cries (Descent 109). In the passage just quoted, Romanes gives Darwin’s authority to support his argument against Müller that “onomatopoeia in all its branches has been the most important of all principles which were concerned in the first genesis of speech.”9 When Lacan cites Darwin as mediated by Romanes and Jones, however, it is not in service of an argument about language’s origin, or, directly, about the similarity or difference between human and animal utterance. The psychoanalytic tradition is clear and explicit in accepting Darwin’s account of species transmutation and in recognizing the kinship of human beings with other animals. In the following chapters, we will trace some vicissitudes in Darwin’s influence on psychoanalysis and in how Freud theorized the human–animal relation. Animals also have pivotal roles in Lacan’s work in its structuralist phase, as Derrida documents in The Animal That Therefore I Am.10 In particular, Lacan’s essay on the “Mirror Stage” explains the formation of the ego in a moment of specular identification with a double or a mirror image with reference to research on the sexual maturation of pigeons.11 Lacan’s writing on the signifier makes repeated reference to non-human animals’ ability to lay and follow tracks and to dissimulate by falsifying their trails.12 Nonetheless, as Derrida

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shows, Lacan’s theory of language makes no fundamental break with the tradition going back to Descartes and Müller that reserves language uniquely for humans. Unlike Romanes, who first published it, Lacan discusses Darwin’s anecdote about his grandchild without referring to the role mimicry of an animal played in the child’s acquisition of language. And yet repeated references in his work suggest that such a role exists. In Seminar VI, where Lacan eventually introduces Darwin’s anecdote, he discusses a case history of Ella Sharpe’s where a patient relates his fantasy of barking like a dog. For Lacan, this is a fantasy of being-other (se faire autre). “He makes himself into something other than what he is with the help of . . . a signifier. Barking is the signifier of what he is not.”13 For Lacan, then, onomatopoeia signifies not identification with a non-human animal, but difference from it: the dog’s bark ceases to be a mere animal cry and is raised to the level of the signifier when it is displaced from its animal origin. Lacan does not, however, typically represent the transformation of onomatopoeia into a signifier as effected in fantasy. Other examples he discusses, including Darwin’s anecdote of his grandchild, involve children, who transform onomatopoeias into signifiers by making them the names of species. Thus Darwin’s grandson gives a duck the name “quack”; in another story Lacan tells, his friend’s child names the family dog a “bowwow.” In Lacan’s work, the transformation of an onomatopoeia into a signifier is usually treated as belonging to developmental psychology (psychologie génétique). This field, he says, studies “how the dear little ones, who are so dumb, begin to acquire their ideas” – Bruce Fink’s translation “dumb” effaces the break with the animal in the original: “le cher petit, qui est si bête.”14 For Lacan, the primordial act of naming is identified with the figure of metaphor. And throughout his work, metaphor and signification require a break with the animal. In the 1960 essay “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” he writes that entry into language takes place only when the child “by disconnecting the thing [i.e., the animal] from its cry, raises the sign to the function of the signifier.”15 The animal, then, can emit signs; these become signifiers when they are displaced by metaphor. Lacan is writing here of what his editors tell us is a children’s rhyme: “The dog goes meow, the cat goes woof-woof.” He refers to this rhyme also in Seminar VI, writing of it as “primitive metaphor . . . purely and simply constituted by means of signifying substitutions.”16 As John Powell Ward has pointed out, Lacan dramatizes the entry into language with the same

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trope we have seen in Wordsworth and Coleridge, where onomatopoeias are mocked by juxtaposition with the wrong animal.17 Lacan’s theory of language relies on an implicit contrast between the seeming automatism of the animal’s stereotyped call and human language, which, disconnecting the call from the animal, transforms it into a signifier. He reads Darwin’s anecdote, in which the child is observed to “detach the ‘quack’ from the duck that made it,” as a parable representing this contrast. In giving the name “quack” first to a bird, then to fluids, then to a coin, Lacan writes, the child does not seek their “meaning [sens] or essence [essence].” Rather, it speaks “nonsense [non-sens]” – a term Lacan goes on to gloss with reference to the English “genre” of nonsense, whose two “eminent examples” he names as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.18 In what follows, I will develop Lacan’s implication that English nonsense writing enacts a defunctioning of onomatopoeia that separates the animal from its call, and also explore the use of onomatopoeia and other nonsense words as names. In doing so, I will take Lacan’s use of Darwin as an authority for his claims as license to suggest that the mockery of onomatopoeia and of onomatopoeic species names in nonsense literature was an historical phenomenon, linked to the parody of species lyric we have already seen in nonsense verse, arising from a general crisis in the concept of species.

***

As we have seen, writers of children’s literature began using onomatopoeia to identify animal species in the 1830s. Lewis Carroll’s nonsense books do not use onomatopoeia; indeed their founding premise is that in Wonderland and Looking-glass Land, non-human animals are endowed with speech. But in Carroll’s contemporaries, we can find writers making nonsense out of onomatopoeia in the way Lacan describes. Here is a poem from Christina Rossetti’s Sing Song, published in 1872: “Kookoorookoo! kookoorookoo!” Crows the cock before the morn; “Kikirikee! kikirikee!” Roses in the east are born. “Kookoorookoo! kookoorookoo!” Early birds begin their singing; “Kikirikee! kikirikee!” The day, the day, the day is springing.

(“Kookoorookoo! kookoorookoo!” 1–8)

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This poem follows the logic I have already discussed, by which the automatism of the birds’ calls are figured by their function as a clock. With its apparent aim of teaching what the cock says, it is atypical of Sing Song as a whole, where animals’ names and calls are typically made the occasion for games with human language. Indeed, even in this poem, Rossetti is less interested in birdsong than she is in scansion. The poem doesn’t teach a single stereotyped call for the cock: It gives two, and its main point is to insist on difference even where there seems to be sameness, as in its two opening syllables: “Kookoo.” The calls are a lesson in quantitative meter: the scansion of the cock’s two cries remains uncertain until the long “kee” in line 3 resolves it into choriambic ( – ˘ ˇ – ), or possibly iambic (˘ – ˘ – ). To read the poem is to learn that one “koo” is not the same as the other, and therefore also to learn scepticism about the mimetic power of onomatopoeia in general. Throughout Sing Song, animal utterance calls not for mimicry but for interpretation: “What does the donkey bray about? / What does the pig grunt through his snout? / What does the goose mean by a hiss? Oh, Nurse, if you can tell me this, / I’ll give you such a kiss” (“What does the donkey bray about,” 1–4). Fully immersed in language, these animals converse in a medium where words are not tethered to a single speaker, context, or meaning. It may be that the cock crows in the poem – but, as the volume reminds us later, “baby crows, without being a cock” (“A pin has a head, but has no hair,” 14). The characteristic form of the poems in Sing Song is the riddle, in which the reader is asked to find the concept represented by a phrase like “The cod-fish has a silent sound” (“The peacock has a score of eyes,” 3). The poems’ plays on words with double meanings in some cases required the illustrator, Arthur Hughes, to abandon verisimilitude and treat images as words. What is in one sense a picture of a cat lashing itself with nine tails that Hughes drew to accompany the line “A sailor’s cat is not a cat” is in another sense a rebus, a picture of the word “cat o’ nine tails,” not a cat at all (Figure 1). The transformation into nonsense of animals and their cries is thus one of Sing Song’s principal themes, though Rossetti is not usually considered a writer of nonsense poetry.19 The term was coined as a description of his own work by Edward Lear, who published A Book of Nonsense in 1846. Natural history and species identity are central topics in Lear’s life’s work; as well as authoring nonsense verse and travel literature, he also had a long career as a painter and illustrator, initially with birds and other animals as his primary subjects. While still in his teens, he collaborated on Illustrations of British Ornithology (1821–34), and his first solo publication was Illustrations of

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Figure 1 Christina Rossetti, “A city plum is not a plum,” with wood engraving after Arthur Hughes. From Sing-Song (1872). Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University

the Family Psitacidae, or Parrots (1830–2), for which he carried out the paintings in the gardens of the Zoological Society in London, and which won him election as an associate member of the Linnaean Society in 1830. He probably worked as an illustrator on Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle20 and was an enthusiastic admirer of its author.21 The contents of the first and second editions of A Book of Nonsense were exclusively in the verse form Lear popularized that we now call the

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limerick. Lear’s limericks are defined by their verse form and by a recurring logical schema, which establishes the genre as having a primary concern with human beings, each of whom is characterized in relation to the entire species by accidental individual traits. Thus: “There was an old man” – or young lady, or young person – and so forth. Next, often, a specification of habitat – for example, “of the Nile.” Finally, the peculiarity of the individual specimen that gives rise to the poem: “There was an old person whose habits / Induced him to feed upon Rabbits.” Often the action of the limerick punishes the protagonist’s eccentricity and narrates her or his reversion to an implied norm: “When he’d eaten eighteen, he turned perfectly green, / Upon which he relinquished those habits” (165). In many cases, the norm is enforced, sometimes violently, by a nameless “they”: There was an Old Man of Whitehaven Who danced a quadrille with a Raven; But they said – “It’s absurd, to encourage that bird!” So they smashed that Old man of Whitehaven.

(172)

As these poems – both added to Lear’s limericks in 1861 – show, human– animal relations are a topic in Lear’s poetry from the beginning, often eroticized, as in the old man’s dance with the raven. The interspecies romance here includes a crossing of species attributes – as the illustration makes clear (Figure 2), man and raven are doubles, and the word “bird” in line 3, as Matthew Bevis points out, could refer to either of them.22 The erotics of Lear’s limericks thus cross species and other categories. The limericks also – occasionally – use onomatopoeia: There was an Old Man in a tree, Who was horribly bored by a Bee; When they said, “Does it buzz?” he replied “Yes it does! It’s a regular brute of a Bee!”

(161)

Beginning with the 1870 publication of Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets, though, non-human animals, no longer brutalized, become the major protagonists of Lear’s verse and begin to speak. The change results in part from the influence of Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865. While the Alice books imagine worlds in which all kinds of hierarchy – including the fundamental hierarchy that sets human beings above other animals – are temporarily inverted, they don’t challenge or play with species taxonomy. Charles Dodgson, the books’ real-life author, was strongly opposed to Darwin and to the idea of species transmutation.

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Figure 2 Edward Lear, “There was an Old Man of Whitehaven” (1861)

Lear, on the other hand, read The Origin of Species in the mid-1860s with admiration.23 As Matthew Bevis notes, his late work, like Darwin’s Descent of Man, abounds in cross-species desire, non-human animals with aesthetic preferences, and song.24 Lear composed music for several of his narratives of animal courtship, and these narratives themselves, like “The Owl and the Pussycat,” typically represent their characters as singers: they are poems about song and about occasions for song. The songs are not, however, onomatopoeic. Not that onomatopoeias are absent from the late poetry – but they are as we shall see defunctioned and turned into nonsense. Before turning to the central topic of sound and sense in Lear, though, I want to note how important questions about species are in Lear’s late work. The limericks, as we have seen, have human protagonists, each of whom belongs to a class singled out from the mass of humanity in general: “an Old Person of Leeds.” The late poems typically have non-human protagonists; rather than being identified as particular members of a general species, though, these protagonists are usually described with a definite article that would normally particularize them

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as in some sense unique, or refer to an entire unique species, as in the poem on “The Wood-Grouse” discussed earlier.25 The characters in “The Owl and the Pussycat” and “The Duck and the Kangaroo,” probably Lear’s two first nonsense songs, are individual members of real animal species; the definite articles that refer to them seem only to single them out as unique within the work where they appear: “The owl who is the subject of this particular story.” But the status of creatures like the QuangleWangle is harder to discern. Is there only one Quangle-Wangle – is he a species of one? Before the two works in which the Quangle-Wangle appears (“The Story of Four Little Children Who Went Round the World” and “The Quangle-Wangle’s Hat”), Lear seems to have introduced it under a different spelling as “a Clangle-Wangle” in “The History of the Seven Families of Lake Pipple-Popple.” This ClangleWangle is undoubtedly a member of a species, which Lear identifies as “by no means commonly to be met with” and for which he supplies a full description: They live in the water as well as on land, using their long tail as a sail when in the former element. Their speed is extreme, but their habits of life are domestic and superfluous, and their general demeanour pensive and pellucid. On summer evenings they may sometimes be observed near the Lake Pipple-Popple, standing on their heads and humming their national melodies: they subsist entirely on vegetables, excepting when they eat veal, or mutton, or pork, or beef, or fish, or saltpeter. (202)

The Clangle-Wangle (or Clangel-Wangel, in a further alternate spelling Lear suggests) is then a rare species, but also apparently a universal one, native to both water and land, and both vegetarian and omnivorous. Whether it is the same creature or not, the Quangle-Wangle who appears in Lear’s subsequent works appears to be sui generis. In the poem Lear wrote in which he is the main player, he appears as a double of the author, hidden behind his own gorgeously ornamented self-presentation: On the top of the Crumpetty Tree The Quangle-Wangle sat, But his face you could not see, On account of his Beaver Hat. For his hat was a hundred and two feet wide, With ribbons and bibbons on every side, And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace, So that nobody ever could see the face Of the Quangle-Wangle Quee.

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(1–10)

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The poem opens with the Quangle-Wangle’s complaint that “very few people” come to the top of his tree, and that in consequence “life on the whole is far from gay!” But in time there come, first Mr. and Mrs. Canary, and then creatures of a host of other species, all asking to build their houses on the Quangle-Wangle’s hat: besides, to the Crumpetty Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail, and the Bumble-Bee, The Frog, and the Fimble Fowl ... . . And all of them said, – “We humbly beg, We may build our homes on your lovely Hat, – Mr. Quangle-Wangle, grant us that! Mr. Quangle-Wangle Quee!”

(28–36)

They are joined by creatures of yet other species, such as “The Pobble who has no toes /. . . / And the Dong with the luminous nose” (38–40), who enter the poem from other works by Lear – and the poem ends with a dance: at night by the light of the Mulberry moon They danced to the flute of the Blue Baboon, On the broad green leaves of the Crumpetty Tree, And all were as happy as happy could be, With the Quangle-Wangle Quee.

(50–4)

The dance figures the harmonious relations among the species in the poem – and, more equivocally, their relations with the figure without a species who makes the space where they assemble. The Quangle-Wangle’s melancholy seems at the end of the poem to have lifted; but when he speaks, it is only “To himself” (47), unlike all of the other creatures in the poem, whose utterances are spoken in chorus and addressed to others. The relations between species, and between species and individuals who appear to be without a species – who are perhaps the last of their species – are indeed the dominant topic of Lear’s late work. All of his courtship narratives, like that of the Owl and the Pussycat, cross species lines.26 Parodies of natural histories of species abound, like the paragraph just quoted on the Clangle-Wangle. Beginning with his 1870 volume, Lear’s publications included nonsense botanies, with illustrations, of imaginary plant species, each with a name spoofing the conventions of Linnaean taxonomy. The supposed species are, however, radically hybrid, cobbled

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from beings and artifacts from altogether different taxonomic realms grafted onto a stem with leaves (Figure 3). The names Lear gives his invented species are moreover as hybridized as the nonsense plants themselves, typically combining English words with Latin case endings: “Manypeeplia Upsidownia.” Lear’s jokes about natural history are invariably also jokes about language. Lear’s imaginary creatures have surprisingly few literary antecedents – in a very different mode, these would include Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. They belong to the nineteenth century, the era when species become historical agents. But they have many successors, ranging from creatures in Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak’s books to alien species in speculative fiction and fantasy. Like Lear’s creatures themselves, these

Figure 3 Edward Lear, “Manypeeplia Upsidownia” (1871)

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imaginary beings are figures through which the biopolitical topics of species, population, race, adaptation, and ecology undergo literary and cultural mediation. These topics pervade Lear’s own writing. “The Jumblies” is another poem that describes its protagonists with a definite article, though it leaves it unclear what kind of group the Jumblies are – a family, a clan, a species? The poem begins: They went to sea in a Sieve, they did, In a Sieve they went to sea! In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day, In Sieve they went to sea.

(1–5)

Although the Jumblies have “friends,” these disappear in the poem’s odd, melancholy refrain, in which they are defined ethnographically – by their habitat and body markings (are these tattoos?): Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live; Their heads are green, and their hands are blue; And they went to sea in a Sieve.

(11–14)

Here the Jumblies appear as a population imperilled as much by their restricted habitat as by their unorthodox choice of watercraft. “The Pobble who has no Toes” (1876) poses similar problems, although in this case the Pobble appears, initially, as an individual: The Pobble who has no toes Had once as many as we; When they said, “Some day you may lose them all;” – He replied, – “Fish fiddle de-dee!”

(1–4)

In the course of the poem, however, the Pobble does, as “they” warn, suffer the loss of his toes during a swim across the Bristol Channel. At its close, his Aunt Jobiska consoles him with “eggs and buttercups fried with fish” and with a piece of folk wisdom perhaps invented for the occasion: “It’s a fact the whole world knows / That Pobbles are happier without their toes” (49–50) – thus suddenly implying that the accident that has befallen her particular Pobble is not singular, but rather defines a type. “The Pobble” of the title would then no longer be an individual but a species, and the poem would read, as Matthew Bevis has put it, as a “just-so story” – a Lamarckian fable of species transmutation.27 Similar confusions are endemic in Lear’s poetry. The failed courtship narratives of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bó and the Dong both feature characters who appear to belong to classes with one member.

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The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bó first appears (without the terminal accent) as the letter Y in an alphabet Lear composed in 1870; since alphabetization is a tool for classifying, his presence here along with “The Zigzag Zealous Zebra” (269) further emphasizes the anomaly of his status as the unique member of his own taxon.28 The anomaly of figures like the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bó and the QuangleWangle is most fully thematized in “The Scroobious Pip,” which Lear wrote in 1871 and 1872 but left unfinished. The poem resembles “The Quangle-Wangle’s Hat” in having as its protagonist a figure who belongs to no class of animals, but nonetheless mediates them all. In this poem, the form that contains all the animals is the song with which the poem closes, in which they all “roared and sang and whistled and cried” the name of the Scroobious Pip (98). Until this point, however, the poem’s topic is the unanswered question of where the Scroobious Pip fits in the animal kingdom. The question is posed first by the beasts, then by the birds, the fish, and the insects. The poem stages the enigmatic relation between the Scroobious Pip and its interlocutors as a relation between onomatopoeia and the nonsense syllables that mark the Pip’s speech as sui generis. Thus at the poem’s opening, the beasts assemble: The Wolf he howled, the Horse he neighed, The little Pig squealed and the Donkey brayed, And when the Lion began to roar There never was heard such a noise before.

(7–10)

They agree that of them all the fox should Go close to the Scroobious Pip and say, “Tell us all about yourself we pray! – For as yet we can’t make out in the least If you’re Fish or Insect, or Bird or Beast.”

(15–19)

The Scroobious Pip, however, does not wait to be asked – at no point does it allow itself to be directly addressed – but rejects the terms of the question by responding at once “with a rumbling sound – / ‘Chippety Flip – Flippety Chip – / My only name is the Scroobious Pip’” (20–2). In succeeding stanzas, the birds assemble – “The Parrot chattered, the Blackbird sung” – and delegate the owl to ask the Scroobious Pip what it is – upon which it asserts “with a chirpy sound – / ‘Flippety Chip – Chippety Flip – / My only name is the Scroobious Pip.’” Similarly, it addresses the fish “with a liquid sound” and the insects with “whistly” one: “Wizziby wip – wizziby wip – / My only name is the Scroobious Pip” (88–90).

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The nominalism of Lear’s poetry is evident in the Pip’s assumption that to ask what order of the animal kingdom it belongs to is to ask its name. In its answers to the animals, the Pip distinguishes itself from all of them, but also, by onomatopoeic echoes, identifies itself as a kind of universal animal. In this respect, the poem humanizes the Pip in accordance with an anthropocentric mythology that we will re-encounter in Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories, where Mowgli becomes the only animal in the jungle who can speak to all the other animals in their own languages. Neither this logic, nor the nominalism that Lear shares with radical Darwinists of the period, explains why the Pip alone of all the animals speaks nonsense.29 We don’t know who named it, though the name “Pip” shows the influence of Dickens’s Great Expectations, whose protagonist, Pip, begins the novel by naming himself.30 In any case, the Pip’s nonsensical name structures its nonsensical refrains, though which its “ip” sound echoes and rhymes, and where its character as a palindrome, reading the same backwards and forwards, is expanded into the ABBA structure of chiasmus: “Chippety Flip – Flippety Chip.” Nonsense words enter Lear’s poetry after The Origin of Species, along with talking animals and what I have argued is a pervasive concern with questions of species and taxonomy.31 We have seen that Lacan refers to Lear’s nonsense in developing an account of language as constituted by the severing of the link between the animal and its call – the cat and its meow. But the example of “The Scroobious Pip” suggests that the antithesis between nonsense and onomatopoeia is less stable than Lacan would allow. While we know that the Pip can use onomatopoeia to mimic the voices of all the other animals, do we know that it has no call specific to itself? Its nonsensical name itself seems like an instance of automatism, and it may be that the Pip is only so called because it cannot help saying “pip” – just as the names of birds like the cuckoo and the whippoorwill derive from onomatopoeic representations of their calls. As we saw in Romantic poetry, making language out of animal sounds involves a degree of violence; so too does the making of nonsense. Before we turn to an example of Lear’s nonsense deriving from onomatopoeia, let us examine some other examples. Among Lear’s quarries for nonsense words, as James Williams notes, were the languages of countries in which he traveled.32 Like his botanical names, words formed in this way can be hybrids, abusively attaching English lexical forms to words and fragments from other languages. “Scroobious,” for instance, was one of Lear’s favourite nonsense words and was the first to appear in print; he used it in a limerick in 1854. Williams has identified its source in an episode from

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Lear’s travels. While sketching in Albania, at the time a Muslim country, Lear was surrounded by villagers who, apparently scandalized by the forbidden act of visual representation, shouted at him the word “Scroo! Scroo!” In narrating the encounter, Lear gives the meaning of the word as “He writes it down! He writes it down!” Williams identifies “scroo” as deriving from shkrova, to write. Williams asserts that “scroo” for Lear was associated with “feelings of acute and nameless embarrassment.”33 Out of it, he made the adjective “scroobious.” To make nonsense out of language may be a form of defence, an act of aggressive appropriation, or both.34 Two of Lear’s minor poems appropriate foreign words directly and demonstrate the comic violence involved in so doing. They are similar – one, from Lear’s diary in 1864, begins: She sits upon her Bulbul, Through the long hours of night – And o’er the dark horizon gleams The Yashmak’s fateful light.

(184)

In this poem, the terms appropriated are Arabic (bulbul = nightingale; yashmak = veil); in a later poem, published in Laughable Lyrics in 1877, they are Hindustani: She sate upon her Dobie, To watch the Evening Star, And all the Punkahs as they passed Cried “My! How fair you are.”

(405)

Both poems inflict a jokey Orientalist violence on their source language, aggravated by the music-hall indecency of arbitrarily using foreign words to mean “bottom.”35 If Lear’s nonsense inflicts a certain campy violence on its materials, I want to close my discussion of his work by suggesting that this is not only its relation to foreign languages, but also to onomatopoeia. Few of Lear’s nonsense words derive from onomatopoeia, so one example will be all I can offer. As we saw in the case of Keats, where incorporating animal sounds into language was figured as an act of violence, sounds and their transcriptions don’t enter language without trouble. “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” was the final poem composed for Lear’s last volume, Laughable Lyrics, in 1876, and it may be his most troubled published work. In the best reading it has received, James Williams begins by noting that it “is a poem full of sounds. In it, ‘the woods and valleys rang,’ the angry breakers ‘roar,’ the watchers ‘cry,’ the

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Dong’s pipe ‘squeaks.’”36 Like the Yonghy-Bonghy Bò and other characters we have discussed, the Dong’s name is given a definite article, making it the name of a class of which he seems to be the sole member. Like the Yonghy-Bonghy Bò too, the Dong features in a narrative of failed courtship, which, like the other courtships we have discussed in Lear, crosses natural-historical categories (even if nonsensical ones). Here as elsewhere in Lear’s late poems, moreover, the romance’s failure apparently dooms its protagonist to the existential solitude of being the last of his kind. For Williams, the poem’s organizing trope is the echo. Besides echoing sounds, it is even more than most of Lear’s poetry full of echoes of other poems, Lear’s own above all: “The Dong” has “The Jumblies” as an intertext; its protagonist falls in love with a “Jumbly girl” who arrives with the other Jumblies in their sieve, and he is left desolate when they leave to continue their travels. The poem incorporates the Jumblies’ chorus in full, as well as echoing others of his works. Lear’s editor, Vivien Noakes, has identified a major source for the poem as Thomas Moore’s “A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” (1806), and also echoes of William Collins’s Persian Eclogues (1724) and Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1832). Williams further notes recollections of Tennyson’s “Maud” (1855) and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867); moreover, the poem is full of phrases like “awful darkness,” “rocky shore,” “midnight hour,” and “plaintive pipe” that had become clichés of sublime (or would-be sublime) poetry in the eighteenth century. The poem is written in the irregular stanzas that Collins and his contemporaries made conventional for the sublime or Pindaric ode. Another feature of poetry in the sublime mode relevant to the setting of “The Dong” is reference to ancient and foreign place names – for example, from Asia Minor and Arabia. In Paradise Lost, among many others, Milton has Ternate and Tidore (2. 635) and “the barren Plaines / Of Sericana” (3. 437); closer to Lear, Shelley’s “Alastor” includes “the lone Chorasmian shore” as a setting, echoed by Matthew Arnold in “Sohrab and Rustum,” which has “the hush’d Chorasmian waste” (878). Khwarazm is a plain in today’s Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, but for many of Shelley and Arnold’s readers, surely, the grand-sounding name might as well have been invented – as indeed Lear did invent the metrically similar “great Gromboolian plain” on which the Dong wanders, which reappears here from earlier poems. When he uses these poetic devices, Lear strips them of reference to transform them into nonsense – if not to suggest that they were nonsense already.

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As it draws poetic devices into its ambit, then, Lear’s poem remakes or reveals them as nonsense. In this light, we can see it as built around a joke about the defunctioning of an onomatopoeia. “Dong” of course is one half of the conventional transcription of a bell’s sound: “Ding-dong.” As Williams notes, Lear uses “ding dong” and variants like “ding a dong” elsewhere in his poetry.37 Only here, however, does the dong appear without its ding. Lear appropriates the onomatopoeia for nonsense by making it a name, changing it from a sign with a motivated relation to its referent to a signifier with an arbitrary relation to its signified. This appropriation, like the appropriation of foreign words, involves violence; in this case, the violence is castrative and motivates the comic phallic substitute with which the Dong provides himself in the form of a prosthetic nose: because by night he could not see, He gathered the bark of the Twangum Tree On the flowery plain that grows. And he wove him a wondrous Nose, – A Nose as strange as a Nose could be! Of vast proportions and painted red, And tied with cords to the back of his head.

(72–8)38

“The Dong,” then, is a poem that allegorizes nonsense’s coming into being through the defunctioning of onomatopoeia; its protagonist personifies the mutilated figure of speech. As the Dong says in his only spoken words, “what little sense I once possessed / Has quite gone out of my head” (62–3). Alongside the poem’s self-reflexive concern with the genesis of nonsense, “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” also recapitulates concerns with population, exogamy, and migration we have seen to pervade Lear’s writing. As with other nonsense creatures in his work, it is uncertain whether the characters in this poem belong to distinct species, or races, or clans – but the poem nonetheless undoubtedly considers the Dong and the Jumbly Girl not as individuals, but as representatives of distinct populations, of which the poem provides a minimal ethnography. The relation between these two fields of concern, one poetic and the other biopolitical, will be the axis followed in the rest of this book. In Part II, I will focus on the work of Darwin, to carry out a symptomatic reading of the suspended reference his argument requires in key terms. In Part III, I will return to the literary representation of species and interspecies relations, setting these in the context of the histories of blood transfusion and of Victorian anthropology’s theorizing of totemism and blood relationship. The book’s closing sections will focus these concerns with reference to another nocturnal figure who, like

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Lear’s Dong, bears an ambiguous species identity and suffers the burden of confronting the end of its kind – Bram Stoker’s vampire, Dracula.

***

We have already encountered Thomas Hardy’s implication that the continuous life of species is inherently vampiric. Hardy rarely employs onomatopoeia, preferring to endow his animals with speech. We saw in “The Robin” how the appearance of onomatopoeia in the midst of a bird’s speech marks a moment of species identification that heralds its death. Hardy’s poetry is indeed haunted by an idea of species immortality identified with song, to which it repeatedly recurs, always in order to debunk or demystify it. In “The Selfsame Song,” as Daniel Karlin notes, Hardy recalls an idealizing line from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”:39 Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient times by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

(61–7)

Hardy refers to Keats in his 1922 poem, taking aim at Keats’s jump from the sound of a supposedly unchanging song to the idea of immortality: A bird sings the selfsame song, With never a fault in its flow, That we listened to here these long Long years ago. ... – But it’s not the self same bird. – No: perished to dust is he. . . . As also are those who heard That song with me.

(1–4, 9–12)

In a rebuke to the theological basis of much Victorian nature writing, Hardy in “The Rambler” (1909) makes the self-undoing claim that he doesn’t even hear the birds whose calls his poem nonetheless records: I hear not the contralto note Of cuckoos hid on either hand, The whirr that shakes the nighthawk’s throat When eve’s brown awning hoods the land.

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(5–12)

To sing in Hardy’s poetics is not to be immortal, but rather to be a ghost, not even heard until too late. Rather than immortal voices, Hardy’s onomatopoeias typically record the sounds of inanimate objects. In “We Sat at the Window,” a 1917 poem in which he recalls his first marriage as a “waste” of “two souls in their prime,” he writes of a rainy day in July when “Each gutter and spout / Babbled unchecked in the busy way of witless things” (3–5). Onomatopoeias are the sounds of witless things, just as Lear’s Dong is deprived of sense. The onomatopoeia marks time in a scene from which meaning has either departed, or in which it will not be recognized except belatedly. Meaning does not come from sound; thus, for the two characters in “We Sat at the Window,” though the rain babbles in the gutter, the speaker says Nothing to read, nothing to see Seemed in that room for her and me On Swithin’s day. We were irked by the scene, by our own selves, yes, For I did not know, nor did she infer How much there was to read and guess By her in me, and to see and crown By me in her. Wasted were two souls in their prime, And great was the waste, that July time When the rain came down.

(6–16)

Hardy’s poetry draws out the association between onomatopoeia and automatism that has concerned us throughout this chapter. In “The Clock Winder,” also from 1917, the sound of a clock measures out the empty time between a forgotten past and a longed-for future. The poem concerns a parish clerk who each night ascends the clock tower to wind “the rheumatic clock”: Up, up from the ground Around and around In the turret stair He clambers, to where The wheelwork is,

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(17–24)

The poem identifies the clock with its winder, who, it turns out, is also marking time in the dark: Him I followed one night To this place without light, And, ere I spoke, heard Him say, word by word, At the end of his winding, The darkness unminding: – “So I wipe out one more, My Dear, of the sore Sad days that still be, Like a drying Dead Sea, Between you and me!”

(29–39)

In a late memory poem, “The Second Visit” (1928), onomatopoeias recording the sounds of machinery and of birds rhyme with each other, and equally function as a meaningless ground of unchanging sound, against which the poem at its close measures the change in the scene caused by the absence of a single speaking voice. The poem thus opens with an onomatopoeia for the sound of a mill wheel – “Clack, clack, clack, went the millwheel as I came” (1) – and registers the sound’s continuity over the years: I come again years after, and all there seems the same. And so indeed it is: the apple-tree’d old house, And the deep mill-pond, and the wet wheel clacking, And a woman on the bridge, and white ducks quacking

(4–7)

But in the poem’s final stanza, the poem distinguishes between the mechanical sound that remains the same and everything that has changed: it’s not the same woman or the same apples; the quack is the same, but the ducks have changed. Recalling Heraclitus, the poem notes that “it’s not the same drops that dash / Over the wet wheel” (10–11). Above all, the poem ends with quoted speech of the woman now missing from the scene: “‘You know I do!’” (12). The poem thus moves from the onomatopoeia of its first line to quoting an absent woman in its last, organizing itself around the contrast between the absent presence of a living voice and the persistence of the machine. In this contrast, the duck’s quack is on the side of the machine, and I have argued in this chapter that its sameness is constituted by the poetic

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technique used to record it. Indeed, Hardy’s identification of onomatopoeia and the species concept that in the nineteenth century it came to underwrite with a machine is of a piece with the suspicion of onomatopoeia that we have traced back to the Romantic era. In the poetry we have read, an aesthetic of the particular is privileged over the representation of types, and this aesthetic drives the twin imperatives to expel onomatopoeia from poetic utterance, or to incorporate it. The classical tropes in which non-human animals behave as automata show a corresponding decline. As is well known, Hardy’s writing shows an exceptional sympathy for animal suffering, and this sympathy is manifest in his poetry’s portrayal of animals as capable of speech. We saw such a portrayal in “The Robin,” where, as in the poems of Minstrelsy, an animal endowed with speech cites its own call. In “The Robin,” this citation of onomatopoeia is a harbinger of death. Hardy poems where non-human animals speak include some that adopt complex verse forms, such as the triolets “The Puzzled Game Birds” and “Winter in Durnover Field” and the villanelle “The Caged Thrush Freed and Home Again,” all published in 1902.40 In all of these poems, the verse form constrains utterance by limiting the number of rhymes and by enforcing the repetition of whole lines. These poems, then, do not only endow birds with speech; they do so in a form that celebrates language’s power to escape arbitrary constraint, a theme literalized in the speaker’s escape from captivity in “The Caged Thrush.” Hardy’s 1928 elegy to Wessex the dog also endows an animal with speech – in this case, Wessex himself, who speaks from the dead to the humans with whom he had shared a home when living. Nothing in the poem suggests that they can hear or understand him; the gift of speech ironically does not enable the dog to communicate. Earlier in Part I, I linked the trouble onomatopoeia causes in “The Robin” to Hardy’s suspicion of species identity. As we saw in “Sine Prole,” his suspicion of species, race, or family types as embodiments of a single continuous life is so intense that he celebrates his own childlessness as a sort of autogenocide. Particularly given that he contrasts the end of his own line with what he represents as the persistence of the collective racial life of the Jews, Hardy’s self-congratulation here is disquieting. The poem makes clear that for him – as for the imaginary creatures of Edward Lear and Bram Stoker – either rejection or acceptance of affinity with a family, species, or racial type takes place in a fully biopoliticized discursive field, so that the question of whether or not to have a child has become a question about the life or death of a population.

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part ii

How Did Darwin Invent the Symptom?

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chapter 4

Darwin’s Unconscious History, the Work of the Negative, and Natural Selection

Chapters 4 and 5 leave poetry behind to discuss the writings of Charles Darwin. We will see that instinctual or automatic behaviour and expressions, like birdsong, preoccupied Darwin throughout his work. In the first of these two chapters on Darwin, consideration of this topic will begin with the notebooks from 1838, in which he first formulated what became the theory of natural selection. In these notebooks, Darwin treats instinct as a psychological problem, related to what he believed to be the possibility of inherited or unconscious memory. As the chapter proceeds, however, my concern will not principally be with Darwin’s psychological work, but with the way the two problems Darwin works on in these notebooks bleed into one another, so that the solution to the problem of species is figured here and throughout his writing as a memory that the naturalist works to uncover. In The Origin of Species (1859), the work of understanding natural selection is represented as a psychomachia, in which different mental faculties struggle for dominance: Darwin writes that in the reader who follows his argument, “reason ought to conquer his imagination” (Darwin, Origin, 141). In writing on taxonomists and morphologists who precede him and whose work he cites as evidence, he suggests that they already recognize the genealogical affinities between species “unconsciously,” and that his work is therefore less one of new discovery than of overcoming a resistance (Darwin, Origin, 313). In this respect, I will argue, Darwin’s thought resembles Freud’s, and indeed the affinities between them are a central topic of this book’s remaining two parts. In the next chapter, we will discuss how Darwin’s work on the expression of the emotions, and more generally his mode of interpreting residual and de-functioned physiological traits, influenced Freud’s concept of the symptom. In this chapter, my concern will not be with any direct influence of Darwin on Freud, but rather with problems, especially in epistemology, that are readily associated with Freud but seem surprising to encounter in Darwin. These problems arise in 69

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connection with the term “unconscious” and, as just stated, Darwin was interested in the topic of unconscious knowledge from an early date, apparently independently of his interest in species. We will begin with his notes on persons who have knowledge without knowing that they have it, including a literary character – and I will argue that these passages from the notebooks presage a difficulty in distinguishing between knowing and not knowing that pervades Darwin’s work. Besides his scientific precursors, we will see that Darwin relies on breeders and fanciers for evidence of how great changes may be made in living organisms by selective breeding for small variations – which, he tells us, “not one man in a thousand has the accuracy of eye” to perceive (Darwin, Origin, 27). The authorities on selective breeding from whom Darwin derives his information of course do not know the theory to which they are contributing – moreover, he argues, the very attention they pay to minor differences in the varieties they breed prevents them from perceiving their shared descent. The same eye is in one sense a source of knowledge and in another a bar to it. The eye, moreover, is in The Origin of Species not only a means of recognizing or misrecognizing the significance of variation in living organisms. It is itself an organ subject to variation – and in this respect also, as we will see, it plays a double part in Darwin’s argument, appearing both as an obstacle to acceptance of this theory and as evidence for it. The doubling of knowing and unknowing in Darwin’s thought is itself doubled as a doubling of the subject and object of knowledge. I will not be discussing Freud’s writings on analytic technique in this book, but they display similar dialectical turns. In Freud’s early analytic writing, he presents the analysis as confronting various obstacles: the censorship that allows dreams to fulfill wishes only in a disguised way, the resistances the patient puts up in the course of the analysis, and the transference by which Freud’s patients re-enacted in analysis the family dramas that made them sick in the first place. As psychoanalytic technique developed, however, the obstacles to analysis themselves became its objects, as analysis of the transference and of resistance became central to therapeutic practice.1 My topic in these chapters will thus be the doublings of knowing and unknowing and of subject and object in Darwin’s work, and, in Chapter 5, the work’s tendency to become self-referential by constituting its own object. In parts of what follows, I will aim to specify aspects of Darwin’s influence on Freud that in my view have not been well understood. But the larger claim to be made in these chapters is that the work of both Darwin

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and Freud is shaped by the emergence into history of the biological species as a subject constitutively incapable of recognizing itself.

***

During 1838, the momentous year in which he first formulated what was to become the theory of natural selection and also resolved to marry his cousin Emma Wedgwood, Darwin’s reading included a significant engagement with the life and work of Sir Walter Scott. This engagement may have been prompted by the recent appearance of John Gibson Lockhart’s biography of Scott, which included substantial extracts from its subject’s journal; Darwin read the first three volumes in 1838 and the remainder, except for volume 5, early in 1839 (Darwin, Notebooks, 322; notebook C, 269–70. See also his letter to Emma Wedgwood, January 6, 1839). The notebooks for 1838 include several references to the biography and also at least five to Scott’s fiction – one to Guy Mannering (1815) and the other four to The Antiquary (1816). As well as observations and theoretical speculations on a variety of subjects, the notebooks refer extensively to Darwin’s reading; Scott’s are the only novels he mentions during 1838. With one exception, Darwin’s mentions of The Antiquary all refer to a single character, Elspeth Mucklebackit, whose role in the novel as a bearer of involuntary memory preoccupies Darwin in the reflections on consciousness, instinct, and heredity that he pursues throughout 1838. Here is a passage from Notebook M in which Darwin refers to Elspeth: Now if a memory ≪of a tune & words≫ can thus lie dormant, during a whole life time, quite unconsciously of it, surely memory from one generation to another, as instincts are, is not so very wonderful. – . . . Miss Cogan’s memory of the tune, might be compared to birds singing, or some instinctive sounds. – Miss. C memory cannot be called memory, because, she did not remembered, it was a habitual action of thought-secreting organs, brought into play by morbid action. – Old Elspeth ≪in Antiquary≫ power of repeating poetry in her dotage is fact of same sort. (Darwin, Notebooks, 521; notebook M, 7–8)

Five or six months later, in Notebook N, Darwin recalls the same character in a related context: Old people – (Antiquary Vol II p.77) remembering things of youth, when new ideas will not enter. is something analogous. to instinct, to the permanence of old heredetary [sic] ideas. – being lower faculty than the acquirement of new ideas. – (Darwin, Notebooks, 575; notebook N, 46)

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The romance plot of The Antiquary involves a protagonist with a forgotten past; though she is a relatively minor character in the novel, it is Elspeth Mucklebackit who reveals the secret of his identity. She also reveals that his parents were not half-siblings, as they had been led to believe, and thus erases the taint of incest which had been the original reason for his being brought up in secret and under an alias.2 Besides the narrative of the protagonist’s birth, Elspeth Mucklebackit is also responsible for bringing to light memories and artifacts from the more distant past. As Darwin notes, Scott represents her as senile and frequently unaware of events taking place around her, but also as having a powerful memory for old ballads and tales which she is described as speaking “like a prent buke.”3 Her connection to the past is symbolized by the yarn it is her “habitual and mechanical occupation” to spin.4 As she spins, she sings, to be overheard in the last moments of her life by the antiquary of the novel’s title, who transcribes her song in the service of his genealogical and historical research. It is the antiquary who eventually uses what he learns from Elspeth to work out the identity of the novel’s hero and restore him to his birthright. Elspeth appears in Scott’s novel as part of a sustained allegorical representation of the relation between Scotland’s commercial, Protestant present – embodied in the antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck – and its Catholic and feudal history. The novel makes an explicit figural link between the condition of Elspeth’s mind and that of the material remains of this history: auld Elspat is like some of the ancient ruined strengths and castles that ane sees amang the hills. There are mony parts of her mind that appear . . . laid waste and decayed, but than there’s parts that look the steever [firmer], and the stronger, and the grander, because they are rising just like to fragments amang the ruins o’ the rest.5

Scott’s entire conception of Elspeth’s psyche is shaped by the allegory in which she features. In this passage, the unimpaired parts of her mind are figured as feudal remainders; her memory brings the past into the present, but in a decontextualized and fragmentary form, in the mode of automatic repetition, whose lack of reference to its context Scott figures by making her memory not an organic faculty but a text – “a prent buke.” In Scott’s novel, the transformation of the past into a dead letter is not an organic process but a social one; Darwin’s interest in his representation of Elspeth comes or appears to come without any interest in the concept of historical periodicity Scott uses it to convey. This book argues, however,

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that Darwin’s work was part of a long process in which biology entered history, and in the final section of this chapter, I will argue that his careerlong preoccupation with the topic of unconscious ideas and agency is a displaced form of historical argument. For much of the chapter, however, our concern will be with epistemology rather than history. In the first section, we will see how Darwin’s representations of automatic behaviour and unconscious memory work to stabilize the relations between the subject and object of knowledge in the notebooks. In the second section, we will turn to Darwin’s representation of the eye and scepticism regarding the faculty of vision in The Origin of Species (1859) as a symptom of the internal differences in Darwin’s species concept that arise from a contradiction between thinking about species and belonging to one. In the final section, however, we will return to history to see how the figures of unconsciousness and blindness we have traced help explain Darwin’s claims about the unconscious knowledge of natural selection to be found in the work of his scientific precursors, and ultimately to propose the existence of an historical unconscious in The Origin of Species itself. In both of the passages I quoted earlier from the notebooks, Darwin links the individual mind’s ability to retain memories “unconsciously” with what he believes is the possibility that memories can be transmitted between individuals of different generations by inheritance. In the earlier of the two passages, Darwin supports his view that memories can be inherited with an analogy to inherited instincts; in the latter, the two ideas are conflated so that instinct itself becomes “an old heredetary [sic] idea.” In the next chapter, we will discuss Darwin’s view that instincts can be formed by a process in which functional actions become habits, and then as habits are transmitted through inheritance. Nothing in the theory of natural selection required this position and indeed Darwin’s initial account of instincts in The Origin of Species opens by arguing that instincts are less commonly formed in this way than by accidental variation: As modifications of corporal structures arise from, and are increased by, use or habit, and are diminished or lost by disuse, so I do not doubt it has been with instincts. But I believe that the effects of habit are of quite subordinate importance to the effects of the natural selection of what may be called accidental variations of instincts. (Darwin, Origin, 157)

In his later works, however, Darwin’s emphasis on accidental variation as the origin of instincts diminished and he became progressively more interested in understanding them as originating in voluntary behaviours. In the sixth edition of The Origin, he altered this passage to assert only that

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effects of habit are “in many cases” subordinate to those of natural selection in the formation of instincts.6 In The Descent of Man, he describes instincts originating in voluntary behaviours as degraded: “Some intelligent actions, after being performed during several generations, become converted into instincts and are inherited, as when birds on oceanic islands learn to avoid man. These actions may then be said to be degraded in character, for they are no longer performed through reason or from experience” (Darwin, The Descent of Man, 88). In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the transformation of a functional behaviour into a habit provides the first of the three principles by which the work accounts for human and animal expressions: “Certain complex actions are of direct or indirect service under certain states of mind, or serve to relieve or gratify certain sensations, desires, etc.; and when the same state of mind is induced, however feebly, there is a tendency through the force of habit and association for the same movements to be performed, though they may not be of the least use” (Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, 34). Such habitual actions constitute the expression of a state of mind associated with them. Darwin goes on to treat them, as he does all habits, as heritable. The growth during Darwin’s career of his interest in behaviours that with the passage of time have lost their function derives from his increasingly explicit rejection of theology. Believers in the independent creation of each species like William Paley or Georges Cuvier described a world in which every trait of every organism is adapted by the creator to the organism’s conditions of existence. Darwin’s argument for descent with modification relies for evidence on traits that are maladapted or useless and thus suggest descent from earlier forms in which they served a purpose. In The Origin of Species, Darwin thus compares rudimentary organs, which have not been much affected by natural selection, to “letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation, but which still serve as a clue in seeking for its derivation” (335). I will return to the topic of rudimentary organs in Chapter 5; Darwin’s study of these had the same rationale as his interest in involuntary expressions of emotion, which, unlike psychologists in our own time, he viewed as having no adaptive value. He treats them therefore above all as evidence of biological kinship. The erection of the hair as a response to fright in human beings has no function, but gives evidence of our kinship to other animals – such as cats – in which the puffing up of the fur under threat serves to terrify potential predators or adversaries. The blush as an expression of shame serves similarly, not to demonstrate human kinship with other animals, but as evidence of the shared humanity of different races of human beings.

