By Virginia Richter (auth.)
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Extra info for Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction 1859-1939
Example text
He specifically includes non-Europeans (the ‘lower races’) in the family of man and stresses the chasm that separates them from apes: ‘The difference of size of brain or cranial capacity between the highest ape and the lowest man is much greater than between the highest ape and the lowest ape’ (EA 374). In particular, he rejects the notion of a real missing link, an intermediary ‘ape-man’ blending human and simian characteristics: Particularly while I resided among the tribes found in the mountains near the banks of the Ovenga river, where the gorilla is rather more 36 Literature After Darwin common than anywhere else, I searched in vain if an intermediate race, or rather several intermediate races or links between the natives and the gorilla, could be found; and I must say here that I made those inquiries conscientiously, with the sole view of bringing before science the facts which I might collect.
Harriet Ritvo maintains that although the publication of On the Origin of Species can indeed be considered to mark the beginning of a new era in the study of life – a paradigm shift from natural history to biology – and although Darwin’s theory ‘eliminated the unbridgeable gulf that divided reasoning human being from irrational brute’,53 some important continuities remained. g. that of Linnaeus. Furthermore, evolution theory, at least in Huxley’s reading, was a forceful assertion of human superiority, not a break with that assertion: ‘Clearly, if people were animals, they were the top animals; and with God out of the picture, the source of human preeminence lay within.
Contemporary travel reports, in particular those describing the most mysterious of apes, the gorilla, continued this tradition by emphasising its anthropomorphic appearance. One of the first modern reports not based on the descriptions of native informants but on the traveller’s own observations was the Franco-American Paul B. Du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, published just two years before Huxley’s treatise. ’49 For the hunter and collector, the similarity between humans and apes raises severe ethical problems concerning ‘fratricide’ and ‘cannibalism’.