Chapter Three - The Animal Within

Summary

Gorilla War

Sharing 97.7 per cent of their genes with Homo sapiens, gorillas are among the most intimate of humanity's animal relations and have often stimulated uneasy and ideologically charged reflections on human origins and identity. Discourses of race, gender and class, in particular, have long accumulated in relation to the gorilla body. As Donna Haraway writes more broadly in Primate Visions, ‘The primate body itself is an intriguing kind of political discourse.’ Consequently, what became known in the 1940s as primatology may, as Erica Fudge comments, tell ‘us as much (if not more) about ourselves as […] about our animal others’, providing the basis for what Haraway terms simian orientalism: the ‘construction of the self from the raw material of the other’. If Fenn's and Henty's narrations of natural history indicate the complexities of human subject formation in encounters with exotic animals and demonstrate the instability of the romance as a vehicle for ideals of masculinity, gorillas provide a hyperbolic embodiment of these anxieties. Their entry into natural history in the second half of the nineteenth century comprises a remarkable and understudied narrative of the cultural production of earth's largest primates in which a number of boundaries appear under stress. With their uncanny likeness to Homo sapiens, gorillas unsettle the generic distinctions between natural history and fiction as much as the evolutionary borders between human and animal. Representations of encounters with these extraordinary creatures provide some of the most sensational and evocative moments of nineteenth-century natural history writing, which in turn offered an unmissable opportunity to authors of boy's adventures.