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Instincts and other kinds of involuntary behaviour, when they have been de-functioned, thus play the same role in Darwin’s argument as residual and rudimentary organic structures, attesting to the descent and affinities of the organisms they affect. We have seen, though, that from Darwin’s earliest notebook entries on evolution to the 1870s, in his writing on involuntary behaviours, he consistently views them as the remainders of “intelligent actions,” as he puts it in The Descent of Man (Darwin, The Descent of Man, 88), or as “hereditary ideas,” to use the term of the notebooks. When Darwin takes this view of involuntary behaviours, I suggest that he engages in a form of projection, by which a trait that enables the naturalist to understand an organism’s past is treated as an embodied memory of the past belonging to the organism itself. Hence Darwin’s view in the notebooks that the heritability of instincts is evidence for a theory of inherited memory and his personification of the useless trait that has outlasted its function as an old person, like Elspeth Mucklebackit, who has lived long enough to become an anachronism. My claim that Darwin engages in projection when he represents involuntary behaviour as a form of memory is, however, complicated by that representation’s internal contradictions. He introduces one of his references to Elspeth Mucklebackit by discussing the case of a woman in her “second childhood” whose recall of the songs of her youth he likens to the instinctive song of birds: “Miss C. memory cannot be called memory, because she did not remembered, it was a habitual action of thoughtsecreting organ, brought into play by morbid action” (Darwin, Notebooks, 524, 521; notebook M, 21, 8). Miss Cogan’s memory that “cannot be called memory,” like Elspeth’s capacity to repeat old ballads, is thus an automatic behaviour – a “habitual action” of the mind – which takes the place of what had once been an effect of conscious intention. If we begin with the suggestion that Darwin’s idea of instincts and automatic behaviours as a form of memory arises from a projection of his own scientific knowledge onto the object of that knowledge, then we need to add that what is projected onto the object is more precisely its own difference from the subject. That is to say, the difference between the scientist who knows the past and the organism that unknowingly provides the scientist’s evidence is transformed into a contradiction within the latter – a “memory [that] cannot be called memory.” In the passages we have been discussing, an epistemological difference is figured as a temporal or even historical one. The need for this figuration arises because in Darwin’s theory of descent, the subject and the object are in fact the same. In the absence of a transcendental object outside nature

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whose purposes or ideas natural history can understand itself as uncovering, the field comes to be characterized by self-reflexivity. As the distance between the subject and object of knowledge collapses, the difference between knowing and not knowing is obscured – an inevitable effect of characterizing the human being as bearer of an inherited “thoughtsecreting organ.” Hence Darwin’s preoccupation in the notebooks with characters formed by a history of which with the passage of time they have become unconscious. In the next section of this chapter, we will see how in The Origin of Species, Darwin describes natural selection as a principle that, as it forms species, does so in ways that conceal its own operation. The result is that, in Darwin’s dialectical account, even his predecessors’ failure to recognize natural selection becomes evidence for his case. To close this section, however, I will consider some further passages on instinct and involuntary action from the notebooks in which, as in those we have already discussed, besides serving as evidence for the theory of descent with modification, they also trigger Darwin’s self-reflexive preoccupation with his own position as theorist. In a passage I have already cited, he characterizes the ability of old age to remember “things of youth, when new ideas will not enter,” as analogous “to instinct, to the presence of heredetary [sic] ideas,” and then observes that this is a “lower faculty than the acquirement of new ideas” (Darwin, Notebooks, 575; notebook N, 46). Throughout his work, Darwin understands the development of intelligence as entailing the gradual loss of instincts and their replacement by learned and voluntary behaviours. This he views, with some qualification, as a form of progress: “We must believe, that it requires a far higher & far more complicated organization to learn Greek, than to have it handed down as an instinct” (Darwin, Notebooks, 576; notebook N, 48). Though both intelligence and instinct are modes of adaptation, they differ in that one is a form of memory – of “heredetary [sic] ideas,” while the other comes into being as an erasure of the past. Paradoxically, the very faculty by which Darwin discovers human descent – the faculty that acquires new ideas – comes into existence only where evidence for that descent has vanished: “Man having some instincts of revenge ≪& anger≫, which experience shows it must for his happiness to check . . . nor is it odd he should have had them. – with lesser intellect they might be necessary and no doubt preservative, & are now, like all other structures slowly vanishing – the mind of man is no more perfect, than instincts of animals to all & changing contingencies, or bodies of either” (Darwin, Notebooks, 549–50; notebook M, 122–3). In this passage, in the form of conflict between human intellect and residual

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instincts, we find another version of the antithesis between consciousness and involuntary action with which we began. The antithesis between the subject who knows the past and the object-body in which the past is materialized is re-enacted and internalized in Darwin’s concept of human nature as such. In this passage, as in many others throughout his work, Darwin denies that there is any absolute scale of development on which species can be ranked. The human mind is not more perfect than the instincts that direct animal behaviour; each is a response to different contingencies. As we’ve seen, however, Darwin in other passages asserts without apparent reservation that it requires a “far higher” mental organization to learn skills like language, as human beings must, than to inherit them as instincts, as birds in Darwin’s view inherit the ability to sing. Versions of these irreconcilable positions coexist throughout Darwin’s evolutionary writings and constitute a major crux in their interpretation.7 For his own framing of the problem, we turn to a final passage from the notebooks: “It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another. – We consider [cerebral structure] those where the most developed, as highest. – A bee [intellectual faculties] doubtless would where instincts were” (Darwin, Notebooks, 189; notebook B, 74).8 With some degree of irony, Darwin here represents speciation as determining consciousness as well as structure. Human beings’ intellects and the instincts of bees are equally adapted to their respective conditions of existence; their different adaptations, however, produce a difference in consciousness, by which both bees and human beings make their specific organization into a universal standard. Even after Darwin develops the theory of natural selection to account for adaptation, as we shall see in The Origin of Species, he consistently represents the power that produces useful adaptations as also producing a kind of blindness or misrecognition. Here, in what amounts to a miniature beast fable, Darwin rebukes the anthropocentrism that makes a specifically human faculty into a universal standard by arguing that, given their different faculties, bees would have a different standard. The bees’ consciousness in this argument is surely something of a heuristic fiction – but then so is that of human beings themselves, even though Darwin identifies it as his own with an underlined “we.” For in the first sentence of the note Darwin flatly contradicts what he says in the second that “we” consider to be true. While the whole point of the analogy between human beings and bees is to show that the error it denounces is not just an absurd view held by some people, but is rather proper to humans as a species, as the analogy’s author, Darwin occupies an

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ambiguous position. At once inside and outside an illusion, Darwin’s position in this note is divided by a contradiction homologous with others we have discussed in this section: on the one hand, a position of blindness that he defines by analogy to the blindness to its own motives of a creature acting by instinct; on the other, a position of knowledge, somehow located outside the history of material bodies and dispositions that limits the first. The problem of this difference within the Darwinian observer remains in The Origin of Species, none the less because in that work the development of human beings is almost excluded from explicit consideration.

***

Because of the absence of a transcendental or theological ground for natural selection, I have claimed, Darwin’s theory is necessarily selfreferential. In his writing on the subject, in consequence, it is often difficult to distinguish between scientific claims that refer to the natural world and epistemological or historical claims regarding the conditions under which that world is available to knowledge. In this section, we will examine the dialectical treatment of vision and images in The Origin of Species, a text in which, both as an object and as a medium of perception, the eye is a stumbling block to the argument. Paradoxically, as we will see, it is the eye’s perfection that most conceals the process of modification by which Darwin argues it was formed. The apparent perfection of some instincts and structures in animals and the difficulty of understanding how they could have come into being by a process of gradual modification is one of the major obstacles to his theory that Darwin discusses in The Origin. Of such structures, the one on which he spends the most time is the eye:9 To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances . . ., could have been formed by natural selection, seems absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if, further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable to our imagination, can hardly be considered real. (140)

In this passage, the principal obstacle to recognizing the action of natural selection is the imagination. This idea appears elsewhere in The Origin, and also recurs at the close of the discussion of the eye, where Darwin writes of

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anyone who has followed his argument that “his reason ought to conquer his imagination; though I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to such startling lengths” (141). This cluster of references to the imagination as incapable of grasping natural selection around Darwin’s discussion of the eye suggests that he conceives imagination primarily as a faculty of visualization. The logic of natural selection can be grasped by reason, but its operation is not amenable to visual representation. The eye is thus an obstacle to Darwin’s argument in a double sense: not only does its perfection make it difficult to understand how it could have been gradually evolved, but it also produces a picture of the world in which evolution remains hidden. The eye’s reliability is in fact called into question throughout The Origin. The dialectical form of Darwin’s argument runs, the better the eye, the more deceptive. On the one hand, he founds his argument for the power of natural selection on the demonstrated possibility of modifying species under cultivation by selective breeding. “The great power of this principle of selection is not hypothetical. It is certain that several of our eminent breeders have, even within a single lifetime, modified to a large extent some breeds of cattle and sheep.” The principles breeders follow provide a model for Darwin’s understanding of natural selection, moreover, because they principally operate not by crossing different breeds, nor by inbreeding, but selecting for variations in a particular trait. To succeed in this requires a trained eye: If selection consisted merely in separating some very distinct variety, and breeding from it, the principle would be . . . obvious . . . ; but its importance consists in the great effect produced by the accumulation in one direction, during successive generations, of differences absolutely inappreciable by an uneducated eye – differences which I for one have vainly attempted to appreciate. Not a man in a thousand has accuracy of eye and judgment sufficient to become an eminent breeder. (27)

The selective power of the breeder’s eye thus provides Darwin with a paradigm for the power of natural selection itself as his argument unfolds in the opening chapters of The Origin. On the other hand, the very accuracy of the breeder’s eye, its training in the recognition of differences, prevents it from recognizing the similarities among the breeds it works on as evidence of kinship: [A]ll the breeders of the various domestic animals and the cultivators of plants, with whom I have ever conversed, or whose treatises I have read,

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Darwin’s point here is to urge modesty on readers who, unlike the expert breeder, recognize that different domestic varieties can descend from a single species – but yet deny the possibility of the transmutation of species. But there is a remarkable dialectical irony in Darwin’s using as his negative example of blindness to transmutation the very authorities he also uses to show its possibility. Given this irony and the idea elsewhere in the book that the visual image is an obstacle to understanding that reason must conquer, it is not surprising that The Origin of Species is the most sparsely illustrated of Darwin’s books.10 It contains only one figure, the schema of divergent evolution that Darwin termed a “great Tree of Life” (Figure 4). Nor should we be surprised, given the equivocal meanings of the eye and the visual image throughout The Origin, that the book gives its single figure several divergent explanations. As Darwin emphasizes, the figure of the tree was not unique to his work: “The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe the simile largely represents the truth” (59). Darwin reworks a figure from the existing literature because what he means it to illustrate is, in part, the current state of knowledge: It is a truly wonderful fact – the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity – that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner which we everywhere behold – namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes. (99)

Darwin’s figure thus illustrates in the first instance a taxonomy characterized by varying degrees of affinity between organisms of the same class. To the

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Figure 4 Lithograph from Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859). Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University

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extent that it represents the state of knowledge before Darwin wrote,11 it represents abstractions: relations of affinity that could be understood as understood as arising from a concept or from a transcendental schema.12 Darwin’s theory gives these affinities a material and historical existence by recognizing them as relations of biological kinship. In his theory, the subordination of group to group refers literally to a chronological and genealogical sequence of events and not to a purely conceptual subordination. Given that Darwin’s argument here aims to transform a conceptual schema into an historical one, however, his own version of the tree is strikingly abstract and lacking in historical referents. Darwin does not, for instance, choose to speculate about affinities between members of any actual class of organism. The eleven letters at the base of his diagram may represent any eleven species whatsoever having varying degrees of affinity with each other, as may all of the letters designating their descendants. Later in The Origin, moreover, Darwin argues that the relations among genera have the same formal properties as those among species, and illustrates his argument by referring back to the figure from earlier in the book, suggesting now that the eleven letters from A to L be thought of as referring to genera rather than to species. As this retrospective revision of his earlier explication shows, Darwin understands the relations of affinity represented by his figure as formally similar at different scales; since these relations are determined by the unfolding of kinship relations in time, the fact that the figure can be viewed at different scales means that it can be viewed as representing different periods of time. Darwin is explicit about this: “The intervals between the horizontal lines in the diagram, may represent each a thousand generations, but it would have been better if each had represented ten thousand generations” (91). Darwin’s sense of constraint in the interpretation of his own figure here is odd, and is belied a few pages later when he expands its temporal scale of reference: “In the diagram, each horizontal line has been hitherto been supposed to represent a thousand generations, but each may represent a million or a hundred million generations, and likewise a section of the successive strata of the earths crust including extinct remains” (96). On the one hand, scaling up the period of time the figure encompasses emphasizes its nature as a representation of a concept rather than of particular historical events and organisms. On the other, the analogy between the figure’s horizontal lines and those of geological strata in the earth’s crust reattaches the figure to the material world, implying that its spatial articulation of time has a geological prototype and that the tree itself might actually picture the spatial relations among fossils found at different depths.

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Recalling the scepticism towards images that we have noted elsewhere in The Origin, however, we need to wonder if here too the image, the figure of the tree in its pictorial dimension, might be an obstacle to be overcome in grasping what for Darwin is the reality of his theory. And indeed, a few paragraphs before suggesting that the horizontal lines in his figure “may represent” geological strata, Darwin tells us that they are “imaginary, and might have been inserted anywhere, after intervals long enough to have allowed the accumulation of sufficient variation” (92). Even here, Darwin downplays the purely virtual and heuristic character of his figure’s representation of temporal articulation. In the figure, the horizontal lines mark the moments at which variation occurs in the different lineages it traces. But in fact, Darwin’s theory clearly represents variation as occurring continuously. Not only could the horizontal lines that locate the moment of variation appear “anywhere”; in strict logic they should be everywhere, covering the entire figure. To produce a schema representing natural selection’s operation through time, Darwin must exclude much of that operation from representation, transforming a continuous process into a series of discontinuous events. This transformation is emphasized by his representation of the appearance of new variations as occurring not only punctually but also simultaneously on every branch of the tree. Nothing in his theory suggests that new variations appear in this coordinated way; that his figure shows them doing so is an effect of its representation of natural selection as an event transecting an otherwise empty homogeneous time. One way to understand the exclusions in Darwin’s figure is by considering its representation of intermediate forms between existing classes. On one axis, the figure denies the extinction of these forms, while on the other, their extinction is presupposed. On its vertical axis, the whole point of the figure is to represent simultaneously the progenitors of a class of organism and their generations of modified successors. In this simultaneous representation, the extinction of earlier forms is ignored. On its horizontal axis, however, the blank spaces between the figure’s lines and points are constituted by extinction. When he returns to a new discussion of the figure in his chapter on “Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings,” Darwin shows how extinction “has played an important part in defining and widening the intervals between the several groups in each class.” Though extinction has only separated groups originating from shared descent, he writes, nonetheless, “if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear . . . it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from all other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between existing varieties” (317–18). As an

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array of points and lines, the tree of life represents Darwin’s concept of how species diverge as they evolve from a common origin. It appears, though, on a blank ground which, in the form of space between the figure’s lines, represents what it excludes: the extinction of the intermediate forms without which species would not exist. The dialectical relation between what is visible and what is invisible is a recurrent topic in The Origin of Species and structures some of the work’s best-known passages: We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget that the birds which we see idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that though food may now be superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year. (50–1)

There is nothing in this passage’s description of the natural world that explains or requires its pervasive distinction between what can be represented by sight or memory and what remains invisible or forgotten. The distinction belongs not to the object but to the subjects of knowledge, the “we” who see only the “face” of nature while Darwin’s text works to make us aware of its relation to other parts that remain unseen. This division within the knowledge conveyed by Darwin’s work also structures the tree of life figure, where it is again allegorized by a difference between what is visible and what is invisible. Here there is no external object of representation; as I have noted, Darwin’s figure does not refer to any particular period of time or class of living things. The figure rather represents a concept, one whose internal divisions it stages allegorically by the negative but mutually constitutive relation of figure to ground. This staging, though, is only one instance of a general pattern in The Origin by which the power of vision or of visual representation is repeatedly linked to a failure to see or to an exclusion from representation. In its broadest meaning, this pattern registers in the form of Darwin’s work the impossibility of any point of view affording a unified or totalizing concept of natural selection. Where or when might such a point of view be located? The point of Darwin’s illustration is to represent the emergence of new classes of organism by the selection over time of favourable variations. To do so, he presents a figure where the process of variation is shown as occurring in a sequence of presents – a linear series of nows, graphically rendered by horizontal lines linking events supposed to occur at the same moment. As

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Darwin allows, these presents are imaginary. This would be as true for the figure’s topmost line as for any other, even though this one does double duty as both an element in the diagram and as its external border. Not only are the presents represented by the figure imaginary, so too is the present it occupies. Though in all other respects, the diagram represents a schema rather than any specific dates or temporal intervals, its upper line marks its intersection with the historical present. Darwin says as much in chapter 13 when he writes that “the present day” is represented by “the uppermost horizontal line” (310). In this one instance where it represents a specifiable historical moment, though, the diagram radically limits the amount of information it conveys. At its uppermost limit, the schematic representation of the secular history of variation and extinction disappears and the diagram is left to represent only the variously related types of organism that that history has produced, variation and extinction themselves being impossible to know as events with a specific historical location.

***

In the first section of this chapter, I read passages from his notebooks to argue that Darwin’s long-standing preoccupation with the topics of unconscious memory and automatism is the temporal projection of an epistemological problem. The problem is to distinguish between thinking about natural selection and unconsciously undergoing its effects, and it arises because the same body does both. To stabilize the distinction between his own consciousness and the objects about which he thinks, Darwin tends to present the latter as bereft of consciousness, like old Elspeth in Scott’s The Antiquary. Nonetheless, the difficulty of distinguishing between the subject of knowledge and its object – and more generally between knowing and not knowing – remains acute in The Origin of Species. The puzzle of Darwin’s attribution of agency to nature and natural selection has been extensively discussed; an especially strange aspect of that puzzle is the way The Origin projects onto nature responsibility, sometimes for Darwin’s discovery of natural selection, but more often for his precursors’ failure to discover it.13 In the book’s conclusion, as Darwin reviews the evidence he has marshalled, he writes that “Nature may be said to have taken pains to reveal, by rudimentary organs and by homologous structures, her scheme of modification, which it seems that we wilfully will not understand” (353). Homologous and rudimentary structures, however, show modification by contrast; they demonstrate the natural “scheme of modification” by showing the affinity of organisms which have in other respects been rendered dissimilar by natural selection. Nature could thus

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with as much reason be seen to conceal “her” scheme as to reveal it – and indeed Darwin suggests as much in his chapter on the imperfection of the geological record, where he argues that because new species are least likely to be formed in geological eras of subsidence, when fossil beds are laid down, nature “may almost be said to have guarded against the frequent discovery of her transitional or linking forms” (216). Underlying the apparent contradiction between these two passages is the dialectical logic of Darwin’s theory of development, which aims to account both for positive data, such as homologous traits in related species, and also for negative, such as the limitations of the geological record. The contradiction only arises when Darwin projects his own theory, as a product of consciousness, onto a personified nature. The result is that the data the theory explains, instead of being its cause, are imagined as its effects. Nature, that is to say, is imagined as already knowing what Darwin knows, and as acting with intent either to reveal or to conceal her knowledge. The dialectical structure of Darwin’s thought does not only appear in The Origin of Species as projected onto a personified nature; it pervades the work and makes it extraordinarily difficult to characterize the relation of Darwin’s argument to what one might term his sources and authorities. As we saw in the previous section, for instance, Darwin’s information regarding plasticity of animal and plant varieties under selection came largely from breeders and cultivators. An important part of the drama of his work arises from the confrontation it stages between establishment science and the unofficial knowledge Darwin obtained from these sources. As well as providing his authorities on the subject of artificial selection, though, we have seen that the breeders and cultivators he cites also serve Darwin as examples of how knowledge can coexist with and depend on blindness. And, finally, notwithstanding the importance of the encounter between official and unofficial knowledges to Darwin’s argument, we recall that the effectiveness of artificial selection does not appear in The Origin principally as evidence that Darwin’s scientific peers have something to learn from animal breeders and horticulturalists, but to provide an analogy for what he goes on to say about the effectiveness of natural selection. This analogy, to which we will return, thus provides yet another example of how The Origin tends to represent objects of knowledge, like nature, as doubles of the subjects who know them. In the first part of this chapter, I argued that Darwin’s notebooks invoke the figure of unconsciousness in order to stabilize these distinctions – between knowing and not knowing; between subject and object – that

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his theory threatens to collapse. The term reappears, though with significantly different associations and meanings, in The Origin of Species. In the later parts of the work, which I will consider first, Darwin uses it to characterize, not material evidence of development unknowingly conveyed from the past, but another kind of evidence for his theory whose bearers also do not know it as such. This evidence appears in the work of Darwin’s precursors in natural history. In his chapters on morphology, Darwin returns to his earlier discussion of taxonomy, observing of “the grand fact in natural history of the subordination of group under group” that from “familiarity” it “does not sufficiently strike us” (304). His task here is thus not to present new knowledge but to “strike” his readers with knowledge they already possess. This task Darwin describes elsewhere as one of taking ideas on which naturalists already unconsciously base their work and raising them to consciousness. Thus he argues that the “rules and guides” for classification followed by the “best systematists” have led them “unconsciously” to use the “element of descent . . . in grouping species under genera, and genera under higher groups” (313). Or he writes that in defining principles of classification, such as that which disregards the functional value of a trait for classification but rather considers whether it appears unchanged in a great number of forms or in invariable correlation with another trait, naturalists have shown themselves to be “unconsciously seeking” a genealogical classification, “not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions” (308–9). Darwin’s argument in The Origin thus concerns not only the history of species but also the history of thought. He is able to use existing ideas about taxonomy as evidence for his theory because he views these ideas not as mere errors but as unconscious truths, presented in the inverted form that Marx characterized as ideological. When Darwin describes his precursors as “unconsciously seeking” a genealogical classification, he assumes that a genealogy showing the development of species in secular time is the reality of which the idea of “an unknown plan of creation” appears as a distorted representation. This pattern is familiar to us from Darwin’s Tree of Life figure, which adapts a schema designed to express purely conceptual relationships and shows that, when properly interpreted, it actually represents a historical process. The manner of interpreting his precursors that Darwin adopts in these examples was moreover not limited to their ideal representations of relations between different forms: we also find it exemplified in his response to Richard Owen’s concept of the vertebrate archetype. Owen’s main field was vertebrate morphology, and he was the preeminent naturalist in Britain during the 1840s and 1850s,

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when he and Darwin were on cordial terms. His major work during this period was on the homologies between different vertebrate skeletons; this work led him to postulate what he termed the vertebrate archetype, a basic skeletal plan of which he held that all existing and fossil vertebrates were variations.14 Owen followed Cuvier in accepting the fossil evidence of extinction, and also in believing that places in the natural order vacated by extinct species were filled by successive new creations; like his peers in the early Victorian scientific establishment – including William Whewell and Charles Lyell – however, he rejected absolutely the idea that new species could come into being by descent with modification or by any other mechanism of transmutation. His vertebrate archetype thus had no material historical existence. Rather, its recurrence as the basic pattern of which every historical vertebrate skeleton is a variation demonstrates, for Owen, the existence of a divine mind possessing foreknowledge of each of the variations that the archetype has made possible.15 Owen presented his final version of the archetype in lectures published in 1849 as On the Nature of Limbs; in his copy of this work, Darwin wrote what seems like an admiring note: “I look at Owen’s Archetype as more than ideal, as a real representation as far as the most consummate skill and loftiest generalization can represent the parent form of the Vertebrata.”16 In light of Darwin’s theory, Owen’s “ideal” becomes “real,” in the same way that in The Origin of Species the traditional figure of the tree of life becomes a “simile” that “largely speaks the truth” (99) and the metaphorical language naturalists use in referring to the skull “as formed of metamorphosed vertebrae” turns out to apply “literally” (322–3). Darwin’s habit of finding in the work of earlier naturalists unconscious representations of the historical reality described by his theory can be understood in part as evidence of real intellectual indebtedness and affinity.17 As it appears in The Origin of Species, it has also been read as an attempt to disarm criticism by minimizing the break Darwin’s theory makes with existing work in the field. Owen, it should be said, was not disarmed; his sneering and obscurantist review of The Origin was among the most damaging it received and it ended at a stroke the two men’s friendship.18 Nor, in my view, was Owen wrong to see Darwin’s work as making a break with his; the distinction between the two is at once as fundamental and as difficult to characterize as that between Marx and Ricardo.19 My aim here is not to address this problem in intellectual history, but rather to read a logic internal to Darwin’s work. To the intellectualhistorical problem, though, my reading contributes evidence that the

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difficulty of Darwin’s relation to his precursors is only one instance of a more general difficulty in his thinking of distinguishing between knowledge and non-knowledge of species transmutation. The result is that the origin of descent with modification as a theory is as impossible to specify as the origin of a species, or as the other events to which, using terms such as adaptation and selection, Darwin’s theory refers. I began by arguing that the fascination Darwin reveals in his notebooks with unconscious memory and inherited ideas was the historical projection of an epistemological problem, the problem being that of establishing a relation between the subject who recognizes natural selection and the one who undergoes it. Instincts, Darwin believes, appear where reason once was; this belief makes it possible to represent the task of reason in the present as one of restoring a version of itself that has been lost in the past. Nothing in Darwin’s theory requires him to understand instincts as the inherited remainders of ideas that have become unconscious. That this understanding might be overdetermined by the broader structure of Darwin’s thought is suggested by its recurrence in inverted form as a way of representing his relation to his precursors: as well as reading evolutionary remainders like instincts as unconscious ideas, Darwin also reads ideas as unconscious representations of evolutionary remainders. In both cases, the theory of descent is understood as a raising to consciousness of what had been unconscious. Darwin’s theory itself takes a rarely noted detour through the concept of unconsciousness. As is well known, Darwin represents natural selection, and seems to some extent to have come to understand it, by analogy with the practice of scientific breeding, which he termed artificial selection. In between his discussions of artificial and natural selection in The Origin, though, Darwin interposes as a third term what he calls unconscious selection (29–33). Unconscious selection, like artificial selection, is effected by human agency; the two kinds of selection differ, however, in that unconscious selection has no intended result and indeed occurs without any intention at all: At the present time, eminent breeders try by methodical selection, with distinct object in view, to make a new breed or sub-breed . . . But, for our purpose, a kind of Selection, which may be called Unconscious, and which results from every one trying to possess and breed from the best individual animals, is more important. Thus, a man who intends keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can, and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, but he has no wish or expectation of permanently altering the breed. Nonetheless, I cannot doubt that this process, continued during

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Biopolitics and Animal Species centuries, would improve and modify any breed. . . . Slow and insensible changes of this kind could never be recognized unless actual measurements or careful drawings of the breeds in question had been made long ago, which might serve for comparison. (29)

In unconscious selection, then, the unconsciousness refers less to the act of selection than to its effects over time. Darwin illustrates this with historical examples, first, of how unconscious selection can operate without the kind of future object envisioned by breeders who practice artificial selection: The pear, though cultivated in classical times, appears, from Pliny’s description, to have been a fruit of very inferior quality. I have seen great surprise expressed in horticultural works at the wonderful skill of gardeners, in having produced such splendid results from such poor materials; but the art, I cannot doubt, has been simple, and, as far as the final result is concerned, has been followed almost unconsciously. . . . But the gardeners of the classical period, who cultivated the best pear they could procure, never thought what splendid fruit we should eat; though we owe our excellent fruit, in some small degree, to their having naturally chosen and preserved the best varieties they could anywhere find. (31)

Another historical example follows, giving evidence that unconscious selection has proceeded in the past, while remaining unrecognized even in retrospect: A large amount of change in our cultivated plants, thus slowly and unconsciously accumulated, explains, as I believe, the well-known fact, that in a vast number of cases we cannot recognize, and therefore do not know, the wild parent-stocks of the plants which have been longest cultivated in our flower and kitchen gardens. If it has taken centuries or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to their present standard of usefulness to man, we can understand how it is that neither Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilized man, has afforded us a single plant, worth culture. (31)

In his redescription of nature, culture, and history in these remarkable passages, Darwin resembles no one so much as the Wordsworth of “Tintern Abbey” and “Michael,” who represents a nature haunted by the remains of culture and history. In the natural world around them, Darwin tells his readers, they see without recognizing the wild parent-forms that have been transformed to produce culture, by a historical process which itself remains unrecognized. Even the antithesis between nature and culture on which this idea rests, though, is deconstructed in the next sentence, which argues that Europeans think of nature as different at home and in

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the antipodes because they do not recognize that in Europe nature is already a culture that does not know itself as such.20 When he shows how by unconscious selection human agency can modify species without intending to do so and without recognizing its work in retrospect, Darwin is preparing the way for his description of natural selection, as he is in his demonstration of the power of artificial selection. The analogy between the two kinds of human agency that have modified species over time and the agency of natural selection is stated in the rhetorical question with which Darwin opens his treatment of the latter: “As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not Nature effect?” (65). Darwin’s analogy between selection by “Nature” and selection by human agency requires him, having demonstrated the principle of selection, to show first that it can operate without intent and second that it need not be teleological. Though the argument is not made explicit, this is what he achieves by introducing unconscious selection as a third term between artificial and natural selection. Without any intention of doing so, by unconscious selection human actors modify species over time in ways that serve their interests. To make the analogy complete, having produced a concept of agency without intentionality, Darwin then goes on to imagine one without interests. Natural selection works in the same way as selection by human agency – but it has no interests of its own to serve: “Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends” (65).21 The concept of natural agency in this argument is produced by negation: by deleting the traits of intention and interest that constitute the subject who acts in artificial and unconscious selection, Darwin theorizes a form of agency without a subject, or with the nosubject he personifies as Nature. In the most schematic reading of his argument, Darwin establishes the possibility of this kind of negative concept by his use of the mediating term un-conscious, which supplies a model for the work of the negative in everything that follows. Mediating third terms, though, often destabilize the arguments in which they appear. As we have seen, by introducing the concept of unconscious selection, Darwin radically undermines the antithesis between nature and culture upon which rests the entire distinction between human and natural agency in the selection and modification of living forms. Unconscious selection is defined by its blindness to its own agency; it thus has a standpoint from which it is impossible to distinguish between the agency of human beings and that of nature. This standpoint of blindness is actually the correct one; it can be shown to be the unacknowledged

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standpoint adopted in The Origin of Species. For the human species is in Darwin’s view part of nature. And unconscious selection in the broadest sense is natural selection: of all the players in the infinitely complex system of mutually dependent forms of life Darwin describes, it could be said that they are mutually and unconsciously selecting one another. Darwin distinguishes between natural selection and selection by human agency with the claim that only the former acts purely for the benefit of the organism under selection; but the dialectical logic of his own argument makes this distinction unsustainable. If we consider his example of the improvement of pears by unconscious human agency as it were from the pears’ point of view, it turns into the story of a fruit’s becoming adapted to human tastes so as to give itself a competitive advantage. The concept of unconscious selection disallows the privileging of the human point of view by making it as much an interpretative construct as any other. And without such a privilege, the evolution of the pear becomes indistinguishable from that of any fruit that evolves by making itself progressively more palatable to the organisms that feed on it. Darwin himself discusses as a kind of natural selection the mutual adaptation of plants and the insects that pollinate them, each of which benefits itself by becoming fitted to the needs of the other (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 71–4). The concept of unconscious selection thus provides a way of understanding human agency as a part of natural selection. Why, we need to ask, does Darwin use it to distinguish the two? His decision not to write about the human species as a product of natural selection in The Origin of Species is well known and widely understood as arising from a wish to present his theory in the least controversial way possible. Less easy to understand but perhaps more fundamental is the book’s non-discussion of human beings’ agency in natural selection. I have argued in this chapter that Darwin’s work represents knowledge of natural selection as constitutively incomplete because faculties shaped by natural selection will necessarily tend to conceal its operation. Natural selection cannot be fully known from within; I thus argued that in Darwin’s notebooks, the work of knowing is divided between, on the one hand, subjects who embody unconscious ideas of the past in the form of hereditary instincts and, on the other, the disembodied scientist in whom these ideas are raised to consciousness. To understand the figure of unconsciousness in Darwin’s later writing, I now want to suggest, we need to turn this view of it as the projection of an epistemological problem upside down. I’ve argued that what Darwin in The Origin of Species terms natural selection is conceived by analogy with but also as the negation of forms of selection involving human agency.

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Only by this negation is Darwin able to produce natural selection as an object that can be comprehended from outside. From the moment when it incorporated human agency, natural selection would cease to exist as such. Instead of being an object available to knowledge, it would be a practice freighted with libidinal and political investments. Foucault argues that species became political in the century when Darwin wrote; in a broader sense, forming and classifying life have always been political projects. What Darwin in The Origin terms unconscious selection is indistinguishable from natural selection except from the standpoint of anthropocentrism. It is not too much to say that the historical interpenetration of human agency and natural selection constitutes the unconscious of Darwin’s ideas, just as a certain material and historical reality constituted the unconscious truth his work revealed in the ideas of his precursors. We know this not only from the instability of the concept of unconscious selection in The Origin itself and the ease with which it can be shown to coincide with its apparent antithesis, but also because of the recurrence throughout Darwin’s work of figures of unconscious agency, most notably when he discusses habits that have become hereditary in the form of instincts. In these discussions, he represents forms of agency that cannot recognize themselves as such, and, being as they are the traces or remainders of past history, cannot properly be represented as present at all. These figures, I suggest, allegorize in Darwin’s writing certain traits of natural selection that elude representation as such: notably, its invisibility in the present as a process that becomes recognizable only in retrospect, and even then not in its actual effects but only in the unassimilated remainders that its operation has left behind. Among these figures is a character who haunts Darwin’s earliest writing on natural selection, Elspeth Mucklebackit from Scott’s The Antiquary. With her yarn, spindle, and unceasing work, Elspeth already appears in Scott not only as a figure typifying a specific period in past history, but also as an allegory of something like destiny as a general and transhistorical agency. In Darwin she not only exemplifies history’s power to shape human action and consciousness in particular ways, but also, and more uncannily, the alienated and misrecognized form under which human agency in biohistory appears in any imaginable present.

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chapter 5

Foreign Bodies The Human Species and Its Symptom

A recurrent analogy in Sigmund Freud’s work characterizes the symptom as a foreign body.1 Its first use dates from 1893, when it appears in the “Preliminary Communication” that Freud and Josef Breuer published two years before the Studies on Hysteria. Here, to present the thesis that hysterical symptoms embody traumatic memories, they write that “the psychical trauma – or more precisely the memory of the trauma – acts like a foreign body [Fremdkörper] which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work” (Freud, 2:6; see also 2:290). The comparison of the hysterical symptom to a foreign body embedded in living tissue persists in Freud’s writing long after he abandons his initial theory that hysteria is caused by trauma. The figure recurs as late as the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis of 1932, where Freud uses it to characterize the relation of the symptom to the ego (22:57). The fullest and most self-conscious use of this figure in Freud’s late work, however, comes in 1926 from Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, where he begins a discussion of the symptom as a compromise formation between the ego and the id by recalling that “an analogy with which we have long been familiar compared the symptom to a foreign body which was keeping up a constant series of stimuli and reactions in the tissue in which it was embedded” (20:98). The first section of this chapter will provide a genealogy for this conception of the symptom by showing its relation to the work of Charles Darwin.2 Subsequent sections, however, will be concerned not with Freud, but with Darwin himself, whose influence on Freud has been misunderstood because it arises from aspects of his work that are themselves poorly understood and that today might even be said to appear foreign to it. These include theories of involuntary behaviour and unconscious agency. My ultimate aim in reading Darwin through Freud, though, goes beyond explaining some difficult points in one as a key to understanding the other. Freud’s theory of the symptom emerges from cruxes in 94

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Darwin’s thought that themselves require a symptomatic reading. Darwin’s concerns with suspended or unconscious agency appear at moments where his work encounters the risk of producing what it purports to describe. Examples of this pattern to be discussed include somatic expressions, such as the blush, and concepts, such that of human species identity. Like symptoms in psychoanalysis, these objects of Darwin’s thought make visible the libidinal structure of the analytic situation itself.

***

An identification – perhaps wishful – of his own work with that of Darwin recurs both in Freud’s writing and in that of his earliest followers. One instance appears in his well-known list of the three blows that science has administered to human narcissism. The first of these, which Freud terms the cosmological blow, is “associated . . . with the name and work of Copernicus,” whose astronomical system displaced humankind from its position at the center of the universe (17:140). The second blow, the biological, was, according to Freud, administered by “Charles Darwin and his collaborators and forerunners,” who showed that “Man is not a being different from animals or superior to them,” but is “himself . . . of animal descent” (17:143). The third blow of science to human narcissism Freud terms the psychological; this has been administered by psychoanalysis itself, which showed, as he put it, that “the ego is not master in its own house” (17:143).3 In this list, Freud’s identification of his work with Darwin’s is explicit, as is his identification of the resistance to psychoanalysis with resistance to Darwinian evolution. Many signs of Freud’s admiration for Darwin appear elsewhere in his writing; in a partial autobiography of 1924, he recalls the role played by his attraction to “the theories of Darwin” in his decision to study medicine (20:8); in a letter of 1907, he characterizes The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) as one of history’s “ten most significant books.”4 That Freud understood his achievement as analogous to Darwin’s emerges again after his death, when Ernest Jones in his authorized biography terms him “the Darwin of the mind.”5 Notwithstanding this characterization, Jones also finds in the relation of Freud’s ideas to Darwin’s “a baffling problem.”6 The problem is Freud’s belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics, a position Jones associates with Darwin’s precursor Jean Baptiste Lamarck, which was contradicted by the genetic understanding of heredity that became available to science in the early twentieth century. The reason for his biographer’s exasperated tone in discussing this aspect of Freud’s thought, it gradually

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emerges, is that the subject is one on which he and Jones had disagreed in the last year of Freud’s life, when Jones had explained to him that his position conflicted with biology and “begged” him to modify it in the forthcoming Moses and Monotheism (1939). Freud, however, did no such thing, incorporating Jones’s arguments in the book only with the observation that in its “present attitude . . . biological science . . . refuses to hear of the inheritance of acquired characters by succeeding generations. I must, however, in all modesty confess that nevertheless I cannot do without this factor in biological evolution” (23:100). From the standpoint of mid-twentieth-century biology, Jones had right on his side in this dispute.7 His intellectual history, however, requires some correction, which is worth making because the picture he gives of Freud’s views remains influential to this day.8 Here is a condensed version of that picture: “Before Darwin, the only serious explanation of evolution that had any vogue was Lamarck’s doctrine of inherited characteristics. . . . This doctrine has been completely discredited for more than half a century” – to support which position Jones gives a long quotation from Julian Huxley and then concludes that “in spite of innumerable . . . strictures Freud remained from the beginning to the end of his life what one must call an obstinate adherent of this discredited Lamarckism.”9 As Lucille Ritvo has shown, however, Freud’s psychological publications contain no references to Lamarck; his correspondence suggests that he did not read Lamarck’s evolutionary work until about the time of World War I.10 Freud certainly had an early and comprehensive knowledge of Darwin, however – apparently more so than his biographer. He therefore knew, as Jones seems not to, that Darwin never rejected the idea that some acquired traits could be inherited and particularly that habits developed by an individual organism could appear as native instincts in its offspring. This idea appears only in passing in The Origin of Species (1859) but plays a much larger role in The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), the later works in which Darwin treats human evolution. Darwin’s understanding of how the inheritance of acquired traits affected a species’ development, however, differed from Lamarck’s, and, as we shall see, Freud’s ideas on the subject were shaped by Darwin.11 They may indeed have been Darwin’s greatest influence on Freud; it is thus an irony of intellectual history that they led to his characterization as a Lamarckian. In Freud’s psychological writings, the earliest citations of Darwin occur in the Studies on Hysteria, where Freud twice refers to The Expression of the Emotions: “When a hysteric creates a somatic expression for an emotionally-coloured idea by symbolism . . . these sensations and

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innervations belong to the field of ‘The Expression of the Emotions’, which, as Darwin [1872] has taught us, consists of actions which originally had a meaning and served a purpose” (2:180–1). In this passage, Freud represents the hysterical symptom as a sensation that at one time had a cause in external reality but now remains without a cause as what he terms a “menemic symbol.” Preserved by an unconscious libidinal investment, the symptom is a sort of organic remainder, as Freud implies by his reference to Darwin’s theory that certain innate bodily expressions of emotions are the recurrence of actions that had once been functional, occasioned by an unconscious mental association with the long-ago situation in which the action had been useful. Such associations may refer to the early life of the individual organism, as in this passage, where we see the Darwinian basis for the theory of neurosis as regression that Freud was to develop after the Studies: Kittens, puppies, young pigs and probably many other animals alternately press their fore-feet against the mammary glands of their mothers, to excite a freer secretion of milk, or to make it flow. Now it is very common with young cats, and not at all rare with old cats . . . when comfortably lying on a warm shawl or other soft substance, to pound it quietly and alternately with their fore-feet; their toes being spread out and claws slightly protruded, precisely as when sucking their mother. (Darwin, Expression, 52)

More typically, however, Darwin theorizes expressions of emotion as remainders of functional behaviours not from an individual’s history, but from that of a species: The involuntary bristling of the hair . . . in the case of animals . . . serves, together with certain voluntary movements, to make them appear terrible to their enemies; and as the same involuntary and voluntary actions are performed by animals nearly related to man, we are led to believe that man has retained through inheritance a relic of them, now become useless. It is certainly a remarkable fact, that the minute unstriped muscles, by which the hairs thinly scattered over man’s almost naked body are erected, should have been preserved to the present day; and that they should still contract under the same emotions, namely, terror and rage, which cause the hairs to stand on end in the lower members of the Order to which man belongs. (Darwin, Expression, 309)

By citing Darwin on the general theory of emotional expression in Studies on Hysteria, Freud implies that the embodiment of memory in the hysterical symptom is only a special case of a process to be found at work in all kinds of affect. He also implicitly accepts Darwin’s conflation of

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the retention of functional acts as habits in individual organisms with their supposed transformation into instincts transmitted by inheritance between the generations of a species. These implications are drawn out only in Freud’s later work, in a treatment of affect in the Introductory Lectures of 1917 that is subsequently elaborated in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety of 1926. I quote here from the Introductory Lectures: An affect includes in the first place particular motor innervations or discharges and secondly certain feelings. . . . The core which holds the combination we have described together is the repetition of some particular significant experience. This experience could only be a very early impression of a very general nature, placed in the prehistory not of the individual but of the species. To make myself more intelligible – an affective state would be constructed in the same way as a hysterical attack and, like it, would be the precipitate of a reminiscence. A hysterical attack may thus be likened to a freshly constructed individual affect, and normal affect to the expression of a general hysteria which has become a heritage. (16:395–6)

As a generalized hysteria, then, affect is in itself pathological. Freud terms the affective state, like the hysterical symptom, “the precipitate of a reminiscence,” using a figure that presents the embodied feeling as the trace or remainder of a memory. As in Darwin, the memory that survives only as an embodied trace is ultimately theorized as an inheritance whose origin is located not in the past of the individual, but in that of the species. The figure we began with of the foreign body within the body turns out to characterize not only the hysterical individual, but also the human species as a whole in relation to its prehistory.

***

The idea that the species body is by inheritance partly foreign to itself is indeed quintessentially Darwinian. Though current evolutionary science is principally concerned with natural selection as it promotes adaptation,12 as Gillian Beer writes, in Darwin and Freud “maladaptation is part of the nature of both mental and physical world.”13 The data that most preoccupied Darwin concerned structures either imperfectly adapted or wholly useless, and The Origin of Species explains the reason for this preoccupation on many occasions. To demonstrate the shared ancestry of different creatures “we choose those characters which . . . are the least likely to have been modified in relation to the conditions of life to which the species has been recently exposed. Rudimentary structures on this view are as good as, or even sometimes better than, other parts of the organization” (408). For the purpose of classifying an organism, the

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most valuable traits are those that have not been adapted to its environment: Analogical or adaptive character[s], although of the utmost importance to the welfare of the being, are almost valueless to the systematist. For animals, belonging to two most distinct lines of descent, may readily become adapted to similar conditions, and thus assume a close actual resemblance; but such resemblances will not reveal – will rather tend to conceal their bloodrelationship to their proper lines of descent. (410)

In the philological metaphor that runs throughout the Origin, “rudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation, but which serve as a clue in seeking for its derivation” (432). The trait that renders the organism’s past history legible is thus the one that has not been modified to its conditions of life, whose uselessness leads Darwin to figure it as an unvoiced letter. I have already noted Darwin’s belief that animals’ inherited traits could be modified by habit as well as by natural selection. In accepting this idea, however, he consistently distinguished his position from that of Lamarck, for whom the inheritance of acquired traits was an indispensable mechanism of evolution. Darwin treats the question in the Origin’s chapter on instincts, which he opens by premising that though it “does sometimes happen” that habitual actions are inherited, “it would be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired” in this way (235). The transformation of habits into instincts is nonetheless a recurring topic in Darwin’s writing. It becomes more prominent in the works after the Origin in which he treats human evolution, and, as we have seen, he even revised his last edition of the Origin itself to give it greater emphasis. Though the case is never made explicit, Darwin characteristically represents instincts acquired from habits as useless to the species that bears them, and sometimes as actually maladaptive.14 He differs from Lamarck, then, not only in believing that instincts can arise from the natural selection of advantageous traits, but also in his view that those instincts which are acquired from habits tend not to be advantageous. In The Descent of Man, when a habit is transformed into an instinct and becomes hereditary, it is degraded: “Some intelligent actions, after being performed during several generations, become converted into instincts and are inherited, as when birds on oceanic islands learn to avoid man. These actions may then be said to be degraded in character, for they

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are no longer performed through reason or from experience” (88). Many other examples also appear in the Descent: In many instances . . . it is probable that instincts are persistently followed from the mere force of inheritance, without the stimulus of either pleasure or pain. A young pointer, when it first scents game, apparently cannot help pointing. A squirrel in a cage who pats the nuts which it cannot eat, as if to bury them in the ground, can hardly be thought to act thus, either from pleasure or pain. (128)

Such automatic behaviours govern large areas of human and animal behaviour; they organize, for instance, the entire process of sexual selection, Darwin’s principal topic in the Descent, to be treated at more length later in this chapter: With the great majority of animals . . . the taste for the beautiful is confined, as far as we can judge, to the attractions of the opposite sex. . . . If female birds had been incapable of appreciating the beautiful colours, the ornaments, and voices of their male partners, all the labour and anxiety exhibited by the latter in displaying their charms before the females would have been thrown away; and this it is impossible to admit. Why certain bright colours should excite pleasure cannot, I presume, be explained, any more than why certain flavours and scents are agreeable; but habit has certainly something to do with the result, for that which is at first unpleasant to our senses, ultimately, becomes pleasant, and habits are inherited. (115)

The term “habit” thus designates for Darwin traits supplemental to the theory of natural selection, which he represents either as irrational automatism or as pure aestheticism. Precisely because they have not been shaped by natural selection, however, inherited habits belong to the class of residual traits that, in Darwin’s theory, are of the greatest value for categorization. This is the fundamental premise of Darwin’s argument in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, originally planned as part of The Descent of Man. Here Darwin presents acquired habit as one of the three principles that account for the involuntary expressions and gestures used by human beings and other animals under the influence of various emotions and sensations. His overarching argument in this work is that these expressions and gestures are evidence of inherited relationships among the species in which they appear. One important strand of this argument relies on the hypothesis that functional behaviours can become hereditary as habits; Darwin frequently explains expressions that are useless to the organisms they affect by showing their resemblance to functional behaviours in related species. We have seen

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an example of this argument in his discussion of the involuntary bristling of hair as a response to terror. Though such acquired habits make up the largest number of the behaviours studied in The Expression of the Emotions, some of the expressions it treats arise in other ways. The most notable instance occupies the last substantive chapter on the expressions characteristic of shame and self-attention, especially blushing. Here Darwin’s belief in the special value for categorization of useless and non-adaptive traits is especially clear; he presents the blush as the only involuntary human expression that has no equivalent in other animals. His argument thus makes it a unique trait marking the human being as such, and uses evidence of blushing in all of what he terms “the so-called races” to argue for humankind’s shared species identity, in opposition to polygenetic racial science, which held that the human races constituted distinct species. The counterintuitive nature of Darwin’s account of emotional expression emerges in a valuable modern critical edition by the psychologist Paul Ekman. In his commentary, Ekman repeatedly expresses surprise at Darwin’s refusal to consider the expression of emotion as a form of communication, which would presumably confer an evolutionary advantage on the species that developed it (Darwin, Expression, xxxiii, 53, 63). As we have seen, though, for Darwin, a species’ identity is recognized not by the advantageous characteristics it has acquired, but by the useless ones it has retained. And it is in this light that Darwin considers the involuntary gestures and expressions that accompany human feelings. The examples he discusses are never actually communicative; Darwin is rather inclined to argue that the expression of emotion actually inhibits communication, as in the anecdote he relates of an “extremely shy man” whose embarrassment before an audience rendered him mute.15 Rather than treating human expressions of emotion as communications bearing a specific message to a specified addressee, Darwin views them as independent of context, stereotyped, and automatic. They appear defunctioned in his work, in the same way as some of the animal behaviour we have discussed. This de-functioning is in some cases, like that of the bristling hair that expresses terror, the result of the species’ evolution. In many others, though, it is an artifact of Darwin’s method. To establish the physiological rather than cultural basis of human expressions, Darwin inquired by means of questionnaires whether particular gestures and behaviours were universally legible as expressions of specified emotions. This method required that any expression under study be reproducible; to meet this requirement, Darwin became a pioneer in the use of photographs for scientific research.16 In producing and selecting the photographs he

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circulated, some of which he also used to illustrate his book, Darwin made no distinction between expressions of actual emotions and simulated expressions. In the most striking of these images, obtained from Guillaume B. Duchenne de Boulogne’s Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (1862), the expressions Darwin asked his subjects to recognize were produced in medical patients by the application of electricity to the muscles of the face (Figures 5–7). In others, they were performed for the camera by actors (Figure 8). The mechanisms that produce human expressions as an object of study thus also estrange them and render arbitrary their relations with the emotions they putatively express. Who could say, after all, what were the actual emotions of the “old, toothless man” of “inoffensive character and . . . restricted intelligence,” as Duchenne described him (Darwin, Expression, 405), undergoing electrocution in the images reproduced here?

Figure 5 Photograph from Guillaume B. Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Électro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France. Darwin describes this image as one in which “the muscles of half the face are galvanized in order to represent a man beginning to cry, with the eyebrow on the same side rendered oblique, which is characteristic of misery” (Darwin, Expression, 151). In the course of his research, he showed it to twenty-three subjects and asked them to identify the emotion being represented; he did not, however, reproduce the photograph in his book.

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Figure 6 Photograph from Guillaume B. Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Électro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France

Figure 7 “Terror, from a photograph by Dr. Duchenne,” engraving from Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University. This engraving in Darwin’s work omits the electrodes that appear in the original photograph.

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Figure 8 “Men simulating indignation,” photograph from Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University

The mechanisms that enable Darwin’s study, moreover, include not only photographic and electrical technology, but also the social institutions of painting, medicine, and imperial administration. To gather evidence of expressive behaviour that he was unable to obtain for himself, Darwin consulted other male professionals, such as doctors and artists, and circulated a questionnaire to missionaries and colonial functionaries. The chapter on blushing, in particular, provides rich examples of somatic expressions implanted by the very institutions used to record them. Here, Darwin’s tendency to study expressive behaviour as automatism takes a less dramatic form than in the earlier chapters, where he used photographs of subjects undergoing galvanism for his examples. Now it manifests itself in a rigorous and reductive formalism that renders immaterial any substantive content the blush might be thought to communicate. Darwin’s thesis on blushing is that a blush expresses “the thought that others are thinking about us” (335; for other versions of this formulation with slightly different phrasing, see 324, 333,

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and 343); that is to say that it expresses any thought whatsoever that iterates or refers to someone else’s thought about the thinker. A blush expresses a thought about a thought about us; the citational structure of this claim opens the possibility of an indefinite series of iterations, in which we would blush at the thought that someone else is thinking about our thought about their thought . . . and so forth. Darwin does not discuss this possibility, which I will nonetheless shortly argue haunts his argument; nor does he follow his sources in discussing how blushing can be communicated mimetically from one person to another in the manner of hysterical symptoms.17 Darwin’s lack of interest in the cognitive significance of blushing, or in the content of the thoughts it expresses, is of a piece with his reading of the blush as the token of a general human species identity. “Blushing,” his chapter begins, “is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that an animal could blush” (Expression, 310). Alone among the expressions treated in Darwin’s book, blushing distinguishes human beings from other animals. It is also a trait whose uniform occurrence among human beings regardless of race or sex Darwin adduces to mount an argument against the racist science of the 1860s. Darwin’s stress on the universality of blushing as a form of expression, however, is in one respect at odds with the cases of blushing he actually describes. These take place in settings where differences of sex and race, far from vanishing, are obtrusively in evidence. There is something embarrassing – even blush-inducing – about the scenes Darwin represents that is not accounted for by the argument in whose service they appear. Three examples will show what I mean. In investigating how far blushing extends down the body and in demonstrating that it is hereditary, Darwin has recourse to information gathered from a friend who as a doctor “necessarily has frequent opportunities for observation”: Even peculiarities in blushing seem to be inherited. Sir James Paget, whilst examining the spine of a girl, was struck at her singular manner of blushing; a big splash of red appeared first on one cheek, and then other splashes, various[ly] scattered over the face and neck. He subsequently asked the mother whether her daughter always blushed in this peculiar manner; and was answered, “Yes, she takes after me.” Sir J. Paget then perceived that by asking this question he had caused the mother to blush; and she exhibited the same peculiarity as her daughter. (Darwin, Expression, 312)

From the gendering of the relation between the medical gaze and its object in this passage, it is only a short step to the orientalist fantasy of the light-skinned

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slave whose capacity to blush enhances her price in the seraglio, which Darwin duly cites a few pages later from Dr. Thomas Burgess, his predecessor in the study of the blush, and Mary Wortley Montagu (335). A more disturbing racial structuring of the relation between the researcher’s gaze and the blush appears in passages where Darwin writes about blushing in non-whites: The Polynesians blush freely. The Rev. Mr Stack has seen hundreds of instances with the New Zealanders. The following case is worth giving, as it relates to an old man who was unusually dark and partly tattooed. After having let his land to an Englishman for a small yearly rental, a strong passion seized him to buy a gig, which had lately become the fashion with the Maoris. He consequently wished to draw all the rent for four years from his tenant, and consulted Mr Stack whether he could do so. The man was old, clumsy, poor, and ragged, and the idea of his driving himself about in a carriage for display amused Mr Stack so much that he could not help bursting out into a laugh; and then “the old man blushed up to the roots of his hair.” (Darwin, Expression, 316)

This anecdote represents the blush as a token that identifies the humanity of its bearer. In so doing, however, it also attaches the blush to a wound – literally so in a final example, again cited by Darwin from Burgess: “Cicatrices of the skin remain for a long time white in the negro, and Dr. Burgess, who had frequent opportunities of observing a scar of this kind on the face of a negress, distinctly saw that it ‘invariably became red whenever she was abruptly spoken to or charged with any trivial offense’” (318). The blush provoked in this woman by the figure who observes her is offered as a token of their shared humanity.18 It appears through a scar, though, and is itself the mute expression of racial and sexual subjugation. When affect is made a token, it becomes traumatic, being implanted, as Freud saw it, as a foreign body in its bearer.

***

Reading and writing are bodily acts; writing about the body is thus prone to a special kind of self-reflexivity.19 As we have seen, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was a trailblazing work in its use of photography for scientific purposes, and its verbal representations, like those I have already discussed, characteristically follow the logic of the photograph by making bodies available to sight from the point of view of an apparatus that itself remains unseen. On occasion Darwin breaks this convention and asks his readers to test his claims on their own bodies, as in this passage where the reader’s eye itself becomes an object of attention: “Any one who will

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gradually contract the muscles round the eyes, will feel, as he increases the force, that his upper lip and the wings of his nose (which are partly acted on by one of the same muscles) are almost always a little drawn up” (Darwin, Expression, 150). Nonetheless, Darwin’s usual practice is to take no account of what might be his reader’s somatic response to his writing, though – as I have said – I think we blush to read the chapter on blushing, and I doubt if anyone has ever read the sections of The Origin of Species on the homologous structure of arms, wings, and flippers without a heightened attention to their own bone structure. Still less does Darwin refer to his own embodiment or to that of his collaborators. The omission is particularly striking in the chapter on blushing, given the recursive structure that he argues causes the blush. If blushes arise from the “thought that someone else is thinking of us,” we would expect them not only in the blushing subjects the chapter represents, but also in the investigators who prompt and report their blushes. Nonetheless, in spite of his concern with “self-attention,” Darwin shows us no blushing scientists, doctors, or painters. Even so, the chapter on blushing is exemplary among Darwin’s writings for the way it makes legible in spite of itself what Lacan would call the desire of the analyst. Though at one remove, as thoughts of thoughts, the blushes it describes bear witness to the emotions of the figures who record them: to the desire of the painter as he views his model; surely to scopophilia, not to say sadism, in the colonial administrators’ and missionaries’ inspection of their Polynesian and African subjects’ skins; to class ressentiment in the doctor who relates how one of his patients, a young duke, blushed on giving him his fee. In these episodes and elsewhere in the chapter, the institutional and affective context in which Darwin’s evidence was gathered becomes part of that evidence. The scientific frame is incorporated by its own object of study. A relation of this kind between the object of study and the institutional and technical means by which it is observed and represented characterizes the whole of The Expression of the Emotions, as I have already implied. Though it is a larger claim than I can properly defend here, I think it could be shown that involutions of Darwin’s methods of observation and representation into his objects of study throughout his work account for some recurrent problems in its interpretation, such as the significance of personification in the representation of natural selection and the relation between the specific intellectual-historical context in which Darwinian theory originated and the universal claims it makes.20 I will close with only one further example, in which, as in The Expression of the Emotions, Darwin links an anti-racist argument about human species identity to an analysis of habits that, as he believes, have by repetition become hereditary.

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In the much longer work of which the Expression was an offshoot, The Descent of Man, Darwin announces at the outset that he will have three topics, of which the first two, human descent from earlier forms of life and the manner of human development, are implied by the main title. The third topic, “the value of the differences between the so-called races of man” (18), however, is not so implied. Of the book that follows, moreover, less than a third is actually spent on human origins and development. Far more space is devoted to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, first as it operates in nonhuman animals and, in the book’s last section, in relation to human beings. Only with the publication of Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause (2009) did it become apparent how close was the link between Darwin’s development of the theory of sexual selection and his objection to scientific racism. Sexual selection, Desmond and Moore show, provided Darwin with a means to account for racial differences without linking them to function or representing them as the result of a useful adaptation.21 Though Desmond and Moore do not discuss the Expression at any length, there too we see the connection between Darwin’s belief in classification on the basis of useless modifications and his racial politics. In the Descent, he argues that sexual selection has been the “most efficient” cause of “the differences in external appearance between the races of man” (675); the entire seeming digression on sexual selection thus has race as its implicit topic.22 The unifying topic of this apparently loosely structured work is in fact Darwin’s rejection both of polygenetic theories of race and of racialist theories of human evolution that emerged in the 1860s in work by Herbert Spencer and even by natural selection’s co-discoverer Alfred Wallace.23 The distinction between natural and sexual selection – that is, the idea that non-adaptive modifications from the point of view of survival can be retained for other reasons – is by no means generally accepted among evolutionary theorists in our own day.24 Some of Darwin’s data are clearly weakened by historically specific assumptions about sex and gender that he brought to his research, and some can be explained in other ways. Nonetheless, his development of a theory of sexuality in which it is divorced from function is one of the now-unrecognized points of affinity between Darwin’s work and Freud’s. His insistence on the point is of a piece with the general refusal to make natural selection a totalizing theory that informs all of his work. In the Origin, the idea that every organism and structure is perfectly adapted to its function is rejected as theological; the world Darwin describes is one where adapted structures coexist with residual and rudimentary ones, and which is only rendered intelligible by the differences between them.

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Darwin briefly introduced the distinction between natural and sexual selection in the first chapter of the Origin (136–8); only, however, with the publication of the Descent twelve years later did he treat the latter in an extended discussion. He remained committed throughout his work to the distinction between the two: natural selection operates by favouring individuals fitted to succeed in the struggle for survival; sexual selection, however, “depends on the advantage which certain individuals have over others of the same sex and species solely in respect of reproduction” (Darwin, Descent, 243). Sexual selection as Darwin theorizes it can operate in innumerable ways, for instance by modifying organisms’ powers of locomotion or prehension, or their ability to defend themselves against competition. In many cases such as these, as he notes, it is impossible to distinguish between the effects of sexual and natural selection (245). Nonetheless, Darwin always insisted that the two forms of selection tend to effect modifications of quite different and potentially conflicting kinds: There are many . . . structures and instincts which must have developed through sexual selection – such as the weapons of offense and the means of defence of the males for fighting with and driving away their rivals – their courage and pugnacity – their various ornaments – their contrivances for producing vocal or instrumental music – and their glands for emitting odours, most of the latter structures serving only to excite the female. It is clear that these characters are the result of sexual and not of ordinary selection, since unarmed, unornamented, or unattractive males would succeed equally well in the battle for life and in leaving numerous progeny, but for the presence of better endowed males. We may infer that this would be the case, because the females, which are unarmed and unornamented, are able to survive and procreate their kind. (Darwin, Descent, 245)

Sexually selected characteristics thus need confer no advantage in the struggle for survival; in some cases, indeed, they can actually be disadvantageous – the well-known examples from the Descent are the colouring of birds, particularly when displayed in elaborate plumage such as that of the peacock and the argus pheasant, and the development of horns in the stag, which in some cases has been carried “to an extreme which, as far as the general conditions of life are concerned, must be slightly injurious” (Darwin, Descent, 262). Of all the effects of sexual selection, Darwin claims that the most powerful are those that confer an advantage in courtship. And it is to modifications of this sort that he attributes the differentiated physical appearance of the human races. Whereas with most non-human animals, the selection of mates belongs to the female, Darwin believes that in humans, it has generally

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been the privilege of men. The historical development of human appearance is thus driven by the preservation of female traits that prove attractive to men. This development, Darwin argues, has unfolded differently in different human populations with differing ideals of beauty: It is certainly not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body. It is, however, possible that certain tastes may in the course of time become inherited, though there is no evidence in favour of this belief; and if so, each race would possess its own innate ideal standard of beauty. . . . The men of each race prefer what they are accustomed to; they cannot endure any great change; but they like variety, and admire each characteristic carried to a moderate extreme. Men accustomed to a nearly oval face, to straight and regular features, and to bright colours, admire, as we Europeans know, these points when strongly developed. On the other hand, men accustomed to a broad face, with high cheek-bones, a depressed nose, and a black skin, admire these peculiarities too when strongly marked. (Darwin, Descent, 652)

The process of racial differentiation for Darwin thus takes the form of a feedback loop, where an arbitrary difference in appearance between two populations shapes their different ideals of beauty, which in turn reinforces the original difference by sexual selection.25 Separate populations, exposed to slightly different conditions and habits of life, would sooner or later come to differ in some small degree. As soon as this occurred, each isolated tribe would form for itself a slightly different standard of beauty; and then unconscious selection would come into action through the more powerful and leading men preferring certain woman to others. Thus the differences between the tribes, at first very slight, would gradually and inevitably be more or less increased. (Darwin, Descent, 665)

Darwin’s argument in these chapters presents some of the same difficulties as that of The Expression of the Emotions. Here again we find him treating as non-adaptive traits that might be – and subsequently have been – explained by means of natural selection. Why not assume that sexual selection will ultimately promote adaptation as individuals with the power of selection choose partners who either themselves possess useful traits or appear likely to transmit such traits to their offspring? I have already noted a political reason for Darwin’s choice, but the question nonetheless remains. Here, as in the Expression, we find recourse to the theory that habitual actions or preferences can be transformed – or degraded – into instincts and become heritable, in that case as emotional expressions, and in this as a predisposition toward a particular ideal of beauty.

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Darwin’s claim in The Expression of the Emotions that the behaviours he describes are the remainders of long-ago voluntary acts bespeaks, I think, his awareness that they embody a problem of agency. My claim is that he misunderstands this problem by framing it historically; the agency of his subjects in the book is not compromised by their heredity but by the contexts in which they are studied and represented. The same holds, moreover, though in a somewhat different and broader sense, for the subject of sexual selection. In representing sexual selection’s way of acting, Darwin begins, as he had in the case of natural selection, with an analogy to selection under domestication, and in particular to what he termed unconscious selection. As we saw in Chapter 4, this is the historical process by which species under cultivation will change over time, with separate populations diverging from one another, owing to the uncounted individual selections made by their cultivators. The analogy has a double force: it at once illustrates the operation of modification by selection over many generations and shows how such modification can take place unobserved. Of the actors in unconscious selection, Marx might say, they do not know what they are doing, but yet they are doing it. Here is Darwin from the first chapter of the Origin: “A large amount of change in our cultivated plants . . . slowly and unconsciously accumulated, explains, as I believe, the well-known fact, that in a vast number of cases we cannot recognize, and therefore do not know, the wild parent-stocks of the plants which have been longest cultivated in our farms and household gardens” (95). If we cannot recognize our own work, Darwin wants us to see, how much more difficult will it be to recognize the impersonal operation of natural selection? The agency of human beings in Darwin’s discussion of unconscious selection thus operates as a personification, a heuristic device that helps us to envision the operation of natural selection. Natural selection itself, though, does not serve the interest of any agent other than the species it works on; to understand natural selection correctly thus entails passing through this personification, retaining it only as a representation that has been superseded by the argument that follows. Nonetheless, the personification of nature and natural selection of course never entirely disappears from the Origin. Moreover, the figure is reintroduced and in a certain sense loses its figural quality in The Descent of Man. As George Levine puts it, “intention, that central motif of natural theology, went out with the Origin, only to return with the Descent.”26 Here the theory of sexual selection is also explained with reference to what Darwin continues to call unconscious selection, but in this case, we cannot

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exactly speak of a personification, but only of an analogy between what emerge as two actual forms of unconscious agency: When a foreign breed of our domestic animals is introduced into a new country, or when a native breed is long and carefully attended to, either for use or ornament, it is found after several generations to have undergone a greater or lesser amount of change. . . . This follows from unconscious selection . . . without any wish or expectation of such a result on the part of the breeder. So again, if during many years two careful breeders rear animals of the same family, and do not compare them together or with a common standard, the animals are found to have become, to the surprise of their owners, slightly different. Each breeder has impressed . . . the character of his own mind – his own taste and judgment – on his animals. What reason, then, can be assigned why similar results should not follow from the longcontinued selection of the most admired women by those men of each tribe who were able to rear the greatest number of children? This would be unconscious selection, for an effect would be produced, independently of any wish or expectation on the part of the men who preferred certain women to others. (Darwin, Descent, 664)

In the subject of sexual selection, then, an explanatory trope from the Origin takes on substance and enters evolutionary theory as a real agent. Here is another case of the incorporation of the theory’s discursive frame by its object. The difference between the breeder or cultivator who is responsible for the unconscious selection of domesticated species and the subject of sexual selection, moreover, is that the species cultivated by the latter is his own; as Desmond and Moore write, sexual selection makes animals into “self-breeders.”27 Darwin’s theory of sexual selection thus enters his work as the embodiment of his own rhetorical figure and as evidence of the recursive structure of his discourse.28 In his theory, sexual desire is attached to arbitrarily chosen and useless variations; leaving aside such incidental moments of selfrevelation as his concern for the reproductive success of the “unarmed, unornamented, or unattractive male” (Darwin, Descent, 245), the theory as a whole incorporates into Darwin’s work an image of the taxonomical drive that produced it. Recall Darwin’s rigorous distinction in the Origin between useful structures that have been perfected by natural selection and the useless or rudimentary parts, compared to unvoiced letters, which are most useful to the taxonomist. Natural selection, in short, cares nothing for taxonomy; scientists who study taxonomy and the kinship relations among organic beings set themselves in opposition to it and seek to discover what it tends to conceal. This is why the structures most useful to the taxonomist are those

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which natural selection has least affected. Given this antithesis between natural selection and the method by which it is studied – between what we might call the interest of natural selection and that of the scientist – there is a deep dialectical irony to the emergence in Darwin’s work of sex as another mode of selection that is said to operate principally on useless traits and that seems under the sign of racial difference to produce structures designed to attract the taxonomist.29 Current debates notwithstanding, for Darwin the crucial problem posed by natural selection was not that it left no room for God, but that it left no room for what he termed “man.” In the Origin, he came to the conclusion that the term “species” itself was necessarily arbitrary; George Levine notes the irony that in a work entitled The Origin of Species, “species . . . have no real existence.”30 Darwin saw that after his work, species could only be viewed as “artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect,” he wrote, but by it “we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term” (Darwin, Origin, 456). Once the concept of species as such no longer had a metaphysical basis, neither did the human as a particular instance of speciation.31 And yet long after he had abandoned the Christian belief in the universal brotherhood of human beings created in God’s image, Darwin remained committed to the concept of species, not least as providing a ground for anti-racism.32 In Darwin’s work, species identity in general, and human identity in particular, are conferred by the arbitrarily selected, residual, and otherwise purposeless traits that define an organism’s relations with members of other species and with members of its own. In The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions, this logic determines Darwin’s focus on sexual selection, aesthetic preference, and affect as the symptoms of being human. These works were the source of Freud’s early understanding of the symptom, which thus reflects the emergence of a biological species from the ruins of a metaphysical idea of “man.”33 Indeed, Freud’s symptom was more than a reflection. Neither his work nor Darwin’s was only an event in intellectual history. Because they produce symptoms and affects in their own right they also belong to the history of the body. The same will prove true of the anthropological and medical writing to be discussed in Part III. The result is a recurrence of problems of reference like those we have studied in Darwin, where de-functioned or symptomatic habits and traits are studied as inherited remainders of the evolutionary process, but are also recognizable as implanted and invested with meaning by the very apparatus used to study them.34 From this standpoint, Darwin may be less important as an influence on Freud than as the figure who made our species body foreign to itself.

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part iii

Societies of Blood

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chapter 6

“Whose Blood Is It?” Economies of Blood in Mid-Victorian Poetry and Medicine

In different contexts, we keep coming back to the species body’s muteness. In a period when the concept of species lost its basis in theology, identifying species nonetheless became a literary and cultural preoccupation, as though the concept could be shored up by proliferating examples. In Darwin’s work and before it, abandoning the search for “the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species” (Origin, 357), meant an ever more minute attention to arbitrary markers of species identity, affinity, and difference. This kind of attention was intrinsic to the scientific breeding of sheep and cattle in the eighteenth century and to the breeding of bird and other animal species by fanciers. From the 1790s, teaching such attention also became the task of field guides addressed to amateur naturalists and of children’s books on animals. In Darwin, as we have seen, the most useful traits in identifying a species are automatic behaviours and rudimentary or de-functioned anatomical parts. While blushing had prior to Darwin been studied by Thomas Burgess as a divinely ordained means of making character and feeling legible on the face, for Darwin, considering the blush as a trait – the only one – distinguishing the human species from all others entailed viewing it as a reflex action without any communicative effect. When field guides began to use bird calls as species markers, they adapted the poetic technique of onomatopoeia to represent them, throwing the mantle of science over animals’ exclusion from language by the poets and philosophers. In this final part of the book, my argument will again have Darwin’s chapter on blushing as one of its points of reference, but the focus will broaden to encompass a general consideration of blood as a token of identity. Shared blood is an ancient figure of kinship; in the nineteenth century, it becomes closely associated with race and species identity. Moreover, in medicine, literature, and anthropology, the idea that members of animal species were of one blood is disturbingly literalized. We will begin in this chapter with a discussion of medical blood transfusion, 117

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a therapy that was first attempted in the seventeenth century using animal blood. Only in the nineteenth century did the transfusion of blood between members of the same species become the norm, though, since blood types were not discovered until 1900, this marked only a very qualified improvement in practice. Blood transfusion remained an experimental therapy until the 1880s and was then largely abandoned until the First World War. As transfusion’s appearances in in Victorian Gothic fiction show, however, it exercised a powerful imaginative appeal. Also during the first half of the nineteenth century, large-scale bloodletting underwent a spectacular and still largely unexplained boom and bust in acceptance. By 1820, “heroic” bloodletting was a recommended therapy for almost every kind of ailment, especially in men. Particularly in rural areas, periodic bloodletting was practiced prophylactically. Thirty years later, however, as we will see, medical practice had undergone a radical change. Writers on medicine noted the change, and, strangely, could not agree on the reason for it. The decline of therapeutic bloodletting is difficult to present in the form of a narrative, and in consequence remains an understudied topic in the history of medicine. In this chapter, I view it as an episode in the emergence of an hystericized species body that cannot tell its own story. In what follows, I will document in literature and medicine an organizing fantasy of a species body that economizes blood. This fantasy emerges during the nineteenth century, and it does so as the species body becomes the principal target of biopower, even while the species concept itself grows less determinate. This fantasy is a knot that ties biopolitics to political economy: as Catherine Gallagher argued in The Body Economic, nineteenth-century political economy became a biopolitics once Ricardo, working on the basis of Malthus’s analysis of labour as the activity of a biological population, defined it as the basis of economic value.1 Blood is a pervasive figure for value in the nineteenth century. We will discuss literary examples later in this chapter; it also appears in writing on political economy by Marx, who figures capital’s appropriation of labour as vampirism, and John Ruskin, whose major work on political economy, Unto This Last (1860), has a chapter organized by an analogy between the social circulation of value and the circulation of blood in the body. In what follows, however, I will not be concerned with the economy of blood as such, but with blood’s significance as a figure for kinship, and with the way Victorian literature and medicine literalize this figure in representations of blood as shared between members of a collective social body. This chapter documents the emergent conception of blood as social property in the

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Victorian era; the next discusses the idea that persons who share blood by consumption or by transfusion become biological kin. We will turn to the theory of totemism as it emerged in anthropology after Darwin, and discuss it as a discourse on species. In considering Victorian writing on kinship, it should be recalled that the biological basis of inheritance was not known in the Victorian era; Gregor Mendel carried out his path-breaking work on variation and inheritance in peas in Moravia between 1856 and 1863, but his results were little known before 1900. Recognizing the lack at the heart of his theory of natural selection, depending as it does on inheritance and variability, Darwin proposed his own theory of biological inheritance in Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication (1868). He termed this theory “pangenesis”; it accounted for shared traits among biological kin, and for such facts as reversion, as well as for the observed rules governing variation. It also allowed for the inheritance of acquired traits and for telegony.2 The theory of pangenesis proposed that all of the body’s cells throw off during the whole period of their existence tiny particles Darwin termed “gemmules.” These aggregated in the reproductive organs and were transmitted to future generations. The theory found some acceptance, especially among neo-Lamarckians.3 The most decisive evidence against it came from an experiment that, like the theory itself, illustrates the preoccupations of late Victorian science. Darwin’s cousin and follower Francis Galton, hoping to prove the existence of gemmules, transfused blood between different strains of rabbits, expecting that inherited traits from the donor strains would appear in the offspring of the recipients, owing to the passing from one to the other of gemmules along with the transfused blood. In his results, published in 1871, he was obliged to report, according to Janet Browne, that “not a single incidence of induced variation occurred in a total of eighty-eight offspring of transfused rabbits.”4

***

The idea that sharing blood might be a kind of sex nonetheless pervades Victorian literature and medicine. It’s an idea that is at once raised and closed off by an aphorism with which Foucault in The History of Sexuality distinguishes the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie from Europe’s hereditary aristocracies: “the bourgeoisie’s ‘blood’ was its sex.”5 This observation introduces the central motif of his book’s last part, the claim that in the Western world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a society of “blood” was superseded by a society of “sex.”6 In this transformation, the bourgeoisie was the leading class: it was for the bourgeoisie

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in the first instance that power came to address itself to the body above all by speaking of sexuality and to sexuality. The class body of the bourgeoisie is thus the first to be defined by sex and sexuality; in this respect, Foucault contrasts it to an earlier aristocratic body, embedded in an older technology of power, that was constituted as bearing blood – that is to say by the thematics of kinship, consanguinity, and filiation. Foucault affirms that the aphorism I have just quoted, identifying sex as the blood of the bourgeoisie, is not merely a play on words. Indeed, he goes on: [M]any of the themes characteristic of the caste manners of the nobility reappeared in the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie . . . in the genre of biological, medical, or eugenic precepts. The concern with genealogy became a preoccupation with heredity; but included in bourgeois marriages were not only economic imperatives and rules of social homogeneity, not only the promises of inheritance, but the menaces of heredity; families wore and concealed a sort of reversed and somber escutcheon whose defamatory quarters were the diseases or defects of the group of relations – the grandfather’s general paralysis, the mother’s neurasthenia, the youngest child’s phthisis, the hysterical or erotomaniac aunts, the cousins with bad morals.7

Foucault’s proposition is thus not a play on words, but rather a metaphor founded on a classically formed proportional analogy, which asserts in full that sex is to the bourgeoisie as blood was to the nobility. I stress the operation of metaphor at this point in The History of Sexuality in order to underscore that “blood” is not here a term that has a literal referent. It becomes so, however, when Foucault considers a different aspect of the society of blood. The History of Sexuality is nearly as interested in violence as it is in sex; the last part in particular begins with a consideration of the sovereign’s power in the classical age to inflict death. Foucault writes that in “a society of blood – I was tempted to say, of ‘sanguinity’ – . . . power spoke through blood: the horror of war, the fear of famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword, executioners, and torturers; blood was a reality with a symbolic function.”8 The executioner sheds real blood; it stands here by metonymy for the life that the absolute sovereign was uniquely entitled to take. Foucault thus describes the society of blood in language that has a realistic dimension as well as a metaphoric one. In this chapter, I will ask what becomes of this real blood, the blood through which sovereignty speaks, as the sovereign’s power to shed blood and take life diminishes in importance and new forms of power organized around life take its place as part of the long historical emergence of what

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Foucault termed biopower. My initial focus will be on medicine and biology, rather than on jurisprudence, as I argue that the second quarter of the nineteenth century saw the transformation of a society that spent blood into one that saved it, while blood itself, initially an object whose spectacular display was an everyday part of medical practice, became one that circulated invisibly. I will argue that in this period, Foucault’s symbolics of blood are replaced by an economics. The context for this chapter is the emergence in the nineteenth century of a social circulation of blood. For the first time – and well in advance of the technologies of transfer, storage, and blood typing that today organize the concept of a “blood supply” – blood became a social property, capable of circulating throughout the human species body, that required protection from contamination and safeguarding against waste. As blood became identified with species, I will argue, its social circulation in humans became one of the forms in which power embodied itself, implanting in the bodies through which it passed new taxonomies of sex and race. To study this process, I will turn to an archive that includes fiction, notably Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and also make a return to Darwin’s chapter on blushing. In both texts, shared blood marks the difference between the human animal and its non-human others. Otherwise, however, the literary focus of this chapter will be on poems in which human beings play the leading roles. Unlike the poems considered earlier in this book, these do not endow species with voice. I will view them rather as making blood and bleeding symptoms of species and racial identity, in an argument developing my claim in Chapter 5 that Darwin understands species identity symptomatically. I will conclude by discussing links between his thought and late Victorian thinking on hysteria, including that of Freud. Here, as throughout this book, I treat poetry as the nineteenth-century literary genre in which the embodiment of power and systems of knowledge is most legible.

***

Without being too arbitrary, we can assign a date to the beginning of blood’s social circulation: September 26, 1818. On this day, Dr. James Blundell performed the first therapeutic blood transfusion between human beings.9 The previous history of medical transfusion goes back to the seventeenth century: the first transfusion experiments involving human subjects were carried out almost simultaneously in France and England in 1667. The salient fact about these experiments is that they in every case involved transfusions between species. In England on November 23,

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a twenty-two-year-old bachelor of arts student was transfused with the blood of a sheep in order to moderate what was considered the excessive heat of his brain. The recipient survived the operation, and Samuel Pepys records in his diary that after six days, he gave a report to the Royal Society, in Latin, in which he pronounced himself better. In the same year in France, a series of similar experiments were made by Jean-Baptiste Denis, physician to Louis XIV. In the fourth and most celebrated of his cases, he on two occasions transfused calf’s blood into the veins of a certain Antoine Mauroy in order to endow him with docility. When Mauroy died shortly after, Denis was tried for manslaughter; though he was acquitted, transfusion was made illegal in France and abandoned throughout Europe for more than a century.10 When transfusion experiments resumed in the early nineteenth century, it was on a new principle. No longer a treatment directed to curing the quality of the patient’s blood, transfusion was now used to supply blood lost to haemorrhage, particularly in women during and after childbirth. As we will see in a moment, the new transfusion science was part of a developing tendency in mid-nineteenth-century medicine to pathologize bleeding in general. Its earliest proponent was Blundell, who taught midwifery at Guy’s Hospital; his uses of the therapy in the early 1820s showed enough success to attract others to the field. Though it remained controversial, transfusion continued in therapeutic use until the late 1880s, after which it largely gave way to infusion with saline solution.11 From its beginnings with Blundell, nineteenth-century transfusion remained typically a therapy given to women, normally to combat uterine haemorrhaging. The majority of its practitioners were obstetricians, and from its founding in 1858, their leading professional association, the Obstetrical Society of London, provided a major venue for transfusion research. The therapy was thus developed largely for use on women by trained physicians and surgeons, who at the time were exclusively male. Transfusion was therefore, as Ann Kibbie writes, an “instantiation of the now familiar, highly gendered scene of Victorian medicine,” as one of the technologies that enabled male professionals in the first half of the nineteenth century to claim childbirth as a scene of medical practice and to displace the traditional women’s practice of midwifery.12 Nineteenth-century transfusion science thus emerges in an institutional setting where the production and redefinition of gender difference was an ongoing endeavour. Illustrations of transfusion from articles in the Lancet and the Transactions of the Obstetrical Society of 1828 and 1864 (Figures 9 and 10) respectively show that practitioners of transfusion imagined in

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Figure 9 From James Blundell, “Observations on the Transfusion of Blood, with a Description of his Gravitator,” Lancet (1828–9), part 2, 321. Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University

Figure 10 From J. H. Aveling, “On Immediate Transfusion,” Transactions of the Obstetrical Society of London, 6 (1864): 134. Courtesy Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University

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gendered terms not only the relation of doctor and patient, but also that of blood donor and recipient.13 The recipients of transfused blood were typically women, and the blood they received often came from their husbands or from medical men in attendance. The gender differences produced by transfusion are, however, mediated by the flow of what was now understood as undifferentiated blood. Whereas the transfusions of the seventeenth century had the mixing of different kinds of blood as their motive, in those of the nineteenth century, it was precluded from the outset. Blundell very early on ruled out using animal blood for transfusion into humans, and the majority of his British and French successors followed his lead.14 And not until 1900 was Karl Landsteiner to discover that human blood itself is differentiated into types and so make possible all subsequent developments in transfusion technology. Transfusion was never a central or uncontroversial part of nineteenthcentury medical practice. Taken together with other contemporaneous developments, however, the transfusion experiments of the period suggest that in the first half of the nineteenth century, therapeutics involving blood became a social practice charged with political and cultural meaning. The first transfusion experiments coincided with the rise and fall of a “heroic” mode of medical treatment centered on bloodletting. Though phlebotomy dated back to classical medicine, its use greatly increased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pioneered by Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, the new practice of bloodletting called for the evacuation of blood in far greater quantities than previously. Massive bloodletting became the norm in Europe as battlefield medicine during the wars and was introduced into civilian practice by medical men returning from the field. In his 1819 Practical Treatise on the Efficacy of Blood-Letting in Epidemic Fever, Benjamin Welsh wrote: The reduction of our vast military and naval establishments, at the conclusion of the war, has not been without its use in promoting the doctrine which we attempt to advocate. For medical men, retiring from these services, have settled in almost every corner of the empire generally . . . carrying along with them the practice which they have found so beneficial.15

In his 1835 textbook, James Wardrop wrote of an army and a navy surgeon who treated excessive vascular activity in wounds by letting fifty ounces of blood at a time to a total of two hundred. Like Welsh, Wardrop describes the practice of treating fevers by letting blood as introduced by military surgeons who had seen the supposed benefits during wartime.16 In the post-war years, all fields of medical practice underwent a rapid process of

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professionalization. The training and licensing of apothecaries and surgeons became more rigorous, and both trades rose in social status. Male physicians replaced midwives as attendants on childbirth, at least in households wealthy enough to be attended by a physician. And the practice of bloodletting was central to the identity of the newly professionalized cadres of medical men. For this reason, when one among their number, Thomas Wakley, in 1823 founded a new journal dedicated to putting medical practice on a scientific basis, the name he chose was that of the instrument most identified with the practice: The Lancet. Large-scale bloodletting during this period became virtually a universal remedy; K. Codell Carter writes that one “four-volume medical encyclopedia, which included articles by fifty of England’s most celebrated physicians and which went through several editions beginning in 1830, recommended the antiphlogistic regime, and bloodletting in particular, for about two-thirds of the diseases identified in the index.”17 William Stokes, who later became the president of the British Medical Association, recalled in a widely quoted lecture from 1854 that during his training in the 1820s, “there was hardly a morning that some twenty or thirty unfortunate creatures were not phlebotomized largely. The floor was running with blood; it was difficult to cross the prescribing hall for fear of slipping. Patients were seen wallowing in their own blood, like leeches after a salt emetic.”18 The theory underlying the new practice of bloodletting was governed by the concept of heat. Fever, local infection, and inflammation were all understood as different aspects of the same phenomenon, and the treatment in every case was either local or general bloodletting to carry away the excess heat. This theory coexisted with other rationales for bloodletting that long predated it. In ancient medicine, bleeding was viewed as a natural curative, and bloodletting as a form of assistance to nature. Galen thus describes nature as “healing diseases by evacuation of blood,” and asserts on the authority of Hippocrates that “a woman vomiting blood was cured by the menses breaking out,” that “haemorrhoids protect against black bile,” and that “copious haemorrhages from the nostrils are for the most part curative.”19 A millennium and a half later, Thomas Watson in his medical lectures of 1836–7 at King’s College asserted an analogy between “habitual haemorrhage” and the “monthly discharge which is peculiar to the female.”20 A standard household manual of 1834 held that “if [an excessive supply] is not worked off by active exertion, or diminished by a moderate and temperate diet, the blood becomes too rich and copious, and nature attempts often to relieve herself by discharging a portion of it. These discharges . . . commonly take place from the nose, or

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from the extremity of the intestinal canal, under the form of bleeding piles.”21 Belief in the value of periodic bleeding was widely held; in his 1845 lectures on surgery, Robert Liston, the senior surgeon at University College Hospital, recalled that “[f]ormerly, it was the practice to bleed every spring, and people did not think themselves safe unless recourse was had to it.”22 Medical writers worried that bloodletting might become habit-forming for patients who underwent it too often.23 The medical establishment abandoned large-scale bloodletting in the second quarter of the nineteenth century as it were without noticing what it was doing.24 William O. Markham dated the change in practice in retrospect to “about 1830.”25 By 1865, Stokes could state in an address to other physicians that “[w]e can hardly conceive of a revolution in practice more complete. Venesection is now, from being the most frequent, the rarest of operations.”26 But, as it was happening, the “revolution” took place largely without comment in the establishment medical press. Debate on the matter occurred in retrospect, and initially took the peculiar form of furious disagreement, not on the therapeutic value of bloodletting, but on the reasons for its abandonment. What came to be known as the Edinburgh Bloodletting Controversy was set off in 1850 by William P. Alison, professor of the practice of physic at the University of Edinburgh, who speculated in a lecture that “there has been a gradual change in the usual form and character of those inflammations [pleurisy and pneumonia], as occurring in the inhabitants of this country – and that . . . they do not in general present the same intensity of local symptoms, nor the same amount of febrile reaction, as used to attend similar diseased actions . . . and therefore that they do not furnish the same indications for bloodletting.”27 The theory that heroic bloodletting had been correct in its time but was now counter-indicated by a change in the type of disease had an obvious appeal; as Stokes, who supported the theory, said in 1865, medical men found it “hard to believe that the fathers of British medicine were always in error, and that they were bad observers and mistaken practitioners.”28 Alison’s view was widely accepted in the profession in Edinburgh and throughout Britain. It was left to his main opponent, John H. Bennett, to note the anomaly that discussion of the merits of bloodletting “instead of preceding, has followed the change, inasmuch as those who are now contending for the advantage of bloodletting and antiphlogistics in inflammation, are the very parties who acknowledge that they no longer employ them.”29 Bennett held simply that bloodletting had always been an error, especially in cases of pneumonia, and asserted that mortality from

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pneumonia had diminished since the abandonment of large bleedings.30 The controversy moved outside Edinburgh in 1857 with the entry of Markham, a prominent London physician, who began his “Remarks on the Inflammation and Bloodletting Controversy” with the summary claim that “both parties are tolerably agreed upon this, – viz. that bleeding, as once practiced, is now an affair of the past, and that the trade of the lancetmaker should at the present time be only an indifferently good one. The question at issue is not so much: Ought we, or ought we not, to bleed – but: How is it that we do not bleed, as our heroic progenitors bled – in inflammatory diseases?”31 Markham rejected the change of type hypothesis, but also argued against Bennett that bleeding had in fact come to be underused in medical practice. The dispute continued on into the 1860s and then, as K. Codell Carter writes, it faded away without either side conceding defeat.32 But inside the profession and outside it, discourse around bloodletting had changed. The 1840s saw the rise of alternative therapies such as homeopathy and hydropathy. The latter was widely popular among writers and intellectuals: Dickens, Tennyson, and Darwin all took the water cure. In an 1868 retrospect, Thomas Laycock generalized: “Persons of highly cultivated minds, and much engaged in occupations involving the imagination or intellect, are most intolerant of blood-letting,” he writes, and continues to assert that as the middle and higher classes have lately “become more imaginative, mystical, and aesthetic in arts, science, religion, and ecclesiasticism, they have for the same reason become more intolerant of blood-letting [and] heroic doses.”33 Outside establishment medical circles, distrust of bloodletting became widespread. Samuel Dickson’s scathing Fallacies of the Faculty, based on a series of lectures, went to a second edition in 1841; Dickson describes the death of Byron as caused by bloodletting and characterizes the therapy as “murderous.”34 The term became current – by 1846 an anonymous reviewer in British and Foreign Medical Review could refer to “that mode of treating diseases which has been absurdly enough termed heroic, but which more properly should be termed murderous.”35 In 1849, a surgeon named John Langley wrote in The Lancet advocating bleeding to “full depletion” in “fever and inflammatory diseases”; he asserts his awareness that he is arguing against “the present fashion in medical practice.”36 When in the following year Robert Peel was thrown from his horse in 1850, suffering injuries that killed him from internal bleeding, he underwent bloodletting, but only by the application of twenty leeches. Langley returned to the fray in a furious denunciation of his physicians, demanding, “Why, even if precautionarily only,

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the most vigorous and copious depletion was not immediately resorted to?” Of the twenty leeches, he goes on to ask, “What essential benefit can possibly have been anticipated from so effete a measure, I am at a loss to imagine.”37 Under earlier medical paradigms, bleeding was natural to bodies of all sorts. But in the course of the nineteenth century, this long consensus was overturned and bleeding became a pathology. One consequence of this change was a new articulation of sexual difference around blood. As we have seen, until the beginning of the century, bleeding was common to men and women; surgical intervention was required to prompt it in any case where nature’s purging or expenditure of blood was interrupted.38 By the century’s close, however, as Elaine Showalter and Caroll SmithRosenberg showed, the periodic loss of blood in menstruation had become a pathological trait specific to women.39 On this supposed trait doctors like Edward Clarke and Henry Maudsley were able to found an entire misogynist sexual science. In the 1820s, transfusion science also identified bleeding as a pathology endemic to women. As germane, though, to its role in the new sexual science was its postulate of blood as an undifferentiated fluid that could in principle circulate between bodies as well as within them. Blood thus acquired a social circulation, in which male and female bodies were characterized by their different propensities to expend a single scarce resource. Well after the actual practice of blood transfusion had gone out of fashion – and before the discovery of blood types – the idea that blood has a social circulation received a florid literary embodiment in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897. As in the seventeenth century political economists had developed a new understanding of flows of goods and money in the social body by analogy with the newly discovered circulation of blood in the individual, so by the time of Dracula blood itself has been refigured on an analogy with money.40 No longer understood either as a humour that must be kept in balance with other humours, requiring purging in the event of a surfeit, or as a nutrient that must be vacated in the event of an oversupply, human blood becomes in this period a sublime and undifferentiated fluid that cannot be shed without loss. In Dracula, blood circulates from men’s bodies into women’s, from women’s bodies into the vampire’s body, and then back again. The society the vampire threatens is thus imagined as a closed social circulation of blood with women as the weak point at which blood can cross into and out of the system. From the moment the principle of transfusion is to replace lost blood with new blood of the same kind, there attaches to blood an entire

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thematics of sameness and difference. Dracula himself, as a creature sustained only by blood, virtually embodies its undifferentiated character: his aim is to replicate himself indefinitely by infusing blood into the bodies of his victims.41 On the other hand, as much recent criticism has noted, the novel is obsessed by taxonomy and differences in type. Its characters are classified by gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, generation, and predisposition to criminality, among other traits. And more basic than any of these classifications is the distinction between the human species of the main characters, who share blood by transfusion, and the monstrosity of Dracula. Dracula has no blood of his own in a novel where blood is the determining trait of humanity; he is nonetheless sustained by human blood: hence his relation to the full humanity of the main characters as parasite, simulacrum, and mimic. Unlike sovereign power, biopower after the mid-nineteenth century no longer speaks through blood. It rather accumulates it in silence. Any individual body that bleeds, or even makes its blood visible, threatens the ideally closed circulation that power works to sustain. As the example of Dracula suggests, in crises when the social circulation of blood is threatened or exposed, blood continues to play a role as a reality that supports the new symbolic function of sex.

***

I will return to Dracula and the idea of kinship as consanguinity in Chapter 7; to show how power is embodied in the social circulation of blood in the second half of the nineteenth century, I will first turn back to a group of texts from the quarter century beginning in 1850. As we have seen, these were the decades when the British medical establishment abandoned large-scale therapeutic bloodletting – or, more accurately, the decades when the establishment became aware that it was for the most part no longer letting blood. The very paradigm shift that transformed the healthy body from one that sheds blood into one where blood circulates unseen itself took place without being seen, to be observed only in a puzzled retrospect. In the decades I am considering, bleeding becomes a pathology or a scandal; in either case, blood’s appearance becomes a point where power attaches itself to the body or bodies affected. Precisely because bleeding becomes an anomaly in the period, I have not confined myself to texts that directly represent it, but will also discuss literary and scientific treatments of blushing. The close connection of blushing and bleeding in these texts will become clear as the discussion unfolds.42

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To begin with, a passage from Dickens on a power that requires “everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it.” This power, personified in Mr Podsnap from Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), is embodied in his daughter’s blushes: A certain institution in Mr. Podsnap’s mind which he called “the young person” may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter. It was an inconvenient and exacting institution, as requiring everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it. The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheeks of the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person was that, according to Mr. Podsnap, she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all. There appeared to be no line of demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest knowledge.43

Podsnappery as Dickens describes it purports to seek a universe where no one would ever need to blush. But the blush is also the form in which Podsnappery is embodied: its power requires the very thing it aims to suppress. Moreover, like Foucault, Dickens recognizes that power does not merely require the thing it regulates, but is in fact identical to it: In Foucault’s formulation, power is actually, positively perverse; in Dickens’s, there is “no line of demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest knowledge.”44 The inter-implication of sex, power, and a blush whose meaning has become radically indeterminate is as we will see a recurrent topic in writing about blushes in the years immediately before and after Our Mutual Friend.45 The earliest work in the sequence to which I now turn is Tennyson’s long poem “Maud” (1855), and we will see both how its representations of blushing and bleeding define a general problematic and how they specifically influence poems written after. The social circulation of blood and the indeterminate meaning of a woman’s blush are indeed two of the central preoccupations in “Maud.” As Pamela Gilbert writes, “‘Maud’ is an . . . entire poem about the movement of blood.”46 Like Dracula later in the century, “Maud” has the identification of blood with money as one of its organizing figures. Though in its modern form this identification originates in the seventeenth century, following upon the discovery of the circulation of blood in the human body, not until the mid-nineteenth does the transfer of money between persons come to be figured as blood-eating, a figure that develops into the representation of capitalists and swindlers as vampires or leeches, engorged with blood drawn from others. Tennyson’s “Maud,” published more than a decade before the first volume of Marx’s Capital, is a key text in

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this development. It consists of a series of dramatic lyrics, all uttered by a single speaker; they are framed by a narrative of dispossession and suicide, in which the speaker’s father lost his fortune to a business partner and then died by falling or jumping into the “dreadful hollow” that the poem opens by describing: “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, / Its lips in the field above are spattered with blood-red heath, / The red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, / And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’” (1. 1–4). The cause of this wound in the land appears later in the poem’s first section as the speaker rails against his father’s old business partner, “now lord of the broad estate and the Hall,” who “Dropt off gorged from a scheme that had left us flaccid and drained” (1. 19–20). There is a gendered economy of bleeding at work in these lines: to bleed is to be emasculated. In accordance with this reading, the wound in the poem’s opening lines may be seen as castrative. But gender is not the main principle governing the representation of blood in “Maud.” Like the blush in Our Mutual Friend and the other texts to be discussed here, the trace of blood migrates from body to body irrespective of gender, bearing with it a generalized guilt. This migration occurs in a Gothic narrative characterized by events that are repeated across generations and by doubled characters. The story turns around the setting of the hollow, and is thus haunted by Echo as a figure for repetition. Its first section concerns the speaker and Maud’s courtship; she is the daughter of the old man of the Hall, whom the speaker blames for his father’s ruin. The central interpretative problem this story poses is whether the speaker’s love of Maud cancels or continues the bloody feud between the families. The poem makes the question undecideable; its uncanny figure for desire is an undead heart beating beneath the earth, longing to fulfill itself in an eroticized outpouring of blood: She is coming, my own, my sweet, Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear it and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.

(1. 916–23)

Here at the close of the poem’s first section, the flowers-as-gush-of-blood trope with which the speaker figures his arousal by Maud repeats the image of flowers as blood in the opening lines – where it appeared as the trace of

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his father’s death. No single set of symbolic associations can account for the meanings of blood in “Maud”; the poem itself beats on, out of control, a machine for generating images of bloodshed. In the second section, it reverts to a narrative of male violence. The speaker and Maud meet in her garden; her brother finds them and the two men quarrel; in the hollow behind the wood a duel ensues, in which the brother is killed. Tennyson’s representation of these events emphasizes at every turn the doubling of the two male antagonists and the way the death of Maud’s brother echoes that of the speaker’s father in a potentially openended cycle of violence: “front to front in an hour we stood, / And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke / From the red-ribbed hollow behind the wood / And thundered up into Heaven the Christless code / That must have life for a blow” (2. 23–7). The narration of the duel opens with a quotation, repeated: “The fault was mine, the fault was mine” (2. 1); thirty lines later, we learn that the quoted words were uttered by Maud’s brother as he died, taking responsibility for the duel and for his own death. But the unassigned quotation at the opening, echoing itself, suggests that no unequivocal assignment of guilt is possible in this story. Indeed, by the very act of trying to take fault on himself with his dying breath, Maud’s brother lays it more heavily on the speaker, at whose hand he dies.47 Since it tells a story in which bloodshed repeatedly gives rise to further bloodshed, “Maud” is as might be anticipated a text with problems of closure. In the poem’s body, the deadly quarrel between its two families stands by synecdoche for a general state of civil war; both the general war and the killing of Maud’s brother by her lover are compared to Cain’s murder of Abel – whose blood in Genesis 4:10 is said to cry aloud from the from the ground, in a figure for violence between kin that haunts the whole of Tennyson’s poem. “Maud” closes with a panegyric on Britain’s declaration of war and mobilization against Russia in the Crimea and the Baltic in 1854, the year before the poem was published. The coming of war, the speaker says, will end the “hysterical mock-disease” from which he and his society have suffered (3. 34). Recovering, he wakes with his countrymen To the higher aims Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold . . . . For the peace, that I deemed no peace, is over and done, And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep, And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire. (3. 38–9, 49–52)

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This close – these were the last lines of the poem as originally published – was widely derided by contemporary critics and remains an embarrassment today. Ending with the same hallucination of a death-uttering mouth and of blood-red flowers that appeared at its opening, the poem undermines its apparent claim that war is a cure for the individual and social pathologies diagnosed earlier on, and suggests that it only projects them outwards. This hallucinatory figure is massively overdetermined; at the outset, it represents the violence of nascent finance capitalism, and at the close, it represents war. It is therefore the poem’s major point of attachment to mid-Victorian history. My interest in it here is a reductive one: the poem is horrified by male bloodshed, but powerless to stop imagining it. These facts too are historical, and correspond to medical writers’ failure in the same period to imagine the end of therapeutic bloodletting. Scandalous bleeding in this poem is masculine. I have already noted, however, that blushing in this period also becomes caught up in a similarly structured set of conflicting imperatives. Typically, though by no means invariably, blushing is feminine; but its structural affinity with male bleeding emerges as a topic in “Maud” as well as elsewhere. In “Maud,” the switch word between blushing and bleeding is “fault.” As we have seen, in the poem’s narrative, the fault for its acts of violence is not fully assigned, but shifts from person to person. The poem allegorizes this indeterminacy of fault by setting its scenes of violence in a rocky hollow, or fault, haunted by Echo.48 Fault, then, like property, in this poem circulates among men. In another sense, though, it pertains to Maud herself. She belongs too to the cluster of geological images in the poem, since she is repeatedly figured as a diamond or other jewel. She is the sublime form of coal, whose extraction from the “hollow,” “gutted” earth makes it one of the many seeming commodities the poem represents as toxic. The speaker spends much of the first part of the poem asking himself whether Maud escapes the taint of her father’s money. Here is his first description of her: a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past, Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault? All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen) Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null (1. 79–82)

Faulty in having no fault, Maud’s jewel-like face thus becomes another example of the irremediable fault haunting the poem. Besides the question of whether her very faultlessness may be a fault, the other trait of Maud’s appearance that preoccupies the speaker is her blush.

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On their second encounter he makes her a bow, which she acknowledges only with a blush: I met her today with her brother, but not to her brother I bowed; I bowed to his lady-sister as she rode by me on the moor; But the fire of a foolish pride flashed over her beautiful face. O child, you wrong your beauty, believe it, in being so proud. (1. 116–19)

Maud’s blush appears again at a subsequent meeting, and determining its meaning becomes a major focus in the speaker’s obsessive scrutiny of her: She came to the village church, And sat by a pillar alone; An angel watching an urn Wept over her, carved in stone; And once, but once, she lifted her eyes, And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blushed To find they were met by my own; And suddenly, sweetly, my heart beat stronger And thicker, until I heard no longer The snowy-banded, dilettante, Delicate-handed priest intone; And thought, is it pride, and mused and sighed “No surely, now it cannot be pride.”

(1. 301–13)

As the speaker falls in love with Maud, he enters a hermeneutic abyss. Even when she herself doesn’t blush to meet him, the landscape around them does instead. The speaker meets Maud in the aftermath of his unacknowledged bow: Whom but Maud should I meet Last night, when the sunset burned On the blossomed gable ends At the head of the village-street, Whom but Maud should I meet? And she touched my hand with a smile so sweet, She made me divine amends For a courtesy not returned. . . . What if with her sunny hair And smile as sunny as cold, She meant to weave me a snare Of some coquettish deceit,

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(1. 196–203, 212–19)

A drive to fix the meaning of Maud’s blush is a leitmotif of the poem’s first section; it attains its fullest expression in a deeply strange lyric of anticipation that comes after the speaker resolves to tell her of his love: Go not, happy day, From the shining fields, Go not, happy day, Till the maiden yields. Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South, Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth. When the happy Yes Falters from her lips, Pass and blush the news Over glowing ships; Over blowing seas, Over seas at rest, Pass the happy news, Blush it through the West; Till the red man dance By his red cedar-tree, And the red man’s babe Leaps, beyond the sea. Blush from West to East, Blush from East to West, Till the West is East, Blush it through the West.

(1. 571–94)

As Herbert Tucker points out, this section identifies the red of sunset and of the blush with the red that on Victorian maps marked the British Empire.49 We re-encounter from Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions the conjunction of a universalist view of blushing (Tennyson’s poem imagines everyone as “red”) with a racializing typology (there is nonetheless a distinct type of “red man”). The blush becomes a kind of telegraph, bearing the anticipated news of Maud’s “yes” across a globe united under British rule. East and West become one; Wordsworth’s Cumbrian pastoral (the source of the leaping babe in line 590) is superimposed on North America; and the “red man” is affectively hard-wired into the speaker’s

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imagination of his erotic fulfillment. As at its close, the poem imagines a cure for the wound or fault that haunts it by projecting it outwards, so here the hermeneutic panic induced by blushing is alleviated by making the blush universal.

***

Three years after “Maud,” the youthful William Morris published The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems (1858). It was his first volume and consists of highly compressed dramatic lyrics and short narratives, largely on topics drawn from medieval literature and history. The entire volume is to the point here: its recurring theme is the relation between juridical or military violence and sex. In spite of the poems’ medieval source material, they were strongly influenced by Tennyson, especially “Maud,” and by the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning. Morris’s title poem in particular shares with “Maud” its preoccupation with the twin motifs of bleeding and blushing. In this poem, as in “Maud,” power no longer speaks through blood. Blood stammers and repeats itself, and its failure to tell a story motivates the poem. The most striking thing about “The Defence of Guinevere” is that it could just as well have been called “Guinevere’s Confession.” Its source is an episode from Book 20 of Morte d’Arthur. In Malory’s story, Guinevere and Lancelot are trapped alone in her room in a trap set by Mordred, who wants to prove the queen’s adultery. Though they are surrounded by armed knights, Lancelot escapes, killing thirteen. Guinevere remains, to be found guilty of treason against her husband the king and sentenced to death by burning; at the very moment when she is brought to the stake, however, Lancelot reappears and rescues her, with the slaughter of another catalogue of knights. Morris’s poem begins with Guinevere at the stake; most of the poem is taken up by a speech in which she relates the circumstances that have brought her there. She makes it clear that she loves Lancelot, while in marrying Arthur, she was “bought” by his “great name and his little love” (82–3).50 In her wedding, she says, her vow was “a little word, / Scarce ever meant at all” (86–7). Guinevere speaks after her sentence has been passed and at the behest of her judges; she tells them nothing that they do not already know: “O knights and lords,” she begins, “it seems but little skill / To talk of well-known things past now and dead” (11–12). This apparently posthumous utterance termed her defense might as well be a rehearsal of her indictment: as she closes by telling the story of her capture,

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she observes that the one thing that would differentiate her story from that of her accusers continues to elude her: You know quite well the story of that fray, How Launcelot still’d their bawling, the mad fit That caught up Gauwaine – all, all, verily, But just that which would save me; these things flit.

(279–82)

The difference between the defense and the indictment of Guinevere is nonetheless marked, though in a purely formal way, by lines she repeats with slight variation three times during her speech: “Nevertheless you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie, / Whatever may have happn’d these long years, / God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie!” (46–8, 142–4, 283–5). With this near-refrain, the poem distinguishes Guinevere’s discourse from that of her accuser; but it does so only by folding the two discourses into one another, so that the truth of one becomes the falsehood of the other. Guinevere’s discourse contains within itself, in a fold larger than the discourse itself, the accusation which is or should be its context. The point is peculiarly clear because either her modesty or Morris’s prevents her from specifying Gawain’s accusation. Without such a specification, we have no way of knowing what the truth is that Guinevere repeatedly swears to. The crucial term missing from her defense would be a citation of her indictment. This citation is nowhere to be found. Reference to the broader context of Malory’s poem does nothing to stabilize the relation between the law and Guinevere’s defense. Though Morris follows Malory closely in most of the details of his poem, his poem bizarrely departs from his source by making Gawain into Guinevere’s principal accuser. In Malory, Gawain is at this point her only supporter, and he remains so until after her rescue by Lancelot, the event with which Morris’s poem closes. In the course of the rescue, Malory has Lancelot kill Gawain’s brother Gareth and thus bring upon himself and Guinevere Gawain’s implacable hate. The events of Morris’s poem are therefore caused by an accusation of which in Malory they are themselves the cause. The “lie” with which Guinevere repeatedly charges her accuser is no more to be found in Morris’s source than it is in “The Defence of Guinevere” itself. Generically Morris’s poem is the dilation of an episode from an epic.51 A few sentences from Morte d’Arthur give rise to 295 lines, most of which are spoken by Guinevere. This formal datum identifies the poem’s critical point with respect to its epic source. There the question of Guinevere’s guilt is discussed only by men, she herself giving no testimony at all. The poem thus belongs to a tradition that begins with Ovid’s Heroides, which

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takes the erotic matter and women’s voices at the margin of epic and makes them the central concern of dramatic lyrics. Poems in this genre perform a critique of their epic sources; they do so, however, using material epic itself supplies. They dramatize a woman’s reply that must seem already implicit in the epic source, which is why Guinevere’s discourse only reiterates a narrative already to be found in Malory. As Morris’s poem is to Malory, so Guinevere’s utterance is to the law. She speaks after she has been condemned, and only because her judges have demanded that she do so. In this respect her speech is no more than the rehearsal of her subjection and, as such, it seems a pure and inconsequential formality. But it is the central theme of the poem that the speech does have a consequence, not by virtue of anything that it communicates, but because it takes up the time that’s needed before Guinevere can be rescued. Dilation, or dilatoriness, itself opens a place in Malory’s epic for Guinevere’s agency. In relation to the law, the poem argues that its need to spectacularize the subjection it has already compelled sets in motion a machinery of citation and deferral that finishes by subverting it. This formal machinery renders illegible every utterance that is drawn into it. My interest in these formal and generic traits of Morris’s poem is that they allegorize an historical argument that can be engaged with Foucault’s narrative of the replacement of a society of blood by a society of sex. In The Defence of Guinevere, a new illegibility of blood emerges at the limit of sovereign power. The poem dramatizes the subversion of juridical utterance by a formal mechanism of citation and expansion. Its organizing figure for this process is a reiterated display of blood. In his mid-Victorian representation of the legendary Middle Ages, Morris’s main object of critique is what he represents as the ancient notion that the law can read blood or speak through it. Consider Guinevere’s blush at the poem’s opening: But, knowing now that they would have her speak, She threw her wet hair backward from her brow, Her hand close to her mouth touching her cheek, As though she had had there a shameful blow, And feeling it shameful to feel aught but shame All through her heart, yet felt her cheek burned so, She must a little touch it; like one lame She walked away from Gauwaine, with her head Still lifted up; and on her cheek of flame The tears dried quick.

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(1–10)

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These lines dramatize the law’s need to double its own utterance that provides the poem’s motive. Once they have spoken, Guinevere’s judges require her to speak; as we’ve seen, she begins by protesting the futility of this demand. In this opening description, the law’s purchase on Guinevere is visibly embodied in a blush. Guinevere touches her cheek as though she had felt “a shameful blow,” which suggests that this blush has the nature of a stigma shamefully given her by her accusers. But it is shameful to be treated shamefully – the shame of the stigma given her prompts Guinevere to cover it with her hand. Shame thus redoubles itself from the context to as it were the text of Guinevere’s body. But if Guinevere’s blush shows that she feels a redoubled shame, her own and her accusers’, it also shows the reverse: Morris’s paradoxical formulation is that she feels ashamed of feeling something else besides shame. That something else remains unspecified. Her blush is at once the mark of her shamefaced subjection to a shameful law and of an illegible resistance to it. This opening treatment of Guinevere’s blush establishes that the poem will throughout treat blood as a mark that reiterates itself and in so doing cancels its meaning. The pure citationality of the blush in Morris’s poem anticipates the recursivity that empties it of meaning in Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions. In Morris, this unreadability characterizes blood as such. Later in her defense, Guinevere recalls the first time she had been accused of adultery, on the evidence – oddly, given that she is a married woman – of blood on her bedclothes: This Mellyagraunce saw blood upon my bed – Whose blood then pray you? is there any law To make a queen say why some spots of red Lie on her coverlet? or will you say, “Your hands are white, lady, as when you wed, Where did you bleed?” And must I stammer out – “Nay, I blush indeed, fair lord,” only to rend My sleeve up to my shoulder, where there lay A knife-point last night: so must I defend The honour of the Lady Guinevere? Not so, fair lords.

(173–83)

The bloodstain on the bedclothes redoubles itself in the hypothetical blush that prevents Guinevere from explaining it. Unlike Malory, who does

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provide a convoluted explanation of the blood and why it gave grounds to suspect the queen (it came from Lancelot’s wounds), Morris gives none at all. Guinevere’s question “whose blood then pray you?” remains unanswered; as the trace of blood reiterates itself, it becomes clear that it is actually never unequivocally proper to any body. To defend Guinevere against Mellyagraunce’s charge, Lancelot challenges him to a trial by combat, which ends, in Guinevere’s words, when “My knight / Sudden threw up his sword to his left hand, / Caught it, and swung it; that was all the fight, / Except a spout of blood on the hot land” (212–14). Is Mellyagraunce’s blood properly forfeit to Lancelot? It seems not, for his death does not close the book on Guinevere’s guilt, which is why she stands at the stake under sentence of death in the scene that frames Morris’s poem. Is her blood now properly forfeit to her judges? The impossibility of an answer only projects into the future the cycle of bloodletting whose beginning the poem has already described. Another round begins in the last stanza, with another blush from Guinevere, when Lancelot arrives to rescue her. This event shows the success of her defense, which now turns out to have consisted in stalling for time. But it is also the confirmation and reiteration of the transgression for which Guinevere was condemned in the first place. To close this discussion of Morris’s poem, let’s return to the spots of blood on Guinevere’s bed that make the initial term in this open-ended series of reiterations. As I have said, the poem gives no explanation of these spots, which in Malory were left by Lancelot. Absent this explanation, there is no reason to read them as signs of the queen’s guilt: what if they were simply menstrual blood? In that case, all of the poem’s subsequent effusions of blood would be instances of hysterical bleeding, each of which would cite or mimic an original whose source was the womb (hystera). In this poem, as in Dracula, the female body would be imagined as the original site of a loss of blood that rapidly becomes so general as to imperil an entire society. And in the interim before Dracula’s 1897 publication, as we will see, the link between blushing and hysterical bleeding is also made by Darwin. All of the literary texts under discussion here have the passing of Foucault’s symbolics of blood as a precondition. The sovereign and the family no longer speak through blood. In its silence, though, blood circulates between bodies bearing an hysterical sexuality that both transgresses and affirms violent taxonomies of race and sex. This cultural history links a form of biopower’s embodiment in the nineteenth century to the history

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of hysteria, since as we will see, Freud’s understanding of the hysterical symptom itself began with Darwin’s work on blushing.52

***

Besides the influence of Tennyson and Robert Browning, “The Defence of Guinevere” was also written in dialogue with Morris’s slightly older contemporaries in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The years immediately after Morris’s volume was published saw Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s second period of intensive work on “Jenny,” his poem on the Victorian sex trade. In its final form, the poem became a dramatic monologue, whose male speaker meets Jenny at a dance hall and goes home with her. Instead of having sex with him, she falls asleep – or pretends to – and the poem consists of his thoughts about her. Shame circulates from character to character in this poem as it does in Morris’s: “Do not let me think of you,” thinks the speaker, “lest shame of yours suffice for two” (91–2).53 At the poem’s close, the speaker blames himself for mocking Jenny, attributing what he has said to being “ashamed of my own shame” (384) – a formulation that, like Morris’s seemingly opposite representation of Guinevere as ashamed of feeling anything but shame, has the effect of making shame a symptom characterized by its transmissibility and reflexivity, rather than by any specific affective content. Predictably in this period, one of the figures Rossetti adopts to represent the contagion of shame is that of the blush. Rossetti’s use of the figure, like Morris’s, captures the way shame is at once an affect and a stigma, as well as the form of its social circulation. The poem’s speaker wonders how to deliver Jenny from what he imagines as her “lifelong hell” (245), and wishes “a woman’s heart might see” her “erring heart unerringly / For once” (250–2). He goes on, though, to explain why that would be impossible – because a woman who understood Jenny would become like her. To make this claim, he uses the Gothic figure of the fatal book that has the power to trap readers within its pages; Jenny is “Like a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look, / For its base pages claim control / To crush the flower within the soul” (253–6). The flowers in this figure are flow-ers – they bleed: “The life-blood of this rose, / Puddled with shameful knowledge, flows / Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose” (264–6). And the book is closed to chaste readers lest the blood puddled in it communicate itself to them in the form of a blush: in its text “are traced such things / As might make lady’s cheek indeed / More than a living rose to read” (259–61). When blood and blushes circulate between characters in Rossetti’s poem, they don’t speak; indeed, like the young person’s blush in Our Mutual Friend, they function as embodied tools of censorship. The title poem of

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the first published volume by Rossetti’s sister Christina, “Goblin Market,” answers and critiques “Jenny” (though it was published first) by embracing the possibility of redemptive communication between women. Though it has nothing directly to say about blood, “Goblin Market” belongs to the sequence of texts under examination here because of the way it represents a communion formed by the circulation of body fluids: “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices” (468). In this respect, and in its narrative of a threat to women posed by supernatural creatures, half human and half animal, “Goblin Market” provided a model for Dracula. But Christina Rossetti’s fullest treatment of blood and bleeding comes in the same volume’s “The Convent Threshold.” The poem indeed seems to inhabit a symbolics of blood: “My lily feet are soiled with mud, / With scarlet mud which tells a tale / Of hope that was, of guilt that was, / Of love that shall not yet avail” (7–10). But the “tale” blood tells does not appear in Rossetti’s poem, which represents an utterance enigmatically set on a series of thresholds marked by blood. The lines I have quoted seem to imply a narrative of sexual guilt; the poem’s opening, however, suggests a narrative of male rivalry: “There’s blood between us, love, my love, / There’s father’s blood, there’s brother’s blood; / And blood’s a bar I cannot pass” (1–3). In these lines, as in “Maud,” sexual guilt and the guilt of murder are obscurely confused: the context these opening lines require is a narrative like that of “Maud,” where conflict between the lovers’ families leads to bloodshed. Indeed, it is possible that Rossetti’s speaker is Maud herself (who never speaks in Tennyson’s poem), referring to the deaths of her lover’s father and of her brother. Like the other texts we have discussed, “The Convent Threshold” represents an economics rather than a symbolics of blood. Blood circulates in the patrilineal family; however it is shed, it belongs to fathers and brothers. It appears at the sill or threshold of the family dwelling (oikos): all night long I dreamed of you: I woke and prayed against my will, Then slept to dream of you again. At length I rose and knelt and prayed: I cannot write the words I said, My words were slow, my tears were few; But thro’ the dark my silence spoke Like thunder. When the morning broke, My face was pinched, my hair was grey, And frozen blood was on the sill Where stifling in my struggle I lay.

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(126–36)

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In this poem preoccupied with thresholds, the speaker repeatedly positions herself ambiguously on both sides of them. She addresses her lover while – the title implies – on the verge of entering a convent. But she also imagines herself as already in paradise, where she “tarries” for him, “veiled” not as a nun but as a bride (140). In the dream, the frozen blood to which the speaker awakens seems to be her own – but, as Rossetti’s editor Rebecca Crump points out, the scene echoes chapter 3 of Wuthering Heights, where Lockwood cuts the ghost Cathy’s wrist on a broken window pane to keep her out of her home. Does blood on the sill come from someone trapped outside or inside the house? Even the poem’s opening, which I have read as motivated by conflict between the speaker’s family and her lover’s – a narrative of difference in blood – could also be read as rejecting him because they belong to the same family – a narrative of consanguinity: “There’s blood between us, love, my love, / . . . / And blood’s a bar I cannot pass” (1–3). Blood circulates in this text, as in the others we have seen, as a social property. It’s in the nature of such circulations to constitute taxonomic classes we can – to adapt Foucault’s phrase – term societies of blood. As we see in this poem, these taxonomies are unstable; here as in all the other texts we have read, Guinevere’s rhetorical question “whose blood then pray you?” locates an interpretative crux. At the borders between circulations, blood appears; whether in blushes or violent effusions, these appearances attach sex to the bodies they affect.

***

As we have seen, Darwin’s 1872 On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals argues that the capacity for emotion is widely shared among human and non-human animals, and that the principal physical expressions of emotion are transmitted by inheritance. Grief, envy, fear, rage, and other emotions are, the work shows, to be found in many different animal species, and their characteristic expressions, such as smiling, weeping, and the erection of hair or fur, are also shared between human beings and their non-human relatives. There is only one emotional expression that Darwin will allow to be uniquely human, and that is the blush: “Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush” (310). So opens the last substantive chapter of On the Expression of the Emotions, devoted to blushing and its affective significance. Here as elsewhere in the book, Darwin identifies inherited expressions as involuntary and views them in contrast to behaviours that can be

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learned or voluntarily modified, as for the most part not useful to the animals in which they occur, either for the purposes of survival or for those of reproduction. While this late work of Darwin’s has lately undergone something of a rediscovery, presaging as it does today’s emerging consensus regarding the cognitive and affective similarities between human and non-human animals, on this point Darwin’s claims have not only failed to find followers, but have actually provoked something close to bafflement. As we saw in Chapter 5, in his modern critical edition of On the Expression of the Emotions, the psychologist Paul Ekman repeatedly expresses surprise at Darwin’s refusal to consider the expressive behaviours that Darwin discusses as forms of communication, which would presumably confer an evolutionary advantage on the species possessing them (Expressions, xxxiii, 53, 63). The reason for Darwin’s refusal to view emotional expression as communication emerges most clearly in the chapter on blushing. Here Darwin offers an explicit critique of earlier writers in the tradition of natural theology, for whom the blush was a key piece of evidence of providential design in the human body. Darwin quotes Sir Charles Bell, in his unofficial eleventh Bridgewater Treatise, writing that the blush “is a provision for expression” (335) and Thomas Burgess, whose book on blushing argues that it was designed by God in “order that the soul might have sovereign power of displaying in the cheeks the various internal emotions of moral feelings” (335). Darwin’s chapter systematically rejects these claims. He denies that the blush has any necessary relation to a moral sense: It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush. . . . It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face. . . . Many a person has blushed intensely when accused of some crime, though completely innocent of it. Even the thought, as [a] lady . . . has observed to me, that others think that we have made an unkind or stupid remark, is amply sufficient to cause a blush, though we know all the time that we have been completely misunderstood. (331–2)

The blush then in Darwin’s view is far from communicating the moral sense of the blusher; on the contrary, it can fail to express guilt at an undiscovered fault, but can also appear and lead to misunderstanding of blushers who know themselves to be innocent. As in Our Mutual Friend and the other works discussed in this chapter, the blush in Darwin’s theory does not distinguish between guilt and innocence.

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Darwin not only rejects the idea that the blush has any determinate relation to guilt or innocence; his account actually denies that blushing has any determinate affective meaning whatsoever. Rather, he identifies it as the expression of a thought with a specific recursive and citational form: “the thought that others are thinking of us” (335; see also 333, 324). The blush is thus a token of identification. A blusher is someone who thinks about the thought that someone else is having about them, regardless of that thought’s particular content. Darwin’s interest in the blush as a token of identification rather than a form of communication is of a piece with the central concerns of his book, where, as we have seen, he at no point considers physical expressions of emotion as a form of communication. Rather, his argument focuses above all on their status as evidence for species identity and for kinship among different species of human and non-human animal. His argument concerning blushing is no different: although it is presented as a form of expressive behaviour that humans do not share with any other species, the main thrust of his chapter is to assert that it is shared by all human beings, regardless of race. Notwithstanding its universalizing argument, as we saw in Chapter 5, Darwin’s chapter on blushing is traversed by minutely recorded differentials of power. These receive no explicit commentary, in spite of the fact that they form the matrix within which the blush is constituted as an object of knowledge. The sources for Darwin’s knowledge of blushing in nonwhites are found in the cultural, scientific and governmental apparatus of empire. Travel literature is a rich source of Orientalist anecdotes: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters are the ultimate source for the claim that Circassian women “who are capable of blushing, invariably fetch a higher price in the seraglio of the Sultan than less susceptible women” (335). Lady Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt provide the information that “a young Arab” blushed on coming into the author’s presence (315). The examples discussed in Chapter 5 from Darwin’s correspondents around the world and from the scientific literature show more direct emotional violence, even sadism, in the scrutiny to which they subject nonwhite bodies. The scopophilic aggression that tinges observations of the blush in Expressions of the Emotions is not limited to the book’s representation of racialized bodies; we saw that Darwin also calls on testimony from colleagues and from other scientists regarding the extent and the heritability of blushing caused by differences of power extending along axes of gender and class rather than of race. Throughout the chapter, abjected subjects

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blush to find themselves under observation by persons embodying scientific, governmental, or cultural power. As I argued earlier, the blush is repeatedly produced by the very apparatus set up to observe it, a fact that endows this chapter with a symptomatic character in relation to The Expression of the Emotions as a whole, where the relation between observing behaviour and producing it is a recurrent problem. Power differentials in Darwin’s text, though, do not always unambiguously favour the blush’s observer, as an anecdote shows that he relates from an unnamed physician. He describes how “a young man, a wealthy duke, with whom he had travelled as a medical attendant, blushed like a girl, when he paid him his fee; yet the young man probably would not have blushed and been shy, had he been paying a bill to a tradesman” (328). The example suggests how blushing in Darwin’s theory circulates as an embodiment of identification. The theory claims that blushing is the physical expression of “the thought that others are thinking of us” (335), and the citational and iterative character of Darwin’s formulation suggests how blushing can cross between subject positions, as we have seen it do in the literary texts discussed in this chapter. Darwin’s writing here as elsewhere characteristically excludes the observing subject from representation; in the case of the blush, though, Darwin’s examples largely represent people who blush because they are under observation – thus unavoidably if indirectly folding the process of observation into the material under analysis. Moreover, Darwin’s theory would predict that observers of blushing will themselves be subject to it, since the nesting of thought within thought that the theory describes could in principle be repeated to any extent: if I blush when I think of an observer thinking of me, the observer is surely likely to blush too, as she thinks of me thinking of her thinking of me.54 Like other texts we have read, such as Dante Rossetti’s “Jenny,” Darwin’s work aims to shut down the communication of the blush, while nonetheless theorizing this communication as in principle unlimited. I return to the chapter on blushing here because it points forward: in the 1895 Studies on Hysteria, Freud cites it as a major source for his understanding of the hysterical symptom.55 As I have argued in this chapter, Freud’s use of Darwin develops an implication in his work already present in the cultural context from which the work emerged. Indeed, the topic of hysteria makes a fleeting appearance in the chapter on blushing itself. In the course of his argument, Darwin takes up the question of how attention to a part of the body and the flow of “nerve-force” that accompanies it affect the circulation (336). In giving evidence to show that “mental attention [has] power to affect the capillary circulation” (336),

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Darwin has recourse to research on mesmerism, as well as on epilepsy and hysteria, and refers to work by the major psychologists of the period, including Henry Maudsley and James Crichton-Browne. From the latter he gleans an anecdote which – though relegated to a footnote – indicates how tightly knotted in this period hysteria was to the topics of blushing and scandalous bleeding: Dr. J. Crichton-Browne, from his observations on the insane, is convinced that attention directed for a prolonged period on any part or organ may ultimately influence its capillary circulation and nutrition. He has given me some extraordinary cases; one of these, which cannot here be related in full, refers to married woman fifty years of age, who laboured under the firm and long-continued delusion that she was pregnant. When the expected period arrived, she acted precisely as if she had really been delivered of a child, and seemed to suffer extreme pain, so that the perspiration ran on her forehead. The result was, that a state of things returned, continuing for three days, which had ceased during the six previous years. (338–9)

***

Among the central concerns of Foucault’s late work was a transformation in the modality of power that he termed the birth of biopolitics. This transformation took place between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth, and saw power’s characteristic form change from sovereign rule to governmental management. Sovereignty, Foucault argued, bears on the collective body of a people; as sovereignty is transformed into government, power’s object is transformed from a collective body into a statistical aggregate: the population. The biopolitical turn was the main explanation Foucault gave for the emergence of sexuality as the dominant mode by which power implants itself in individual bodies during the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries. Sexuality, he wrote “exists at the point where body and population meet. And so it is a matter for discipline [and] regularization.”56 Though reasonable, this argument surely requires supplementation. It depends in the first instance on the basic fact that sex is the means by which a population reproduces itself. But in Foucault’s own History of Sexuality, much of what is covered has nothing to do with the birth rate. Even the broader field of sexuality that since the 1830’s power has brought under its aegis in the name of public health does not include the entire terrain. It seems likely that Foucault himself was well aware of this; in his insistence in The History of Sexuality that power does not only produce perversions in

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order to regulate them, but is itself directly, actually, perverse, he seems to suggest some surplus of pleasure that accrues to power beyond biopolitics. Such a surplus, however, is not my concern here. I am rather interested in attaching Foucault’s theory of sexuality to another central pillar of his account of the biopolitical turn: the claim that biopower is necessarily racist: At the end of the nineteenth century, we have then a new racism modeled on war. It was, I think, required because a biopower that wished to wage war had to articulate the will to destroy the adversary with the risk that it might kill those whose lives it had, by definition, to protect, manage, and multiply. . . . I think that, broadly speaking, racism justifies the deathfunction of the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger, insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality.57

These lines could have been written as commentary on some of the texts we have been discussing, notably Dracula and “Maud.” What our texts add to Foucault’s account of the biopolitical basis of race is an erotics. Desire in all of these texts is organized by shared blood, whose trace repeatedly constitutes the point where sex and power are attached to the body. In a Freudian paradigm, these traces would be symbols of a family relation and of desire’s basis in incest. Such a symbolic reading however has remarkably little purchase on the texts we have discussed here, where the crucial concerns are not with relations across or within different bloodlines, but with an undifferentiated blood that can pass between bodies, and with the uncontrollable reduplication and transmission of the blush and other blood traces. In both contexts, the genealogical question of the relation between different bloods is displaced by the antinomies of surfeit and lack, and of visibility and invisibility, organized around an undifferentiated social circulation. At the limits of that circulation, with a certain eroticized violence, these texts mark the borders between the human species and its various others: non-human animals, parasites, spectres, and vampires. It remains a question why these borders are sexualized. Why are the prototypical participants in the scene of transfusion a married couple – charged not only with the imperative of sexual reproduction, but also with that of sharing their blood with the minimum possible of spillage or waste? Why is the vampire’s attack a kind of seduction? Why does Darwin make the blush, with all its erotic connotations, the singular affective mark distinguishing human beings from all the other animals?

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In the next chapter, we will consider the human–animal distinction in Freud’s theories of sexuality and kinship and in their precursors in Victorian anthropology and discuss more broadly the relations between desire and taxonomy in the nineteenth century. In general, sexual reproduction requires a desire that chooses an object not only of the right sex but also, more primordially, of the correct species. The evidence of Victorian anthropology and legal history; of children’s literature; and, later, the evidence of Freud’s case histories – in so many of which his analysands show cross-species desire and identification – suggest that this cannot be taken for granted. And while Foucault insists that the nineteenth-century specification of individuals by sexual taxa was a stratagem of power, it seems completely in the spirit of his work to view it also as a sexual menu. Nineteenth-century sexuality would itself have involved a drive to classify, and would have been the first to imagine the erotic quest as a search for a partner of the right type.58

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chapter 7

The Totem and the Vampire Species Identity in Anthropology, Literature, and Psychoanalysis

At the end of 1869 and the beginning of 1870, a two-part essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review that established the problem of the totem as an object of study in anthropology and, I will argue, had a decisive influence on the new discipline itself. John Ferguson McLennan’s “The Worship of Animals and Plants” used current ethnographic literature, principally on western Australia, describing totem worship “among the existing tribes of man” as evidence for a general claim that “ancient nations came, in prehistoric times, through the totem stage, having animals and plants, and the heavenly bodies conceived as animals, for gods before the anthropomorphic gods appeared.”1 McLennan’s argument made a crucial contribution to establishing the founding paradigm for comparative anthropology in the post-Darwinian era – for what Robert Alun Jones terms “evolutionary anthropology.”2 This was the premise that all human societies pass through the same stages of cultural development, with the result that so-called primitive societies “could be viewed as evidence in reconstructing the history” of the modern societies of the West.3 McLennan’s ideas shaped an entire subsequent discourse on totemism, whose acceptance was such that Sigmund Freud would open his 1913 Totem and Taboo with the assertion that it had by then become “incontestable” that “totemism constitutes a regular phase in all cultures” (13:108). In fact, Freud’s work on totemism came late to the game. The critique of evolutionary anthropology began in 1896 with Franz Boas’s essay on “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology.”4 Its implications for the study of totemism were made explicit in 1910 by Boas’s student Alexander A. Goldenweiser, whose “Totemism: An Analytical Study” argued both that human societies have different histories, and therefore need not all pass through a totemic phase, and also, more radically, that the very concept of “totemism” was an artifact of anthropology’s disciplinary assumptions. Only by bringing together evidence from societies in the 150

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ancient Mediterranean and Near East, and contemporary Australia, Polynesia, and North America, had anthropologists been able to assemble a composite idea of totemism as both a religious system and a form of social organization. Absent the assumption that all societies develop in the same way, and that evidence drawn from different places and times can therefore be aggregated to draw conclusions about the general concept of totemism as a phase of universal history, the concept itself dissolves into a diverse array of ritual practices, dietary prescriptions, plant and animal taxonomies, and clan systems.5 In a 1962 retrospective on the late nineteenth-century emergence of the discourse on totemism and on its twentieth-century decline, Claude LeviStrauss proposed a suggestive analogy. “Totemism,” he wrote, “is like hysteria, in that once we are persuaded to doubt that it is possible arbitrarily to isolate certain phenomena and to group them together as signs of illness, or of an objective institution, the symptoms themselves vanish or appear refractory to any unifying interpretation.” As Levi-Strauss goes on to note, the comparison of totemism and hysteria “suggests a relation between scientific theories and culture . . . in which the mind of the scholar . . . plays as large a part as the minds of the people being studied.”6 For Levi-Strauss, the “particle of truth” in the “illusion” of totemism is indeed the unsuspected resemblance between Victorian anthropologists and the peoples they studied;7 for Robert Alun Jones, the “secret” of totemism is that the concept was determined by the disciplinary history of anthropology and the historically specific questions that drove anthropological research.8 In this chapter, I won’t undertake either a structural analysis of totem discourse or an intellectual history. But I will begin with a type of structuralist bracketing of the referent, to identify two leading traits of the discourse, which I will argue are determined less by the Australian, South Pacific, American, and Near Eastern peoples it ostensibly concerns than by a crisis in species relations, and in the concept of species, in the late nineteenth-century West. The first of these traits is the centrality of species to totem discourse, which always understands its topic as a practice of classification: of plants and animals, of foods, and ultimately of persons into permitted and forbidden sexual partners. The second trait that will concern us here, notwithstanding the anthropologists’ eventual theorizing of totemism as regulating sex, will be its mystification of sex’s role in sustaining and constituting populations. Totemism was from the outset theorized as a practice of taxonomy, grounded in the concept of species. In 1870, the same year as McLennan’s

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foundational paper on the worship of animals and plants, John Lubbock made a crucial distinction between totemism and fetishism: “The negro who has, let us say, an ear of maize as a Fetich, values that particular ear . . . but has no feeling for maize as a species. On the contrary, the Redskin who regards the bear, or the wolf, as his totem, feels that he is associated with the entire species.”9 James George Frazer, in his survey of the field in 1887, makes Lubbock’s distinction his point of departure: “As distinguished from a fetich, a totem is never an isolated individual, but always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or plants.”10 The distinction between the fetish and the totem is foundational for the discourse of totemism. More broadly, it marks the foundation of anthropology in a conceptual break with the enlightenment critique of religion, which relied on the concept of fetishism as a paradigmatic type of error. Its replacement as a major theoretical paradigm by the totem establishes a new disciplinary orientation towards the study of religion as historically valid within a complete social system. In connection with accounts of rituals where totems are sacrificed and brought back to life, Frazer speculates that “the idea of the immortality of the individual totem, which is brought out in these ceremonies, appears to be an extension of the idea of the immortality of the species, which is, perhaps, of the essence of totemism.”11 This passage typifies one aspect of totem discourse, in that it shows the instability of the border between the ontological position of the totem worshipper and that of the anthropologist: “The idea of the immortality of the individual totem” is apparently held by the Zunni people whose turtle worship Frazer has been discussing. “The idea of the immortality of the species,” of which he interprets the Zunni ritual as an “extension,” is less clear. Is this idea Frazer’s? What indeed is Frazer’s relation to the concept of species in general, recalling that this concept, and that of species immortality, were both under extreme pressure as he wrote? Species had gradually ceased to be sure of immortality in the early nineteenth century, with the great French taxonomist Georges Cuvier treating the evidence of species extinction as settled science. In 1859, Darwin’s Origin of Species had made extinction more than an occasional accident, drawing it into universal history and making species no less mortal than individuals. To argue in the last third of the nineteenth century that immortal species provide the basis of social organization in all human cultures at an early stage of their history is thus to endow a contingent idea with implausible universality. The plasticity of species demonstrated by Darwin was moreover not only a conceptual problem in the late Victorian period.

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It pervaded culture and politics. Foucault’s late work gives the long history of how between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, the category denoted by the term “human” changed from a metaphysical to a biological one. In the nineteenth century, Foucault wrote, “Western man” learned “what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, possibilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history . . . biological existence was reflected in political existence.”12 By the late nineteenth century, perceived risks to humankind’s biological existence as a species had become the occasion for a general politicizing of sexuality and marriage, of the organization of the family, and of the sale and consumption of food and drugs. In each of these fields, law and medicine marked certain bodies, spaces, and habits as threats to the species’ survival. A central argument of Foucault’s lectures from 1975 to 1976 at the Collège de France is that modern racism, culminating in the scientific racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is motivated by the biopolitical project of killing or quarantining that which threatens the species. The discourse of totemism emerged in anthropology contemporaneously with the pseudoscience of race in ethnography and medicine. Its project was to show the universality in human societies of dietary taboos and of marriage customs structured by the systematic distinction of permitted and forbidden sexual partners. As we have seen, the lynchpin that bound these structures together as parts of a complete social system was the concept of species. This concept’s operation in totem discourse, however, was profoundly incoherent. The totem, we recall, is by definition a species rather than an individual; totemism is the division of society into groups defined by their affinity with distinct totem species. As well as a religion, totemism was also from McLennan’s foundational articles of 1869–70 onwards always theorized as a kinship system. McLennan had previously published a book, Primitive Marriage, on bride capture as the basis of exogamy – a term he was responsible for introducing into the study of human societies.13 In his articles on “The Worship of Animals and Plants,” he argues that totemworshipping societies are organized into exogamic clans, each taking its name from a different totem. The data supporting this claim came from Sir George Grey’s 1841 account of the clan system prevailing among the indigenous people of western Australia, in which clans took their names from animal or vegetable species, and in which marriage between members of the same clan was prohibited. McLennan linked this system to the clan

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system found in some North American First Nations, and gave the resultant general concept the name “totem,” which had been brought into English from the Ojibwe language by American travel writers.14 Further, McLennan asserted that, in societies where totemism prevails, it is more than a mere naming system, but rather has as its basis a belief in the literal kinship of clan members and their totems: “American Indians, like the aborigines of Australia, regarded themselves, we have every reason to believe, as being of the breed of the totem.” For the people of the Caribbean and of the South West, he cites sources in ethnographic literature; for the remainder of the continent, “regular authorities being silent,” his source is James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans, which relates how “a party of warriors, comprising a Beaver, happening to pass a colony of real beavers, the Beaver refused to pass without addressing his kinfolk. ‘There would have been a species of profanity in the omission,’ says Mr. Cooper. . . . ‘Accordingly, he paused and spoke. . . . He called the animals his cousins.’”15 Though the focus of McLennan’s work is on the place of totemism in the history of religion, his claim that worshippers of a totem “in every case” believe themselves “to be, nominally at least, of its breed or species” was the basis of all the work that followed on totemism as a complete social system.16 Since clan membership was based on shared kinship with the totem, the prohibition of marriage between members of the same clan appeared in the light of his work as a taboo on incest. And the prohibition on killing and eating the totem appeared homologous with a taboo on shedding the blood of one’s kin. I have argued that late Victorian theorists of totemism were preoccupied with species and with the regulation of sex and diet because they projected onto other societies the biopolitical concerns of their own. In an aside that suggests the logic of this projection, Frazer saw a resemblance between the structure of a complex totem society, with totem groups superposed on groups so that any given individual would have several totems, and the hierarchical classification of organic life into “genera, species &c.”17 Theorists of totemism thus understood it at once as a system that classifies things – animals, plants, persons, foods – and as a system that scandalizes classification. The concept of the totem is as we have seen inseparable from that of the species; at the same time, however, for every theorist writing after McLennan, totemism is understood as a system of cross-species kinship. The major consequence of this contradiction in totemism discourse is the emergence of symptomatically disturbed theories of kinship itself.

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Although totemism was understood to have at its center the social regulation of sexual activity, its theorists actually have remarkably little to say about sex. Far more space is devoted to rituals and regulations concerning the consumption of plants and animals as food, and the power imputed to dietary practice in establishing kinship and constituting populations makes the second striking trait I want to discuss in totem discourse. The most influential British work on totemism in the whole history of its study was William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, published in 1889. Robertson Smith was a scholar of the Old Testament who knew both McLennan and Frazer; McLennan was his senior and a strong influence; Frazer was a contemporary and a continuing interlocutor. Unlike the work of McLennan and Frazer, Robertson Smith’s focuses on the ancient Near East, not on putatively primitive societies in his own time. Rather than anthropology, he writes religious history from the standpoint of Christianity, to which he sees all other forms of worship as pointing the way. His work belongs to the discourse of totemism, though, because he adopts from McLennan and Frazer the hypothesis that all societies pass through a phase of totem worship during their religious development. Robertson Smith’s work argues that the traces of this phase are legible in the Hebrew Bible and in other records of the ancient Near East, as well as in Greek and Roman myths associating the Olympian gods with animals. Above all Robertson Smith doubles down on the idea that totem worship entails belief in the kinship of worshippers and their totem. Among the Semites, he writes, “the original type of religion, out of which all other types grew,” was one “in which the deity and his worshippers make up a society united by the bond of blood.”18 My topic in this chapter is the work late nineteenth-century writers do by using blood as a symbol for social bonds. In the first instance, blood retains its ancient significance as a figure of inheritance, though an inheritance that is no longer primarily based in law, and that no longer has the family as its principal field of operation. Inheritance now binds populations into societies defined by race or species. This view of inheritance defines Robertson Smith’s understanding of social bonds and determines the object of his argument: Traditional religion is handed down from father to child, and therefore is in great measure an affair of race. Nations springing from a common stock all have a common inheritance of traditional belief and usage in things sacred as well as profane, and thus the evidence that the Hebrews and their neighbours had a large common stock of religious tradition falls in with the

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Biopolitics and Animal Species evidence that we have from other sources, that in point of race the people of Israel were nearly akin to the heathen nations of Syria and Arabia. The populations of this whole region constitute a well-marked ethnic unity, a fact which is usually expressed by giving to them the common name of Semites.19

This passage opens a lengthy consideration of the criteria by which the Semites can be considered an “ethnographical group”: [D]irect historical evidence . . . as to the original seats and kindred of ancient peoples is not generally to be had. The defects of historical tradition must therefore be supplied by observation, partly of inherited physical characteristics, and of mental characteristics, habits and attainments. . . . Among the indirect criteria of kinship between nations, the most obvious . . . is the criterion of language; for it is observed that the languages of mankind form a series of natural groups, and that within each group it is possible to organize the several languages which it contains in what may be called a genealogical order, according to degrees of kinship. . . . As a rule . . . the classification of mankind by language, at least when applied to large masses, will approach pretty closely to a natural classification; and in a large proportion of cases, the language of a mixed race will prove on examination to be that of the stock whose blood is predominant.20

Blood here stands as a figure for racial inheritance understood as the property of a collectivity, of whose biological history Robertson Smith interprets the cultural inheritance of language as a token. Notwithstanding this passage’s identification of blood with a “natural classification” of peoples, in the Lectures as a whole, Robertson Smith assumes throughout that kinship in the societies he studies is made, rather than naturally given, and that the means by which it is made is the literalization of this self-same figure. In these societies, he asserts, blood stands for kinship, as it does in his own text. “Blood,” he writes, “is the primitive symbol of kinship.”21 Without further explanation, Robertson Smith assumes that in the societies he studies, this symbol is always confused with what it represents, so that his work abounds with accounts of blood-brotherhood rituals, in which participants “become brothers by opening a vein and sucking one another’s blood,”22 and of ritual incisions in the course of initiation or mourning rituals.23 The assumption that the literal sharing of blood forms the basis of kinship is built into the main argument of Robertson Smith’s Lectures, which was the basis for its influence on Freud. Like his precursors in the study of totem worship, Robertson Smith held that totemism was at the root of dietary taboos, which he viewed as affording special protection to

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the totem animal on the grounds of kinship. He extends the interpretation of dietary taboos, however, in a theory intended to account for the practice of animal sacrifice, widely attested in the Hebrew Bible, in classical texts, and in other ancient sources. He argues that the sacrifices these sources describe are the survivals in ancient cultures of a prehistoric totemic phase.24 In this phase, sacrificial animals were of the totem species, chosen for their special holiness: “in a religion based on kinship, where the god and the worshipper are of one stock, the principle of sanctity and the principle of kinship are identical.”25 Under these circumstances, the sacrifice of a sacred animal can supersede the usual taboo on its consumption on condition that the sacrifice be the act of the entire tribe or clan: The fact . . . that all sacrifice was originally clan sacrifice . . . puts the slaughter of a victim in a new light, by classing it among the acts which, in a primitive society, are illegal to any individual, and can only be justified when the whole clan shares the responsibility of the deed. So far as I know, there is only one class of actions recognized by early nations to which this description applies, viz. actions which involve an invasion of the sanctity of the tribal blood.26

Robertson Smith’s hypothetical sacrifice thus affirms the kinship of the sacrificial animal and the clan members who join together to take its life. Moreover, he proposes, not only does the clan affirm its kinship with the animal by participating in its death, but also and above all by sharing it as food. Though the animal’s death is . . . a shedding of the tribal blood. . . . Nonetheless the slaughter of such a victim is permitted or required on solemn occasions, and all the tribesmen partake of its flesh, that they may thereby cement and seal their mystic unity with one another and with their god. . . . This cement is nothing else than the actual life of the sacred and kindred animal, which is conceived as residing in its flesh, and especially in its blood, and so, in the sacred meal, is actually distributed among all the participants.27

As readers in Robertson Smith’s own time noted, his claim that animal sacrifices in the ancient world were survivals of prehistoric totem worship had little but conjecture to support it. The one text he adduces that describes a group of kindred feasting on a sacrificial animal dates from the fourth century, and is thus of dubious relevance to the analysis of prehistoric societies.28 Written, as I have said, from a Christian standpoint, the work is strongly motivated by a wish to establish that Judaism contained in its origins a prefiguration of the Christian sacrament.

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Nonetheless, the work had broad cultural impact. I will argue that it influenced Bram Stoker, whose Dracula (1897) follows Robertson Smith in recalling from Deuteronomy the phrase “the blood is the life,” and in reading it to mean “that the race has a life of its own, of which individual lives are only parts.”29 Robertson Smith’s ideas were of course central to Freud’s work on totemism. Most broadly, he gave expression to a general hystericizing of blood in the late nineteenth century that resulted from the emergence into politics of populations and their aggregated life as a field of concern. In Robertson Smith’s terms, “The only thing that is sacred is the common tribal life, or the common blood that is identified with that life.”30 The figure of “common blood,” far from being primitive, is absolutely characteristic of late Victorian biopolitics, both in its emphasis on the collective biological existence of the population, and in its profound mystification of how the population, or “tribe,” is constituted.

*****

Though totemism was an artifact of nineteenth-century intellectual history, that is not all it was.31 Just as the discourse of hysteria produced hysterics, the discourse of totemism made totem worshippers: If the evidence of Freud’s case histories can be accepted, they were to be found in the schools and nurseries of Europe, not in Western Australia. How could it be otherwise for children raised on Carroll’s Alice books (1865, 1871), Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), Christina Rossetti’s Sing Song (1872), Kipling’s Jungle Books (1894, 1895) and Just So Stories (1902), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1901), and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908)? The Jungle Books, with their narrative of Mowgli’s adoption by wolves, even provided the model for Robert Baden-Powell’s organization of young Boy Scouts into “packs” of “wolf cubs.”32 In Kipling’s jungle, the “Master Words” that Mowgli has to learn are an assertion of species identity figured as blood: “We be of one blood, ye and I.” Animals claim kinship with others of their kind by speaking the words in their own language. In the story “Kaa’s Hunting,”33 Mowgli, the human child protagonist who is adopted by wolves, learns that to survive among the animals, he must speak all of their languages, so that he can in case of need claim kinship with any of them.34 The story that follows his lesson shows him saving himself by claiming blood kinship first with the carrionkites and later with the snakes, enacting in its use of the figure of blood the same contradiction we saw in totem discourse, where blood is at once the fundamental figure of species identity and a basis for cross-species identification. For Kipling, the human boy belongs to a universal species, whose

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ability to mimic the attributes of all the other animals makes him their master.35 A more anxious, literalizing use of blood to figure the collective life of a population is the organizing principle of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There is no evidence to say whether Stoker read Robertson Smith’s Lectures, though it seems likely that he would have at least known of them. In any case, his novel’s preoccupations with race and species identity, with cross-species affinity, and with dietary practices, and its mediation of all of these themes through the figure of a social circulation of blood, locates the two texts in a shared cultural moment. Along with other late Victorian vampire narratives like Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), moreover, Dracula shares with Robertson Smith’s Lectures an unexamined assumption that blood relationship obeys a sacramental logic – that is, that by consuming the blood of another person or of an animal, one becomes their kin.

***

Late Victorian Gothic fictions share with their Romantic-era models such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and James Hogg’s Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner (1824) the use of character doubling as an organizing principle. In response to the late Victorian crisis in the concept of species, though, as Mario Ortiz-Robles notes, in the fiction of this era, the monstrous double is animalized.36 In texts like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Beetle (1897), and Dracula, Gothic now puts in question the species identity of its protagonists. At the same time, the fundamental Gothic theme of the remainder from an otherwise dead past – a literary topos which we saw in Chapter 4 itself influenced Darwin’s understanding of living bodies as containing organic remainders of their own histories – is transformed into a preoccupation with biological atavism. As we saw in Chapter 6, Dracula is the literary culmination of the nineteenth-century emergence of a social circulation of blood, functioning both as a basis for identification – of bodies sharing “the same” blood – and for multiple kinds of differentiation: 1) between speciated or racialized bodies having different bloods; 2) between bodies bearing diseased or tainted blood and healthy bodies; and 3) between bodies on the basis of their propensity to bleed. As we have seen, all of these modes of differentiation are at work in Dracula, as is the concept of a society defined as sharing a common blood supply. But the single most striking thing about the novel is that, notwithstanding its massive investment in taxonomies of species, race, and gender, in its version of the vampire narrative all of these

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taxonomic boundaries can be crossed by the act of sharing or consuming blood. In this respect, the novel resembles Robertson Smith’s Lectures and totem discourse more generally. The theme of male doubling in Dracula develops along two narrative paths, both well trodden by earlier Gothic texts. One of these paths dominates the novel’s first sections: Jonathan Harker is invited to Castle Dracula on the pretext of completing legal work for Dracula’s purchase of a property in England; it emerges, however, that the real reason Harker has been brought to the castle – where he shortly finds that he is a captive, rather than a guest – is to enable the Count, following his planned move to England, to pass for a native. Harker finds in Dracula’s library that he has been studying books “relating to English life and customs and manners,” as well as dictionaries, almanacs, and maps. Dracula allows that through these books he has come to “know” and “love” England (50), but laments that “alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend,” he says to Harker, “I look that I know it to speak,” so that on his projected move to London, “no man stops if he see me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say ‘Ha, ha! a stranger!” (51). Dracula thus aims to model his speech and appearance on Harker’s so as to appear “like all the rest” (51) in England. His self-fashioning on Harker’s model extends later in the opening chapter to stealing and wearing his clothes so as to impersonate him. Most strikingly, because in Stoker’s version of vampire lore the vampire does not cast a reflection, when Harker looks into a mirror while the Count is standing behind him, he is startled to see that “the room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself” (56). When Harker looks for Dracula in the mirror, the image he sees is his own. In doubling narrative number one, then, Dracula appropriates Harker’s identity; Stoker’s novel allegorizes this appropriation as a desire to drink his blood. I will expand on this claim after outlining a second way in which male doubling structures relations between Stoker’s “crew of light” (to adopt Christopher Craft’s term) and their monstrous adversary.37 Since Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, a weirdly eroticized and ambivalent anti-Catholicism has been a staple feature of Gothic fiction – it remains so to this day. Dracula fully embraces this Gothic motif. With respect to his English and American antagonists, Dracula embodies an un-dead piece of history. This fact above all reflects the novel’s political plot, which stages a confrontation between the bourgeois, imperialist states that for Stoker embodied modernity and the feudalist, ethnic social order of which Dracula, alone in his ruined castle, is a remnant. But Dracula’s religion,

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as well as his politics, makes him an anachronism in nineteenth-century England. Stoker’s vampire mythology makes Dracula vulnerable to artifacts of Roman Catholic worship, notably the transubstantiated host and the crucifix. If there were any doubt of the specifically Catholic provenance of these holy objects, the vampire hunter Van Helsing explains, as he commits an apparent sacrilege by rolling up the host and stuffing it around the door of Lucy Westenra’s tomb, that “I have an Indulgence” (248) – at once showing that he is himself Catholic and hinting that, like other Gothic protagonists in years to come, he is well connected in the Church hierarchy. Another axis along which Dracula’s plot doubles the vampire and his antagonists, then, is that of Catholicism. The English and American characters in the crew of light carry out Van Helsing’s plans and use the sacred objects he supplies, but do not share his religion; Harker, for instance, identifies himself as an “English Churchman” and notes that he has been taught to view the crucifix as “in some measure idolatrous” (35). Van Helsing, a Catholic stranger in London who speaks accented English, is thus the most obvious of Dracula’s doubles, and indeed his leadership of the vampire hunt follows the logic of Wagner’s Parsifal: “The spear that made the wound must heal it” – or that of schoolyard homophobia: “It takes one to know one.” As Talia Schaffer observes, Van Helsing’s crucifix is “a vaccine against vampirism – but like a vaccine, it initiates the disease against which it protects.”38 The man whose identity he wants to assume and the man who can see him for what he really is are by no means Dracula’s only doubles in the novel. Indeed, thinking about Dracula as organized by relations between doubles risks treating its characters too much as individuals and neglecting the extent to which they are types – representatives of populations or segments of populations. The novel’s fundamental subject is the war of populations – and its organizing figure for the vampire’s war on the “swarming millions” of England’s population is his appropriation of its blood, which as we have seen, the novel imagines as an undifferentiated fluid circulating at large through the social body. The theme of the double, the secret affinity between Dracula and the characters who oppose him, at bottom stages the extreme porousness of the envelope enclosing this body, the population that the vampire threatens. The novel is explicit on these points. The vampire has provoked an autoimmune response at home, where a population alert to the threat he poses shuns him and reduces him to short rations – apparently to feeding only on small children. Van Helsing figures him as leaving a land that has

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become “barren – barren of peoples – and coming to a new land where life of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn” (360). There he plans to become the “father or furtherer of a new order of beings” (343) like himself. The equivocation in Van Helsing’s formulation underscores how in this text sexual reproduction as the driver of population is mystified, replaced with the literalized figure of blood kinship, as it is in totem discourse. Dracula then stages a war between population groups constituted by shared blood. Four of the male members of the crew of light give their blood by transfusion to Lucy Westenra in a doomed attempt to save her from the vampire’s depredations. Dracula vampirizes and establishes a telepathic bond with Mina Harker by forcing her to drink his blood. Each of the warring populations from the standpoint of the other appears animalized. Dracula in his one encounter with the crew of light memorably compares them to sheep and jackals: “You think to baffle me, you – with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! . . . Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my creatures, to do my bidding, and to be my jackals when I want to feed” (347). To his human antagonists, Dracula is “brute, and more than brute” (276); or, to Mina Harker, a Thing “not human – not even beast” (267). In these passages, the novel suggests that the biopolitical threat posed by Dracula is that of unclassified “bare life”; when the boxes of soil in which he rests are made inaccessible to him with pieces of the host, they are repeatedly characterized as “sterilized.” Stoker’s conception of the vampire has animal models, notably the vampire bat. To become a vampire is to be gradually animalized, beginning with the development of canine fangs. And of course the vampire can appear in animal form – above all, as a bat – and summon at will the aid of non-human animals with whom he has an affinity, such as the wolf and the rat. Notably, Dracula’s affinities tend to be with animals that appear in a pack or swarm; in his encounter with his adversaries too, when he compares them to sheep and jackals, he turns for his analogies to a herd animal and one that roams in packs. The foundational antagonism in Stoker’s novel is between population groups, not individuals. To understand the animality of Stoker’s vampires, it is useful to contrast the novel with earlier Victorian representations of struggle against animality represented as a form of atavism. Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) propounds a pre-Darwinian idea of progressive evolution in which the

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human species develops by losing traits supposedly characteristic of nonhuman animals: “Move upwards, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die” (118. 27–8). Charles Kingsley’s post-Darwinian The Water Babies (1863) includes a devolutionary fable in which a tribe he calls the “Doasyoulikes” quickly devolve into apes, losing the ability to raise food, to walk upright, and to speak. In both cases, the animal allegorizes human traits that the writers deplore: violence, imitativeness, lust, dirt, laziness, and so forth. In both, the animal also represents what the writers view as the primitivism of suppositious racial groups – Irish, in Kingsley’s case, and in Tennyson’s, African and South Asian. Stoker’s Dracula does not allegorize any specific character traits; nor, though the novel is fully invested in late Victorian racial ideology, does the vampire typify any particular “race.”39 He embodies not a particular population, but the concept of population; it is not his individual life but the life that he bears that threatens his adversaries, inasmuch as this life requires their death. Like the totem, Dracula embodies the collective life of his race or species, including the idea of species immortality. Immortal as he is, his memories and the racial memory of his people appear as one. The novel’s crusade against him seeks to exterminate an entire species or genre of life: Dracula is in this sense a genocidal text.

***

By embodying the concept of population in the vampire, Dracula establishes that the late eighteenth-century genre of Gothic retains a critical edge with respect to late Victorian biopolitical and eugenic ideas. Our reading of the novel opened by establishing that the novel doubles the vampire with his principal antagonists and that it symbolizes this doubling by the transfer of blood between them. Thus Dracula’s plan to adopt Jonathan Harker’s identity is symbolized as a wish to drink his blood. In a broader view, we can now see that the vampire stands at once for the population and for the biological agent that threatens it, or more abstractly, for the doubling of biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Besides the threat of blood loss that the vampire poses to the collective in Stoker’s novel, then, it also renders visible the symbolic work that blood does in affirming kinship between the different individuals and groups that it comprises. I have already argued that Dracula embodies the concept of population; we can now add that he represents not only a biopolitical threat to the teeming millions of Britons, but also by a dialectical necessity the body in which the biopolitical concept of population actually becomes visible.40 In his body mingles the blood of men and women, of Catholics and Protestants, and of

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white inhabitants of both the Old World and the New.41 In the novel’s plot, Dracula is the antagonist who brings the disparate members of the Crew of Light together and forges their identity as a collective; in its symbolic argument, the figuration of the collective as constituted by the mingling of its members’ blood shows its biopolitical character. The novel’s Gothic narrative represents the population as an artificial body whose ability to assimilate many lives into one is fundamentally morbid. Its accumulation of life – allegorized as blood – is figured as excessive, wasteful, and uncanny, and its self-reproduction entails violent death. The Crew of Light themselves, though joined in the course of the novel by the tie of blood, are compared to the vampire strikingly uninterested in reproducing. The Crew’s male members are linked by professional ties as doctors and lawyers and by friendships formed while hunting big game, and Dracula follows the conventions of the adventure story in setting its heroes a task that calls on each of their talents to complete. The social ties that join the vampire hunters are thus emphatically homosocial, and the novel indeed bears a relation to other late Victorian genres that require an all-male team to renounce women for the duration of the narrative. The exception that proves the rule in Stoker’s novel is the inclusion of Mina Harker as a vital member of the Crew. During the course of the novel, Mina marries Jonathan Harker, an event for which she prepares by studying typing and stenography. Her skills, like those of the men, prove indispensable in the campaign against the vampire, and late in the novel Van Helsing credits her with “a great brain . . . trained like [a] man’s brain” (481). It is true that unlike her friend Lucy, Mina does not put the men of the Crew at risk by her sexual allure; to this extent she is represented as unfeminine. But the secretarial work Mina does was in fact fully characteristic of the generation of women who in the 1880s and 1890s entered office work in Britain and the United States along with the new technology of the typewriter, displacing the male clerks of an earlier era, represented in the fiction of Dickens and Trollope, who wrote by hand.42 The novel’s point is thus that a woman’s work is as vital to the Crew’s success as that of the men: Mina not only contributes the technical ability to transcribe records in different media, including Jonathan’s stenographic diary and Seward’s dictaphone recordings, and reduce them to a single text legible to all; she also serves as an affective medium. Only to her are the novel’s male characters able to reveal the incredible or shameful secrets of their encounters with vampires, so only she is able to assemble the entire narrative of Dracula’s invasion. Mina’s work as a mediator culminates in the telepathic

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connection she is able to make with Dracula as he seeks to escape at the novel’s end. Mina is thus an essential member of the Crew and cements the homosocial bonds that constitute it. And though the novel thus incorporates in its representation of the struggle against Dracula an argument about the complementarity of men’s and women’s talents, it remains resolute in keeping the serious business of adventure sex-free. Mina and Jonathan’s wedding – and their wedding night – take place while the latter is confined to a hospital bed in a convent. The room they share in Seward’s asylum is the scene of Dracula’s attack on Mina, to which she responds by declaring herself “unclean! unclean!”, echoing the menstrual taboo of Leviticus 19:15–33. Only with Dracula’s death is the taboo seemingly lifted. In the “Note” with which the novel ends, dated seven years after its main action ends with the vampire’s killing, Jonathan reveals that he and Mina now have a son, born on one of the anniversaries. They have given the boy a “bundle of names” that “links all our little band of men together” (419) – making him the last of Dracula’s doubles, a final figure of the collective body.43 Like a vampire, the baby boy is nourished by sucking; and, though as an individual he is the result of sexual reproduction, symbolically his appearance at the novel’s close reiterates its concern with how the collective body reproduces and perpetuates itself.44 While Mina and Jonathan’s baby does not literally mingle the blood of an entire population, his life is nonetheless founded on death: of all his names, the one his parents actually call him by is Quincy, to commemorate the American killed by Dracula’s attendants in the final moments of the novel’s action. Dracula’s exiguous romance plot cannot conceal the novel’s concern with the constitution of the biological population by killing, a concern that it shares with Robertson Smith’s Lectures and with the broader literature in totemism.

***

In at least two respects, the subject theorized by psychoanalysis belongs to the historical period treated in this book, in which from the late eighteenth century politics becomes concerned with life as such. The first of these arises from the centrality to psychoanalytic theory of a specifically sexual unconscious, which, as Emily Steinlight writes, is “the site of political collectivity and of species-being.”45 Freud’s postulate of an unconscious formed of rejected libidinal positions, of sexual attachments from the past that remain active in the mind of a subject who can no longer acknowledge them, was the result of clinical experience. It was the most controversial of

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Freud’s claims, giving scandal to his contemporaries, and precipitated divisions among the first generation of psychoanalysts when leading figures including Alfred Adler and Carl Jung split with him to embrace broader concepts of the unconscious based on cultural archetypes or on aggression. The idea that some kinds of mental activity could be carried on without being admitted to consciousness was by no means new when Freud advanced it and indeed provided a key paradigm for Victorian theories of mental illness and aberrant behaviour. These included, on the one hand, well-developed theories of compulsive action and automatism, and, on the other, theories of alienated or divided consciousness owing to external agencies such as mesmerism or shock. Psychoanalysis, with its early use of hypnosis and its analysis of symptomatic acts as a means of access to unconscious material, has long been recognized as building on these existing areas of research. Freud’s account of an unconscious constituted by the repression of sexual desire, however, made a decisive break with nineteenth-century psychiatry. It also broke with the long history of Western writing about sex, where it has rather been associated with an excess of consciousness than the reverse. To find a precursor for Freud’s sexual unconscious, we need to leave the field of individual psychology and look elsewhere, to demographics and natural history.46 We have already discussed ideas of unconscious agency in Darwin’s work, culminating in the idea of sexual selection as a mechanism by which a population unconsciously shapes its own phenotype. Beginning in The Origin of Species, Darwin presents unconscious selection as an inevitable result of the cultivation of other species by human beings. In The Descent of Man, he theorizes sexual selection as a species’ selfcultivation, by which the aggregated aesthetic preferences of a population’s individual members confer a reproductive advantage on possessors of body types and other traits deemed beautiful. These traits in time propagate and intensify, becoming embodied as distinctive to the population in question. Darwin held that the visible markers of racial difference in human beings – for instance in body type, skin pigmentation, distribution and quantity of body hair – were for the most part produced in this way. In this view of the unconscious agency of sex in constituting populations, Darwin develops a way of theorizing about sex and population that Thomas Malthus had pioneered in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). The well-known premise of Malthus’s Essay is that “the passion between the sexes” is an unvarying part of human nature, appearing “to exist in as much force at present as it did two thousand, or four thousand years ago” (16). The result of what Malthus calls a fixed law of nature is that

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populations tend to expand until they are checked by shortage of food or other resources (15). Like Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Malthus’s Essay relies heavily on analogy. Neither the exponential growth nor the collapse of human populations are in fact to be observed as such; Malthus deduces what he characterizes as the tendency of human populations to increase at an exponential rate by analogy with animals and plants, which “are all impelled by a powerful instinct to the increase of the species. . . . [W]henever . . . there is liberty, the power of increase is exerted; and the superabundant effects are repressed afterwards by want of room and nourishment, which is common to animals and plants; and among animals, by being the prey of others” (21). But the power of increase in human populations is almost never observable: in Malthus’s time, as he discusses, it was even a matter of dispute whether the European population had increased at all since the Roman Empire. In human beings, the sexual instinct is repressed by what he terms the “preventative check” caused by individuals’ rational decisions not to have children whom they cannot support (32–8). Only among the poor does the “positive check” (39) to population appear, in the forms of malnutrition or disease – and there, the supposed checks can be read, and of course were read by Malthus’s critics, as the effects of poverty rather than of overpopulation – of a failure to distribute the available resources, rather than of an absolute shortage. The supposed instinct to increase the human species in Malthus’s work thus never appears as such. Malthus hypothesizes that its operation produces what he terms an “oscillation” or alternation of “progressive and retrograde movements” in economic conditions, by which rises or falls in the price of labour serve as a signal triggering cyclical growth and retrenchment in the population. Even in this form, however, the population’s tendency to increase “has been less obvious, and less demonstrably confirmed by experience, than might naturally be expected” (23). The reasons Malthus adduces for the non-obviousness of the oscillating predominance of sex and death include historians’ attention only to “the higher class” and the difficulty of determining the real price of labour (23). In Malthus’s account of the human sexual instinct from the point of view of population, then, it is not only invisible as such, but it manifests itself in the oscillating predominance of population growth and of checks to that growth. These checks include not only deaths caused by overpopulation itself, but also the vaguely specified “vice” that Malthus represents as the form sex takes under overcrowding. This Malthusian view of sex as the hidden regulator of population, bringer of both life and death, containing within itself both its own check and its own perversion, shapes the

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pervasive linkage of sex and death in post-Darwinian European culture – with Dracula only one of innumerable examples. Our reading of the vampire as personifying a collective body in which the conjunction of biopolitics and thanatopolitics is made manifest, would thus need to be extended, such that this personification could be seen at work in the male protagonists of Baudelaire, Wagner, Swinburne, and Hardy, to name only a few. It is in the milieu defined by these writers, of course, that Freud formulated his theory of sexuality and the unconscious. The sexual basis of the unconscious was a key premise of psychoanalysis from the Studies on Hysteria on; in what Freud considered his purely psychoanalytic works, beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams, however, sex has the peculiarity – as in Malthus – of always appearing divided against itself, as precipitating its own check. In the first iteration of libido theory, the psychic apparatus’ tendency to satisfy itself by immediately discharging any accumulation of energy through fantasy is checked by the development of the reality principle. This latter Freud theorizes not as opposing satisfaction, but as deferring it; as he put it later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it enjoins “the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (18:10). In Freud’s early work, the checking of the pleasure principle by the reality principle is the basic form of psychic conflict, and the motive that eventually leads the developing subject to repress portions of the libido whose satisfaction is incompatible with reality. In Freud’s late work, with the introduction of the so-called second topographic model of the mind, he develops another theory of the sexual instinct as self-checking when he proposes that the ego itself is libidinally invested, and thus develops a theory of psychic conflict based on the demands the ego makes with respect to the subject’s choice of external sexual objects.47 Repression in this view derives from a check that sex imposes on itself. Freud’s final model of psychic conflict does not quite postulate, as his earlier work did, a division of the sexual instinct against itself. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is nonetheless his most Malthusian work, both because it resembles Malthus’ Essay in having the conflict of life and death as its structuring principle and because the work takes as its topic not only the individual psyche but more broadly the claim that psychic conflict is ultimately only an instance of a conflict immanent to life in general. In Freud’s work from this period on, the paradigm for psychic conflict is the conflict between the sex drive and the death drive, psychic agencies that Freud now understands as working through the individual body while

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joining it to the long history of its species and indeed of living matter as such, on whose behalf they are ultimately viewed as acting. The sex drives are therefore those which “watch over” the germ-cells and “bring about their meeting with other germ-cells”; “they are the true life-instincts [Lebenstriebe]” (18:40), since they aim at a kind of immortality – that of the population, or of the species. These drives “operate against the purpose” of the others, whose aim is death. Because all life is affected by the conflict between these two countervailing forces, Freud writes, It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts [Triebe] rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life [i.e., death] as quickly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to an earlier point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey [die Dauer des Weges zu verlängern]. (18:40–1)

There is no evidence that Freud read Malthus.48 The figure of the vacillating rhythm in this passage reappears in the other figures of oscillating movements and halting steps that pervade Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but I do not mean to suggest that they allude directly to the oscillating movement of the population in which instinct is manifest for Malthus. Rather, I have tried to show in this section that Freud’s concept of sex as an agency that works through individuals who remain largely unconscious of it, and that becomes visible in moments of conflict when it turns against or checks itself – that Freud’s entire concept of sex presumes a postMalthusian biopolitical framing, which by his time had become so pervasive that it received virtually no explicit notice in his writing. The other respect in which the Freudian subject is a biopolitical subject has only an indirect relation to his Malthusian affinities; it is the pervasive identification of the subjects in Freud’s case histories with non-human animals. In four of Freud’s six extended case histories, the subject’s ambivalent relations with a species of animal play a major role. In two of these, the cases of Little Hans and of the Rat Man, a full-blown animal phobia precipitates the analysis; in the other two – the cases of the Wolf Man and Dr Schreber – material related to the wolf and to the eagle emerges in the course of the analysis. These case histories were published between 1909 and 1918, and, making allowances for the many differences between them, they have in common Freud’s interpretation of his subjects’ relations with animals as figures for their ambivalent relations, at once rivalrous and identificatory, with their fathers. Though he only explicitly cites the history of Little Hans and his

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horse phobia, Freud’s experience in this whole group of cases shaped his argument in Totem and Taboo – the first of his anthropological writings, published in 1913 – as did contemporary work by other analysts on boys with animal fixations, like Little Arpad, whose obsession with roosters was the subject of a case history by Sandor Ferenczi, also published in 1913. To formulate a general theory to account for his repeated observations of animal phobias and animal identifications in children (and in childhood memories of adult patients), Freud in Totem and Taboo turns to the late Victorian discourse on totemism, especially the works of McLennan, Frazer, and Robertson Smith.49 For speculations on the social organization of early human society, he also turns to Darwin, whose The Descent of Man argues on the analogy of present-day great apes, that early humans lived in polygamous groups dominated by a single male. In fact, while in Freud’s work and in psychoanalysis more generally the topic of species identity appears under theorized, his work nonetheless attributes a preoccupation with the concept of species to his subjects, just as earlier writers on the totem did to the “primitive” cultures they studied. In this final section, I will argue that totem theory in Freud, as in its nineteenth-century originators, works as a theory of species and population that does not know itself as such.50 Without explicit acknowledgement of the fact, Freud’s case histories show how children come to understand sex, death, and birth by observing animals. Freud is explicit on the kinship children feel with animals, writing in Totem and Taboo that they show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between our own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as they are in their avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who may well be a puzzle to them. (13:126–7)

In the slightly later “A Difficulty in Psychoanalysis,” Freud likens the kinship children and totem societies feel with non-human animals to the kinship between species theorized by Darwin: In the course of the development of civilization man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this supremacy, . . . he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. . . . Curiously enough, this piece of arrogance is still foreign to children, just as it is to primitive and primeval man. . . . At the level of totemism primitive man had no repugnance to tracing his descent from an

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animal ancestor. . . . A child can see no difference between his own nature and that of animals. . . . Not until he is grown up does he become so far estranged from animals as to use their names in vilification of human beings. We all know that little more than half a century ago the researches of Charles Darwin and his collaborators and forerunners put an end to this perception on the part of man. Man is not a being different from animals or superior to them; he himself is of animal descent. (17: 140–1)

Freud’s writings on totemism and on children’s relations with animals thus obey a double logic. On the one hand, in discussing the kinship that totem worshippers and children feel with non-human animals, Freud views them as grasping a truth that the “arrogance” of civilized adults conceals, and from which it was given to Darwin in making his discovery to lift the veil of repression. And as we will see, Freud views animals as the legitimate teachers to children of facts that adults keep from them. On the other hand, Freud also views children’s identifications with non-human animals and sense of kinship with them, as well as totem societies’ claims of kinship to animals, as wholly symbolic – that is, as disguised representations of real relations of kinship within the human nuclear family. The fullest account in Freud’s work of a child’s relations with animals occurs in his case history of “Little Hans,” published in 1909. Freud met the boy Hans only once, and most of the case material comes from notes taken by his father, who was a follower of Freud’s. The events of the case history begin when Hans is four, and they show that he carefully observes and has strong affective relations with many animals around him. Most notable is his interest in the carriage horses and cart horses he sees outside his home in Vienna and encounters on his walks; zoo animals, including lions and giraffes, also preoccupy him, as do farm animals he encounters during trips to the country. Hans identifies with the horses he sees and plays at being a horse (10:52, 58). The critical event of his life in the period narrated in the case history is the birth of a sister when Hans is three and a half. As a result of his observation of his new sister, as well of his mother, and also in consequence of his mother’s threat to have his penis cut off if he played with it, the boy becomes deeply preoccupied by the difference between beings with penises and beings without, seeking out animals with penises, notably horses, and the lion and the giraffe at the zoo. As Freud observes, his investigations enable him “to come at genuine abstract knowledge” (10:9), though it at this point only concerns the difference “between animate and inanimate objects,” inasmuch as “a dog and a horse have widdlers [wiwimacher]; a table and a chair haven’t” (10:9). In the course of the events narrated in the case history, however, the boy is

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brought by repeated assurances from his father to accept that his mother and sister do not in fact have penises, and to recognize the penis’s significance as a marker of sexual difference. In the wake of his sister’s birth, Hans’s fascination with horses and their genitals is supplanted by a horse phobia, which confines him to the house owing to fear that a horse will bite him (10:22). The analysis leads to the quite plausible conclusion that that the boy’s at once phobic and identificatory relation with horses symbolizes his ambivalence towards his father. Perhaps predictably, we learn much less about Hans’s attitude to his mother; nonetheless, his researches do not only concern his father’s role in his sister’s birth, but also hers. He treats his parents’ story that she was brought by the stork with derision; he seems to identify the sounds he heard during the birth (he was in the house at the time) with the sounds made by a horse falling down in the street (10:66, 135); he imagines her birth on the analogy of a chicken laying an egg (10:85). Freud interprets little Hans’s researches as motivated solely by curiosity about the relations between his parents and about his sister’s birth. At the close of the case history, notwithstanding his researches, the boy remains effectively ignorant about the facts of sex and childbirth. His phobia has receded, though, and – for Freud these events are causally linked – he has “got on to familiar terms” with his father (10:144); there is no suggestion that he any longer identifies with horses, or that he is any longer obliged to displace onto them the fear and aggression he felt towards his father. For little Hans, in Freud’s view, the resolution of his neurosis brings about the end of any need to symbolize his relations with actual kin through his relations with animals. So too in Freud’s essay on totemism, the supposed totem stage of human beings’ development as a species is a mere means of symbolizing a general cultural ambivalence towards the memory of the primal father, whose murder Freud postulates as the founding event of human history. Totem and Taboo’s narrative of the development of the species is more openended than the individual case of little Hans; in Totem and Taboo, there is no implication that the cultural transitions from totem worship to polytheism to the monotheistic religions, and thence to Christianity are progressive, or curative – Freud does not view the history of religion as affording a gain in knowledge or a lifting of repression. There can be, in Lacan’s term, no Real father, but only a series of symbolic substitutions for the dead primal father, in which the role played by animals in totemism is later played by different kinds of anthropomorphic deity and by other cultural heroes.

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Our question is, does the relation with non-human animals have any particular privilege, or ontological independence, that would distinguish it in Freud’s view from, say, religion as a mere illusion, having no reality independent of the paternal relation of which it is a disguised representation? To answer the question, we recall that Freud takes from Victorian totem discourse the central claim that totemism is a system of kinship as well as a religion. Unlike most succeeding religions (with Christianity being the exception and – to Freud’s mind – in this respect a regression) it answers the question, “who are my kin and what do we share in common?” On the answer to this question totem societies were supposed to have based a law of exogamy that elaborated the single law of the primal father into a social system and established the historical progenitor of every subsequent system of human kinship. In taking over this claim from his Victorian sources, Freud reproduces the fundamental incoherence of their idea of kinship. Totemism requires the idea of species: the totem itself is defined as a species of animal (or, less often, of plant), but it also defines an idea of kinship that is constituted by the crossing of species lines. In Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, the central topic is the constitution in philosophy of the human in a relation to animals that remains unacknowledged. Derrida argues that the human comes into existence as a follower of animals (the French je suis signifies both “I am” and “I follow”). Conjoined with this general claim is a specific argument that the trace – a key motif in Derrida’s work since Of Grammatology – is proper to the animal: it is animals who leave traces and it is given to the animal to follow the trace.51 For Derrida, speaking at a conference on “The Autobiographical Animal,” the autobiographer who writes “I am” is necessarily an animal in pursuit of an animal, an animal whose own animality eludes it. A final thematic in this work, that of nudity, also at issue in autobiography where it is the task of the autobiographer to present himself or herself stripped bare, will concern us less. Here too, for Derrida, the problematic of the human relation to the animal is made manifest, since it is when naked that the human being assumes the condition of an animal – and yet, as Derrida writes, we do not say of non-human animals that they are naked. I give these theoretical points of reference because psychoanalysis, as Freud’s case histories show, is very much a practice of autobiography. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, the critique of psychoanalysis is a major part of Derrida’s argument, but he says little about the case histories or about Totem and Taboo – though he does refer in passing to the animality of the absolute father, collapsing the distinction between the totem as

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symbol and the murdered primal father whom Freud supposes to be the person symbolized.52 Much of what follows expands on this throwaway suggestion of Derrida’s. There is certainly every reason to extend Derrida’s claims about the structuring presence of the animal/human divide in autobiography to the practice of psychoanalysis. In his first psychoanalytic case history, Freud begins by stating that inability to tell their own stories is characteristic of neurotic patients: I begin the treatment . . . by asking the patient to give me the whole history of his life and illness, but even so the information I receive is never enough to let me see my way about the case. . . . I cannot help wondering how the authorities can produce such smooth and precise histories in cases of hysteria. As a matter of fact the patients are incapable of giving such information about themselves. (7:16)

Freud goes on to assert that the theoretical significance of neurotics’ inability to tell their stories is that it shows the operation of repression; the lifting of repression in the course of analysis that alleviates the patients’ symptoms therefore also fill in the gaps in their memory. It is only towards the end of the treatment that we have before us an intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case history. Whereas the practical aim of the treatment is to remove all possible symptoms and to replace them by conscious thoughts, we may regard it as a secondary and theoretical aim to repair all the damages to the patient’s memory. These two aims are coincident. When one is reached, so is the other; and the same path [Weg] leads to them both. (7:18)

Analysis then consists in uncovering and following a path. The figure of the path in this sentence is ambiguous in its meaning, referring at once to the psychoanalytic method followed by the therapy and to the narrative of the patient’s life that it uncovers. There is a similar ambiguity in Freud’s assertion that an “unbroken case history” emerges “towards the end of treatment” – what is the relation between the history that emerges in analysis, presumably as a product of the patient’s memory, and the case history we are reading, the history of the analysis, in which it is narrated from a position of retrospect outside it? Throughout Freud’s work, his own discourse can be observed to double that of his patients, and to be subject to pressure and deformation by some of the same mechanisms of symptom formation. Freud himself observed this, and the topic is a staple in commentary on his work.53 I raise it here to preface the claim that Freud’s own stories, like his patients’, leave “gaps

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unfilled and riddles unanswered” (7: 16), i.e., leave the path – especially when they deal with the relations between human and non-human animals. Before concluding with a return to Totem and Taboo, I want to consider another of Freud’s case histories in which the analyzand’s relation to animals plays a key role. Freud published the case history of the “Wolf Man” in 1918, five years after Totem and Taboo – though the analysis it narrates took place from 1910 to 1914 and included the period of Totem and Taboo’s composition and publication in 1913; in spite of the delay in publication, the Wolf Man case history was written in 1914. Like that of little Hans, the Wolf Man case history has an animal phobia at its center, though in this case, the phobia is directed against animals that the patient had very probably never encountered in real life, and stem from an anxiety dream he experienced at the age of four. In this anxiety dream, the patient recalled, [I]t was night, and I was lying in my bed. . . . Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting in the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheepdogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked up like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently afraid of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. (18:29)

The way this dream is narrated makes it a dream within a dream, since it begins with the child in his bed, dreaming that he is in bed, then seeing the window opening – the only action in this dream where otherwise all the actors are motionless – as a kind of raising of the curtain to the main dream. The dream is in a sense already a dream of a dream – a point underscored by Freud’s report that “in the course of the treatment the first dream reappeared in innumerable variations and new editions” (18:36). Also extant in many variations and editions is the Wolf Man’s visual rendering of his dream, the first version of which he made for Freud during the course of the analysis. Later in his life – having lost his inherited fortune during the Russian Revolution – the Wolf Man sold paintings to make money, including multiple versions of the original drawing rendered in oil. Each of these renderings might be described as a Wolf Man “original.”54 The relation between representation and original in the context of the Wolf Man’s dream is thus far from straightforward. Freud’s interpretation – perhaps the most controversial and brilliant of his dream interpretations – nonetheless focuses on the task of discovering the original event that the

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dream represents. As I have noted, there is no reason to think that the almost five-year-old Wolf Man had ever seen a wolf; the immediate sources for his dream, it rapidly emerges, were fairy tales. The patient right away produces a reference to a story told him by his grandfather, of a tailor who caught a wolf by the tail and pulled it off, whereupon the whole pack chased him up a tree, led by the maimed one (17:30–1). The patient also recalled a picture of a wolf in a book of fairy tales of which he was “terribly afraid” at the period of the dream (17:29). But the most important originals of the wolves in this dream belong to other species altogether. As the text of the dream notes, the wolves are white and have bushy tails. The analysis links these traits to animals that the patient has actually met with – sheep, as the putative source of the wolves’ whiteness (though this will turn out to be overdetermined), and sheepdogs, as the source of their bushy tails. From Freud’s interpretation of this dream, I wish to refer only to one strand, certainly the most important, and also the most equivocal in its conclusions. Recalling that one source for the dream material was the story of a tailor chased into a tree by a pack of wolves, Freud observes that this image appears in the dream in inverted form – in the patient’s dream, the wolves are in the tree, not below it. Treating the dream, as he characteristically does, as an aesthetic object with its own immanent principles of formal unity, he proposes that the transposition of key terms is in this dream a general rule. Thus, a scene in which “the wolves sat there motionless; they looked at him but did not move” would symbolize a scene of violent movement at which he [the patient] looked with strained attention. In the one case the distortion would consist in the interchange of subject and object, of activity and passivity: being looked at instead of looking. In the other case it would consist in a transformation into the opposite; rest instead of motion. (17: 35)

The ensuing analysis shows that the dream (occurring on Christmas Eve – which was also the eve of the patient’s birthday) had as one of its determinants the child’s anticipation of the gifts he was to receive the next day, some of them hanging from the Christmas tree. The gifts turn to wolves because the boy in a homosexual phase of the Oedipus complex associates receiving gifts from his father with receiving sexual satisfaction from him. Freud thus reads the picture in the dream as a distorted version of a sexual scene; in the course of the analysis, on the basis of the patient’s associations but without any direct corroboration from his memory, he constructs the scene that is represented in his patient’s dream: “What sprang into activity that night out of the chaos of the patient’s unconscious

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memory-traces was the picture of copulation between his parents, copulation in circumstances which were not entirely usual and were especially favourable for observation” (17:30). In fact, Freud proposes, at the age of one and a half, the child woke from a nap in his parents’ bedroom to witness their “coitus a tergo [from behind], three times repeated; he was able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as well as its significance” (17:37).55 This so-called primal scene [Urszene] originates the Wolf Man’s neurosis – and, from a formal point of view, much of the remainder of Freud’s discussion consists of attempts to prevent it from being enfolded into the narrative at whose beginning it supposedly stands. The passage I have just quoted seems to close with the assertion that the one-and-a-half-year-old observer of his parents’ intercourse “understood” what he observed; to this assertion, though, there is a note: “I mean that he understood it at the time of the dream when he was four years old, not at the time of the observation. He received the impressions when he was one-and-a-half; his understanding them was deferred” (17:38–9). The principle of deferred action [nachtraglichkeit] arises in all of Freud’s case histories; in that of the Wolf Man, it operates across the distinction between the human and the animal: the anxiety dream of the wolf is the form in which the boy’s deferred understanding of his parents’ sex appears to him. But even this equivocal claim that the sex of human beings is the origin of the boy’s knowledge and of the neurosis that follows is qualified as the case history develops. In addressing what he anticipates will be his readers’ scepticism about the highly particularized scene that he constructs on the basis of his patient’s symptoms and associations, Freud suggests an alternative: that the dream of the wolves staring at the boy is an inverted representation of his observation, not of his parents, but of other animals. Perhaps what the child observed was not copulation between his parents but copulation between animals, which he then displaced onto his parents, as though he had inferred that his parents did things the same way. Colour is lent to this view above all by the fact that the wolves in the dream were actually sheep-dogs and, moreover, appear as such in the drawing. Shortly before the dream the boy was repeatedly taken to visit the flocks of sheep, and there might see just such large white dogs and probably see them copulating. (17: 57–8)

Subsequently, Freud admits that every time he has been able in analysis to bring out a scene in which the subject observed his parents having sex, it had the “peculiarity” (17:59) that the parents perform what he discreetly

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names in Latin as “coitus a tergo, more ferarum [coitus from behind, in the manner of beasts]” (17:57).56 This fact suggests, as Freud allows, that the primal scene “is only a phantasy, which is invariably aroused, perhaps, by an observation of the sexual intercourse of animals” (17:59). Invariably . . . perhaps. Here Freud pauses the argument, returning to it at the analysis’ close, where further material – to which the patient is led by dreaming of a butterfly – gives him evidence enough to reassert the reality of the primal scene and to affirm once and for all that in the patient’s animal phobia, the wolf is a substitute for the father (17:112). Perhaps. In making this claim Freud also takes the opportunity to link his findings in the Wolf Man’s case to anthropological argument of Totem and Taboo. There too Freud interprets non-human animals – the animals putatively worshipped as totems at an early stage in the history of every human society – as symbols of the father, and the taboo on killing the totem as atonement for the supposed primal murder. The work of Freud’s text consists in uncovering the traces of the father-animal’s murder: “An event such as the elimination of the primal father by the company of his sons must inevitably have left ineradicable traces [unvertilgbare Spuren] in the history of humanity; and the less it itself was recollected, the more numerous must have been the substitutes to which it gave rise” (13:155). In Freud’s rendering of historical memory in this work, totemism, like all of the other religious and cultural institutions he discusses, institutes both the repetition of the primal murder and the act of atonement for it. It is not too much to say that in Freud’s work the human as such comes into being with the radical ambiguity of the trace – an ambiguity that this text does not fail to reproduce as it uncovers and recovers the singular event of the primal murder. In referring to the event, Freud’s writing makes a radical shift in diegetic mode, from argument to narration, as if stumbling onto a track. Thus having asked in the mode of argument how totem societies “composed of members with equal rights . . . subject to the restrictions of the totem-system” (13:141) could have emerged from the “primal horde [Urhorde]” theorized by Darwin57 – in which a single male keeps all the females for himself, driving away his sons as they grow up – Freud answers with a story: “One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured the father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde” (13:141). To the words “one day,” though, Freud appends a note: “To avoid possible misunderstanding, I must ask the reader to take into account the final sentences of the following footnote as a corrective to this description” (13:141n1). These sentences, in turn, attribute a “lack of precision” and “abbreviation of the time factor” in the

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body of the text to “reserve necessitated by the nature of the topic.” The note concludes that “it would be as foolish to aim at exactitude in such questions as it would be unfair to insist on certainty” (13:142n.1). In its halting gait, its recourse to unspecified grounds for “reserve,” and its equivocation about the eventuality of the event it describes – about whether or not it happened and whether or not it was repeated – this passage resembles nothing so much as the end of a vampire story. It is no weakness in psychoanalysis that its theory of human culture centers on a traumatic kernel, whose unnarratability the theory is doomed to enact as well as to describe. Quite the contrary. My intent in this chapter has only been to notice how consistently this traumatic kernel is associated with the concept of species and with species difference. Freud has no account of why for little Hans and the Wolf Man the traumatic encounter with the parents’ sex should be symbolized by an entire species of animal, nor of why a species of animal is the form of the primal father’s return. Other than the breezy assertion that the brothers of the primal horde were “cannibal savages” (13:142) Freud offers no explanation of why the concepts of kinship and species should be so insistently linked to eating in his account of totemism, as in totem discourse more generally dating back to Robertson Smith. If, as I’ve argued here, totem discourse is a way of thinking about species, its preoccupation with diet should be related to the evidence we have seen from writers for children like Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll, that in the bourgeois societies of the nineteenth century – as, perhaps, in our own – there was a close connection between learning to classify animals and learning to recognize foods. For a child, the species chicken, pig, or lobster may first appear as something to eat, just as a child’s first models of sexual behaviour are likely to be animals. The point here is not the banal one that for the Victorians all forms of appetite were beastly, but rather that if in the nineteenth century, as Foucault proposed, human beings for the first time discovered themselves to be a biological species, this discovery required an identification with their animal counterparts. Besides the central role that non-human animals can play in children’s sexual histories, as evidenced in the cases of little Hans and the Wolf Man, Freud’s myth of the primal father and indeed the whole of totem discourse suggest that identification with something like meat, or something undead, forms an unacknowledged basis of human species-being.

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Notes

Preface and Acknowledgements 1. The Animal that therefore I Am, trans. David Willis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 7. 2. The term is that of Charles James Hett, in his Dictionary of Bird Notes (Brigg: Jackson, 1898). 3. For a vivid account of Charles Darwin’s experience of the species concept in crisis among naturalists in the 1830’s, see Julia Voss, Darwin’s Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, trans. Lori Lantz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 67–70. 4. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 239.

Introduction: Method and Field 1. Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 6–11. 2. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Willis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 7. 3. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 245. 4. Foucault, Society, 243. 5. On Malthus, political economy, and biopolitics in nineteenth-century fiction, see Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 6. Foucault, Society, 255. 7. See Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), whose central topic is “Why does biopolitics continually threaten to be reversed into thanatopolitics?” (39). 180

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8. Foucault, Society, 254–5. 9. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 38. See pages 56–63 for Weheliye’s extended critique of the Eurocentric account of race in Foucault’s 1975–6 lectures; as he notes, the topics of racism and colonialism are largely absent elsewhere from Foucault’s extensive work on taxonomy, knowledge systems, and power. 10. For a defense of Foucault’s work on race in contrast to the prevailing tendency in postcolonial studies of “suturing . . . race to the hierarchical colonizer– colonized relation,” see Rey Chow, “Foucault, Race, and Racism,” in After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lisa Downing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 107–21. 11. Reprinted in Achille Mbembe, Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 161–92. 12. Besides Jackson, cited in note 13, see Claire Jean Kim’s argument that we need “to engage with two taxonomies of power, race and species, at once – and to understand their connectedness.” Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 15. On the relation of postcolonial studies and animal studies, see Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya, eds., Postcolonial Animalities (New York: Routledge, 2019), where Sinha and Baishya’s introduction (pages 1–25) gives a valuable literature survey and critiques the “monohumanism” even of avowed posthumanists such as Cary Wolfe. 13. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 12. 14. Jackson, Becoming Human, 15. 15. The peculiarity of Foucault’s lack of interest in other species in his discussion of biopolitics is heightened by the fact that his history of “governmentality” argues that it is a development of the Christian pastorate, whose basis in the practice of sheepherding he discusses at length. He sums up the paradox of his lectures in 1977–8: “Of all civilizations, the Christian West has undoubtedly been, at the same time, the most creative, the most conquering, the most arrogant, and doubtless the most bloody . . . But, at the same time, . . . over millennia Western man has learned to see himself as a sheep in a flock, something that assuredly no Greek would have been prepared to accept.” Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 130. 16. On Robert Bakewell’s breeding practices and the commodification of animal pedigrees to which they gave rise, see Harriet Ritvo, “Possessing Mother Nature: Genetic Capital in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Noble Cows

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17. 18.

19.

20.

Notes to pages 5–9 and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 156–76. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm, 2003), 36. Matthew Holmes’s blog Thinking Like a Mountain has a page on the Scottish history of the capercaillie; it gives the circumstances under which the last two recorded birds from the native population were shot in 1785 in Deeside (https://bit.ly/3Pmvb7d). Their extinction was the result of hunting and loss of forest habitat. The forced depopulation of the Highlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, led to rewilding, and owners of the newly cleared estates hoped to increase their rental value by promoting game-bird hunting. Hence the reintroduction of the capercaillie, which finally succeeded in 1837. The species was hunted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but renewed habitat loss has again put it at risk of extinction in Scotland. I am indebted to Julia Saville for pointing me towards the wood-grouse’s history. Other writers, working with different archives, have come to the opposite conclusion. Thomas C. Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 302–20, gives a survey of criticism arguing that literature effects “a positive change in eco-awareness” in works where “other species really speak back.” More recently, Mario OrtizRobles argues that we can “make animals count” if we “perceive literature anew”; see his Literature and Animal Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 145. David Rothenberg ’s Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006) makes a sustained argument that by playing music with birds, we can feel what it is like to be one. For divergent views of the relation between the conceptualization of aesthetic and organic form in Romantic-era philosophy, science, and poetry, see Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) and Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Chapter 1 Species Lyric 1. Sarah Waring, The Minstrelsy of the Woods; or, Sketches and Songs Connected with the Natural History of Some of the Most Interesting British and Foreign Birds (London: Harvey & Darton, Gracechurch Street, 1832). Though this work was published anonymously, the title page identifies it as “by the author of The Wild Garland &c.” This refers to The Wild Garland, or, Prose and

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2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

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Poetry Connected with English Wild Flowers and Forest Trees (London: Harvey & Darton, Gracechurch Street, 1827). A second edition of The Wild Garland appeared in 1837, with the author’s name given as S. Waring, and with a reference to her authorship of Minstrelsy. Unlike The Wild Garland, Minstrelsy did not have more than one edition. Nor am I aware of any reviews. Nonetheless, it does seem to have been plagiarized: four years after Waring’s book, there appeared Nevill Wood’s British Song Birds: Being Popular Descriptions and Anecdotes of the Choristers of the Grove (London: John Parker, 1836); as its title suggests, this work is something of a compendium and includes many extracts, usually with attributions. Many of Wood’s chapter epigraphs, however, are drawn without attribution from Waring’s poems in Minstrelsy. Waring Minstrelsy, 27. Minstrelsy treats both native birds and birds foreign to Britain, like the whippoorwill. The wood-grouse, (otherwise known as the capercaillie or capercailzie) is an intermediate case, and of interest as a nineteenth-century example of a managed wild animal population. Waring’s chapter on the wood-grouse begins by stating that it was “once abundant in the Highlands of Scotland,” but has now become rare (181). In fact, it had been extinct in Scotland since the eighteenth century, as other writers of the period knew – Charlotte Smith among them, who notes the extinction in her 1807 Natural History of Birds, Intended Chiefly for Young Persons, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: John Arliss, 1819), 2:18. The wood-grouse remained numerous in northern Europe, and attempts to reintroduce it from Sweden began in late 1828 or early 1829 and continued into the 1830s – for a contemporary account of these, see William Jardine, The Natural History of Game Birds (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars, Stirling, and Kenney, 1834), 109–14. On the authority of a writer on field sports, Jardine gives “Peller, peller, peller” as a transcript of the male wood-grouse’s call (115) and “Gock-gock, gock” for the female. Approximately the same renditions appear in Charles Louis Hett, A Dictionary of Bird Notes (Brigg, Lincolnshire: Jackson, 1898), 67. Waring, Minstrelsy, 184. See Rudyard Kipling, “Road-Song of the Bandar-Log,” 1–8, 17–25, in The Jungle Book (London: Macmillan, 1965), 84. Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Vintage, 1994), 23. Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1898), 1:305. James Knowles reported that the poet made a similar remark to him about the speaker of In Memoriam in a conversation during the 1870s.

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Notes to pages 13–16

8. In an important reading of In Memoriam, Devin R. Garofalo discusses the “speciating” power of lyric subjectivity, though she differs from me in concentrating on earlier moments in the poem, where lyric subjectivity is posited in “collective and even distinctly nonhuman terms.” See Devin R. Garofalo, “Victorian Lyric in the Anthropocene,” Victorian Literature and Culture 47, no. 4 (2019): 753–83, at 755. 9. Robert Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 459. 10. Lord Mansfield of course said, “I thought so then, and I think so still,” in objecting to MPs’ use of parliamentary privilege to avoid criminal prosecution. See Sara Lodge, Inventing Edward Lear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 290. 11. The question whether there can be natural selection of groups is currently a topic of intense controversy. In Darwin’s own work, with rare exceptions, he theorizes selection as affecting individual living organisms, favouring those that possess a variant trait giving them a reproductive advantage. After the twentieth-century rediscovery of genetics, which was linked with Darwin’s work in the 1920s to produce what Julian Huxley termed the modern synthesis, natural selection could be understood as operating on advantageous genetically transmitted traits propagated within a kin group, which led to the study of kin selection, in which individual members of a group, without reproducing themselves, could act altruistically in ways favouring the group as a whole, which is thus said to undergo selection. More recent versions of natural selection have viewed selection as operating on the gene itself, disaggregating the kin group and indeed the individual organism into mere bearers of pieces of genetic code. The question whether natural selection can be understood as operating on collectives – biological populations or social groups – independently of its effects on the individuals they comprise is currently the subject of intense research and debate. For an overview of the controversy over group selection, see Jean Gayon, “From Darwin to Today in Evolutionary Biology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 277–301, at 292–3. A crux in the debate took place after this overview, when in 2010, Martin Nowak, C. E. Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson published a paper in Nature advocating a multilevel theory of selection that included groups, which prompted a negative response signed by 137 other evolutionary biologists. The canonical statement of the case for the gene as the primary object of selection is Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 142. 13. Foucault, Society, 255.

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14. I cite the text of “Itylus” as it appears in Algernon Swinburne, Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 45–7. 15. Margot K. Louis, “Family Secrets, Family Silences: The Language of the Heart in Swinburne’s ‘Itylus.’” Victorian Poetry, 37, no. 4 (Winter, 1999): 453– 64, at 460. 16. Charlotte Smith’s treatment of the swallow thus closes with a poem “To the Swallow,” in which the poet wishes she could “learn, fleet bird, from thee, / All our vain systems only guess, / And know from what wide wilderness / You come across the sea” (Natural History of Birds, 2:102). 17. Peter Bircham, A History of Ornithology (London: Harper Collins, 2007), 134. 18. I am grateful to Julia Saville for drawing this and other Hardy bird poems to my attention in her paper “Genre and Experiment in Thomas Hardy’s Ecopoetics.” Conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association, Columbus, OH, Friday, October 18, 2019.

Chapter 2 “How Can You Talk with a Person if They Always Say the Same Thing?” Species Poetics, Onomatopoeia, and Birdsong 1. An example from a field guide to hand represents the yellow-billed cuckoo’s song as follows: “Kakakakaka-kow-kow-kow-kow-kowp-kowp-kowp, guttural call; starting fast, slowing at end.” See Jack Griggs, American Bird Conservancy’s Field Guide to All the Birds of North America (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 104. 2. The paradigm for this literature is a nursery rhyme: Bow, wow, says the dog; Mew, mew, says the cat; Grunt, grunt, goes the hog; And squeak goes the rat. Tu whu, says the owl; Caw, caw, says the crow; Quack, quack, says the duck; And what sparrows say, you know.

The earliest publication of this rhyme I know is in James Burns, Nursery Rhymes, Tales, and Jingles (London, 1844), 66. Dickens refers to it in 1865 in Book 3, Chapter 15 of Our Mutual Friend. 3. Waring, Minstrelsy, ii and v. As noted in Chapter 1, the volume was published anonymously; it is attributed to S. Waring on the title page of another work, The Wild Garland. Internal evidence in Minstrelsy, which is dated from Wyards (a farm near Alton in Hampshire) and addressed to the family of

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

Notes to pages 24–7 a brother living in Glamorganshire, enables us to identify its author. She was Sarah Waring, daughter of Jeremiah Waring, a wool dealer in Alton. She lived until 1871 and is described in the 1841 census as a teacher. Her other publications include A Sketch of the Life of Linnæus, in a Series of Letters Designed for Young Persons (1827) and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and Its Consequences to the Protestant Churches of France and Italy (1833). Her brother Samuel and her niece Anna Letitia Waring both published volumes of hymns; the latter’s Hymns and Meditations (1850) was republished sixteen times before her death in 1910. Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (London: Penguin, 1977), 136. White, Natural History of Selborne, 216. White, Natural History of Selborne, 217. White, Natural History of Selborne, 134–5. For a representative example, see Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne: With Notes by Capt. Thomas Brown (Edinburgh: James Chambers, 1833). On page 62, the notes identify the bird White has discussed – the sedge bird – and give its call as beginning “chit, chit, chiddy, chiddy, chiddy, chit, chit, chit.” Waring, Minstrelsy, 174–5. Waring, Minstrelsy, 219. Waring, Minstrelsy, 172. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Owl” (https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/ 3033140581) and “Cuckoo” (https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4321521575). Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “‘Whip-poor’-will” (https://doi.org/1 0.1093/OED/4010392451). Charles Waterton, Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles, in the Years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824 (London: J. Mawman, 1825), 140–1; quoted in Waring, Minstrelsy, 99–100. “Whippoorwill” is today the common name of caprimulgus vociferous, whose range is largely confined to the continental mass of the Americas, though it may include Jamaica. The whippoorwill’s literary associations with the Caribbean and with slavery are perpetuated in literature by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” a poem ostensibly set in the United States, but whose flora and fauna come from Jamaica. There are many species of caprimulgus (goatsucker) native to the Caribbean; it may be that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the name “whippoorwill” was used for one or more of these. The name “willy-come-go,” for which Waterton’s book seems to be the first print source, has dropped out of use. Waterton, Wanderings, 17. In 1826, Sydney Smith reviewed Waterton’s book in the Edinburgh Review and made a joke of his transcriptions of bird calls; after quoting him on the

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Notes to pages 27–9

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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whippoorwill and the willy-come-go, he comments, “It is very flattering to us that they should all speak English!” See Sydney Smith, “Review of Charles Waterton’s Wanderings in North America,” in Essays Reprinted from the “Edinburgh Review” (London: George Routledge, 1847), 448–58, at 453. Waring, Minstrelsy, 103. Wood, British Song Birds, 97. Wood, British Song Birds, 55. A somewhat different version of Johann Matthaus Bechstein’s transcription appears in the introduction to an 1853 translation of his Cage and Chamber Birds: Their Natural History, Food, Diseases, Management, and Mode of Capture (London: H. Bohn, 1853), 11. Bechstein’s work became a standard reference in Victorian Britain, appearing in many editions and at least two translations. David Rothenburg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 235. Musical transcriptions of birdsong have a history that runs parallel to that of onomatopoeia. Analogies between birdsong and human music are very ancient; in the early nineteenth century, theorists begin to ask whether each species has its own music. William Gardiner in 1832 gives a musical transcription of the blackbird’s song in his The Music of Nature: or, An Attempt to Prove That What Is Passionate in the Art of Singing, Speaking, and Performing upon Musical Instruments, Is Derived from the Sounds of the Animated World, reprint (Boston, MA: Wilkins and Carter, 1837), 222. He also observes of birdsong in general, however, that not “every one of the same species sings the same song; . . . although there is a general resemblance, many varieties may be noticed” (224). While poetry is most vexed about its relation to birdsong in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century sees this question come to the fore in musicology; on this history, see Rothenburg, Why Birds Sing. For an account of the history of the relation of birdsong and music with attention to the histories of evolutionary science and of the technology of acoustic recording, see Rachel Mundy, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018). Edward Blyth, “On the Fen Reedling (Salicania Arundinacea, Selby), Reed Wren, or Reed Warbler,” The Naturalist 1 (1837): 33–7, at 33. See William MacGillivray, A History of British Birds, Indigenous and Migratory, vol. 1 (London: Scott, Webster, and Geary, 1837), 332–3. In Canada, the sparrow is said to sing “Oh sweet Canada, Canada.” John Burroughs, Fresh Fields, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 147. Burroughs, Fresh Fields, 18. Hett, A Dictionary of Bird Notes, 67. Hett, A Dictionary of Bird Notes, 67.

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Notes to pages 29–32

29. Samuel Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Birds: Showing How to Rear and Manage Them in Sickness and in Health (London: S. O. Beeton, n.d.), 77 30. Bechstein, Chamber Birds, 185. 31. Bechstein, Chamber Birds, 289. 32. Bechstein, Chamber Birds, 251. 33. Bechstein, Chamber Birds, 320. 34. Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Birds, 119. 35. Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Birds, 109. 36. Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Birds, 111. 37. Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Birds, 138. 38. Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Birds, 149. 39. Bechstein, Chamber Birds, 7. 40. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. Adrian Desmond and James R. Moore. London: Penguin, 2004. On the current science of birdsong and mimicry, see Rothenburg, Why Birds Sing, 93–115; see also the discussion of the mockingbird’s song at 180–3. 41. Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 6. 6. 31. 42. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Constable and Company, 1906; facsimile ed., Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1970), 192. 43. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 192. 44. White, Natural History of Selborne, 216. 45. I will also later in this chapter discuss onomatopoeias of what the nineteenthcentury classicist Harry Thurston Peck termed a “higher type,” where lines of verse imitate a sound without necessarily directly naming it. “Onomatopoeia of a higher type than mere wordmaking is found in literature, where the poets, especially, often make the sound of their lines harmonize with the sense most effectively. Homer is rich in such verses.” Peck goes on to give examples where the Iliad imitates the falling of the sea (1. 34) and the galloping of horses (10. 535). This effect is, he claims, surpassed by Virgil in the Aeneid (8. 596); Virgil also imitates the sound of Cyclopes at the forge in Georgics 4, 174. See Harry Thurston Peck, “Onomatopoeia,” in Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1898), accessed via Perseus Collection: Greek and Roman Materials (https://bit.ly/3Zza0U9). Effects of this kind became fashionable in English poetry in the eighteenth century, perhaps as a result of Alexander Pope’s dictum in the Essay on Criticism that in poetry, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense” (2. 365). The Essay itself goes on to give examples: “But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, / The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar” (2. 368–9). Poets later in the century used the technique to mimic animal

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Notes to pages 32–6

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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sounds, as in Collins’s “Ode to Evening,” where “The beetle winds / His small but sullen Horn” (11–12) and Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” where “From yonder ivy-mantled tow’r / The mopeing owl does to the moon complain” (9–10). The critique of this technique mounted in Keats’s “To Autumn” will be discussed later in this chapter. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 24. Examples include Anna Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition,” Robert Burns’s “Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, the Author’s Only Pet Yowe,” and the chorus of swine in Percy Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant. All of these are in different ways anomalous. On the contrast between animals’ silence and the speech of inanimate nature in Wordsworth, see Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 144–7. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 8. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 8. René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, trans. Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 47–8. René Descartes, Philosophical Letters, trans. Anthony Kenny (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 207. For the swallow, see Pervigilium Veneris, 90. The bees’ labour and the conversation of cranes in flight provide matter for epic similes in both the Iliad and the Aeneid; for the bees, see Iliad 2. 87 and Aeneid 1. 430–6, and for the crane, see Iliad 3. 2–6 and Aeneid 10. 264–9. Virgil treats the natural history of bees at length in Georgics 4. 149–314. See George F. R. S. Ellis, ed., Specimens of the Early English Poets: To Which Is Prefixed an Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the English Poetry and Language . . . 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: G. & W. Nicol; J. Wright, 1801), 1:112. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Paul de Man, “Autobiography As De-facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–81, at 73. For a reading of how “in ‘The Idiot Boy,’ Wordsworth leverages onomatopoeia to complicate the categories of the human and the animal, the normative and the disabled,” see Megan Quinn, “‘His Lips with Joy They Burr’: Onomatopoeia in Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy,’” Studies in Romanticism 60, no. 1 (2021): 27–52. Quinn focuses on Wordsworth’s representation of Johnny’s utterance as a “burr” to show his interest in the materiality of language. On Johnny’s summing up and its transposition of night and day as an exemplary work of the imagination, see

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58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

Notes to pages 36–42 Karen Guendel, “Johnny Foy: Wordsworth’s Imaginative Hero,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56, no. 1 (2014): 66–89, at 81. Wordsworth links the two poems when he describes this period in The Prelude; in the 1805 version, see 13. 398–402. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997). Scott heard “Christabel” recited sometime between 1800 and 1802, when Minstrelsy appeared. John Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 100–1. I quote Clare’s poetry in the text established by Eric Robinson and David Powell in John Clare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Their text, based on Clare’s manuscripts, differs significantly from the published text of 1831. Clare’s poems of the 1820s and 1830s include many closely observed syllabic transcriptions of bird sounds. “The March Nightingale,” where the quotation of a stock version of a bird’s song begins a comedy of errors, is not typical of his poetry in this genre and should be contrasted with the particularity of the nightingale’s song in “The Progress of Ryhme” discussed earlier in this chapter. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:80–1. John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). For discussion of the relation between “To Autumn” and Hunt’s September 9, 1819, “Calendar of Nature,” see William Keach, “Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 182–96; also see Nicholas Roe, “Keats’s Commonwealth,” in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 194–211, at 201–5; and Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 178. White, Natural History of Selborne, 44. Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 248. Vendler, Odes of John Keats, 251. To be exact: in September of 1819. The three previous autumns had been very cold, under the influence of the eruption of Mt. Tambora in April 1815. On this eruption and the historicity of climate in poetry, see Jonathan Bate, “Living with the Weather,” Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 3 (1996): 227–50. Among many English poetic representations of robins in winter, Keats would have remembered Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” 67–9. White mentions the robin’s over-wintering in Natural History of Selborne (117), while the migration of the swallow is in this work something of an obsession, as

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White disbelieved in it and for years sought evidence that at least some swallows buried themselves in sandbanks rather than leave England. 70. Helen Vendler finds Keats in this line yielding to pathos; to represent sheep as “full-grown lambs,” she writes, is “the equivalent of calling human beings in some context ‘full-grown infants’” (Odes of John Keats, 254). Terry Eagleton, in “The Politics of the Image,” Critical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2012): 26–34 at 26, wonders whether the phase is an oxymoron: “It seems to be, since lambs are by definition not fully grown. Full-grown lambs are sheep.” 71. I am indebted to Sasha Torres for explaining the seasonal routine of sheepherding in wool and dairy flocks. 72. On full-grown lamb as an object of consumption: “We supped plentifully upon milk, yucca-root, honey, and a full-grown lamb, roasted entire.” (John Parish Robertson and William Parish Robertson, Letters on Paraguay, 2 vols. [London: John Murray, 1838], 1:265). A later reference to a different mode of consumption further establishes the particularity of “full-grown lamb”: “The material used in the manufacture of gloves is almost exclusively lambskin, the skins coming in three different sizes only – first, second, and third grades. The skin of the young lamb slaughtered when but a few weeks old is called first grade; the skin of the more mature lamb, which, however, is not full grown, is called second grade; and the skin of the full grown lamb is called third grade.” (“Extracts from Diplomatic and Consular Reports: Glove Leather Industry in Austria.” Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry 12 [1893]: 386–7, at 386). The distinction between full-grown and spring lamb also signifies in Christian typology. An article from 1867 takes up a dispute having at its heart the question whether Christ is to be identified with the spring lamb sacrificed at Passover (the Paschal lamb – from pesach, passover), or with the ram [krios] given by God to redeem Isaac on Mt. Moriah in Genesis 22. From a discussion of the view of Melito, a second-century bishop of Sardis: In the fourth fragment, he explains why the lxx. [Septuagint] in the passage of Genesis which he quotes, reads κριός [krios] instead of αμνός [amnos]. It was in order to denote not a young offering like Isaac, but the full-grown, the perfect Lord. . . . Nothing can well be more certain than the conclusion to which such language leads, that Melito beheld in Jesus “the Lamb of God,” for it is not simply Christ’s offering that he beholds typified on Mount Moriah, but it is that offering as the offering of a lamb, and he sets himself to explain why the Greek translator of the Hebrew should have used the word κριός instead of αμνός; it is not that that translator would convey a different idea, but that he would bring out more perfectly the true idea of Jesus as the full-grown lamb. (William Milligan, “The Easter Controversies of the Second Century, in Their Relation to the Gospel of St. John,” Contemporary Review 6 [1867], 102–18, at 110)

Keats could not have encountered the idea of Jesus as full-grown lamb here; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biblical lexicons, however, regularly use the

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73.

74.

75. 76.

77.

78.

Notes to pages 43–5 distinction between spring and full-grown lamb to illustrate what they termed the Greek amplificative; see, for instance, John Parkhurst, A Greek and English Lexicon to the New Testament in which the Words and Phrases Occurring in Those Sacred Books Are Clearly Explained, 7th ed. (London: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1817), 14. On this question in Heidegger, see Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I am, 154. For a comparative study of grief and mourning in human and nonhuman animals, see Barbara King, How Animals Grieve (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). On the relation between eating and speaking in the Alice books, see Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Charles Stivale and Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 23–7. For Deleuze’s discussion of language and loss more generally, and the fashioning of “speaking . . . out of eating and shitting,” see 186–95. On “sacrificial logic” of the subject and its connection to “carnivorous virility,” see Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Peter Connor, Eduardo Cadava, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 112–16. Keats, Letters of John Keats, 2.225. The Gnat himself is something like an animated word. His smallness is represented on the page by small type, and he disappears at the moment when Alice enters the wood with no names, where she and everyone else forget what they are called. The implication is that the Gnat is a name (Nat?). On animals and names in Genesis, see Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 15–21. Later in the same text, Derrida suggests that naming the animals was a stage in making them “sacrificial flesh” (42). Derrida’s reading of Genesis here responds to that of Walter Benjamin, who writes that “to be named – even when the namer is godlike and blissful – perhaps always remains an intimation of mourning.” See Walter Benjamin, “On Language As Such and the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913–26, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 62–74, at 73. On this topic, see Timothy Morton, Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The Romantic species poetics traced in this chapter might be seen as complementing the species discourse of Romantic poetry discussed by Maureen McLane in Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For McLane, British Romanticism grounds poetry on a conception of the human as a species; here I argue that the animal must be banished or eaten to make this possible.

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Chapter 3 Onomatopoeia, Nonsense, and Naming: Species Poetics after Darwin’s Origin 1. Lacan’s references to this anecdote are to be found in “In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism” and in his seminar for 1958–9. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 593, and Desire and Its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 166. 2. George G. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench and Company, 1888), 283. Ernest Jones refers to the anecdote as “oftquoted” when he discusses it in “The Theory of Symbolism,” in Papers on Psychoanalysis, 5th ed. (Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins, 1948), 107. 3. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (London: Longmans, 1861), 14. 4. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 342. 5. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 352. 6. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 355. 7. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 352. 8. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 340. 9. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, 290. 10. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 119–40. 11. Lacan, Écrits, 77. 12. Lacan, Écrits, 683. 13. Lacan, Desire and Its Interpretation, 163. 14. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Champ Freudien, 2013), 198. On the difficulty of translating the French “bête” and “bêtise,” see David Wills’s note in his translation of Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, 162–3. 15. Lacan, Écrits, 682. 16. Lacan, Seminar VI, 165. Lacan’s understanding of metaphor here may be compared with that of Aristotle in the Poetics, which is based on the chiasmatic substitution of attributes. The wine cup is to Dionysus as the shield is to Achilles; “the cup may, therefore, be called ‘the shield of Dionysus,’ and the shield ‘the cup of Ares.’” Metaphor, Aristotle goes on to say, can be used to supply a term for something that otherwise has no name. See Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, trans. Samuel H. Butcher (Indianapolis, IN: Library of the Liberal Arts, 1948), chapter 21, 1457b1–30. 17. John Powell Ward, Wordsworth’s Language of Man (Sussex: Harvester Press), 106. 18. Lacan, Seminar VI, 165; Séminaire VI, 202.

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Notes to pages 50–60

19. Constance W. Hassett makes this connection in her chapter on Sing-Song in Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005). 20. James Williams, Edward Lear, Writers and Their Work (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 52. 21. On Lear and Darwin, and on Lear’s work as a zoological illustrator, see Lodge, Inventing Edward Lear, 141–53. 22. Matthew Bevis, “Edward Lear’s Lines of Flight,” Journal of the British Academy 1 (2013), 31–69, at 41. 23. Lodge, Inventing Edward Lear, 114, 147. 24. Bevis, “Edward Lear’s Lines of Flight,” 42–5. 25. In the titles of Aesop’s fables, the definite articles refer to classes – defined, however, not by conspecificity, but by conformity to a type. The protagonists of “The Fox and the Grapes” and “The Ant and the Grasshopper” represent moral types; Lear’s poems parody this usage as well as the use of “the” to refer to a species. 26. On sexual relations between different species of birds see Darwin, Descent of Man, 465–7. And for an account of sexual selection as “an attraction to difference, rather than sameness” which necessarily leads to cross-species relations and hybridity, see Nancy Armstrong, “Do Wasps Just Want to Have Fun? Darwin and the Question of Variation,” differences 27, no. 3 (2016): 1–19. 27. Bevis, “Edward Lear’s Lines of Flight,” 41. 28. On the connection between animals and alphabets, see Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 185. 29. Though not necessarily with Darwin himself. See David Stamos, Darwin and the Nature of Species (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 14, for an explanation of why Darwin’s readers were predisposed to see him as a species nominalist. 30. Lear also draws on Great Expectations for the name of a character in “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” where the protagonist’s successful rival shares another of Pip’s names, Handel, as well as his line of business in overseas trade. 31. Sara Lodge discusses the relation between the nonsense choruses in Lear’s late songs and those of traditional folk music, and then adds, “in Lear’s nonsense these choruses frequently explore the debatable land between human and animal language” (Inventing Edward Lear, 50). 32. Williams, Edward Lear, Writers and Their Work, 91–9. 33. See Williams, Edward Lear, Writers and Their Work, 94, where Lear’s Journal is quoted and discussed.

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34. Lear adopts “scroobious” as a favourite adjective in the same way as he “often referred to himself as a ‘damned dirty landscape painter,’ a wounding comment made by two young Englishmen that he overheard in Calabria in 1847, whose power to upset him he overturned by making it a running joke” (Lodge, Inventing Edward Lear, 334). 35. Martin Dubois has a full account of the source words for these two poems, which he reads as artifacts of the colonial “contact zone.” See his “Edward Lear’s India and the Colonial Production of Nonsense,” Victorian Studies 61, no. 1 (2018): 35–59. 36. Williams, Edward Lear, Writers and Their Work, 132. 37. Williams, Edward Lear, Writers and Their Work, 133. Williams notes that the Oxford English Dictionary records uses of “ding dong” going back to 1659; there are no onomatopoeic uses of “dong” by itself until 1890. 38. The equation of nose and phallus is a running joke in Tristram Shandy; in a chapter on the association of the nose and the genitals in nineteenth-century embryology, in racist science, and in the work of Freud’s associate Wilhelm Fliess, Sander Gilman refers to it as a “traditional folkloric association.” See The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 96. The word “dong” did not become slang for “penis” until the twentieth century. Given the phallic jokes in Lear’s poem, it may have influenced the change. Today, the idea of a dong without a ding conveys in a nutshell Lacan’s theory of the phallus. 39. Daniel Karlin, The Figure of the Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67. 40. Anna West discusses these poems in Thomas Hardy and Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 105–6, noting that only “in his poetry does Hardy directly imagine the voices of animals.”

Chapter 4 Darwin’s Unconscious: History, the Work of the Negative, and Natural Selection 1. For Freud’s account of this history, see section 3 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (18:18–23). For analysis of the transference, see also in “The Question of Lay Analysis” (20:226–7). 2. Darwin’s interest in Elspeth may have been related to her anxiety-dispelling revelation that the hero’s birth had not been incestuous. Emma Wedgwood, whom Darwin married in January 1839, was his first cousin; later, Darwin worried about the effect on his children of their parents’ consanguinity. The effects of inbreeding were a central topic in his researches into heredity; for its connection to his own life, see Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging,

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

Notes to pages 72–82 a Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 282. For a discussion of Darwin’s marriage and his views on heredity in the broader context of Victorian marital conventions and ideas about incest, see Adam Kuper, Incest & Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 83–103. Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt (London: Penguin, 1998), 214. Scott, Antiquary, 214. Scott, Antiquary, 228. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text, ed. Morse Peckham (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), 382. For a history of the idea of progress in the Victorian era in which Darwin’s theory is understood as presenting a broadly non-progressive and nonteleological view of evolution, see Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1989). The contrary view of Darwin is maintained by Robert J. Richards, especially in The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). This entry must have been made before the end of September 1838. The entries cited from Notebooks M and N also belong to the second half of 1838. Darwin’s attention to the problem of the eye is an implicit response to its use as a principal exhibit in the argument for design mounted in William Paley ’s Natural Theology (London: R. Faulder, 1802), 19–41. Voss, Darwin’s Pictures, 151–9, contrasts Darwin’s book with luxury illustrated books of the 1850s and 1860s depicting birds as works of art. She argues that these depictions provided implicit support to the idea of a divine creator. When he adopts a hierarchical classification of groups under groups, Darwin distinguishes his theory of classification from that of Lamarck. For the latter, the classification of organic forms was made by human beings and has no basis in nature: “La nature n’a rien fait de semblable; et au lieu de nous abuser en confondant nos oeuvres avec les siennes, nous devons reconnoitre que les classes, les ordres, les familles, les genres, et les nomenclatures a leur égard, sons des moyens de notre invention, dont nous ne saurions nous passer, mais qu’il faut employer avec discretion.” (“Nature has not made anything of the kind, and instead of deceiving ourselves by confusing our work with hers, we should recognize that classes, orders, families, and genera, together with their nomenclatures, are tools of our invention, which we could not manage without, but which must be used with discretion.”) Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Philosophie Zoologique, Ou Exposition Des Considérations Relatives a L’histoire Naturelle Des Animaux (Paris: Dentu, 1809), 20. Lamarck’s classification, moreover, does not use groups under groups, but rather consists of a single series of organic life arranged in order from lower to higher forms.

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12. Darwin’s vague assertion that the figure of a tree has “sometimes” been used to represent the affinities between different forms of life obscures its specific reference to idealist and anti-Lamarckian theories of life’s ascent current in Britain during the 1840s. For an account of these, see Adrian J. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 276–372. To compare with Darwin’s figure, here is a passage from the anatomist and follower of Coleridge J. H. Green’s 1840 Hunterian Oration, Vital Dynamics: We might perhaps venture to symbolize the system of the animal creation as some monarch of the forest, whose roots, firmly planted in the vivifying soil, spread beyond our ken; whose trunk, proudly erected, points its summit to a region of purer light, and whose wide-spreading branches, twigs, sprays, and leaflets, infinitely diversified, manifest the energy of the life within. In the great march of nature nothing is left behind, and every former step contains the promise and prophecy of that which is to follow. (Qtd. Desmond, Politics of Evolution, 369–70)

13. As part of their argument against the Darwinian concept of natural selection, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have argued that Darwin cannot get rid of the language of agency from his account because the idea of selection is incoherent without the idea of a selector – so that the idea of selection itself must be rejected. See What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2011), 95–138. For an account of Darwin that takes his personifications seriously as evidence for an idealist reading of natural selection, see Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, chapter 14. In Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Paul, 1983), 53–4, 67–73, Gillian Beer argues that attributions of agency in Darwin’s argument arise from the necessarily metaphysical language in which it is expressed. 14. Showing his conviction that the relations among different expressions of the archetype are ideal rather than genealogical, Owen suggests that modifications of the type unknown on earth might exist on other planets. See Richard Owen, On the Nature of Limbs: A Discourse, ed. Ron Amundsen (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 83–4. 15. Owen, On the Nature of Limbs, 86. 16. Quoted in Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838–1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 146. 17. For an account of how Darwin’s theory was shaped by developments in morphology and taxonomy during the 1830s and 1840s, see Ospovat, Development of Darwin’s Theory, 115–200. 18. Owen’s review was published anonymously in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860. For a narrative of his relations with Darwin and of the break following the publication of The Origin, see Janet Browne, Charles Darwin:

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Notes to pages 88–91

The Power of Place, Volume Two of a Biography (New York: Knopf, 2002), 97– 9 and 110–12. 19. Marx produced a theory of fetishism to explain his relation to bourgeois political economy. Darwin produced no such historical metatheory. For discussion of the historical problem of Marx’s relation to the labour theory of value as it was formulated in classical political economy, see Matthew Rowlinson, Real Money and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 100–16. 20. The irony is further deepened by Darwin’s own blindness, and that of European settlers, to the history of agriculture in the lands they conquered. For example, see the overview of current knowledge about farming in southern Africa in the last millennium, in Simon Hall’s chapter “Farming Communities of the Second Millennium: Internal Frontiers, Identity, Continuity and Change,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K. Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1:112–67. See especially pages 142–3 on the geographical limits of sorghum and millet cultivation and their southward expansion in the seventeenth century, and 148 on the introduction of maize from the sixteenth century. Of a large literature on crop varieties under cultivation in southern Africa before the arrival of European settlers, see Bianca Steyn and Alexander Antonites, “Plant Use in Southern Africa’s Middle Iron Age: The Archaeobotany of Mutamba,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 54, no. 3 (2019): 350–68. Writing admittedly about areas north of the Cape, Steyn and Antonites document archaeobotanical evidence from the thirteenth century of cultivars not only of the staples sorghum and millet, but also of many species of fruits, beans, and peas. 21. The most striking and frequently discussed feature of this passage is the personification of Nature. But its reference to natural selection’s object as a “being” whom Nature “tends” also poses a problem: what is this “being”? The idea of a beneficent nature that cares for all individual living creatures is one that Darwin in The Origin frequently rejects; the improvement of most species occurs only because many of its members die without producing offspring. It seems possible that Darwin’s “being” is a species, since it is to the “improvement” and “perfection” of species, by a process that requires the destruction of its individual members, that Darwin generally represents natural selection as aiming. In this sense, the “being” in this passage, like the animal speakers of the poems discussed in Chapter 1, is the personification of a species. But to read more rigorously, we should note that Darwin’s understanding of the dependence of life on death operates at every scale: of species, just as much as of individuals, he argues that most become extinct and in the long run leave no descendants.

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When Darwin refers to a “being” for whose benefit natural selection acts, his language is thus fully as figurative as when he personifies Nature. This being favoured by nature returns in The Origin’s penultimate paragraph: “as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection” (360). With reference both to the agency of natural selection and to its object, Darwin’s seeming personifications could more accurately be termed hypotyposes, in that they constitute their objects.

Chapter 5 Foreign Bodies: The Human Species and Its Symptom 1. For a prior discussion of this analogy, see Jacques Derrida, “Geopsychoanalysis: ‘. . . And the Rest of the World,’” trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 64–90, at 68. 2. My argument develops a suggestion of Adam Phillips, who writes in a discussion of the relations between Darwin’s term “habit” and the Freudian symptom that “Freud’s word for habits was symptoms.” See his Darwin’s Worms (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 131. 3. Freud’s narrative extends a comparison of Copernicus and Darwin that had already become commonplace. For its history, see Lucille B. Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 22. 4. Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud, 23. 5. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 3:304. 6. Jones, Sigmund Freud, 3:310. 7. Developments in epigenetics today have made the position less certain. A standard textbook proposes that, in “a strange twist of fate, Lamarck may have the last laugh. Epigenetics, an emerging field of genetics, has shown that Lamarck may have been at least partially correct all along.” Joseph Tucker Springer and Dennis Holley, An Introduction to Zoology: Investigating the Animal World (Boston, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2013), 94. For an account of Romantic-era epigenetic theories, with reference to William Blake and Erasmus Darwin, as well as to Lamarck, see Goldstein, Sweet Science, 35–71. Goldstein traces the historical antinomy between “evolution” (literally, the unrolling of an already existing design) and “epigenesis” (a formative process that takes place during the life of the organism). She concludes by discussing the current revival of epigenetics: “From quarters as diverse as developmental psychology, experimental embryology, immunology, ethology, ecology, ‘evodevo,’ biological philosophy, and feminist science studies, a once-heretical

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8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

Notes to pages 96–9 consensus is gaining ground: patterns of gene expression can indeed be modified by environments . . . and even by learned behaviors. Such modifications are even heritable.” See, for instance, a 1988 article by Robert Wright in the New Republic, cited by Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud, 194, or, more recently, Maud Ellman’s introduction to a 2005 translation of Totem und Tabu in Adam Phillips, ed., On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2005), xv. Jones, Sigmund Freud, 3:310–11. Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud, 53–4, 72–3. For an argument that Darwin was able to maintain his difference from Lamarck only by wilfully misreading the latter, see Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 90–4. Richards’s reading of Darwin as a Lamarckian malgré lui is presented in the service of his larger claim that Darwin viewed natural section as having a progressive and moral tendency. This is no longer the received reading of Darwin’s theory, though it was so in the late nineteenth century. Epigenesis lurks in the intellectual history of natural selection as a foreign body that cannot be fully deactivated, like the evolutionary remainder in the living organism. Darwin’s emphasis on the importance of maladapted and residual structures in understanding evolution was taken up in the late twentieth century by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin in their argument against biologists and cognitive psychologists who make natural selection a totalizing theory, a tendency the former termed “Darwinian fundamentalism.” See Stephen J. Gould, “Darwinian Fundamentalism, Part 1,” New York Review of Books 44, no. 10 (1997): 34–7, “Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism, Part 2,” New York Review of Books 44, no. 11 (1997): 47–52, and, with Richard Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 205, no. 1161 (1979): 581–98. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 75. In the sixth and final edition Darwin published of The Origin of Species, he included a new chapter with responses to the major published criticisms of natural selection. Here, as part of a refutation of St. George Mivart’s view that evolution must take place by the sudden and providentially directed appearance of new species, Darwin defends the gradualism of his own theory. In so doing, he does attribute the gradual appearance of some beneficial structures to habit. See Darwin’s discussion of placement of the eyes in flatfish and the development of monkeys’ prehensile tails in Origin of Species: A Variorum Text, 250–3.

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15. “A small dinner-party was given in honour of an extremely shy man, who, when he rose to return thanks, rehearsed the speech, which he had evidently learnt by heart, in absolute silence, and did not utter a single word; but he acted as if he was speaking with much emphasis. His friends, perceiving how the case stood, loudly applauded the imaginary bursts of eloquence, whenever his gestures indicated a pause, and the man never discovered that he had remained the whole time completely silent” (Darwin, Expression, 321). 16. For an account of the technical innovations made by Darwin and his collaborators in the production of the Expression, see Phillip Prodger, “Photography and The Expression of the Emotions,” in Paul Ekman, ed., The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 399–410. On Darwin’s use of Duchenne’s photographs, see Voss, Darwin’s Pictures, 203–4. 17. On hysterical mimicry in Victorian psychology, see, for instance, John Connolly’s 1833 article on hysteria in The Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, excerpted in Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 184–6. Connolly describes Mrs. Siddons’s representation of emotion on the stage inducing hysterical paroxysms among “the female part of the spectators.” According to Bourne and Shuttleworth, mimicry provides the basis for an entire theory of hysteria in Frederic Carpenter Skey’s 1867 book Hysteria: Six Lectures (193). Mimicry is an important part of Freud’s understanding of hysteria, as in his question to Dora concerning a new symptom: “Whom are you copying now?” (7:38). 18. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson gives a scathing critique of this move in liberal discourse: “Universal humanity, a specific ‘genre of the human,’ is produced by the constitutive abjection of black humanity” (Becoming Human, 23). 19. On the self-reflexivity of Darwin’s writing on human behaviour, especially in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, see George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 217–19. 20. On Darwin’s personification of “nature” and “natural selection,” see Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 68–72, and Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, 99–100. On the political and scientific context of his work, see Adrian J. Desmond and James R. Moore, Darwin (London: Michael Joseph, 1991). On the racial politics of his work, especially the Descent and the Origin, see the same authors’ Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). For a critical response to Desmond and Moore’s work before 1995 and to Beer as overemphasizing the culturally specific origin of the theory of natural selection, see Ted Benton, “Science, Ideology and Culture: Malthus and

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21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

Notes to pages 108–10 The Origin of Species,” in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. David Amigioni and Jeff Wallace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 68–94. Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 139–41. Elizabeth Grosz discusses Darwin’s views on the role of sexual selection in racial differentiation and their political significance. As she writes, “Darwin stands in stark contrast both to the racist and imperialist assumptions his work was manipulated to confirm” (The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004], 85). George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 44–51, 126–7. For a survey of differing positions on this issue, see Malte B. Andersson, Sexual Selection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 96–118. One paradigm for the integration of the theories of natural and sexual selection is Amotz and Avitag Zahavi’s “handicap principle,” which provides the basis for the view of sexual selection in William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 52–62. In this principle, behaviour that lessens an organism’s fitness for survival can be sexually selected because such behaviour functions to signal fitness. The organism expends resources on display to show that it has resources to spare. The concept of fitness at work in this understanding of natural selection has come to be divided against itself, as able to encompass both adaptive and counter-adaptive traits. For much of the century after The Descent of Man was published, the conflict between natural selection and sexual selection was resolved simply by the dismissal of the latter. As Helena Cronin noted, sexual selection remained largely inactive as a field of study after Darwin until the 1970s; see The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 114–265. In the past decade, however, interest in Darwinian sexual selection as a basis for aesthetic theory has sparked renewed interest; see, for instance, Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us (New York: Anchor, 2018), which follows Darwin in arguing for sexual selection’s independence from natural selection, and George Levine, “Victorian Excess and the Darwinian Aesthetic,” Victorian Studies 62, no. 1 (2019): 9–34. For a general argument that this kind of feedback loop can endow “superabundant variations” with the power to “disrupt, subsume, and subordinate the logic of competitive elimination to a quite different account of speciation,” see Armstrong, “Do Wasps Just Want to Have Fun?” 10.

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26. George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 176. 27. Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 141. 28. Ian Duncan also reads Darwin’s theory of sexual selection as an instance of recursivity in his work. See his essay on Darwin as the most important Victorian heir of Friedrich Schiller’s account of the aesthetic as originating in a biological drive that exceeds function, “Natural Histories of Form: Charles Darwin’s Aesthetic Science,” Representations 151 (2020): 51–73. 29. Nancy Armstrong compares sexual selection to Dickensian bureaucracy as a taxonomical agency. See “The Victorian Archive and Its Secret,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 34, no. 5 (Dec. 2012): 1–18, at 12. 30. Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, 98. Levine’s reading of Darwin was the normal one in the nineteenth century, both among opponents like Louis Agassiz and supporters like George Henry Lewes. Agassiz thus complained, “If species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary?” (qtd Stamos, Darwin and the Nature of Species, 12); Lewes cheerfully viewed Darwin as arguing that “Species is a subjective creation having no objective existence”; “Mr. Darwin’s Hypotheses,” Fortnightly Review n.s. 9 (April 1868): 353–73 at 359. A reassessment of Darwin’s view has been ongoing since the late twentieth century; for an overview, see Stamos, Darwin and the Nature of Species, 19–20, who gives Darwin’s response to Agassiz from a letter to Asa Gray: “I am surprised that Agassiz did not succeed in writing something better. How absurd that logical quibble; – ‘if species do not exist how can they vary?’ As if anyone doubted their temporary existence.” 31. For a use of Freud’s “The Uncanny” to understand Darwin’s representation of racial difference in the absence of “an original type or essence,” see Ian Duncan, “Darwin and the Savages,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4, no. 2 (1991): 13–45, at 27. 32. Resting on the shaky foundation of the species concept, Darwin’s critique of racism is always divided against itself. For a reading of his monogenism as complementing rather than contradicting animalized depictions of Blackness and on the connection of “race” and “species” in his work, see Jackson, Becoming Human, 22, 171. 33. For a political reading of what he names “creaturely life” as a way of thinking human species-being, see Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006): “Human beings are not just creatures among other creatures but are in some sense more creaturely than other creatures by virtue of an excess that is produced in the space of the political and that, paradoxically, accounts for their ‘humanity’” (26). This excess that both qualifies and disqualifies the human as a creature is closely related to the Freudian symptom. Although it distinguishes the human,

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Notes to pages 113–21

Santner describes how creaturely life can also emerge in non-human creatures “that have been ‘deterritorialized,’ removed from their natural habitat” (144), and whose behaviour when confined and put on display is marked by excesses, such as a compulsion to repeat, otherwise characteristic of humans. 34. Hence Karl Kraus’s enduring criticism of psychoanalysis as itself the disease it purports to cure. Freud himself came to recognize that analysis necessarily produces transference neuroses as “new editions” of the patient’s original symptoms (7:116).

Chapter 6 “Whose Blood Is It?” Economies of Blood in MidVictorian Poetry and Medicine 1. Gallagher, The Body Economic. 2. Telegony was generally accepted by Victorian breeders of animals and by scientists including Darwin. Harriet Ritvo defines it as “the notion that the first male to impregnate a female left some permanent, heritable trace of himself behind” to be transmitted to all of her subsequent offspring, even those with other fathers (Noble Cows, 129). 3. Darwin’s theory appeared in chapter 27, the final substantive chapter of The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication as a “provisional hypothesis.” For recent discussions, see Ritvo Noble Cows, 130, and Devin Griffiths The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 206–7. 4. Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, 291. 5. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 124. 6. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 147. 7. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 124–5. 8. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 147. 9. The date is deducible from Blundell’s account of the operation in “Some Account of a Case of Obstinate Vomiting, in Which an Attempt Was Made to Prolong Life by the Injection of Blood into the Veins,” MedicoChirurgical Transactions 10 (1819): 296–311, at 304. For more on Blundell’s work on transfusion, see my “On the First Medical Blood Transfusion between Human Subjects, 1818,” in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, 2012 (www.branchcol lective.org/?ps_articles=matthew-rowlinson-on-the-first-medical-blood-tra nsfusion-between-human-subjects-1818). For an overview of writing on transfusion after the seventeenth-century experiments but before Blundell’s work, see Ann Kibbie, Transfusion, Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 4–5.

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10. Noble S. R. Maluf, “History of Blood Transfusion,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 9 (1954): 59–107, at 63–7. 11. The best available account of this history is found in Kim Pelis, “Blood Clots: The Nineteenth-Century Debate over the Substance and Means of Transfusion in Britain, Annals of Science 54 (1997): 331–60. 12. Kibbie, Transfusion, 15. 13. For other discussion of these illustrations, see my “First Medical Blood Transfusion” and Kibbie, Transfusion, 18–20. 14. Maluf, “History of Blood Transfusion,” 73–4; Kibbie, Transfusion, 5. 15. Quoted in Peter H. Niebyl, “The English Bloodletting Revolution, or Modern Medicine before 1850,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51 (1977): 464–83, at 473. 16. James Wardrop, On Blood-Letting (London: J. D. Bailliere, 1835) 71, 119. 17. K. Codell Carter, The Decline of Therapeutic Bloodletting and the Collapse of Traditional Medicine (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2012), 11. 18. Stokes, Clinical Lectures on Fever, qtd. John Harley Warner, “Therapeutic Explanation and the Edinburgh Bloodletting Controversy: Two Perspectives on Medical Meaning in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Medical History 24 (1980): 241–58, at 243. 19. Peter Brain, Galen on Bloodletting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 21–2. 20. Thomas Watson, Lectures on the Principle and Practice of Physic; Delivered at King’s College. 2 vols. (London: John Parker, 1843), 1:253. 21. Perceval B. Lord, Popular Physiology: Being a Familiar Explanation of the Most Interesting Facts Connected with the Structure and Functions of Animals, and Particularly of Man, Adapted for General Readers (London: John W. Parker, 1834), 195–6. 22. Robert Liston, Lectures on the Operation of Surgery (Philadelphia, PA: Lea and Blanchard, 1846), 386. 23. Henry Clutterbuck, On the Proper Administration of Blood-Letting for the Prevention and Cure of Disease (London: S. Highley, 1840), 119; Clutterbuck argues that the benefit of occasional bleedings outweighs the risk of its becoming habitual. Wardrop, On Blood-Letting, 147, denies that bleeding can be habit-forming, but allows that many practitioners believe so. 24. It is sometimes stated that bloodletting was abandoned as a result of Pierre Louis’s statistical analysis of its effects on pneumonia, published at Paris in 1828 and translated into English in the United States in 1836. Louis’s work was little known in Britain, if the absence of citations can be taken as evidence; moreover, as Alfredo Morabia shows, though Louis was an important precursor of statistical epidemiology, his results did not make an unambiguous case against bloodletting. “Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Notes to pages 126–8 and the Evaluation of Bloodletting,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99, no. 3 (March 2006): 158–60. William O. Markham, Bleeding and the Change of Type of Disease, Being the Gulstonian Lectures for 1864 (London: John Churchill, 1866), 49. William Stokes, “The Address in Medicine,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 241 (August 1865): 133–42, at 134. Quoted in Carter, Decline of Therapeutic Bloodletting, 73–4. Stokes, “The Address in Medicine,” 135. Bennett’s 1856 reply to Alison, qtd. in Carter, Decline of Therapeutic Bloodletting, 71. Carter, Decline of Therapeutic Bloodletting, 74. William O. Markham, Remarks on the Inflammation and Bloodletting Controversy,” The Lancet (British edition) 70, no. 1783 (1857): 439–41, at 440. Carter, Decline of Therapeutic Bloodletting, 75. Thomas Laycock, “Contributions to a New Chapter in the Physiology and the Pathology of the Nervous System.” British Medical Journal 1, no. 374 (February 1868): 187–9, at 188. Samuel Dickson, Fallacies of the Faculty: Being the Spirit of the Chrono-thermal System in a Series of Lectures (London: H. Bailliere, 1839), 87, 170–3. Dickson appears as a character in Charles Reade’s novel Hard Cash (1864), under the name of Dr. Sampson. Far more than Dickson’s own writing, Reade’s version of him expresses the new economic view of blood. From Hard Cash, chapter 5, here is Sampson’s outraged response to a servant’s suggestion that the novel’s heroine should be bled To put it economikly, and then you must understand it, been a housekeeper: “Whatever the Disease, its form or Essence, / Expenditure goes on, and income lessens.” To this sick and therefore weak man, enter a Docker [doctor] purblind with cinturies of Cant, Pricident, Blood, and Goose Grease; . . . gashes him with a lancet, spills out the great liquid material of all repair by the gallon, and fells this weak man, wounded now, and pale, and fainting, with Dith stamped on his face, to th’ earth, like a bayoneted soldier or a slaughtered ox.

35. “Review of Maximilian Simon, Medical Deontology,” British and Foreign Medical Review 21 (April 1846): 438–52, at 450. 36. John Langley, “On the Treatment of Unhealthy Inflammations: [Strictures on the Observations of Mr Broke Gallwey],” The Lancet (British edition) 54, no. 1367 (1849): 506–7, at 506. 37. John Langley, “The Surgical Treatment of the Late Sir Robert Peel,” The Lancet (British edition) 56, no. 1402 (1850): 63. 38. In this respect as in others, Galenic medicine recognized only one sex. For the one-sex model of the body in ancient, medieval, and early modern medicine, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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39. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Random House, 1985), 124–6. 40. For this analogy in Dracula, see Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983), 90–8. 41. Dracula eats only one thing; living human beings eat foods of many different kinds, as Jonathan Harker’s diary documents with an ethnographer’s relish. The pioneer of British transfusion, James Blundell, understood blood as nutriment; his first transfusion was of a patient whose cancer prevented him from eating. Later in the century, Lewes, in The Physiology of Common Life (1859), treats blood as a conveyance for nutrition, rather than nutritive in itself. See my “First Medical Blood Transfusion.” 42. For a discussion of this connection in conjunction with John Ferguson McLellan’s theory of primitive matriarchy, see Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 33, no. 1 (1999): 109–10. In the heterosexual economy of Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds, Psomiades argues, the blood relation of mother and daughter is a scandal to the circulation of female bodies between men that drives the novel’s kinship plot. 43. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Michael Cotsell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 129. 44. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 47–8. 45. The radical unreadability of blood in the period under discussion contrasts with the normative view earlier in the century that the outward appearance of the blush is a sure index of internal feeling. This view was given authoritative medical expression in Dr. Thomas Burgess ’s The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing (London: John Churchill, 1839). Burgess held that the blush was evidence of providential design in human physiology, since by it “internal emotions” exhibit themselves on the bodily exterior, thus providing a “check on the conscience” of individuals who might otherwise violate moral law (24–5). Mary Ann O’Farrell in Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), views representations of the blush throughout the century as torn between viewing it as an infallible indicator of a character’s true nature and viewing it as a mechanical response to circumstance. I owe to the later chapters of O’Farrell’s book the idea that late Victorian preoccupation with the communicability of the blush is related to the period’s fascination with the transmissibility of vampirism. 46. Pamela Gilbert, Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 98.

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47. I have made this argument at more length in “The Thing in the Poem: Maud’s Hymen,” differences 12, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 128–65, at 144–5. 48. The geological sense of the term “fault” dates from the late eighteenth century. It was popularized by Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–3), which Tennyson knew well. On geology in “Maud,” see Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics (London: Routledge, 1994), 249, 264. 49. Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 421. 50. Parenthetical citations of “The Defence of Guinevere” refer to the text as it appears in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne Rundle (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005), 438–43. 51. On dilation, deferral, and figures of the feminine in the long history of romance, see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 8–17. 52. Blood and bleeding were also hugely important in Freud’s own hysteria and in his practice in the late 1890s as he developed the theories of the unconscious, of repression, and of the Oedipus complex. Along with much else, these topics are obscured in his published work because they involve Wilhelm Fliess, the Berlin ear, eye, and nose specialist and quack whose friendship with Freud provided him with an indispensable forum for his ideas in the 1890s, but thereafter became an embarrassment. In brief: 1)

2)

Fleiss viewed the nose and genitals as homologous organs and treated neurosis by nasal surgery. In early 1895, he operated on the nose of a patient of Freud’s, Emma Eckstein, who suffered from anxiety and nosebleeds. He botched the operation, leaving gauze in the nasal cavity. Freud attributed Eckstein’s subsequent discomfort to neurosis, until in March the gauze was discovered and she suffered a near-fatal haemorrhage. His self-reproaches form part of the subject of the “specimen-dream” of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the “dream of Irma’s Injection.” For a fuller account, see Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (London: Basic Books, 1992), 119–20, 134–41. Fliess believed in a male menstrual cycle, which could manifest itself in periodic nosebleeds. During 1897 and 1898, we find Freud writing to Fliess about the periodicity of his own nosebleeds and those of his son Martin. See Jeffrey M. Masson, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1897–1904 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Correspondence regarding Emma Eckstein appears on pages 106–23; Freud discusses his own nosebleeds and those of his son Martin on pages 256 and 317. Fliess’s belief was a belated version of the Galenic theory of male bleeding discussed earlier; though Laqueur does not discuss male menstruation with reference to Freud, he does suggest that psychoanalysis preserves aspects of the premodern one-sex theory of the body (Laqueur, Making Sex, 233–43).

53. Parenthetical citations of “Jenny” refer to the text as it appears in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 2003.

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54. As Adela Pinch shows, poetry of this period takes up the implications of this kind of recursive loop of thinking about other people’s thoughts. Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112–32. 55. For a full discussion of Darwin’s work on blushing in the context of precursors like Charles Bell and Thomas Burgess and of subsequent writers including Cesare Lombroso, Harry Campbell, and Havelock Ellis, see Gilbert, Victorian Skin, 70–91. Gilbert discusses late Victorian writers who view compulsive blushing as a pathology; in his 1890 Flushing and Morbid Blushing: Their Pathology and Treatment, Campbell recommends treatment by bleeding with leeches on the cervix, groin, or anus. 56. Foucault, Society, 252. 57. Foucault, Society, 258. 58. The OED (s.v. “Type” 6 c) dates the first use of “type” in this sense to 1934: “He was not her ‘type.’” George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1880), however, has the smooth and fashionable Stephen say of Maggie Tulliver, “She is not my type of woman you know” (book 6, chapter 2). The Mill on the Floss is concerned from the outset with the trouble that comes from “the crossing o’ breeds” (book 1, chapter 2). Its courtship plots are structured by the contrast between a fair heroine and a dark one; Stephen’s remark refers to that contrast. In Walter Scott, to whose use of the fair/dark contrast Eliot is responding, it is a device for contrasting racial types, as in Ivanhoe.

Chapter 7 The Totem and the Vampire: Species-Identity in Anthropology, Literature, and Psychoanalysis 1. Reprinted in John Ferguson McLennan, “The Worship of Animals and Plants,” in Studies in Ancient History, ed. Eleanora McLennan and Arthur Platt, 2nd Series (London: Macmillan, 1896), 491–569, at 493. 2. On the “comparative method” in anthropology, see George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 170. 3. Robert Alun Jones, The Secret of the Totem: Religion and Society from McLennan to Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 20. 4. Jones, Secret of the Totem, 299. 5. Jones, Secret of the Totem, 291–3. 6. Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1963), 1. 7. Levi-Strauss, Totemism, 104. 8. See Amy Woodson-Boulton’s “Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory,” Victorian Review 46, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 211–33, for another view of late Victorian writing

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Notes to pages 152–7 on the totem in relation to the problematics of diet and primitivism; this essay also takes Levi-Strauss’s book as a point of departure. Quoted in Jones, Secret of the Totem, 55. James G. Frazer, Totemism (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1887), 2. Frazer, Totemism, 49. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 142. Previous study of McLennan’s work in the context of literature has focused on its naturalization of Victorian norms regarding gender and sexuality. See Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 60–8; Psomiades, “Heterosexual Exchange”; Supritha Rajan, A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in NineteenthCentury Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 168–71. Levy and Psomiades both discuss blood relations and kinship systems in McLennan’s Primitive Marriage, while Rajan discusses totemism to show an affinity in totem discourse between women and sacred things. In today’s Anishinaabemowin, the term is written as “doodem,” and means “clan.” For the history of its entry into European languages, see Frazer, Totemism, 1–2. McLennan, “The Worship of Animals and Plants,” 505–6. McLennan, “The Worship of Animals and Plants,” 518. Frazer, Totemism, 85. William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, First Series: The Fundamental Institutions (New York: Appleton, 1889), 51. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 5. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 6–7. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 45. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 296. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 304–6. Under the influence of E. B. Tylor, and ultimately of Darwin, Victorian anthropologists worked with a less totalizing theory of historical eras than their Enlightenment precursors. Using the term “survival,” Tylor adapted Darwin’s theory of the value of rudimentary and abortive structures for understanding the history of living organisms into a tool for understanding the history of human societies. “When in the process of time there has come general change in the condition of a people,” Tylor wrote in his 1871 Primitive Culture, “it is usual, notwithstanding, to find much that has manifestly not had its origin in the new state of things, but has simply lasted on into it. On the strength of these survivals, it becomes possible to declare that the civilization of the people they are observed among must have been derived from an earlier state, in which [their] proper home and meaning . . . are to be found” (Primitive Culture, ed. Paul Radin. 2 vols. [New York: Harper and

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Notes to pages 157–8

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

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Row, 1958] 1:71). Robertson Smith’s view of religious observances as holding a historical meaning misrecognized by those who participate in them derives from Tylor; Tylor himself however wrote little on totemism, and ultimately became sceptical of claims about its universality. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 271. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 266. On Robertson Smith’s disagreement with Frazer’s view of sacrifice as a form of exchange, and how his account of sacrifice as based in kinship paved the way for functionalist theories in the twentieth century, see Rajan, A Tale of Two Capitalisms, 49–56. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 295. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 263. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 41. Robertson Smith, Lectures, 271. Totemism as a sense of kinship to a species rather than an individual resembles the affinity animal fanciers and breeders, and owners of companion animals, can have to breeds and species. Such relations become an ordinary part of bourgeois life in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially as concerns dogs. The Kennel Club, founded in 1871, normalized showing dogs by breed and established breed standards and a stud book. On this history, see Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses since 1800 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 48–57. On dog people and love “for a kind of dog, of a breed,” see Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 36. See Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 149–50, and Jessica Straley, Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 136–8. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (London: Macmillan, 1965), 45–83. Mowgli’s education reprises motifs discussed in Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, 20. It is on the basis of his fault, or lack, that man is made a subject who becomes “master of nature and of the animal.” Derrida cites the story of man’s creation in Plato’s Protagoras 320c–322a. There Epimetheus equips every species of animal with a suitable covering, weapons, and means of locomotion, such as fins, hoofs, or wings. But in an oversight, he leaves only man “naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed.” To preserve man, Epimetheus’ brother Prometheus steals for him techne (skill in the arts) together with fire. Man, Derrida writes, thus “claims in a single stroke his property . . . ([which is] not to have anything that is proper to him), and his superiority to what is called animal life.” On Mowgli’s arrival among the animals, he is a “naked cub” (Kipling, Jungle Book, 21). Baloo the bear undertakes his education, teaching him all the “Master Words” (except that of the snakes, for which he goes to Hathi

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35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

Notes to pages 159–64 the elephant, as Baloo cannot pronounce it), to give him the means to seek protection in his weakness. Eventually, it is his command of fire that enables him to defeat his adversary the tiger Shere Khan. Christie Harner reads Mowgli’s education through Deleuze as an instance of becoming animal ( “The ‘Animality’ of Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books,” in Victorians and Their Animals: Beasts on a Leash, ed. Brenda Ayres [New York: Routledge, 2018], 188–206, at 194–6). Tess Cosslett writes that “Human and animal are related, but knowing the words is also a kind of trick, by which Mowgli compels the animals to do his will” (Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 134). Jessica Straley writes of Mowgli as “an encyclopedia of the animal kingdom, [who] can be every animal at once” (Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature, 125). For discussion of this conception of the human in Romantic-era writing by Rousseau and Herder, see Ian Duncan, Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 44–5. See also Agamben on the “anthropological machine . . .an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to homo” (The Open, 29). Mario Ortiz-Robles, “Liminanimal: The Monster in Late Victorian Gothic Fiction,” European Journal of Victorian Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 10–23. The animality of the monster is nonetheless not a wholly new motif in late Victorian Gothic. As Maureen McLane notes, Frankenstein finds materials in the slaughterhouse as well as the dissecting room, implying that his creature is a chimera whose parts come from animals of more than one species (Romanticism and the Human Sciences, 87). And Bertha Mason, the monster of Jane Eyre (1847), is also animalized, not least by being deprived of speech. Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations 8 (1984), 107–33. Talia Schaffer, “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula,” English Literary History 61, no. 2 (1994): 381–425, at 412. As J. Halberstam and Jules Zanger have shown, aspects of Dracula’s character and appearance echo anti-Semitic stereotypes. See Jules Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews,” English Literature in Transition 34, no. 1 (1991): 33–44, on Dracula and the blood libel, and J. Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (1993): 332–52, for a Foucauldian reading closer to my own. In my view, however, Dracula does not stand only for Jews, but rather for the more general concept of an invading population. Franco Moretti writes, “Dracula is at once the final product of the bourgeois century and its negation” (Signs Taken for Wonders, 93). Dracula is literally the whitest man in the novel. On the late Victorian figure of the typewriter girl, see Christopher Keep, “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl,” Victorian Studies 40, no. 3 (1997):

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Notes to pages 165–70

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

213

401–26. On Dracula, typewriting, and consumer capitalism, see Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” English Literary History 59, no. 2 (1992): 467–93. Schaffer, “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me,’” 419, reads the boy as conceived by the mingling of fluids throughout the novel that culminates in Dracula and Quincy’s simultaneous deaths. Jules Law discusses the bedroom scene in Dracula as part of his argument that the figure of vampirism haunts breastfeeding in the Victorian period; see The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 164. Emily Steinlight, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 221. Catherine Gallagher argues that modernism (including Freud) “assimilated from comparative anthropology . . . the Malthusian obsession with fertility metamorphosed into a theory of the symbolic” (The Body Economic, 172). In this second model, the distinction between conscious, unconscious, and preconscious ideas is supplemented by the differentiation of the psychic agencies of the ego, id, and superego. Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 254, identifies two passages in Freud’s early writing where he refers to “the problem of Malthusianism” as a term for attempts to limit family size. Freud’s use of evidence about the organization of so-called primitive societies in Australia, the South Pacific, and North America to explain clinical evidence in case histories of children and neurotics is made possible by the belief generally held among late nineteenth-century scientists that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This idea was introduced in biology by Ernst Haekel, who proposed that the foetal development of individual organisms recapitulates the evolutionary history of the species to which they belong. Darwin did not accept Haekel’s theory as a necessary law of development, but it nonetheless became an axiom in late nineteenth-century biology, and subsequently for the emerging sciences of anthropology and sociology that made biological evolution a paradigm for the historical study of human societies. For the idea’s history, see Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). Recapitulation theory was omnipresent in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, and it is the basis of Freud’s argument in Totem and Taboo, which he presents as “a comparison between the psychology of primitive people, as it is taught by social anthropology, and the psychology of neurotics” (13:1) – which in Freud’s view, was invariably formed by fixation of the libido on an object-choice from childhood. In a discussion of Darwin and Freud as theorists of desire, Robert Azzarello writes of Totem and Taboo as “an analysis of species differentiation” and “a

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51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

Notes to pages 173–8 meditation on species interaction” in which “the totem animal for Freud reveals a human desire for other species” ( “Desiring Species with Darwin and Freud,” in Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, ed. Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 177–93, at 189. For Lacan, the animal can leave a false trace, but cannot lie by feigning to leave a false trace. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 54. For a reading of Dracula through Freud’s Totem and Taboo, in which the vampire is an avatar of Freud’s primal father, see Laurence Rickels, The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 32, 40–5. See, for instance, Freud’s remark at the end of the Schreber case history on the “striking conformity” between Schreber’s paranoid delusions and his own libido theory (12:78–9). For discussion of these images, see Whitney Davis, “Sigmund Freud’s Drawing of the Dream of the Wolves,” Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 2 (1992): 70–87. Davis connects their representations of trees to the branching schema of phylogeny in Darwin’s Origin and subsequent works by Ernst Haekel and George Romanes. The parents, Freud writes, were “half undressed”; in a note he adds, “in white underclothes: the white wolves” (17:37). On the ambiguous nudity of animals, who are both nude and incapable of nudity, see Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 4–5. The parents in Freud’s construction of the primal scene who are neither covered nor undressed share this ambiguity with the wolves that stand in for them. The moments in Freud’s work when he has recourse to foreign languages to discuss matters he expects his readers will find shocking comprise a bestiary in themselves. In the case history of Dora, for instance, Freud explains that he calls sexual acts and parts of the body by their common names – and shifts into French: “J’appelle un chat un chat” (7:48). Though the cat in this commonplace is itself presumably a euphemism, the animal here as so often in Freud blinks into view both as that which cannot properly be named and as that which can be named only as a stand-in for something else. Freud quotes Darwin’s discussion in chapter 20 of The Descent of Man, 659. “Horde” is Freud’s own term – Darwin refers only to “small communities.”

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Index

Adler, Alfred, 166 Aesop Fables “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” 194n25 “The Fox and the Grapes,” 194n25 Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 4 The Open, 32, 212n35 Agassiz, Louis, 203n30 Alexis Psomiades, Kathy “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology,” 207n42 Alison, W. P., 126 Anderson, M. B. Sexual Selection, 202n24 Antonites, Alexander “Plant Use in Southern Africa’s Middle Iron Age: The Archaebotany of Mutamba,” 198n20 Appignanesi, Lisa Freud’s Women, 208n52 Aristotle, 18 Poetics, 193n16 Armstong, Isobel Victorian Poetry, 208n48 Armstrong, Nancy “Do Wasps Just Want to Have Fun? Darwin and the Question of Variation,” 194n26, 202n25 Arnold, Matthew “Dover Beach,” 61 automatism, 10, 25, 33–4, 43, 44, 49, 50, 64–6, 72, 75, 93, 100, 117. See also drive, symptom and emotional expression, 101 Ayres, Brenda Victorians and Their Animals: Beasts on a Leash, 212n34 Azzarello, Robert “Desiring Species with Darwin and Freud,” 213n50

Baden-Powell, Robert, 158 Baishya, Amit R. Postcolonial Animalities, 181n12 Bakewell, Robert, xii, 5, 181n16 Barbauld, Anna “The Mouse’s Petition,” 189n47 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 16 “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” 186n14 Bate, Jonathan “Living with the Weather,” 190n68 Bechstein, J. M., 28, 29–30 Beer, Gillian, 98, 197n13 Darwin’s Plots, 201n20 bees, 15, 33, 39, 44, 77, 189n52 Beetle, The, 159 Beeton, Samuel, 29–30 Bell, Sir Charles, 144, 209n55 Benjamin, Walter “On Language As Such and the Language of Man,” 192n76 Bennett, J. H., 127 Benton, Ted “Science, Ideology and Culture Malthus and The Origin of Species,” 201n20 Bevis, Matthew, 52–3, 57 Bewell, Alan Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 190n64 Bewick, Thomas, 24 History of British Birds, 9 Bible, The Genesis 22, 191n72 Genesis 4:10, 19, 132 Leviticus 19:15–33, 165 biopolitics, 20, 22, 57, 62, 66, 93, 118, 121, 147–9, 153, 158, 180n5, 181n15 and thanatopolitics, 1–5, 164, 168, 169 in Dracula, 161–2 birds, song training of, 29–30 birds, species of argus pheasant, 109

228

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009409940.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index black-cap, 37 blackbird, 187n21 bullfinch, 30 canary, 29, 30, 55 chaffinch, 29, 30 chicken, 172, 179 cock, 34, 36, 50, 170 crane, 14, 25, 33, 44, 189n52 crow, 29, 185n2 cuckoo, 25, 26, 34, 36, 185n1 duck, 46, 48, 65, 185n2 eagle, 37 goldfinch, 30 goose, 50 honey-bird, 26 hoopoe, 19 nightingale, 16–20, 28, 29, 38 owl, 25, 26, 34–6, 185n2 parrot, 51 peacock, 109 pelican, 14 pigeon, 48 raven, 29, 52 robin, 20–2, 42, 190n69 sedge-reedling, 28 skylark, 29 sparrow, 185n2 stork, 172 swallow, 17–20, 25, 33, 39, 42, 44, 185n16, 189n52, 190n69 thrush, 28, 29, 31 whippoorwill, 26–7, 183n3, 186n14 white-throated sparrow, 28, 187n24 wood grouse (capercaillie), 5, 29, 182n18, 183n3 yellowhammer, 11, 28 Blake, William, 199n7 blood, 19–20, 117–33, 136, 138–40, 142–3, 147, 207n41 as figure of kinship, 117, 154, 155–9 as figure of money, 130 bloodletting, 118, 124–8, 133, 205n23 in the history of psychoanalysis, 208n52 transfusion of, 117, 121–4, 129 Blundell, Dr James, 121–4 Blundell, James, 207n41 “On the First Medical Blood Transfusion between Human Subjects, 1818,” 204n9 blushing, 95, 101, 104–6, 130, 134–6, 139, 141, 207n45, 209n55 as human species trait, 117, 143–7 Boas, Franz “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology,” 150 Bowler, Peter J. The Invention of Progress, 196n7

229

Breuer, Josef “Preliminary Communication,” 94 British and Foreign Medical Review (journal), 127 British Medical Association, 125 Brown, Thomas (captain), 186n8 Browne, Janet, 119 Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Volume Two of a Biography, 197n18 Charles Darwin: Voyaging, a Biography, 195n2 Browning, Robert, 136, 141 Buffon, Comte de, xi Burgess, Dr Thomas, 106, 117, 144, 209n55 The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, 207n45 Burns, James Nursery Rhymes, Tales, and Jingles, 185n2 Burns, Robert “Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, the Author’s Only Pet Yowe,” 189n47 Burroughs, John Fresh Fields, 28 Byron, Lord (or George Gordon Byron), 127 Campbell, Harry Flushing and Morbid Blushing, 209n55 Carroll, Lewis, 34, 46, 49, 179 Alice books, 44–5, 158, 192n74 Alice in Wonderland, 52 Through the Looking Glass, 32–3, 44 Carter, K. Codell, 125, 127 Chow, Rey “Foucault, Race, and Racism,” 181n10 Clare, John, 36, 44 “The March Nightingale,” 190n61 “The Progress of Ryhme,” 28, 190n61 Clarke, Edward, 128 Clutterbuck, Henry On the Proper Administration of Blood-Letting for the Prevention and Cure of Disease, 205n23 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 16, 36, 37, 45, 49, 197n12 “Christabel,” 36, 190n60 “Frost at Midnight,” 190n69 Collins, William “Ode to Evening,” 37, 189n45 Persian Eclogues, 61 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 47 Connolly, John The Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, 201n17 Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans, 154 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 95 Cosslett, Tess Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 211n32, 212n34

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Craft, Christopher, 160 Crichton-Browne, James, 147 Cronin, Helena The Ant and the Peacock, 202n24 Crump, Rebecca, 143 Cuvier, Georges, 24, 74, 88, 152 The Animal Kingdom, 9 Darwin, Charles, 1, 4, 5, 10, 15–16, 20, 23, 46–9, 51–3, 62, 69–93, 94–113, 117, 127, 140–1, 146, 148, 159, 178, 184n11, 204n3, 214n57 dialectic of vision in his work, 70, 78–80, 84, 196n9 natural selection, theory of, 15, 69, 73, 79, 84, 85, 91–3, 111, 112, 184n11, 197n13, 198n21 pangenesis, theory of, 119, 204n3 relation to Lamarck, 99, 119, 196n11, 200n11 sexual selection, theory of, 15, 100, 108–12, 166, 194n26, 202n22 unconscious ideas in, 69–73, 85, 86–9 unconscious selection in, 89–92, 111–12 visual images in his work, 80–4, 102 works of The Descent of Man, 31, 47, 53, 74–5, 95, 96, 99–100, 108–10, 111–13, 166, 170–1, 194n26, 201n20, 202n24, 214n57 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 74, 96–7, 100–1, 105–8, 110, 113, 135, 139, 143–6, 201n16, 201n19 Notebooks, 71, 75–7, 196n8 On the Origin of Species, 6, 15, 47, 53, 59, 69–70, 73–4, 76, 77–93, 96, 98–9, 107, 108–9, 111–13, 117, 152, 166, 198n21, 201n20 The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication, 119, 204n3 Voyage of the Beagle, 51 Darwin, Erasmus, xi, 199n7 Davis, Whitney “Sigmund Freud’s Drawing of the Dream of the Wolves,” 214n54 Dawkins, Richard The Selfish Gene, 184n11 De Man, Paul, 35 Deleuze, Gilles, 212n34 Logic of Sense, 192n74 Denis, Jean-Baptiste, 122 Derrida, Jacques, xi, 32, 47–8 The Animal That Therefore I Am, 1, 47, 173–4, 192n73, 192n76, 211n34, 214n55 “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” 192n74 “Geopsychoanalysis ‘ . . . And the Rest of the World,’” 199n1

Of Grammatology, 173 Derry, Margaret E. Bred for Perfection, 211n31 Descartes, Rene, 24, 33, 41, 43. See also automatism Desmond, Adrian J., 112 Darwin, 201n20 Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 108, 201n20 The Politics of Evolution, 197n12 Dickens, Charles, 127 Great Expectations, 59, 194n30 Our Mutual Friend, 130, 131, 141, 144 Dickson, Samuel Fallacies of the Faculty, 127, 206n34 Dodgson, Charles, 52. See Carroll, Lewis Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 20, 159 drive, in psychoanalysis, 2, 168. See also automatism Dubois, Martin “Edward Lear’s India and the Colonial Production of Nonsense,” 195n35 Duchenne de Boulogne, G. B., 201n16 Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, 102 Duncan, Ian “Natural Histories of Form: Charles Darwin‘s Aesthetic Science, ” 203n28 “Darwin and the Savages,” 203n31 Human Forms, 212n35 Eagleton, Terry, “The Politics of the Image,” 191n70 Eckstein, Emma, 208n52 Edinburgh bloodletting controversy, 126–7 Ekman, Paul, 101 On the Expression of the Emotions, 144 Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss, 209n58 Ellis, George Specimens of the Early English Poets, 34 Ellis, Havelock, 209n55 Ellman, Maud, 200n8 Englishman’s Magazine, 36 epigenetics, 199n7, 200n11 Esposito, Roberto, 3, 4 Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, 180n7 Eyre, Edward (governor), 13 Ferenczi, Sandor, 170 Fink, Bruce, 48 Flesch, William Comeuppance: Costly Signaling Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, 202n24 Fliess, Wilhelm, 195n38, 208n52 Fodor, Jerry What Darwin Got Wrong, 197n13 food and diet, 6, 14, 16, 19, 20, 41–3, 44–5, 149, 179, 191n72, 192n74, 207n41

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009409940.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index as basis of kinship, 155–9 totemism as prescription of, 151 Forrester, John Freud’s Women, 208n52 Fortnightly Review, 150 Foucault, Michel, xii, 1–5, 93, 130, 138, 140, 143, 147–9, 153, 179. See also Biopolitics The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 16, 119–21, 147 Security, Territory, Population, 181n15 Society Must Be Defended, 1–4 Frazer, J. G., 152, 154–5, 170, 211n26 Totemism, 210n14 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 23, 47, 69–71, 94–8, 106, 108, 113, 141, 149, 156, 158, 166, 178–9, 214n53, 214n55, 214n56, 214n57 admiration of Darwin, 95 human–animal relations in his work, 178–9, 214n56 hysteria of, 208n52 supposed Lamarckism of, 95–6 works of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 168–9, 195n1 The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1897–1904, 208n52 “A Difficulty in Psychoanalysis,” 170 Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 94, 98 The Interpretation of Dreams, 168 Introductory Lectures, 98 “Little Hans,” 169, 172 Moses and Monotheism, 96 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 94 “Preliminary Communication,” 94 “The Question of Lay Analysis,” 195n1 “Rat Man,” 169 Studies on Hysteria, 94, 96–7, 146, 168 Totem and Taboo, 150, 170, 172–5, 178, 214n52 “The Uncanny,” 203n31 “Wolf Man,” 169, 175–8 Galen of Pergamon, 125 Gallagher, Catherine The Body Economic, 118, 180n5, 213n46 Galton, Francis, 119 Gannon, Thomas G. Skylark Meets Meadowlark, 182n19 Gardiner, William The Music of Nature, 187n21 Garofalo, Devin R. “Victorian Lyric in the Anthropocene,” 184n8 Gayon, Jean “From Darwin to Today in Evolutionary Biology,” 184n11 Gigante, Denise

231

Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, 182n20 Gilbert, Pamela, 130 Victorian Skin, 209n55 Gilman, Sander The Case of Sigmund Freud, 195n38 Goldenweiser, A. A. “Totemism: An Analytical Study,” 150 Goldstein, Amanda Jo Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life, 199n7 Gordon, Lady Duff Letters from Egypt, 145 Grahame, Kenneth The Wind in the Willows, 158 Gray, Asa, 203n30 Gray, Thomas “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” 37, 189n45 Green, J. H. Vital Dynamics, 197n12 Grey, Sir George, 153 Griffiths, David The Age of Analogy, 204n3 Griggs, Jack American Bird Conservancy’s Field Guide to All the Birds of North America, 185n1 Grosz, Elizabeth The Nick of Time, 202n22 Guendel, Karen “Johnny Foy Wordsworth’s Imaginative Hero,” 189n57 Haekel, Ernst, 213n49 Halberstam, J., 212n39 Hall, Simon “Farming Communities of the Second Millennium,” 198n20 Haraway, Donna, 5 The Companion Species Manifesto, 211n31 Hardy, Thomas, 63–6 The Book of Baby Birds, 11 “The Caged Thrush Freed and Home Again,” 66 “The Puzzled Game Birds,” 66 “The Rambler,” 63 “The Robin,” 63, 66 “The Second Visit,” 65 “The Selfsame Song,” 63 “Sine Prole,” 22, 66 “Winter in Durnover Field,” 20–2, 64, 65, 66 Harner, Christie “The ‘Animality’ of Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books,” 212n34 Hassett, Constance W. Christina Rossetti The Patience of Style, 193n19

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232

Index

Heidegger, Martin, 192n73 Heraclitus of Ephesus, 65 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 212n35 Hett, Charles James A Dictionary of Bird Notes, 29, 183n3 Hippocrates of Kos, 125 Hogg, James Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner, 159 Holmes, Matthew Thinking Like a Mountain (blog), 182n18 Homer Iliad, 188n45, 189n52 Hughes, Langston “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” 12 Hunt, Leigh The Examiner (journal), 39 Huxley, Julian, 96, 184n11 hybridity and interspecies love, 30, 52, 53, 55, 61 instinct, 69, 71, 73–8, 89, 99. See also automatism and emotional expression, 47 The Island of Dr Moreau, 20 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman, 4 Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, 181n12, 181n13, 181n14, 201n18, 203n32 Jane Eyre, 212n36 Jardine, William The Natural History of Game Birds, 183n3 Jay Gould, Stephen “Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism,” 200n12 Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 213n49 Jones, Ernest, 46–47, 95–6 “The Theory of Symbolism,” 46, 193n2 Jones, Robert Alun, 150, 151 Jung, Carl, 166 Karlin, Daniel, 63 Keach, William “Cockney Couplets Keats and the Politics of Style,” 190n64 Keats, John, 16, 190n69, 191n72 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 38, 39 “Ode to Autumn,” 6, 9, 37–45, 189n45, 190n64 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 37–8, 39, 63 Keep, Christopher “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl,” 212n42 Kenyon-Jones, Christine Kindred Brutes, 189n47 Kibbie, Ann, 122

Transfusion, Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 204n9 Kim, Claire Jean Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, 181n12 King, Barbara How Animals Grieve, 192n73 Kingsley, Charles The Water Babies, 163 Kipling, Rudyard, 59, 158 The Jungle Books, 11–12, 158, 211n34 Just-So Stories, 11, 158 Knowles, James, 183n7 Kraus, Karl, 204n34 Kuper, Adam Incest & Influence, 196n2 Lacan, Jacques, 47–9, 59, 107, 172, 195n38, 214n51 Écrits, 46, 193n1 “Mirror Stage,” 47, 48 Seminar VI, 48, 193n1, 193n14, 193n16 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 95–6, 99, 200n11 Philosophie Zoologique, Ou Exposition Des Considerations Relatives a L’histoire Naturelle Des Animaux, 196n11 Lancet, The (journal), 125, 127. See also Wakley, John Landsteiner, Karl, 124 Langley, John, 127 Laqueur, Thomas Making Sex, 206n38 Law, Jules The Social Life of Fluids, 213n44 Lawson, John New Voyage to Carolina, 26 Laycock, Thomas, 127 Lear, Edward, 46, 49, 50–62, 66, 194n21, 195n34, 195n38 “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” 194n30 “The Duck and the Kangaroo,” 54 “The Jumblies,” 61 “The Pelican Chorus,” 13–14 “The Pobble Who Has No Toes,” 57 “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,” 54, 58 “The Scroobious Pip,” 58–9 “The Story of Four Little Children Who Went Round the World,” 54 “The Zigzag Zealous Zebra,” 58 A Book of Nonsense, 22, 50–1, 53, 54, 57 Illustrations of British Ornithology, 50 Illustrations of the Family Psitacidae, or Parrots, 51 Laughable Lyrics, 60

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009409940.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” 60–3, 64 Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets, 52 LeFanu, Sheridan Carmilla, 159 Lerer, Seth Children’s Literature A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter, 194n28 Levine, George, 111, 113 Darwin and the Novelists, 201n19 “Victorian Excess and the Darwinian Aesthetic,” 202n24 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 151 Levy, Anita Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898, 210n13 Lewes, G. H. “Mr. Darwin’s Hypotheses,” 203n30 The Physiology of Common Life, 207n41 Lewis, Matthew, 160 Lewontin, Richard “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist Programme,” 200n12 Linnaean Society, 51 Linnaeus, Carl, 24 Liston, Robert, 126 Locke, John, 24 Lodge, Sara, 14 Inventing Edward Lear, 194n31 Lombroso, Cesare, 209n55 Louis XIV, 122 Louis, Margot, 17 Louis, Pierre, 205n24 Lubbock, John, 152 Lyell, Charles, 88 Principles of Geology, 208n48 MacGillivray, William, 28 Malthus, Thomas, 118 An Essay on the Principle of Population, xii, 2, 166–9 Mansfield, Lord (William Murray), 14, 184n10 Markham, W. O., 126 “Remarks on the Inflammation and Bloodletting Controversy,” 127 Marryat, Florence The Blood of the Vampire, 159 Marx, Karl, xii, 87, 88, 111, 118, 198n19 Capital, 130 Maudsley, Henry, 128, 147 Mauroy, Antoine, 122

233

Mbembe, Achille Necropolitics, 4. See also Biopolitics McLane, Maureen Romanticism and the Human Sciences, 212n36 McLennan, John Ferguson, 151, 153–5, 170 Primitive Marriage, 153, 210n13 “The Worship of Animals and Plants,” 150, 153 melancholic incorporation, 20, 22, 37, 43–5. See also food and diet Mendel, Gregor, 119 Milligan, William “The Easter Controversies of the Second Century, in Their Relation to the Gospel of St John,” 191n72 Milton, John “Lycidas,” 38 Paradise Lost, 61 Mivart, St. George, 200n14 Monboddo, Lord (James Burnett), xi Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 106 Turkish Embassy Letters, 145 Moore, James R., 112 Darwin, 201n20 Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 108, 201n20 Moore, Thomas “A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” 61 Morabia, Alfredo “Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis and the Evaluation of Bloodletting,” 205n24 Moretti, Franco Signs Taken for Wonders, 207n40, 212n40 Morris, William The Defense of Guinevere and Other Poems “The Defense of Guinevere,” 136–41, 143 Morton, Timothy Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite, 192n77 Müller, Max, 46–8 Lectures on the Science of Language, 46 Mundy, Rachel Animal Musicalities, 187n21 Murray, Lindley English Reader, 14 The Naturalist (journal), 28 Noakes, Vivien, 61 nonsense and nonsense poetry, 14, 46, 194n31. See also onomatopoeia as defunctioning of onomatopoeia, 49–50, 53, 58–62 as parodic natural history, 54–6 Nowak, Martin, 184n11

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Index

O’Farrell, Mary Ann Telling Complexions, 207n45 Obstetrical Society of London, 122 onomatopoeia, 9–11, 12, 14, 21, 24–32, 44, 58, 64–6, 117, 185n1, 188n45. See also nonsense and nonsense poetry as origin of language, 46–7 in Keats’s odes, 37–8, 42 Ortiz-Robles, Mario Literature and Animal Studies, 182n19 Ovid Heroides, 137 Metamorphoses, 19 Owen, Richard, 87–8 On the Nature of Limbs, 88, 197n14 Paget, Sir James, 105 Paley, William, 74 Natural Theology, 196n9 Parkhurst, John A Greek and English Lexicon of the New Testament in which the Words and Phrases Occurring in Those Sacred Books Are Clearly Explained, 192n72 Peck, Harry Thurston, 188n45 Peckham, Morse The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text, 200n14 Peel, Robert, 127 Pelis, Kim “Blood Clots: the Nineteenth-Century Debate over the Substance and Means of Transfusion in Britain,” 205n11 Perkins, David Romanticism and Animal Rights, 192n77 Phillips, Adam Darwin’s Worms, 199n2 On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, 200n8 Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo What Darwin Got Wrong, 197n13 Pinch, Adela Thinking about Other People in NineteenthCentury British Writing, 209n54 Plato Protagoras, 211n34 Pliny the Elder, 90 Pope, Alexander Essay on Criticism, 188n45 Potter, Beatrix Peter Rabbit, 158 Prum, Richard O. The Evolution of Beauty, 202n24 Psomiades, Alexis “Heterosexual Exchange and Other Victorian Fictions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian Anthropology,” 210n13 Puttenham, George, 31–2

Quinn, Megan “‘His Lips with Joy They Burr’ Onomatopoeia in Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy,’” 189n57 Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius, 37 Institutio Oratoria, 31–2 race, in human beings, 2–4, 12–13, 22, 57, 101, 106, 113, 135, 145, 148, 153, 181n9, 184n11, 203n32 as effect of sexual selection, 108–10, 166, 202n22, 209n58 in Dracula, 163, 212n39, 212n41 Radcliffe, Ann, 160 Rajan, Supritha A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 210n13 Reade, Charles Hard Cash, 206n34 Ricardo, David, 89, 118 Richards, Robert J. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, 200n11 The Romantic Conception of Life, 196n7, 197n13 Rickels, Laurence The Vampire Lectures, 214n52 Ritvo, Harriet Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras, 204n2 “Possessing Mother Nature: Genetic Capital in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 181n16 Ritvo, Lucille B., 96 Darwin’s Influence on Freud, 199n3 Robertson Smith, William, 170, 179, 210n24 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 155–7, 159–60, 165 Robertson, J. P. and W. P. Letters on Paraguay, 191n72 Roe, Nicholas “Keats’s Commonwealth,” 190n64 Romanes, George G., 46–8, 214n54 Mental Evolution in Man, 46 Rossetti, Christina, 142–3, 179 “The Convent Threshold,” 20, 142 “Goblin Market,” 142 Sing Song, 49–50, 158 Rossetti, D. G. “Jenny,” 141–2, 146 Rothenberg, David Why Birds Sing, 28, 187n21, 188n40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 212n35 Rowlinson, Matthew “On the First Medical Blood Transfusion between Human Subjects, 1818,” 207n41 Real Money and Romanticism, 198n19 “The Thing in the Poem: Maud’s Hymen,” 208n47

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Index Rush, Benjamin (of Philadelphia), 124 Ruskin, John, 43 Unto This Last, 118 Santner, Eric On Creaturely Life, 204n33 Saville, Julia, 182n18 Schaffer, Talia, 161 “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula,” 213n43 Schwitters, Kurt, 28 Scott, Sir Walter The Antiquary, 71–2, 75, 85, 93, 196n3, 196n4, 196n5 Guy Mannering, 71 Ivanhoe, 209n58 The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders “Clerk Saunders,” 36 Sendak, Maurice, 56 Seuss, Dr (Theodor Seuss Geisel), 56 Sewell, Anna Black Beauty, 158 Shakespeare, William, 34–5 Love’s Labor’s Lost, 34 Sharpe, Ella, 48 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 20, 159 The Last Man, 20 Shelley, Percy, 16 “Alastor,” 61 Swellfoot the Tyrant, 189n47 Showalter, Elaine, 128 Shukin, Nicole, 1, 4 Shuttleworth, Sally Embodied Selves, 201n17 Sinha, Suvadip Postcolonial Animalities, 181n12 Skey, F. C. Hysteria: Six Lectures, 201n17 Smith, Charlotte, 10 Natural History of Birds, Intended Chiefly for Young Persons, 183n3, 185n16 Smith, Sydney, 186n16 Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll, 128 species lyric, 10–14, 16–22, 26 Spencer, Herbert, 108 Steinlight, Emily, 165 Steyn, Bianca “Plant Use in Southern Africa’s Middle Iron Age: The Archaebotany of Mutamba,” 198n20 Stocking, George Victorian Anthropology, 209n2 Stoker, Bram, 63, 66

235

Dracula, 20, 121, 128–9, 130, 140, 142, 148, 158, 159–65, 168, 207n41, 214n52 Stokes, William, 125, 126 Straley, Jessica Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature, 211n32, 212n35 Sulloway, Frank Freud, Biologist of the Mind, 213n48 Swift, Jonathan, 56 Swinburne, Algernon, 21–2 “The Garden of Proserpine,” 16 “Itylus,” 16–20, 22 Poems and Ballads, 16, 20 “The Triumph of Time,” 16 symptom, in psychoanalysis, 1, 69, 94, 98, 113, 121, 146, 199n2, 201n17, 203n33 Tarnita, C. E., 184n11 Taylor, Jenny Bourne Embodied Selves, 201n17 Tennyson, Alfred, 34–6, 127, 141 In Memoriam, 13, 162, 183n7, 184n8 “The Lady of Shalott,” 20, 61 “Mariana,” 36 “Maud,” 61, 130–6, 142, 148, 208n48 Thomson, James, 10 Torres, Sasha, 191n71 totemism, 20, 119, 150–8, 211n24 in Dracula, 159–63 in Freud, 172, 178 Tristram Shandy, 195n38 Trollope, Anthony Eustace Diamonds, 207n42 Tucker, Herbert, 135 Tylor, E. B. Primitive Culture, 210n24 vampires and vampirism, 129, 130, 148, 179 and totem discourse, 159–63 as a figure for biological population, 163–5, 168 as a figure for extinction, 63 Vendler, Helen, 40 Virgil, 31 Aeneid, 188n45, 189n52 Georgics, 188n45, 189n52 Voss, Julia Darwin’s Pictures, 180n3, 196n10, 201n16 Wagner, Richard Parsifal, 161 Wakley, Thomas, 125. See also Lancet, The (journal) Wallace, Alfred, 108 Ward, J. P., 48 Wardrop, James, 124 On Blood-Letting, 205n23

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Waring, Anna Letitia Hymns and Meditations, 186n3 Waring, Jeremiah, 186n3 Waring, Samuel, 186n3 Waring, Sarah, 28 The Minstrelsy of the Woods, or Sketches and Songs Connected with the Natural History of Some of the Most Interesting British and Foreign Birds, 9–11, 24, 25–7, 31–2, 66, 182n1, 182n3, 185n3 “The Song of the Wood-Grouse,” 10, 26 “The Wood-Grouse,” 54 “To My Brother’s Children,” 9 The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and Its Consequences to the Protestant Churches of France and Italy, 186n3 A Sketch of the Life of Linnæus, in a Series of Letters Designed for Young Persons, 186n3 The Wild Garland, or, Prose and Poetry Connected with English Wild Flowers and Forest Trees, 183n1, 185n3 Waterton, Charles Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles, 26–7, 186n16 Watson, Thomas, 125 Wedgwood, Emma, 71, 195n2 Weheliye, Alexander Habeas Viscus, 4, 181n9 Welsh, Benjamin Practical Treatise on the Efficacy of Blood-Letting in Epidemic Fever, 124

West, Anna Thomas Hardy and Animals, 195n40 Whewell, William, 88 White, Gilbert, 18, 41 The Natural History of Selborne, 24–5, 32, 38, 190n69 Wicke, Jennifer “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” 213n42 Williams, James, 59, 61–2 Wilson, E. O., 184n11 Wolfe, Cary, 181n12 Wood, Nevill British Song Birds, 183n1 Woodson-Boulton, Amy “Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory,” 209n8 Wordsworth, William, 37, 43, 49, 135 “Michael,” 90 “The Idiot Boy,” 36, 189n57 “There Was a Boy,” 36 “Tintern Abbey,” 90 Lyrical Ballads, 35–6, 45 The Prelude, 35 Wright, Robert New Republic, 200n8 Wuthering Heights, 143 Zahavi, Amotz and Avitag, 202n24 Zanger, Jules, 212n39

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009409940.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture GENERAL EDITORS Kate Flint, University of Southern California Clare Pettitt, University of Cambridge Titles Published 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill miriam bailin, Washington University Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by donald e. hall, California State University, Northridge Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art herbert sussman, Northeastern University, Boston Byron and the Victorians andrew elfenbein, University of Minnesota Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by john o. jordan, University of California, santa cruz and robert l. patten, Rice University, Houston Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry lindsay smith, University of Sussex Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle kelly hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder Rereading Walter Pater william f. shuter, Eastern Michigan University Remaking Queen Victoria edited by margaret homans, Yale University and adrienne munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels pamela k. gilbert, University of Florida Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature alison byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont Literary Culture and the Pacific vanessa smith, University of Sydney Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home monica f. cohen Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation suzanne keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth gail marshall, University of Leeds Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin carolyn dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy sophie gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre deborah vlock After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance john glavin, Georgetown University, Washington, DC Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by nicola diane thompson, Kingston University, London Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry matthew campbell, University of Sheffield Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War paula m. krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts Ruskin’s God michael wheeler, University of Southampton Dickens and the Daughter of the House hilary m. schor, University of Southern California Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science ronald r. thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology jan-melissa schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World elaine freedgood, University of Pennsylvania Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture lucy hartley, University of Southampton The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study thad logan, Rice University, Houston Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 dennis denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 pamela thurschwell, University College London Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature nicola bown, Birkbeck, University of London George Eliot and the British Empire nancy henry The State University of New York, Binghamton Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture cynthia scheinberg, Mills College, California Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body anna krugovoy silver, Mercer University, Georgia

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Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust ann gaylin, Yale University Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 anna johnston, University of Tasmania London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 matt cook, Keele University Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland gordon bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee Gender and the Victorian Periodical hilary fraser, Birkbeck, University of London judith johnston and stephanie green, University of Western Australia The Victorian Supernatural edited by nicola bown, Birkbeck College, London carolyn burdett, London Metropolitan University and pamela thurschwell, University College London The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination gautam chakravarty, University of Delhi The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People ian haywood, Roehampton University of Surrey Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature geoffrey cantor, University of Leeds gowan dawson, University of Leicester graeme gooday, University of Leeds richard noakes, University of Cambridge sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and jonathan r. topham, University of Leeds Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot janis mclarren caldwell, Wake Forest University The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by christine alexander, University of New South Wales and juliet mcmaster, University of Alberta From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction gail turley houston, University of New Mexico Voice and the Victorian Storyteller ivan kreilkamp, University of Indiana Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture jonathan smith, University of Michigan–Dearborn Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture patrick r. o’malley, Georgetown University Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain simon dentith, University of Gloucestershire Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal helena michie, Rice University The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture nadia valman, University of Southampton

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Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature julia wright, Dalhousie University Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination sally ledger, Birkbeck, University of London Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability gowan dawson, University of Leicester ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle marion thain, University of Birmingham Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in NineteenthCentury Writing david amigoni, Keele University Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction daniel a. novak, Louisiana State University Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 tim watson, University of Miami The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History michael sanders, University of Manchester Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman cheryl wilson, Indiana University Shakespeare and Victorian Women gail marshall, Oxford Brookes University The Tragi-comedy of Victorian Fatherhood valerie sanders, University of Hull Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America cannon schmitt, University of Toronto From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction amanpal garcha, Ohio State University The Crimean War and the British Imagination stefanie markovits, Yale University Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction jill l. matus, University of Toronto Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s nicholas daly, University College Dublin Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science srdjan smajic´ , Furman University Satire in an Age of Realism aaron matz, Scripps College, California Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing adela pinch, University of Michigan Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination katherine byrne, University of Ulster, Coleraine

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Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World tanya agathocleous, Hunter College, City University of New York Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 judith w. page, University of Florida elise l. smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society sue zemka, University of Colorado Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century anne stiles, Washington State University Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain janice carlisle, Yale University Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative jan-melissa schramm, University of Cambridge The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform edward copeland, Pomona College, California Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece iain ross, Colchester Royal Grammar School The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense daniel brown, University of Southampton Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel anne dewitt, Princeton Writing Program China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined ross g. forman, University of Warwick Dickens’s Style edited by daniel tyler, University of Oxford The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession richard salmon, University of Leeds Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press fionnuala dillane, University College Dublin The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display dehn gilmore, California Institute of Technology George Eliot and Money: Economics, Ethics and Literature dermot coleman, Independent Scholar Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 bradley deane, University of Minnesota Evolution and Victorian Culture edited by bernard lightman, York University, Toronto and bennett zon, University of Durham Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination allen macduffie, University of Texas, Austin Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain andrew mccann, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

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95. Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman hilary fraser birkbeck, University of London 96. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture deborah lutz, Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus 97. The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York nicholas daly, University College Dublin 98. Dickens and the Business of Death claire wood, University of York 99. Translation As Transformation in Victorian Poetry annmarie drury, Queens College, City University of New York 100. The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel maia mcaleavey, Boston College, Massachusetts 101. English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914 will abberley, University of Oxford 102. The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination aviva briefel, Bowdoin College, Maine 103. Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature jessica straley, University of Utah 104. Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration adriana craciun, University of California, Riverside 105. Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press will tattersdill, University of Birmingham 106. Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life lucy hartley, University of Michigan 107. Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain jonathan farina, Seton Hall University, New Jersey 108. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience martin dubois, Newcastle University 109. Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing heather tilley, Birkbeck College, University of London 110. An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel gregory vargo, New York University 111. Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology linda m. austin, Oklahoma State University 112. Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 richard adelman, University of Sussex 113. Poetry, Media, and the Material Body: Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain ashley miller, Albion College, Michigan 114. Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire jessica howell, Texas A&M University

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The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination edited by alexandra lewis, University of Aberdeen The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture anna feuerstein, University of Hawai’i–Manoa The Divine in the Commonplace: Recent Natural Histories and the Novel in Britain amy king, St. John’s University, New York Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext adam abraham, Virginia Commonwealth University Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions richard menke, University of Georgia Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf jacob jewusiak, Newcastle University Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Life upon the Exchange sean grass, Rochester Institute of Technology Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire phillip steer, Massey University, Auckland Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination will abberley, University of Sussex Victorian Women and Wayward Reading: Crises of Identification marisa palacios knox, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century charles laporte, University of Washington Children’s Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure’: Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle anne stiles, Saint Louis University, Missouri Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience timothy gao, Nanyang Technological University Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination leila neti, Occidental College, Los Angeles Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Afterlife of Victorian Illness hosanna krienke, University of Wyoming Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction: Form, Ethics and the Novel matthew sussman, The University of Sydney Scottish Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Romance of Everyday Life juliet shields, University of Washington

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132. Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon richard fallon, The University of Birmingham 133. Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival dennis denisoff, University of Tulsa 134. Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture alistair robinson, New College of the Humanities 135. Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation heather bozant witcher, Auburn University, Montgomery 136. Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages: Personal and Public Art and Literature of the Franklin Search Expeditions eavan o’dochartaigh, Umeå Universitet, Sweden 137. Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle fraser riddell, University of Durham 138. Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity linda k. hughes, Texas Christian University 139. Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry elizabeth helsinger, University of Chicago 140. Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century francesca mackenney, University of Leeds 141. The Art of the Reprint: Nineteenth-Century Novels in Twentieth-Century Editions rosalind parry, Independent Scholar 142. Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence sarah green, University of Oxford 143. Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel lauren gillingham, University of Ottawa 144. Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies edited by charles martindale, lene østermark-johansen, and elizabeth prettejohn 145. Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel: Extreme Measures aaron rosenberg, King’s College London 146. The Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel daniel williams, Bard College 147. Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science matthew rowlinson, University of Western Ontario

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press